Sorry, but no

If they really cared about children and the most vulnerable they’d be taking much firmer action about car pollution, especially near schools and hospitals

Sure, appetite drops a bit in that specific person, but this still doesn’t do anything to motivate the big food industry to change its ways - they can assume that specific person will still eat their products, and can carry on selling ultra-processed food to everyone else

Isn’t the dystopian bit of this the scary capitalism of it? This approach allows the food industry to continue selling people crap that is making them unhealthy rather than reforming their business model, and it’s doing this by handing a massive amount of money to the pharma industry. This is exactly the solution I’d want if I were a wealthy investor with money in lots of vast global businesses, and for me that’s the dystopian bit - the way it’s all about handing money to The Man to continue unhealthy lives rather than, y’know, fix anything a bit

I’m guessing that’s Venus

I’d be very intrigued in a system that lets me leave my phone in my (waterproof) pocket and access audio and navigation on Bluetooth. Let’s get this on bikes asap

Now imagine that, but onions

One of my big worries with the way people are using LLMs is that they’re being trained to trust whatever they spit out. Hey Google, what’s the nutritional content of peanuts? And people are learning not to ask where the information came from or to check sources.

One of the many reasons this worries me is that very soon these businesses are going to need to recoup the billions they’re spending, and I wonder how long until these systems start feeding paid promotions to a population that’s been trained to accept whatever they’re told. imagine what some businesses, or governments, would pay to have exactly their choice of words produced on demand in response to knowledge queries.

Agreed. although my worry with the closed-list system is that it makes parties, not people, the main thing we vote for. This feels like a barrier to entry for independents, and a way of propping up the power of established parties. It also feels like it removes voters’ ability to reject a politician that happens to be popular within the party, or to support a more maverick politician who doesn’t toe the party line but who resonates with the public.

It would have a massive effect. Transport (car) emissions are one of the larger - and growing - sources of emissions.

And we can’t hide behind “But the corporations…” because ultimately what they produce gets used by us.

So to answer your question: riding a bike when Global Capital wants you to keep buying cars and pumping oil into them is one of the best acts of defiance you can make

Apparently the surge pricing reflected what touts would have charged. Makes you want to grab somebody and shout HOW IS THAT A JUSTIFICATION?! Yeah, and if somebody steals a car they’ll sell it to me cheaper than the dealer - so it feels like TM logic means the dealer should sell it to me cheaper too because that’s what the black market is priced at?

2 and 3 are massive. I’m on Mastodon, but am having a much better time on Bluesky. Mastodon is full of gatekeeping and policing and people complaining - Bluesky is just fun and interesting, like Twitter 12 years ago

They mean it would cost more because the problem has become bigger and more complicated because it wasn’t addressed early

That shouldn’t affect GDP - after all, America is much further away and has a bigger GDP than any of these. Indeed, GDP being what it is (a rough measure of total economic activity) I suspect being far away from the hub, like Greece, would likely boost it: think of all the economic activity for your shipping and logistics businesses

It would make a lot more sense if humans could just lay some sort of egg sac which we could keep in the garage for 9 months until it hatches. I honestly don’t know why biologists and geneticists haven’t dealt with this by now

A really large number of them are references - possibly dated references - to other things. Sometimes cultural phenomena (the movie Ishtar, which was before my time and I’m really old) but often scientific or other phenomena. In one of his books he mentioned a biology teacher who pinned a load of his comics to the wall and, week by week, the students would go “Ah, now I get that one” as they learned something about chimpanzee communication, eye spots, or whatever.

Of course, some are just whimsy. And others are warning us about those sneaky sneaky cows…