They know there’s going to be pushback and people hollering and shouting how out of touch they are for printing it.

They don’t care, they’re just seeding the public narrative, trying to get people used to seeing the message in media that they should expect less and be content without things.

It’s not how we feel about the article today, it’s about the kids and young people growing up seeing this message as normal.

I mean, we’re all raging at this presidential administration for ending USAID which supplied food and medicine to developing nations and poverty-stricken regions without infrastructure, it will lead to the deaths of millions, for no other reason than they don’t have access and resources in many of the places the program served.

if populations collapse in too many industrialized nations too rapidly, many industries and shipping lanes and distribution channels will start to slow down and possibly even eventually close entirely, leading to much greater problems than even the absence of USAID or other programs. A lot of our modern infrastructure we depend on functions on a scale dependent on a certain level of production and labor.

A lowered population would absolutely help us with a lot of issues with scarcity and pollution, but we can’t get to those lowered population levels rapidly or that’s the same as any other apocalyptic event that will cause vast amounts of suffering.

Along with a host of other foreign and domestic donors paying our representatives to represent corporations and investment bankers and the like.

Yep, basically anything that delivers new “things” to you that requires a level of updating and re-engagement over and over with a sense of looking for something that’s interesting to you, especially including anything that supplants socializing with comments on the internet by random strangers.

I feel like it was different in the days when we just read a morning newspaper, because it wasn’t all interesting or relevant to us, it was just informative and you got “today’s concerns” and then set it down and used it for kindling or bird cage lining later. There was no need to pick it up again and see if anything changed.

Here we train our brains to feel like they’re going to get “interesting stuff” on demand, and it creates an expectation for that dopamine reward over and over, so whatever you read that doesn’t give you that feeling becomes less interesting. This is why so many of us can’t finish a book or sit through a movie, it’s just conditioning.

The good news: You’re a childless adult who can do fun things and just let the rest of the population keep the numbers up so civilization doesn’t collapse from rapid population decline.

The bad news: Everyone else has this idea also.

You can just stop using content-aggregation websites like reddit, youtube or twitter.

Seriously, it’s hard at first because you have no idea how addicted your brain is for content and information about the world, but after a few weeks you will settle back into how you were in the before times, and may even have a desire to sit and watch a whole TV show or movie without scrolling, or you might even read a “book.”

(Books are these things that have “content” encoded in text on sheets of pressed wood cellulose, ask your grandparents about them. Side effects include enhanced imagination, retention of knowledge, images and ideas forming spontaneously in your mind, and simulated experiences that create actual emotional responses.)

You won’t miss out on anything, I promise. Our species has existed for thousands of years without you knowing what’s going on, we will continue to exist for millennia without you knowing what’s going on, just read up on your local political candidates when election season rolls around and you’re golden.

boondocking

I will never not read this as some kind of obscure, local nickname for something absurd and sexual/scatalogical. Like “Me and this chick did an Ohio Boondock in an Ace Hardware parking lot once, the manager called the cops so we had to get out of there, but man they must have been glad they rent carpet steamers, ah tell you what.”

I was floored when I saw what even the low-end pre-made travel-vans were going for. They’re really following the whole “Why sell a million cookies for a dollar each when you can sell one cookie for a million dollars” economic model with these things.

To think the trend probably really started because some folks decided to build like, plywood frames around their poop-bucket in back and documented it on social media with various photo filters to look romantic and free-spirited.

Bonfires on the beach at night, shirtless young dude with a guitar, maybe a dog, probably black lab or golden retriever, girls in bikinis and everyone is just perfect and happy… don’t you want to be happy like this too? Get your van with built-in poop bucket for only $90,000 now and start recapturing that escaped youth living off your parent’s dime and a trust fund!

That could have potentially been bred out for domesticated strains like we did with horses also, but we never even got to that point because horse hierarchy and zebra hierarchy are very different beasts, and you can’t really tame a zebra matriarch and have the rest of the herd fall into line, because zebras don’t have that kind of matriarchal social system. They are so mistrustful and hard to approach that we were never even able to get to square one.

Lucky for you, that’s always a good thing… but that’s also kind of the idea, they don’t build them everywhere, they build a few massives ones to “process” animals on an industrial scale, so it still ends up in your local grocery store, which is why it’s worth taking a minute to check where they get their meat and dairy.

Oh goodie, a dumb post making fun of veganism, I’m sure the comments are going to super mature and nuanced.

does one life form have more value than another?

Like with everything, there is no clear boundary and it’s up to us, the thinking, sapient creature to make these distinctions so that we can exist while minimizing our harm to the world.

We will never eliminate all harm we do to the living world, that’s ridiculous and nobody is expecting it except the most delusional people.

But we do need to draw lines somewhere. And broadly, we can make distinctions that higher animals like cows, pigs and chickens have more of an “experience” of the world than most insects, and thus their lives have more value. It’s a weird thing to say out loud but we can’t shy away from making these moral choices as long as inhabit the earth and want to remain the dominant species.

You haven’t seen how factory farms work then, which is good for your mental health probably, but you should really take time to understand the actual problems and serious it is.

The conditions that most animals live in is horrifying and they suffer a great deal before butchering, and the butchering process is often flawed and has tons of problems, with wide-scale reports of abusive conditions and botched kills, to say nothing of the massive amount of mental and physical harm it does to the people who’s job it is to kill thousands of living beings every day.

You don’t have to give up meat, but at the very least consider buying local from non-industrial farms.

He did a short video about sex and gender a few years ago, it was a tad performative but that’s how he does a lot of his work. Broadly though it made a LOT of people angry because even people who ostensibly pretend they’re progressive and care about science, freak the fuck out when thinking about genitals.

That’s basically the US in a nutshell.

“America. Freaking the everloving fuck out about other people’s genitalia for 249 years strong!”

Angry chuds all the way.

Like a lot of Simone’s videos have a bit of language

So do most 12-year-olds

Geddouddahere with that shit, Nye has been based and solid his entire professional career as a science communicator, if you didn’t like him talking about gender and sex, that’s a skill issue.

If that’s not what you’re talking about, then you deserve equal condemnation for cowardly vagueposting.

(coward deleted lol)

The basic costs of getting a van and converting it can be thousands of dollars at the cheap end, not counting the van itself.

If you want to get a pre-made travel van with amenities like a toilet and lighting already installed it will set you back tens of thousands more than just getting an old beater and modifying it, and that counts on your ability and energy to actually engineer and build the stuff you will need.

So you need either a huge up-front investment, or you need to make monthly payments if you finance it, or you need an already stable lifestyle that lets you slowly collect and build the stuff you need over a long period of time.

I don’t know how you support a mobile lifestyle anyway unless you have a job you can do from the back of a van parked in a walmart parking lot, which is where you will spend most of your time as you will need daily life shit like toilet paper and a few meals a day. (Except you can’t park there overnight, you will need to park either in a campground or an RV park or some place for designated overnight parking, which usually comes with fees if they’re anywhere near a city. Long-term sites with utility hookups or bathrooms will need a monthly rental contract.)

I’m fully convinced, that at least in the US, every last “van life” influencer can only support the lifestyle by promoting it and riding on trust-funds when views run short. Homelessness isn’t that fun actually.

Edit: just to make it clear, my family lived in a van for a few years when I was little, and I respect people who have no choice and live out of their cars or vans, and yah you can do it for next to nothing if you have to, but it’s a hard life and and you still need money, which means some form of stability to interact with the world, a phone, a craft or job or something you can sell, expenses for a vehicle that’s going to run a lot. You’re going to interact with a lot of cops. And other types. Wouldn’t recommend it if you can help it. I am calling out specifically the influencers and the popularized “van lifestyle” that makes it look like a perpetual party on the beach.

The only people Newsom appeals to are neo-liberals ashamed that Trump won’t keep up appearances and isn’t keeping his criminal imperialism masked in the liberal pageantry that we’ve done for decades or centuries in the US.

He is courting the right, he made a day to celebrate Ronald Fucking Reagan, jesus christ how loud of a dog-whistle do you all need.

Tankies are just roleplay kids, they hate everyone who isn’t roleplaying also. Newsom is an actual threat to democracy wrapped in a too-wide smile and promises of a “return to normal.” He would be more dangerous than Trump and he would do his damage behind a facade of national cooperation and stability while empowering the lunatics like Thiel and Musk.

Because that’s not enough, they are a resource, if we don’t tap that resource, the other side does… as they are doing now.

I’m saying it’s not an “abstract group of people,” I am talking about the currency that shapes nations, the force behind the declarations and policies and intentions.

That power comes from only a small number of sources, the top two are violence or money.

The right has both, and they are doing everything they can to secure them before others can, and there are a LOT of forces trying to get a piece of both those pies. We could wrest a section of it with careful political messaging and coordination and establishing local communities and electing leadership that actually wants better outcomes instead of better donations. But you don’t do that without knowing exactly who you’re trying to message and what your message needs to be.

None of this is as simple as “fuck them, we’re doing our own thing” we’re all in this together, even the people you don’t like.