stopdropandprole

couple hyper rich douchebags are doing

it’s not just about the individual carbon footprints of each billionaire, it’s about the cumulative effect of the inefficiencies which billionaires propagate globally. for example, why is the US government currently doubling down on fossil fuels? duh, because a handful of billionaires and hundred millionaires are pushing have captured decision making in Washington. they own the legislative and executive branches outright. so instead of rule by meritocracy or rule by the smartest or the most democratic process, the whole global economy is forced to bend to the selfish desires of a few whale investors. entire sectors of the economy are being raised up or suppressed not because they are efficient or counteract climate change, but because an oligarch wishes it so.

meanwhile, as all this chaos and destruction is happening, who is getting wildly rich?

around 3,000 families control wealth equal to 15-17% of global GDP.

In 2025, the world’s 12 richest men owned more wealth than half of humanity.

add to that, billionaires are increasingly influencing global politics as governmental advisors or by tipping scales in elections… when they’re not getting rich directly off military contracts and reconstruction/real estate deals on the land they just got paid to help “liberate”.

the planet is being steered into apocalypse by a handful of madmen.

and with climate perma-crises on the horizon, “disaster capitalism” is going into overdrive.

more expensive gas projects with far greater negative externalities (pollution, price volatility)

it low-key feels like you’re trying to lessen the impact of the decision by pointing out a minor detail that the money isn’t technically “wasted”. if they take the money and invest it in terrible projects that accelerate global climate catastrophy and burden future generations, doing a well akshually about the money is kinda disingenuous. it’s not like he’s simply re-investing in US based energy, he’s misusing tax dollars that were planned in advance for the benefit of posterity, to enrich his circle of oligarchs deeply tied to fossil fuels.

I commented elsewhere but it’s worth noting here too.

this is FIFTH TIME the administration has done this and it’s cost almost 4 billion in total: Source

If this sounds at all familiar, it’s not your imagination. In March, the Republican administration announced that it had agreed to pay a foreign company almost $1 billion in American taxpayer money to abandon two wind farm projects that would have produced enough electricity to power more than 1.3 million homes and businesses […]

At the administration’s insistence, the company will instead proceed with different energy projects that will cost more and pollute more. [thanks to] President Donald Trump, many American consumers will pay for the privilege of paying more to turn on the lights, all while polluting our own air.

Then in April, it happened again, when the Republican administration announced plans to pay energy companies almost $900 million to abandon plans for two offshore wind farms. Two months later, Team Trump spent $765 million to buy back another group of offshore wind leases.

In late June, a fourth example emerged, when the administration announced plans to pay Duke Energy $129 million to abandon an offshore wind project off the coast of North Carolina.

With a fifth instance this week, the combined price tag for the developments is approaching $4 billion.

How about lowering prices? Do companies have a straightforward way to do that?

just something to keep in mind…

something like 62% of all water used is for alfalfa crops grown to feed industrial livestock operations. the US exports 1.1 billion tons of beef annually. meaning, multinational meat packing corporations are literally exporting our water so they can capture markets in Asia and elsewhere.

only like ~20% goes to all of Residential, Commercial and Industrial use.

The majority of the water in the Colorado River basin—more than one trillion gallons—is used to grow feed for livestock, connecting the region’s water crisis to how much dairy and meat we eat.

simply managing the resource a teensy bit for the benefit of the public would free up enough water for generations of new development.

this is a resource management problem and can readily be solved if enough people got angry and forced Big Ag to mildly cut back their profits.

Let’s talk about the biggest cause of the West’s water crisis. The Colorado River is going dry … to feed cows.

as far as I understand, they were not there to serve a warrant. he was crossing a border and the feds are claiming that the 4th amendment doesn’t apply because he hadn’t yet crossed into America.

border patrol was essentially using a loophole to preemptively collect potential evidence (they’ll figure out what to charge him with after they see his phone contents). he’s a political activist against a cop city, they were obviously trying to do him dirty.

they were not serving a search warrant. they were abusing what should be an illegal search at the border in order to silence those who speak out against govt overreach.

so many of the world’s problems boil down to a handful of tech bros who made that book their entire personality.

congratulations on escaping the Rand death cult

you can also tag people on Lemmy, or at least I can. look for the About User menu then “Add Tag” or “Tag user” from their profile

interesting note: a flavor of techno fascism actually started in the 30s, it was called Technocracy, Inc.

The technocracy movement was a social movement active in the United States and Canada in the 1930s which favored technocracy as a system of government over representative democracy […] a California engineer, invented the word technocracy in 1919 to describe “the rule of the people made effective through the agency of their servants, the scientists and engineers”

here’s an article explaining how Musk, Thiel, and Andreessen (and other tech billionaires) have adopted a similar philosophy with the “Charter Cities” ancap utopianism they’re working to replace democracy with.

A 1930s movement wanted to merge the US, Canada and Greenland. Here’s why it has modern resonances

appreciate the rec, I’ve been a patreon to Climate Town for years and already listened to that episode of CDH…

my point still stands. “too much” is a spectrum, my opinion likely differs significantly from most people, including Rollie’s. i lean towards the Daniel Quinn side of environmental ethics, which definitely places more than just fat over consuming Americans in the category of unsustainable cultures.

(I’m not saying this is my personal opinion so don’t roast me plz):

it’s not that there are too many people.

it’s that there are too many people living under a regime that compels them to wantonly consume, pollute, and generally destroy the ecosystem in favor of the sole benefit of a miniscule number of oligarchs

in other words, the planet has the carrying capacity to sustain all of us theoretically, but not practically as things are today, at least not if humans continue living according to capitalist hyper consumptive individualism.

so yeah, there are too many people - unless we effectively reprogram all of modern culture to embrace a sustainable and pro environmental ethics… which you and I know, isn’t going to happen.

QED: too many people.

note: this is different from the other commenters take because it’s not making claims about human nature as being inherently bad. it’s just claiming that the system/culture people are born into is bad and does in fact impose artificial limitations on the capacity of the planet to support diverse ecosystems

I’m so sick and fucking tired of “the drug problem” being used over and over and over again to justify anything the government wants.

the US has been fighting a war on drugs to the cost of trillions of dollars over 50 years and what has it led to? massive expansion and militarization of the border at taxpayers expense, and more people do drugs today than EVER!

we need to stop letting the propagandists win by nodding along to this ‘fentanyl is America’s #1’ enemy bullshit. people are on drugs because theyre fucking miserable! they don’t have safety nets, homes, communities, support to quit, or meaningful work. enough is enough!

they probably mean “culturally progressive”, as in, woke leaning. bombs with rainbows painted on them.

the US was only very briefly controlled by a progressive govt and it took a great depression and threats of mob violence against the ruling class to get that much.

as much as tariffs are a comically bad self-own, I’d actually be happy if this means even a fractional decrease in Temu’s non-stop generation of landfill waste.

low cost, ubiquitous knick nack consumerism needs to be curtailed.

i think tik tok might be in a position where they must sell in order to continue serving content to American users

https://apnews.com/article/trump-tiktok-china-bytedance-social-media-tariffs-665e46fd5bb555e97c4d7301e07230df

The order was announced as White House officials believed they were nearing a deal for the app’s operations to be spun off into a new company based in the U.S. and owned and operated by a majority of American investors,

the extension only happened because after the TikTok CEO, Shou Chew, threw a big party for right wing influencers during Trump’s record breaking $200M bribe acceptance party inauguration, Trump mysteriously halted the order (despite being signed into law) to ban the app.

from the article:

Top TikTok executives reportedly rubbed shoulders with American tech leaders and handed out business cards at an elite pre-inauguration donor event on Sunday featuring members of the Trump administration, as the app’s future in the U.S. remains uncertain.

Tiktok executives including CEO Shou Chew and vice president Michael Beckerman were reportedly on hand at the event, which President Donald and First Lady Melania Trump hosted at the National Building Museum in Washington. They joined a reported guestlist including Vice President JD Vance, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and conservative megadonor Miriam Adelson.

geeze, it’s almost like the tech oligarchs told Trump to pause the ban until they could negotiate a way to profit more from acquisition of TikTok (or a newly created US based subsidiary that Bezos is trying to invest in) than by outright banning users access to it, cold turkey.

on April 19th there will be protests nationwide in every city.

I plan to be at the one where I live, with as many people as I can get to come with me. attending is the bare minimum i can do, but until we collectively get up enough courage for large scale civil disobedience, simple protests are a starting point to get you connected with local allies and movements.

~people aren’t doing anything~

literally millions of Americans organizing nationwide protests and resistance events, uniting with friends and co-workers to strategize, with larger and larger turnouts with each passing week…

🤔🤔🤔

people keep using this ‘interrupting your enemy’ phrase incorrectly and it’s really tiresome.

it’s like, “hey, your enemy is destroying your country, do something!” and braindead meme junkies are like “well actually, don’t interrupt your enemy…” smh

ig it gives them permission to do nothing… it grants validation for passivity.

“The president golfed in Florida Saturday and planned to do so again Sunday, the White House said.”

one might say, hypothetically , perhaps the next mass demonstration needs to be 20,000 protesters marching onto the golf greens in formation and providing this wannabe dictator piece of shit scumbag with feedback directly from his constituents.