I feel like this article misses the big underlying problems of car dependency, and is mostly directed at dense urban centers which are already reasonably well equipped to ween off car use.

The real issue is reforming car first infrastructure and urban design. The science is clear: you literally cannot transit your way out of an auto-dependent suburb. People’s homes are so spread out that having enough transit lines and stops to cover everyone would be astronomically expensive, and much slower than simply driving.

The solution to reforming the suburbs is twofold.

First is to give people reasonable options for living in less autodependent spaces by allowing and encouraging denser housing development in already walkable areas, and relaxing suburban zoning to allow walkable spaces to develop naturally in these areas.

Second is to, essentially, force people to stop using their cars via economic leverage. Gas taxes, carbon taxes, registration fees, additional infrastructure fees for sprawled suburban homes, no free parking, fees for using highways and fees for exiting highways into dense urban areas, etc. The reality is, cars are extraordinarily convenient, comfortable, and safe, and we will continue having ample roads for them to drive on for the forseeable future.

If only we could get that idea in people’s heads.

Seems misguided to me. People only do these sort of society-wide prosocial actions when it is within their convenience tolerance. It reminds me of this:

Sure, you occasionally will run into the desperately poor person working 3 jobs who also finds the time to pick up litter in their local park. But most of the time this person has more important things to think about than litter - like getting a job that doesnt require them to work 3. The idea that we need to get people to be more pro-social so they will take the bus feels a lot like the idea that we need to teach people that exercise is healthy so they will cycle more. But the reason people don’t cycle, we know, is because it is inefficient and dangerous, and the reason people don’t take transit is because it is slow and unpleasant. And when cycling or taking transit is faster, cheaper, safer, and more pleasant than driving, people do that.

Douchebags, obviously.

No, really, it’s basically the same thing. Healthy, ambitious, intelligent, nice guys with golden retriever energy will attract those girls. If you are having trouble, then your problem is either presentation, or substance, or both.

Substance - are you actually a healthy, ambitious, intelligent, nice guy with golden retriever energy? Like, do you exercise and eat healthy and sleep enough most days? Do you have lofty goals that you are working towards and that you are making significant progress on? Can you sit down and solve problems by thinking about them, or else do you have a witty sense of humor? Do you try to treat everyone with kindness, and help others when you can? Do you walk into social situations excited to see all your old friends with a huge smile on your face, and ready to get to know every stranger there with the expectation that they will eagerly give you head scratches? Because if not, the perscription is simple - go be that guy. Of course, you don’t have to be perfect - but as long as you are making progress in any of these things, you are going to be a more attractive date.

Presentation - like… do you look good? I mean, I guess backing up, do you look at all - that is, are you even showing up to places where you can meet new people you might want to date? Because you can be the most dashing gentleman in the world, but it doesnt matter if you never leave the house. Even online dating, at some point, will require you to leave the house. Anyway - you don’t just need to be good, you need to look good. Groom yourself, express who you are by how you dress (make it good, not cringe), and then leave the house and say hello to people you’d like to date. Yeah, you have to say hello. Sexual dimorphic behavior is still alive and well on the dating scene, and this is your job - so nut up and start talking to pretty girls. Lots of women get turned on by the simple fact that a guy too the initiative to talk to them in the first place. Then, just move the conversation towards having a date. Done

Most colleges in Germany have options where you aren’t stuffed in a room with others unless you want to. It’s generally a tiny bit cheaper to stuff yourself in

This is literally the same situation as most American universities.

I don’t see the appeal unless you know your roommate.

Ya know how all the kids these days don’t know how to socialize and are super lonely? This is their opportinity to very easily make friends when they are starting college

The impression I get is that teal and grey have been hooking up casually for a while and have been open in their discussions about actively looking for other people. Teal’s “thank god” is a call back to grey’s consistent difficulty finding s suitible partner or complaints about being unable to find one. Grey then responds with faux outrage.

I’ve had these sorts of message back and forth with fwbs before, but even meaner. They’re hilarious

But I can tailor my feeds to be primarily people I know. Also, I have largely stopped using the feeds on these platforms. On fb, for example, I use Messenger and Marketplace. My feed, otoh, I scroll down through for a post or two that my friends made on my way to marketplace, then stop scrolling once it runs out of content relevant to me.

On reddit, content made by people I don’t know is all the content. So if it degrades in quality, I will stop showing up. Which I did. Which is why I’m here.

Two reasons.

I think /u/trem gives a reasonable statitical explaination. But it likely goes farther than that. The reality is, these days it is generally considered impolite to start a conversation with a stranger without pretense, and especially so to start a conversation with a woman with romantic intentions. The zeitgeist of our time is that women, by default, are not interested in men’s advances, and that making an advance on a woman for no reason other than her physical appearance (which is all you can know before approaching) is chauvinistic. Thus, almost all intelligent, pro-social men have been trained not to make advances on women they might be interested in in public. So who are you left with? The dumb, not-forward-thinking, idgaf crowd. The kind that spend every night at the bar, and then don’t care if anyone thinks they are a trashy peice of shit. And so that’s who approaches you.

The second reason is probably something about the vibe you are giving off. Reading your post here, and a few of your other comments on lemmy, I get the impression that you are walking around with an expression like you have a smear of shit under your nose. Like, I get that you aren’t interested in these men - but the way you say it, you sound like a very judgemental person who believes she is better than everyone else because she doesn’t eat fast food or something. And the problem with this vibe you are giving off is that it is going to repel the guys you want to attract - healthy, ambitious, intelligent, nice guys who want a healthy, ambitious, intelligent, nice girl. Maybe they interact with you a bit and think “oh, she’s judgemental, I don’t want to date her.” Or maybe they simply see the default look on your face and say “hmm, she looks pissed - I bet she’d yell at me if I tried to talk to her.” The girls who get lots of attention from attractive guys are the ones with golden retriever energy - they love meeting everyone, which means the attractive guys feel less nervous about striking up a conversation and asking them out. It reassures them that, even if this girl isn’t interested, she will at least be nice about it.

Where did I imply that making it so the planet doesnt kill us impacts only the companies?

You implied it when twice you went on long tangents going into the minutiae of the carbon production process while avoiding providing the simple, obvious answer to the question. Why do those companies produce all that carbon? Because they are making things that people want and need.

The problem with this framing is that it implies that climate change exists solely due to a few bad actors, and if we just constrained them or sestroyed them or whatever, then we would all live happily ever after. But this is not the case.

Suppose we round up all the CEOs and major shareholders to these companies tomorrow, and put them on a firing line, and threaten anyone else with the same if they don’t immediately dissolve the companies. Well, after maybe a year or two of a global economic crisis and restructuring of the world’s supply lines, do you think carbon emmissions would have gone down? Probably not. Instead, you would likely have new major players who stepped into the old companies roles. Or maybe now those roles are more dispersed - so instead of 7 companies emmitting all this carbon, we now have 700 million.

Now, I’m not saying that the concentration of global economic power isn’t a problem. But it isn’t the main problem to solve if we want to solve climate change. Because the production of carbon isn’t driven by companies making products, but by consumers demanding products. Nigerians coming out of poverty want dirty two stroke mopeds. Vietnamese pho vendors want propane to power their food carts. Latvian software developers want to display their wealth by driving low end luxury cars. Argentinian housewives want to eat steak for every meal. And remote villiagers in Pakistan want to keep enjoying the power they now have in their homes for only the last few years that comes from the coal plant 100km away. And if we want to snap our fingers and decarbonize the world, then at least some of these people are going to face disruptions to some of these goods.

That doesn’t mean that a decarbonized world has to be worse for everyone. But it means that maybe Latvian software developers need to develop a taste for expensive watches, and maybe Argentinian housewives will need to learn to grill jackfruit, and maybe an NGO needs to pay for rural Pakistanis to have solar panels on their roofs. But the actual number of companies that are the endpoints of pollution based on whatever statistical analysis is fairly irrelivant. Whether it is 7 companies or 700 million, we need to stop the demand for carbon intensive goods that is driving the supply - and that means changing peoples preferences or creating alternatives for those preferences to be met which do not depend on carbon emmissions.

The “constantly immediately responsive” part also means he’s probably a workaholic

You might be exaggerating a bit, but you’re right. I have quite a number of friends from, say, college or other interests that I want to keep up with. But maybe they live far away, or are now busy with a different stage in their lives, so we don’t or can’t hang out casually like we used to to catch up. I avoided IG for more than a decade out of a desire to not get addicted to it and somethingsomethingfuckcorporate or whatever. But the practical outcome of this is that I’ve lost contact with a lot of good friends that I would like to keep up with. Not through any malintent on either of our parts, but simply because I am choosing not to be on the platform where they share about their lives.

And along with your point, a great number of community events are run on these social media sites. There is a facebook group dedicated to playing pickup ultimate frisbee in my city, and I want to do that. So if I want to stay up to date on things going on in the group, like new games being scheduled or regular games being rainchecked, I need to be on facebook.

I often organize canyoneering trips for my friend group, and these trips often may have up to 40 people interested in going. And often there are one or two people who can’t join the facebook or whatsapp chats because for whatever reason they don’t have accounts on those platforms. It is so annoying to have to text them every new detail and update because they aren’t on the platform everyone else is on. I’ll do it, but it’s annoying.

Tbf, they did get Russia epic wrong

The secret is that Tom Cruise has remained a famous actor for the entire time. This gives him both the money and incentive to maintain a youthful and attractive appearance. Personal trainers, private chefs, anti-aging doctors, hair drugs, hair plugs, hair dye, regular skin care routine, regular preventative botox, tailored clothes, professional hair and makeup work before all public appearances.

The point they are trying to get at is that the vast majority of carbon produced by these companies is produced to see to the wants and needs of common people, and it is disingenuous to imply that solving climate change would impact no one except these companies shareholders.

Most carbon isn’t being created to build data centers. It is used to build roads, apartments, office buildings, cars, and trains. It is created by people driving cars or using gas stoves or eating hamburgers or running a heat pump on electricity generated in a coal plant. It is created when cheap plastic knick knacks are manufactured in indonesia, shipped across an ocean, and then transported overland to a store where they can be bought, used today, and thrown in the dump the next.

So regardless of where you apply pressure to stymie climate change, common people will be impacted, and pretending otherwise is essentially telling a lie to those common people.

I also find it irritating when politicians brag about bills like “this will create 3000 American jobs.” Seriously, that is not even a drop in the bucket.

I agree. I think that there are some things that were better in the past - mostly the defaults we had set in diets, exercise, and social interaction. Since we now have the option to be sedentary, eat processed food, and stay isolated, this can lead to a great deal of unnecessary unhappiness unless you make a conscious choice to do otherwise. And this choice can feel difficult to make, because so many other people have normalized an unhealthy way of life. But still, it is a choice, and any individual can choose to live differently if they want to.

Female is used as an adjective here. Its fine. It isn’t a dirty word.

I read it. It immediately fixed all sorts of chronic pain I had. I literally don’t give a shit about anything else, and if you have chronic pain, neither should you. You can find the book for free on the internet, and the solutions listed cost zero dollars. There is no reason not to do this, Dr Phil or no.

“Things were better in the past”

No… you just spend too much time on the internet. And yes, that includes comparing everything to 1950s America. Of course, there are ebbs and flows, and things get worse for some people or groups of people sometimes. But on net, if you compare the present to the past over any substantial period of time, based on metrics that people generally find important like health, safety, free time, and freedom to choose how to live their lives, the present is wildly better than the past.

Taking 1950s America for example, since it is such a popular example, 1/3 of homes didn’t have indoor plumbing. We don’t even have to go back to medieval times and talk about how you probably wouldn’t be a princess - we can just compare to the supposed golden age of one of the richest societies the world has ever seen, and you have a one in three chance of having to poop in a hole outside every day and heating your bathwater in a stock pot on the stove.

Really? You’re asking what’s 6x7? Didn’t you learn that in elementary school?

Adding onto the other commenter - yes the electoral college skews votes towards less populous states. But state borders weren’t drawn with this intent, so it isn’t gerrymandering.