A Troll on Karl Johan Street

@sungodsevenoclock / sungodsevenoclock.tumblr.com

Words! Pens are too light. Take a chisel to write.

Part of what is necessary to reduce carbon emissions is to reduce the carbon emissions from airplane travel, and when calculating the effect a given policy would have, for example, it makes sense to calculate the per-person carbon cost of a plane trip as the carbon cost of the plane divided by the number of passengers. But when calculating the marginal carbon cost for you purchasing a plane ticket, I don't think it makes sense to think like that.

After all, you didn't order the plane. I guess you're encouraging less demand for flights by the price difference that would need to exist for the next marginal ticket buyer to buy your ticket. Something like that?

The reason to limit excessive plane travel is mostly to "put your money where your mouth is" and make you feel more secure in trying to get a large scale solution to happen. Obviously, this is something that doesn't work if everyone were to buy plane tickets. A similar situation as with voting: not voting is not bad, but the success of the system kind of relies on people doing it. Thus, I think you should feel roughly as bad about buying a given plane ticket as you should about not having voted the last time you had a candidate you wanted to support and didn't vote.

The thing is, apart from causing a lot of people to just uselessly feel bad, personal carbon cost doomerism leads people to seek out alternate defences like "fuck it the world is going to end and there's nothing we can do, you think you can help by sorting your garbage? lmao" and "all of pollution is done by 70 corporations", which are both also actively bad.

Look, the vast majority of both pro-Pluto is a planet people and anti-Pluto is a planet people get to their positions by ascribing an unnecessary level of coherence and meaning to the word "planet", so the search by people on this website for the less unreasonable position based on which side has less people invested in the definition of the word planet is just bound to fail.

"Why are you so mad that Pluto isn't officially a planet any more?" "Why are you so mad that people disagree with the IAU?"

Problem is, the people who don't care don't say anything? Well I don't care about the classification of Pluto in the slightest. But you know what does bother me? Yes, you do, because I've said I will complain about this when people complain about Pluto. It's those periodic tables with lanthanum in group 3 and lutetium at the end of the lanthanide series below. Bad periodic tables that should feel bad.

The Shooting Party (Anton Chekhov) did you know that before he settled on short stories and plays, young Anton Chekhov wrote a murder mystery novel? It's a real murder mystery, though it's also a nineteenth century novel about the country lives of the Russian nobility, so, following traditions of the latter genre it's mostly preamble. That, and that the precipitating event is marital infidelity, which is treated in nineteenth century novels as the most serious sin and most important story there possibly could be, give the whole thing an archaic feel. But still, it would make a pretty compelling murder mystery. Except it isn't, at all, because the murderer is unnecessarily given away in an author's footnote. Like, if you take away the footnotes, maybe it would still be obvious what happens, maybe not, but I can't even judge that question because the mystery is deliberately spoiled by Chekhov himself. I can't fathom the decision to have those footnotes in.

I realise Fully Automated Luxury Communism isn't like a serious stream of Marxist thought or what have you, but among online communists, at least, it sure seems more popular than versions of Lenin's (/St. Paul's) "who doesn't work, doesn't eat". So if you're strictly talking in terms of online disputes between communists and liberals, at least, I would say that inequality is a bigger motivating factor than alienation.

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I’m memorizing the Greater Bug Phylogeny. the sister group to insects has 60 legs and only lives in saltwater caves. the sister group to insects + 60 legs guy is water flea (crowd cheers)

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Song

by Adrienne Rich

You’re wondering if I’m lonely: OK then, yes, I’m lonely as a plane rides lonely and level on its radio beam, aiming across the Rockies for the blue-strung aisles of an airfield on the ocean. You want to ask, am I lonely? Well, of course, lonely as a woman driving across country day after day, leaving behind mile after mile little towns she might have stopped and lived and died in, lonely. If I’m lonely it must be the loneliness of waking first, of breathing dawn’s first cold breath on the city of being the one awake in a house wrapped in sleep. If I’m lonely it’s with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore in the last red light of the year that knows what it is, that knows it’s neither ice nor mud nor winter light but wood, with a gift for burning.

What are the boundaries of what counts as aesthetic preferences? Does it cover all the senses? It's weird to think of "pizza" or "soft skin" as aesthetic preferences.

The Yukon River is the third-longest river in North America, flowing 1,980 miles (3,190 km) through northwestern Canada and the U.S. state of Alaska before emptying into the Bering Sea. At 321,500 square miles (832,682 sq km), its total drainage area is about 10 times the size of Ireland. This Overview shows a section of meanders near the community of Beaver, Alaska — population 48.

66.257263°, -147.813035°

Source imagery: Maxar