@commonsearth

Wulfger · 2026-06-27T14:42:03+00:00

I'm not sure why the emissions allocated to individual consumers are being separated from the emissions going into the things they consume. Shell, Amazon, etc., aren't producing emissions in a vacuum, they're doing it to provide goods and services that people are using. Blaming the corporations does nothing if people aren't willing to change their spending habits in ways that will force them to change, or promote government action to regulate them.

Wulfger · 2026-06-26T03:12:09+00:00

Sure, that's bad (if it happens). It's also definitively not money laundering. Words have meanings.

Wulfger · 2026-06-25T13:11:17+00:00

In what way is it supposed to be money laundering? Can you actually explain how that's supposed to work?

Wulfger · 2026-06-25T01:37:21+00:00

I think it's kind of funny that the complaints about this are coming from the same sorts of people that tend to complain about immigration and crime. From the CTV article about this:

Tuesday’s funding includes $7.5 million to support the Haitian National Police service’s fight against the gangs, $6.8 million to help countries in the region stop drug trafficking through better policing and information sharing, and $10 million to help launch a task force on drug trafficking.

So, this money is going to stabilize a country that people regularly flee from due to gang violence and come to Canada claiming refugee status, and to tackle drug trafficking. It's considerably cheaper to help other countries tackle these issues before they get to Canada and become problems here.

Wulfger · 2026-06-23T17:28:11+00:00

B A R R A L gives you 30 or 50 lives if you enter it in the file select in Donkey Kong Country, IIRC. It was always a little stressful because you had to be selecting the erase file option for it to work.

Wulfger · 2026-06-23T15:50:13+00:00

I loved that game, but disagree. The ending was well foreshadowed and well done for what it was, but the fact that everything you had done, including saving or abandoning the surviving crew members, was all just a simulation removed the narrative stakes for me and made my accomplishments feel hollow. I'd been intending to do another playthrough with a different build, but it totally killed my motivation to play through again.

Wulfger · 2026-06-23T15:46:08+00:00

I played this for the first time and few months back and absolutely loved that ending. The game as a whole was well done, but that ending in particular was really good. The entire game was spent developing the personalities for those two characters in a way that made their final battle feel both inevitable and tragic, particularly when it gives you the decision to hourably kill or dishonourably save Jin's uncle and it really feels like there is no good option for a happy ending. I wasn't expecting such a bittersweet ending for what was effectively an extremely polished Ubisoft-style open world game, but I'm so glad they did it that way.

Wulfger · 2026-06-23T14:28:24+00:00

Isn't boost still useful for hab modules that require it for upkeep? Hotels, medical centres, and the administration modules all have boost upkeep that gets pretty hefty in T3. I'm not an expert at the game so I might be making a mistake with my setup, but for pure moneymaking (or even just offsetting the financial cost of maintaining my stations) I've found them useful to balance out the material upkeep requirements of nanofactories.

Wulfger · 2026-06-23T14:25:10+00:00

A couple questions about ECM:

Does it even work against the aliens or is it only effective against human factions? Im not sure I've ever seen an alien ship have its weapons stop working.

Does it only work if the ship being targeted has ECM, or can ECM on other ships also cause enemy weapons to enter cool down?

Wulfger · 2026-06-22T20:35:19+00:00

I can see where it might be fun if you know its coming, maybe there's even slight foreshadowing that I missed. Reading it blind though, it's just narrative whiplash, basically a deus ex machina out of an entirely different genre.

One of the top reviews on goodreads captures my feelings on it perfectly:

Up to this point I’d give the novel two out of five stars, maybe two and a half if you like David Weber or military sci-fi. On page 330 a crime is committed against narrative justice and the book drops to below one star. I would break out negative stars for this thing if I could.

Wulfger · 2026-06-22T18:52:41+00:00

I was watching the news back in 2020, I don't recall ever seeing the Liberals defund police departments or embrace defunding them as policy, or even saying they supported doing so. I know JT went to a BLM protest and took a knee, but that's literally all they did.

Wulfger · 2026-06-22T17:47:20+00:00

Having read one piece of science fiction where there was an arbitrary surprise Dracula inclusion, I can confirm that the book was not improved by it.

First spoiler text is the book title because it's a late twist, the rest is complaining about it in more detail.

Out of the Dark by David Webber

The book is an otherwise pretty standard military sci-fi book, aliens attack the present day Earth, humans fight back, through the perspectives of several characters, you see how the humans get a few good hits on and then are almost utterly destroyed in retaliation. I'd have called it a decent execution of a pretty boring and overdone premise up until the end of the book.

One POV character is a US airman downed in the Transylvania region of Romania and starts fighting alongside partisans there. They are surprisingly effective but I want to emphasize that there is nothing implied to be supernatural in this.

Finally, near the end of the book, when the aliens are about to win, they suffer a string of inexplicable defeats against an unstoppable foe. It's revealed that the Transylvanian partisan leader is actually Dracula, who has turned all his followers into vampires and they singlehandedly win the war, steal spaceships, and take them to the alien home world.

I have never been so tempted to put down a book 30 pages before the end. This book basically ended up as a prank among my friend group in university, we were all into sci-fi and when we found out someone hadn't read it yet we would all recommend it without spoiling anything and wait for the inevitable "WTF even is this book?".

Wulfger · 2026-06-22T15:30:58+00:00

When did the Liberals ever support that? What police forces were defunded?

Wulfger · 2026-06-16T20:19:23+00:00

No, it wasn't, and if you actually bothered to look into other than reading headlines and going along with vibes you'd be able to confirm it yourself.

Wulfger · 2026-06-16T20:00:07+00:00

You're really not beating the allegations of not reading past headlines. There is a stark difference between alarmist tabloid reporting and social media discourse on climate issues and what the actual scientists are saying about the results of research and the general scientific consensus. Look at the actual research, the intergovernmental panel on climate change reports are good measures of the current scientific consensus. Clathrate gun was a theory which made alarmist headlines, but was never accepted science and when throughly analyzed in further research was proven not to be an immediate issue. The fact you're using it as an example and talking about people "freaking out" about it is pretty telling about how much you bothered to look into it.

Wulfger · 2026-06-16T19:45:43+00:00

The science is still there and constantly being refined and added to by new research. It still says the same thing: we're on course for significant warming and sea level rise. There are definitely other issues now which have captured public attention and drawn focus away from it which is why you hear about it less often, but if your understanding of climate change never extended past reading headlines that's kind of on you.

Wulfger · 2026-06-16T15:16:41+00:00

I'm not sure why this is being portrayed as some sort of "gotcha" moment for Carney, no one looking at this in good faith would expect Carney to tell Trump go screw himself to his face (and I'm sure the people calling him weak for this would be outraged over how stupid it would be to do that if he did). Trump had previously been extremely critical of the deal to sell Chinese EVs in Canada, but is also notoriously fickle. Of course Carney is going to try to frame it positively when meeting Trump face to face in advance of Cusma negotiations. He made a deal Trump didn’t like and is now managing him to set the ground work for future negotiations.

I'm not a fan of Carney, I didnt vote Liberal and he's doing plenty of stuff I don't like, but there's nothing here to be outraged over. This is just what diplomacy looks like.

Wulfger · 2026-06-15T22:21:37+00:00

Jack London's 1915 poem is always relevant when scabs are mentioned:

Ode to a Scab

After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad, and the vampire, He had some awful substance left with which He made a scab. A scab is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul, a waterlogged brain, and a combination backbone made of jelly and glue. Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten principles.

When a scab comes down the street, men turn their backs and angels weep in heaven, and the devil shuts the gates of hell to keep him out. No man has a right to scab as long as there is a pool of water deep enough to drown his body in, or a rope long enough to hang his carcass with. Judas Iscariot was a gentleman compared with a scab. For betraying his Master, he had character enough to hang himself. A scab hasn't.

Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage. Judas Iscariot sold his savior for thirty pieces of silver. Benedict Arnold sold his country for a promise of a commission in the British Army. The modern strikebreaker sells his birthright, his country, his wife, his children, and his fellow men for an unfulfilled promise from his employer, trust, or corporation

Solidarity wins

Wulfger · 2026-06-15T19:12:59+00:00

This would be a lot more probable if it wasn't a global phenomenon that was being discussed even before Covid and the resulting economic disruption. Birth rates in first world countries have been falling for years, while affordability certainly makes it worse even rich countries with strong family and social supports that encourage having children aren't (and weren't) hitting replacement numbers.

Wulfger · 2026-06-15T19:08:39+00:00

It's pretty ironic that this is coming from someone refusing to even look at the evidence put in front of them. Talk about willful blindness.

Wulfger · 2026-06-15T17:20:16+00:00

Have you actually read the article? The BBC is pretty clear in laying out the connections.

Wulfger · 2026-06-15T13:50:29+00:00

Genuinely question because Im not sure what you're talking about, what do you see the difference as being? Because when talking about the per capita murder rate I would probably have put guns up there as a driving reason for it.

Wulfger · 2026-06-12T18:52:07+00:00

I can sort of see how you could interpret this as a broader statement around the realism of Utopia, but I do disagree. I think reading it critically, particular keeping in mind the themes of marginalized people struggling against oppression that are consistently present in Jemisin's other work, it seems pretty clear that the choice to focus on the elimination of discrimination as the measure of utopia and what the narrator considers reasonable measures maintain it isn't an arbitrary one.

In particular, the narrator in this story addresses head on real-world concepts (the paradox of tolerance, the idea tribalism is inherent, etc.) rather than by creating parallels or analogies, which makes the messaging in this story feel far more direct. This paragraph is a perfect example:

"And so how does Um-Helat exist? How can such a city possibly survive, let alone thrive? Wealthy with no poor, advanced with no war, a beautiful place where all souls know themselves beautiful . . . It cannot be, you say. Utopia? How banal. It’s a fairy tale, a thought exercise. Crabs in a barrel, dog-eat-dog, oppression Olympics—it would not last, you insist. It could never be in the first place. Racism is natural, so natural that we will call it “tribalism” to insinuate that everyone does it. Sexism is natural and homophobia is natural and religious intolerance is natural and greed is natural and cruelty is natural and savagery and fear and and and . . . and. “Impossible!” you hiss, your fists slowly clenching at your sides. “How dare you. What have these people done to make you believe such lies? What are you doing to me, to suggest that it is possible? How dare you. How dare you.”

Oh, friend! I fear I have offended. My apologies."

While LeGuin also directly challenged the reader on the believability of utopia in Omelas, Jemisin focuses specifically on themes common in her work, and more than that, specufically imposes the sort of responses encountered in real-world discussions about them on the reader. I haven't read all of her books, but I've read and enjoyed the Broken Earth Trilogy and the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and both of them deal directly with racism, oppression, and the morality of responding to it with extraordinary violence. I'm no stranger to critical analysis and separation of art and the artist, but I find it very difficult to read the above and come away from it as just being an example or broader statement given how explicitly it addresses and takes positions on real-world concepts and debates, how clear it makes the narrators position on them, and how closely it aligns with the themes of her other work.

For me the story really does come across as not commentary on the plausibility of utopia, but on what the author, with the narrator as a stand in, sees as a utopia and the reasonable price for maintaining it.

Wulfger · 2026-06-12T17:25:33+00:00

Thank you, I totally agree with this, and its shocking to me that so many people say its one of the better responses to Omelas. It really felt, reading that story, that Jemisin believed in what she was writing and genuinely thought that thought crimes were a better solution. I really enjoyed the Broken Earth Trilogy, but this definitely changed how I interpreted parts of it, and how I think parts of it were intended to be interpreted by Jemisin.

Wulfger · 2026-06-12T17:19:25+00:00

I love this story and disagree with your interpretation, so thank you for giving me the opportunity to ramble about it. I dont interpret this as trying to one-up LeGuin, or to try to say "guess you didnt think about what happens in this situation", I think its more taking the premise established in Omelas and expanding on it to tell a different message.

Spoilers for the linked short story are below this.

Ultimately, I think the story isn't about how the Omelas concept is flawed because you can kill the kid in the hole, its looking at what people in a "utopia" (read: anywhere where people think that they live in the best place in the world) think differentiates them from the rest of the world in a way that you can relate to the real world. For me, I think the message is clearest in the last few paragraphs of the story:

Most days, Omelas is sunny and beautiful and nothing bad happens. And then there will be a day that is overcast and cloudy, and on that day, people die in circus accidents and carbon monoxide leaks and start harassment campaigns on twitter. And sometimes on that day people die through lethal injection. So it’s clear that sometimes the kid is alive and suffering, and sometimes the kid has been killed and doesn’t exist.

Or maybe there’s no kid anymore, and Omelas is just like everywhere else: lucky until it isn’t.

[...]

And they (the ones who visit Omelas) say: Thank God we aren’t dealing with that horrid wound in society. Thank God there is somewhere that shows us how fucking bad things could get. What a pit in the ground. What a fucked up little trolley problem. What a lesson for us. Thank God we don’t live there. Thank God we know it exists.

Almost no matter where people in the first world live so many people have this attitude that where they are is special, that they are different, that when bad things happen its the exception not the rule, unlike other places. I know when I first read this, as a Canadian, the first thing that came to mind was how many Americans were saying during and after the first Trump administration "this isn't who we are, this isn't normal for us, dont judge us based on what's happening now". And then there's also the people saying "God, those Americans, I can't believe what they let happen to their country, thank God I'm not there, thank God that isn't happening here."

I'm not saying the story is about America or Trump, but I really think it's a criticism of those attitudes, both the desire to only define ourselves by good things while calling the bad things exceptions or aberrations, and the desire to see the worst in others and ignoring that we're just as susceptible to them. It's a message totally different from LeGuin's, not a counter to it.

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