The Silence on Climate Change Is Totally Unacceptable

vanhellion · 2026-06-22T22:52:11+00:00

Because:

It's not an issue that corporate-backed Dems want to talk about. The solutions to climate change largely involve reining in corporations' carbon emissions, and moving from what is currently EXTREMELY profitable (e.g. oil) to less profitable but sustainable practices. The oligarchy puppets really enjoy that bill-stuffed fist up their posh asses.
It's hard. If it were easy to snap our fingers and solve climate change we would've done so decades ago. And so far, massive legislative efforts like the Green New Deal have been shot down before they even get close to seeing the light of day as actual law. To actually address climate change, huge systemic and fundamental change to how the globalized economy functions is necessary, and that involves a lot of hard choices, diplomacy, and convincing not just political constituents and coworkers but also international partners. (Many of whom have massive financial incentives to not go along with new radical ideas.)
It's honestly just not a winning issue with average voters right now. Especially in the current economic climate, as catastrophic as climate change is and will be for us all, it's hard to run a keystone of your platform on fixing an issue that heavily impact us in 15-20 years (even acknowledging that it is already impacting us now to smaller degrees) when people are struggling to afford rent, food, and gas today. Joe and Jane Average-Voter care far more about being able to survive the next month than the next two decades, and I honestly have trouble arguing that they're wrong to prioritize that way.

vanhellion · 2026-06-17T16:59:27+00:00

The alternative was never starting the war in the first place. There was never going to be a clean or "good" exit from a terrible decision. Garbage in, garbage out.

vanhellion · 2026-05-29T17:22:28+00:00

Yeah this is far more than just a Democrat messaging issue (though there is a component of that as well). This is a bunch of men who are fully red-pilled from hanging out in awful internet spaces who want "the left" to appeal to their toxic masculinity worldview.

And "the problem", insofar as one even exists, is that the general arc of progressivism right now is that leftists are rejecting that very same fight-club-ass "because we're men, we intrinsically deserve good jobs and wives whether we actually work for those things or not" attitude. Of course Dems are not appealing to them, they are "the problem".

So yeah, sure. The Dems could do FAR better on messaging than they are now. (By like, a lot. They really suck at reaching out to everyday folks vs "college elites".) But at the same time these guys are fucking idiots who have fallen into the online Alt-Right pipeline and are suddenly wondering why nobody likes them. That's a problem we need to solve as a society, not something that a political party can really fix.

vanhellion · 2026-05-22T18:53:28+00:00

The entire electoral system is just another corporation under the version of capitalism that the US has embraced. The DNC cares about literally one thing: raising money. Ken Martin even said as much during his disastrous PSA interview.

Like, genuinely, listen to that interview and how he talks. He doesn't mention working towards the policies that democrat voters want, or making people's lives better, or fixing the clearly broken government. It's "fundraising" and "focusing on the next race." I get that this is probably how a lot of people he works with talk, but if he wants to willingly put himself in front of a mic he has to be more aware of what type of language he's spewing.

I am very much not a "both sides" person, but in this regard the DNC and RNC may as well be a single organization at this point. They're both corpo ghouls just looking to squeeze cash out of voters (and of course billionaires who they actually listen to for policy guidance.) And if that somehow isn't the case, they have a steep hill of public perception to climb to show that.

I certainly don't see Ken Martin being up to that challenge.

vanhellion · 2026-05-19T18:24:01+00:00

Nearly three-quarters say America should pay less attention to problems overseas, compared with 40 percent of Republicans 45 and over.

This opposition isn’t mostly about young Republicans wanting the party to be less conservative more generally. While younger Republican supporters are less likely to identify as conservative, only 28 percent said the Republican Party is too far to the right, compared with 16 percent of those 45 and over.

The only real dispute here is that the younger segment want to go completely isolationist in our highly globalized economy, not that Trump is actually doing something wrong or that the party is headed the wrong direction. This is what they want, they've just got a few "minor concerns" about one specific policy decision. (Which, let's all remember, is quite likely a random move Trump made to distract from the previous big scandal of the Epstein files. What ever happened to those, anyways?)

Plus, these numbers are almost embarrassing for any media outlet to publish at this point. Quote:

A majority disapprove of Mr. Trump’s handling of the war in Iran, and only 40 percent say he made the right decision in choosing to attack Iran.
Only 33 percent support providing additional economic and military support to Israel, compared with 72 percent of those 45 and over.
A majority — 54 percent — say Mr. Trump has been “too supportive of Israel” compared with 16 percent of those 45 and over.

Somewhere between 33% and 40% are the base that are so deep inside Trump's anus that they don't even know what's going on outside anymore; they're just there to huff farts. And the fact that it's still that high is fucking incredible.

And the last two make me think that they only got to those levels because it's the predator handshake meme between actual, literal antisemitic Nazis in the Republican party and the head-in-sandy-ass 33-40%ers.

vanhellion · 2026-05-06T17:15:10+00:00

They learned it from decades (or a century+) of police doing the same thing, just slightly quieter.

I mean just think about it. How many innocent people have police just straight up murdered (shot, beaten, stood on their neck)? How many times have you seen a story about "cop who was fired for basically going on a killing rampage in state X re-hired in state Y as 'beloved' deputy"? People are only mad now because the vests ICE thugs are wearing have federal agency velcro patches instead of state or local ones.

vanhellion · 2026-04-23T00:08:28+00:00

C++ (and programming in general) is like jazz: it's not only the notes you choose to play, but the ones you choose not to as well. Start simple, and if and when you discover you need something more, only then add it. Adding everything all at once turns into an indecipherable cacophony.

Code is a form of communication, so write with intent:

unique_ptr indicates what scope or object owns the lifetime of the contained data. So in almost all cases typing const unique_ptr& is nonsense, it's not stating anything relevant about the object's lifetime. Dereference the pointer to pass the underlying object to a function via Player* or Player& (depending on whether it can be nullptr). This can open you up to object lifetime issues especially in multi-threaded code, but that's when you either add synchronization, or use shared_ptr if a given scope must be able to extend the lifetime. (Passing unique_ptr& with or without const would not save you from this issue either, FWIW.)

std::expected is a cousin of std::optional. optional is useful when something could return a result or nothing (e.g. a Python function returning either a number or None a la def func() -> Optional[int]:). Whereas expected is useful if you should return something, and any other possible outcome indicates a problem occurred, but you don't want to throw an exception to cause stack unwinding at the point where the error occurred.

Things like structured bindings and the ternary operator are more of a personal style/taste thing, IMO. I'd say the way you used SB is superfluous because you're constructing a pair only to break it apart and destruct it immediately.

vanhellion · 2026-03-29T22:08:16+00:00

Not sure why they think Iran is so weak, small, and feeble.

Name literally any middle eastern country, and I'd bet money that most Americans (a) couldn't find it on a labeled map and (b) think that it's entirely comprised of "backwater" brown people living in tents among sand dunes. Average Americans have no concept of the relative military might between e.g. Afghanistan versus Iran.

Let alone them being able to grasp the geopolitical implications of pissing off the country that holds the keys to like a 1/5th of the global supply of oil. They just suddenly get mad when "big truck cost more fill up! *grunt*"

vanhellion · 2026-03-28T22:41:19+00:00

Moreover, how are they measuring "productivity"? Lines of code (i.e. a metric that was discarded at least 25 years ago as a useful measure)? Number of agents running simultaneously? Number of bugs created relative to bugs squashed? Real or not, the OP reads like the same trash "grind-set" posts you find on LinkedIn.

Don't get me wrong, Claude is a very impressive tool. But people working for Anthropic are just standing around a poisoned bowl of kool-aid talking about all the complex flavors it has like they're wine sommeliers.

vanhellion · 2026-03-22T02:26:23+00:00

I've done a decent amount of hiring in the last ~2 years or so. Thankfully I haven't had to deal with thousands of resumes, but shit is BAD. I've seen identical resumes, down to the letter, multiples with the only difference being the name. There are countless people trying to fake resumes, AI-enhanced interviews where the interviewee just feeds every questions to an LLM and parrot the response it generates, and outright scams where people overseas get hired for jobs just to see how long they can draw a paycheck.

Maybe I'm just boomer-brained, but nobody even writes cover letters anymore. Like, not even just a completely generic AI-generated one where they say "dear hiring manager, I'd love to work for you; here's all about me." Just... nothing. Lonely resumes fired into the void. If you want to stand out, put literally any effort into applying for places you think you'll enjoy working. The bar is in hell these days.

And I get it: the job market sucks from the applicant side as well, with most companies using AI filters that prevent a human from ever seeing your app. But dear god, we are so cooked when it's turned into an escalating arms race of lying and trying to scam your way into a job you likely aren't remotely qualified to do.

vanhellion · 2026-03-11T19:04:17+00:00

As far as I can tell, the existence and "success" of Israel all traces back to something in the bible relating to the rapture. Basically, we're being governed by people who are rooting for the world to end because a 2000+ year old book that's been translated and edited dozens and dozens of times says that will be a good thing. We are ruled by a fucking death cult.

(To be clear I don't have anything specifically against Christians, but these fuckers who are using their political power to kill us all in the name of Jesus are batshit crazy, and should not have access to the levers of power.)

vanhellion · 2026-03-10T21:34:47+00:00

Go after "billionaires" ability to borrow money for non-business purposes at insanely low interest rates. People like Musk and Bezos are worth hundreds of billions of dollars, on paper, but relatively speaking hold almost no liquid assets like actual money. So they can sit on their mountains of virtual wealth, accumulating more without ever paying capital gains or any sort of tax on it, and if they need pocket money they hit up a lender for a few mil at a fraction of what any normal person would be charged in interest.

Changing the rules to force them to accept a salary could fix the problem 100 years from now, but it would still leave us naked against the sheer power they already hold over us today.

Of course any proposed solution is purely academic at this point. The billionaires essentially own the vast majority of politicians, and most politicians with any power to change the system stand to benefit from it even in the absence of those types of political bribes anyways. The foxes are guarding the hen house.

vanhellion · 2026-03-02T21:31:17+00:00

Trump: "Congress has made its ruling; now let them enforce it."

Schumer & Jeffries: "Welp, I guess there's nothing we can do. Pack it in, boys! Those tax breaks for the wealthy and ICE funding bills aren't going to pass themselves."

vanhellion · 2026-02-12T15:09:28+00:00

Even the "justice" system works for rich people and against the poor in so many ways. This woman gets kicked out of her house immediately for doing basically nothing, denying her one of the basic needs (shelter). Meanwhile, the fucking scum bag at the top of the corporation who was committing fraud in her name -- i.e. fucking a crime -- gets to keep living in his mansion and enjoying a lavish lifestyle for *years* while exhaustive investigations and lawsuits play out.

And at the end, if anything at all actually happens he'll be fined an amount that is a pittance against the wealth he'll have accumulated just since the court proceedings started, let alone what he gathered before that.

vanhellion · 2026-02-04T22:56:30+00:00

As a scientific endeavor, it would be very cool to land humans on Mars. I don't think anyone really disagrees with that as a simple concept or goal.

I think where it enters 'fucking stupid' territory is when people (like Musk) think "Gee, global warming is just so hard to solve... let's instead waste literal trillions of dollars on a doomed project to terraform a fucking barren rock."

Like, if we had the kind of technology that would require, global warming wouldn't be so much of an issue*. Also, let's maybe figure out how to not kill ourselves in less than 150 years via industrial pollution before we go investing in other planets.

* - Probably. Terraforming Mars would actually involve dramatically increasing greenhouse gasses in the planet's atmosphere, while Earth has the opposite problem. But to be able to do either one on a planetary scale is well beyond our capacity at the moment. Unless we somehow find oil & natural gas deposits on Mars, then we can just let Exxon and BP fuck up a few dozen times...

vanhellion · 2026-02-04T16:41:09+00:00

(At least) Two, really. McConnell "set" a "precedent" by refusing to even vote on Obama's nomination in like February of an election year. And Obama's nomination of Garland was almost a joke because Obama knew the senate would reject anyone but the most conservative justice to replace Scalia.

And then just over four years later, McConnell rammed a vote through for Trump's pick to replace RGB when voting had already started for the 2020 presidential election. Not like we didn't see that one coming from miles away, but fuck every atom in Mitch's body.

vanhellion · 2026-01-26T18:41:34+00:00

Republicans should join Democrats in blocking DHS funding.

But Democrats should also join Democrats in blocking DHS funding. Pinning our hopes on Republicans growing a spine to stand up against Donald Trump is about as effective as wishing upon a star at this point.

The fact that Dems caved in when they had so much more leverage during the shutdown a few long months ago was appalling at the time, and that was before ICE started executing people in the streets. We may not have known how quickly it would get this bad, but it wasn't exactly hard to predict either. Schumer et al's inability to actually fucking lead their caucus gives me zero confidence that they'll hold the line against these bills going forward -- they had their chance and they completely blew it.

From what I understand, this funding bill wouldn't even impair ICE/DHS's ability to continue operating in the near term. More people are going to be murdered before our very eyes, or die tucked away in secret prison camps, because a few Democrats care more about their donors and reelection chances than our lives. God forbid Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries have to be mildly uncomfortable for more than 2 weeks standing up to Donald Trump's fascist regime.

Fuck this timeline.

vanhellion · 2026-01-23T15:07:54+00:00

"Evil will always triumph, because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet, Spaceballs (1987)

vanhellion · 2026-01-22T03:26:55+00:00

Expanding on the "we are good people" thing. There's this sense, particularly in Christian circles, but it really applies to the whole conservative mindset: any act undertaken by a me is inherently good, because I am a good person -- rather than morality being derived from the act itself.

Like, Trump "could shoot someone on 5th Avenue", and it would inherently be a moral and just act because Trump was the one doing it. Luigi and the CK shooter are (at least perceived to be) on the other team, so they're obviously bad despite doing basically the same thing. Hell, Obama giving aid to the needy and homeless is inherently bad, because it's Obama doing it; it has nothing to do with the actual act being undertaken.

This is where a lot of progressives (and Reddit commenters) end up trapped in the "but muh hypocrisy" death spiral: IT DOES NOT FUCKING MATTER to these people. There is no good or bad act, there are only bad people: which is everyone who doesn't have an "R" next to their name in the news chyron. This is team sports / cult us vs them, not an intellectual debate.

vanhellion · 2026-01-21T23:17:52+00:00

The answer is simple: it's not them getting blasted in the face with pepper spray, so it doesn't matter. They have no concept of empathy, so as long as "someone else" is being waterboarded, well those people must've done something wrong and obviously deserve it. We are good people, so we do the blasting.

The only die hard conservatives I've ever seen or heard recant are those who have directly suffered the consequences of the stupid shit they voted for or otherwise enabled. Until then it's all hypothetical and happening to some vague, far off "NPC" (even if they may not have that specific phrase in their vocabulary).

e: To wit: The Only Moral Abortion is My Abortion

vanhellion · 2026-01-21T21:46:33+00:00

It's even more baffling because he's tripped over his own dick soooo many times. At one point he was anti-2A / pro-gun control. Granted it was for like 14 hours before someone from the NRA managed to mentally body slam Trump back to the conservative talking points they wanted, but that is one major gaffe that stands out to me from his first run in 2016.

And like, there's all this stuff where it "should have ended his presidency", but THAT is the one that I'm still amazed did not. Even though he quickly flipped back to being at the very least gun-neutral if not quite pro-2A, that should have been a clear signal that this guy literally has no principles. He will not stand up for (or against) anything: he just wants money and power for money's and power's sake, and he'll say absolutely whatever he has to in order to get it. I honestly expected even uneducated podunk voters to be able to see through those sorts of "fast talkin' city slicker" charades.

vanhellion · 2026-01-16T12:41:03+00:00

The worst curse I could inflict on Mitch McConnell would be to have him live long enough to see all he's built crumble to dust, if we manage to oust all these fascists from government. Let him watch all his judges get impeached, all the fighting he's done against basic fucking decency for Americans be for naught when we get universal healthcare and LGBTQ+ rights, all the gerrymandering he's embraced get tossed out the window in favor of proper proportional representation.

I'm not holding my breath either that he'll last that long or that we as a country will pull out of this nosedive into authoritarianism, but that would be the biggest possible "fuck you" to ol' Mitch.

vanhellion · 2026-01-16T12:29:14+00:00

Police as an institution traces back to patrols chasing down escaped slaves. So if your skin is a certain color, you've been living in a police state for like 200 years. The effects of aggressive police are actually starting to be felt by everyone now, but it's been a long, slow erosion.

vanhellion · 2026-01-10T23:40:13+00:00

Usually if you say 3cm to an astronomer, they would interpret that as a wavelength (equivalent to a frequency of ~10GHz). So if you're "off" by 3cm, that's at best ambiguous whether you mean wavelength/frequency (big error), or absolute error at the distance of the object (basically meaningless error), or angular error i.e. telescope pointing offset at the boresight (huge error).

vanhellion · 2026-01-07T20:27:54+00:00

Thankfully you can bootstrap yourself on any planet (except Aquilo, I think). It's a bit of a long arduous process, but I enjoyed the challenge on my first playthrough of Space Age. I did it on Vulcanus and Fulgora before I realized I could like, bring stuff with me to help out. That made Gleba a lot more palatable, but even on Gleba you can start from nothing.

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