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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • As with most sci-fi the author gets loopier in the later books. That being said:

    • Dune: masterpiece of philosophy, one of the best books ever put to print
    • Dune Messiah: a worthy sequel and must read after the first book; completes Paul’s arc
    • Children of Dune: more plot driven than the first, but still thematically rich and entertaining.
    • God Emperor of Dune: the most divisive of the books: you love it or you hate it. I am in the love it camp, the book is unhinged and the themes are marvelous. This is where I’d stop a read of the series.
    • Chapterhouse and the other (Heretics?): forgettable in my opinion, simply because I’ve forgotten them. Later book fan opinions welcome.
    • anything Brian Herbert: not terrible but not awfully good either. Makes for decent light reading I guess, and there’s good lore building in some of the books despite some unforgivable retcons (Agemmemnon, sigh)









  • You’re being downvoted because this is the attitude that got us into, and is keeping us in, this mess. Let us be precise with terms: housing is not a speculative investment. You don’t buy a house because you presume it will appreciate 100-1000% by the time you sell it. That attitude leads to the paradox that the government is unable to stop: you either build/allow affordable housing, lowering prices and crashing people’s speculative investment, or you restrict new home building through restrictive zoning and NIMBYism run wild, letting houses appreciate to the point of unaffordability.

    You buy a house to live in long term: to buy it back from the bank and own it all to yourself. You have right to sell it for an equal or roughly price tracking rate with inflation. That’s a good investment. Every Canadian has the right to buy affordable housing. Saying affordable housing is affordable renting is not only reductive but downright prejudicial: people don’t rent because they’re poor. They rent because they want the freedom to move without selling a house. They rent because they are building lives as students or young families or their careers. They rent because they choose to invest their money in something other than house equity. And all the real, concrete policies which help new homeowners (ie building more housing) help renters: these two groups are not at odds with each other.





  • Y’all really don’t read the articles. The UN already has reports on greenwashing woth pretty solid definitions and recommendations. The report was linked in the article.

    Excerpt from the linked UN report:

    Our report also specifically addresses the core concerns raised by citizens, consumers, environmentalists and investors around the use of net zero pledges that make greenwashing possible. Our recommendations are clear that:

    • Non‑state actors cannot claim to be net zero while continuing to build or invest in new fossil fuel supply. Coal, oil and gas account for over 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions. net zero is entirely incompatible with continued investment in fossil fuels. Similarly, deforestation and other environmentally destructive activities are disqualifying.

    • Non-state actors cannot focus on reducing the intensity of their emissions rather than their absolute emissions or tackling only a part of their emissions rather than their full value chain (scopes 1, 2 and 3).

    These recommendations explicitly cover the ad campaign discussed in OP’s article, as well as many other greenwashing ad campaigns.




  • Hi and welcome! Our take is a little bit more nuanced than that, if I may be bold enough to speak on behalf of the community. We understand that most people don’t have a choice but to own and drive a car for most of your everyday needs: here we call that car dependence. The sane among us recognize that most people didn’t necessarily choose this way of living, and most acknowledge that those who enjoy it have that right.

    We do recognize that car dependence has a lot of negative impacts on society: from climate to economy to health to geopolitics and more (there’s whole books on the subject). And we’re a growing group of people who strive to build a better world than the one we inherited. What that means is taking action to reduce car dependence and instead promote alternatives like public transit, walkable towns, and cities built for people (not for cars). It’s a multifacted issue, far beyond the (incendiary) name implies. This discussion is about trains and how safe they are compared to cars, which kill over 50 thousand people a year in the United States, and injure millions more. It doesn’t have to be this way.

    Wouldn’t it be great to not have to drive 30 miles each day? That’s the kind of future we’re trying to build for the growing number of people who desire that. Accomplishing that is difficult and takes time and political action that many in this community are trying to build.