The people who voted for the Dumpster at least managed to take the most basic, simple first step in starting to fulfill their civic duty. I don't know if I can bring myself to laud that, but I've certainly no credit to award those who didn't even vote at all.

If so much as 10% of the nation is engaged and has so much as a spark of competence yet cannot bear to vote Democrat, where did all the 3rd-party and off-ballot votes go? Why are those still practically a rounding error, hovering around 2% every year but 2016?

Those who didn't vote at all ought to feel the most shame, because the laziness of abdicating all personal responsibility doesn't offer half the emotional shielding that idiocy does.

It's not effective at changing minds when it's done like that.

I had a rather lengthy response to Otter -- then I read their post more carefully, so you get one even longer. 🙄 This is why I normally lurk. Moderation is not my strength.

Propaganda is absolutely effective, but only significantly so when measured, diverse, and subtle, at least until already enjoying widespread majority support. The tactics that work involve obscuring bias or position behind oblique or selective framing. Bludgeoning people with facts tends to be counter-productive, even alienating people who already share the same views. That means the data was incorrectly measured, with a bias toward checking boxes/signaling virtue rather than actually exerting influence.

And there lies the deeper problem as well. How does one form "good journalistic practice" around such manipulative presentation of information, when that is partly how we define bad journalistic practice? Honesty/diligence and effectiveness are directly at odds with one another, and that's pretty hard to coherently codify. If you can't always be objectively right, then you have to always be honest and transparent -- to not exert influence that is not intrinsic to incontrovertible facts. And what today is ever incontrovertible to a general audience?

Journalism as a craft desperately needs the institutional trust it only ever earned by policing itself against such practices, so that it could leverage a trust that those who engage in more effective manipulations could not. And that didn't even protect the truth nearly so much as it did the status quo and established beliefs. The reality is we always needed critical thinking that has to come from somewhere greater in breadth and capacity than our own imagination, intuition, or narrow experience could ever train.

When the walls around publishing collapsed, we lost the good with the bad. I don't think the solution we need today can still (pretend to) exist within journalism/institutions, nor with a purely self-organized general public. Today, I find democratized aggregators like Lemmy helpful, but the quality is a direct consequence of its limited influence also limiting the incentive to subvert it. Even then it's only a relative boost to signal quality, not a new kind of signal.

A new mechanism is needed to filter and direct trust irrespective of subject -- perhaps as educational institutions once did to greater degree. If we don't figure it out soon, AI will create that solution for us its creator-owners by becoming the substrate through which all human knowledge gets filtered and approximately summarized. We've likely already met the next Rupert Murdoch.

Dang it, of course I'd post in the wrong spot. For the record, this was a copy of the other reply, not the one I mentioned not posting.

I wouldn't have considered the noise pollution to exceed the scope of a nuisance and disruption to wildlife habitat, but Benn Jordan did a pretty good job demonstrating infrasound's capacity to impact human health.

I wouldn't worry about that. Getting by presidential veto requires a two-thirds vote.

Nothing projects a terminal deficit of imagination quite like "but baseline power!"

Grid-scale storage has never been cheaper at scale, and there's no floor in sight, nor much greater opportunity to build our economy with a local industry that directly consumes our own resources. Our grid layout could use another bridge or two, but is overall fairly resilient and stable, and smoothing out short-term fluctuations has never been easier. And we're even right next to a province going all-in on some of the most reliable wind energy on the planet.

The challenge isn't finding alternative solutions to more oil and gas -- it's picking one.

I, a colonizer by birth and person of average shittiness, care deeply about the environment, because I live in it. I'd have to be profiting pretty obscenely from destroying humanity's future to budge that balance of self-interest. But as a regular working-class person, nothing I earn in my entire lifetime could possibly outweigh -- nor secure -- personal access to clean air and water, healthy food, and the natural beauty of our land.

In this context, the only distinction I see between myself and a "noble savage" is that indigenous people have, if anything, a stronger and more legitimate sovereign claim to Canadian territory (along with a tradition of more direct reliance on it). Why wouldn't they care? And maybe they don't care more than anyone else, especially relative to how they're personally impacted. But whether from care or convenience, they are vastly over-represented among the people that actually show up and put their bodies on the line opposing environmental destruction. They're 5% of our population, yet as best I can estimate a plurality across front lines nationwide.

With the billionaire class consistently getting to do whatever they want to the planet, it's very easy to forget: Even in the face of so much pro-business propaganda permeating our media, environmental protection is actually one of the areas where the rest of the world is not very divided at all.

Besides...the more "civilization" I see, the more attractive the label "savage" becomes.

I have no problem with Canada Post operating at a loss, but not while that effectively means taxpayer dollars subsidizing the private businesses dominating all easy, high-volume routes using underpaid gig labor. CP are getting penalized at both ends, as are we. The only other way I can think to frame it is urban taxpayers subsidizing rural and especially remote communities, which I'm sure will be very popular while public transit remains wholly inadequate.

I don't know how to solve any of that internally, nor just within shipping. It's most likely far from feasible to mandate every shipping company ^and-who-counts-as-such?^ deliver to every corner of Canada, or even of just certain regions. But putting an end to gig work by closing the contracting loopholes would be a good start. And start forcing all employers with more than 10 employees -- including contracted sole proprietorships -- to maintain a supermajority of labor hours being supplied through salaried full-time positions. Even that disrupts actual independent professionals, but at least it would still be a level playing field.

Anyway, it seems to me like most of the real problems and their origins are external to Canada Post itself

so it makes sense that there may not be any kind of internal solution.

This looks really promising. I was never at risk (during youth) because I was under the thumb of religious fervor, but I imagine I would have responded much more favorably to this kind of "know yourself" approach than the usual "everything is bad" propaganda. The latter is inherently self-defeating because it always contains some elements of both lying and hyping things that are non-issues on a personal basis. Both discredit any value delivered in the same package, and it's not a "messaging" issue or figuring out how to be cool enough to make kids listen.

I might go so far as to identify this kind of self-understanding as the most notable absence in the most egregious shortcomings of my education and overall upbringing. That probably shouldn't be so surprising, with western religion's adoration for "one size fits all" approaches to everything. But the key factor to maximizing reception and impact would be staying well clear of pseudoscience and limiting the program's ambitions to assessment backed by solid evidence.

Ah, so eastern social credit is the public(ish) policing private business. And that is very bad -- by which of course I mean it's targeting the people who most manipulate western public opinion.

But our western financial credit is private business policing the general public. "This is normal."

https://archive.is/IywFZ

The trouble with

letting go of this peeve

is that

[men are] doing a good job of escalating it.

In political terms, I'm affected in so far as disaffected men are storming the halls of power and pursuing agendas that will make everything worse for all of us. In interpersonal terms, "I got mine." And in subsequent identity terms, saying and doing nothing feels a bit like pulling up the ladder behind me.

Ok I'm signing off now. Cheers.