I fear for induced demand. If electricity is cheap, why build more efficiently? Why not do bitcoin mining or AI training?

It wouldn't be so bad if there weren't plenty of places around the world that could desperately use solar panels, that are building fossil fuel infrastructure instead. Climate change is a global problem, so the obsession with getting your individual emissions down to zero is selfish and sometimes even detrimental to the climate if "your emissions" don't include the cost of manufacturing and limited availability.

We should be sending solar panels to the developing world as fast as humanly possible, not making electricity so cheap in California that multinationals can open up a couple more data centers.

Could you explain why?

America is super big and super stretched apart

Perfect for long-distance rail travel. Just get in the train, wait X minutes to get to the next town over, and get out. It's literally how the west was colonized in the second half of the 19th century.

What makes America bad for public transit isn't that the nation is spread out, it's that suburbs are a death knell with how spread out they are. I honestly don't think there's a way to make suburbs self-sustainable short of quadrupling the US' population so you can get decent density even there. Sort of like the SF Bay Area except actually building medium density housing instead of having >8 people to a low density home.

More realistically, the suburbs will probably have to be scrapped. It's not like those homes were built to last, anyway. Just don't replace them when they need to be condemned.

As for there not being enough greenery in cities, that's just a matter of choice, isn't it? Pedestrian boulevards can be lined with trees, building facades with ivy, public parks next to apartment blocks, etc. etc. Almost all the toxins in western urban areas today are from car tire dust and exhaust. Just ban motorized personal vehicles except mobility scooters and e-bikes, and most of what you seem to hate about urban areas can just go away.

I remember the DVD commentary on the 2004 Spongebob movie talking about this. It's bad, but it's not new.

Going by the NOAA's data, it isn't even getting worse, and the five year rolling average has decreased steadily since 1995. It's inevitable that some years will be above average with that amount of variance.

A plan to slowly decrease it is in operation, the cause and consequences are known and accounted for. As far as climate disasters go, this one's pretty tame.

I put together this gif for a side-by-side comparison. The picture was taken from a slightly different location, so it's not perfect, but the difference is obvious.

Police have discretion on which crimes to prioritize. They're not honor-bound to ticket someone who is double-parked in the middle of a car chase. They can opt not to arrest people for trespassing if it gets them to cooperate with a murder investigation.

Going to arrest pacifists engaging in criminal conspiracy to temporarily block nonessential industry and infrastructure at one location while ignoring ongoing racially motivated assault, looting, and arson is a choice.

John Brown was a based terrorist. The British Suffragette movement had a bunch of based terrorists. Mother Jones was based, and as much of a terrorist as most of Al Qaeda (i.e. not personally involved in terrorist attacks, but supporting movements that did engage in terrorism).

All you need is a sufficiently abhorrent status quo and terrorists who are otherwise decent human beings.

It's an interesting open question what we would want to replace intellectual property with.

My brain is so used to capitalism that I would be inclined to preserve things like artists having a contractual obligation to turn their work into a finished product if they got paid for it by someone that wanted a finished product. But if you look at some of the great renaissance artists, many of them were infamous for just skipping town and leaving unfinished works left and right when they got bored of making them. So maybe it's better to just accept that many great works are never finished so that other, greater works can get made instead.

One thing that does seem very important is crediting the actual artists and people that made it possible. Not to deny the right to copy or distribute, but to make it so people just know who is responsible and who they want to support or praise or communicate with. You would need infrastructure for that to make it easy to check, to remove duplicates, and to make sure entries give credit correctly.

Another important thing is the location, maintenance, and integrity of physical pieces. Hoarding seems bad, especially behind closed doors and especially without the permission of the creator or their (cultural) descendants. Letting artpieces decay seems bad, especially if others would pay to maintain them. Defiling artpieces seems bad, perhaps even with the creator's consent. But how do we decide which measures, if any, are okay to address these issues? I honestly don't know.

I don't know if it's necessary to do anything beyond these two that is specific to art. As long as there is a digital currency and wealth is already fairly distributed, voluntary patronage and donations (using the crediting infrastructure to make sure it ends up at the right places) may just be the best system for deciding which artists get what budget and how much of the world's resources and labor go to art. If wealth weren't fairly distributed, poor people would have less say in what gets made than everyone else, but the solution to that is to redistribute the wealth, not to patch that up with special rules for art. If there is no digital currency, then it's inconvenient to pay artists remotely.

Foelly

It's annoying that she put this on Instagram where there's no scrobble function, and she then spends so much time leading up to it.

For those not willing to sit around listening to off-the-cuff meandering, AOC's points:

• Ohio requires political parties to submit their candidates' names before the Democratic convention. If the convention is contested, Democrats likely won't be able to vote there effectively.
• AOC says that swing states might have enough legal ambiguity in the electoral code that Republicans can challenge any voting results, and then let it escalate to the Supreme Court who can throw out the Democratic result.
• Democrats are divided on who would be the replacement candidate, with many of the people calling for Biden to step down opposing Harris as well.
• The Biden/Harris campaign has $100M of campaign funding that will not be able to be transferred to another ticket. (Maybe it can be transferred to Harris? She mumbles a bit there).
• Anecdotally, when AOC sat "in rooms with those people" that call for Biden to step down, they didn't seem to have a proposed game plan for any sort of replacement. This includes lawyers who ought to know whether this creates legal trouble and people in the legislature.
• There is a risk that if the Democratic convention is contested, it won't be concluded before the deadline to submit the ticket in more states, which is two days after the scheduled end.
• There are no candidates that poll way better than Biden.
• Many mail-in votes can already be made in September or October. A new candidate would have to have a succesful campaign by that time.
• Biden is systematically underestimated (by Democrats and fianciers?) in his ability to rally 'demographics typically not cared for'.
• Biden does great with elderly people, which may not transfer to other Democrats.
• Democrats opposing Biden seem to be mostly concerned about big donors, not popular support.
• Democratic party members speaking anonymously to the press is both strategically stupid and undemocratic. They should have either spoken out publicly or kept it behind closed doors. The fact that they did may be why Biden is polling so bad.
• Biden gets energized from having people around him, which was not the case for the debate with Trump.

My personal opinions:

• With regards to Ohio, betting websites put the Republicans at 95% chance of winning the state, and Biden appears to have been trailing by 10 percentage points even before the debate. Losing Ohio only matters if you would have won Ohio with Biden, and that's questionable.
• With regards to the Supreme court handing the election to Trump based on a bullshit legal ruling, it seems like AOC is making the dangerous and questionable assumption that the Supreme Court cares about the law, and that the outcome of these legal challenges will depend on technicalities rather than on whether they think they can practically succeed at the coup.
• With regards to the $100M war chest, this seems to be cancelled out by her argument that Democrats opposing Trump are mostly concerned about donors. In 2020, Biden's election got $1 billion in funding while on May 9th, Biden had raked in $170M according to this website. So with upwards of $700M of donations left to collect, a 14% decrease in donations would mean Biden has less money to work with than other candidates.
• With regards to other candidates not doing much better, it seems impressive that they are polling better than Biden even with Biden running a massive election campaign and having spent a hundred million dollars in ads already. I would expect the gap to widen if those other candidates actually start trying to win the election as much as Biden is.
• With regards to the votes in September and October, with regards to the elderly and demographics typically not cared for and popular support, these all seem to be cancelled out by the polls.
• With regards to the Democrat backchannels, the damage is done. It's fair that she's mad about it, but it doesn't affect future decisions.
• With regards to Biden's energy, either this doesn't explain the Zelensky-Putin gaffe, or it's kind of irrelevant. Biden won't be sitting in the oval office with an audience to work off of.

So from everything AOC says, all that seems reasonable to me is (1) the observation that there is no good Democratic alternative plan, (2) the worry that the convention might run long so the alternative candidate can't appear on the ticket, (3) the possibility that a succesful Republican coup is significantly more likely with a candidate that might provide loopholes for the Supreme Court to work off of than with Biden, and (4) the possibility of losing Ohio if Biden would otherwise have won it.

However, even here, the parts of the alternative plan she is most worried about seems to be the legal trouble, which she seems most worried about only if the Democrats aren't on time with selecting a candidate. It seems to me that if only the Democrats are able to rally behind a new candidate before the Ohio deadline two days before the convention, none of her concerns apply more to the new candidate than to Biden. If it happens after the Ohio deadline, it only matters if there is a technicality that disqualifies the new candidate and Biden would otherwise have won Ohio and that technicality determines whether a coup succesfully occurs.

That's the neat thing about workers' rights. Workers have more interest in making good products than investors, especially in artistic fields. Investors will gladly sabotage a product's quality for the sake of personal gain and move on to the next company with goodwill to exploit, but for workers a job well done is inherently rewarding.

Unionization directly leads to better games with more artistic merit.

So apparently a swamp cooler for a single house uses as much water per day as it takes to water 250-1100 m^2 worth of lawn, or 125-550L per day. Not great for regions with water shortages, which have a pretty big overlap with regions that are arid enough for swamp coolers to be effective. Given the salt buildup, sea water is not an option, so you really need to spend a lot of fresh water to get this to work.

Honestly, I think solar powered electric air conditioning is more environmentally friendly in most use cases, at least until you cut massively on agricultural water usage.

Though of course the best air conditioning is shaping housing and lifestyles to need it less. Build into (artificial) hills or mountains, use shade, use air currents, live densely so less AC is necessary and other people can benefit from it. Work in the morning and the evening but take a >4 hour lunch/siesta break when the day is hottest.