I don’t think this site will return to normal until the US midterms are over, but I’ll try to be less of a dick until then.

Happy to contribute!

lmao I’m sorry. I tend to respond with the energy I’ve been given and this week Lemmy has been giving me lots of rude BS.

He’s referring to Ars Technica you box of rocks.

Yep. And I’m sure you know this, but we toppled Iran’s democracy at the behest of British Petroleum (BP) through clandestine action of the CIA.

They used another tactic that I didn’t notice until one of the commenters on the Ars article/forum pointed it out:

Promising good stuff that’s not too close (~5 years) so you’ll remember it and say, “Hey, where’s my <good thing>?!” but not so far away (~25+ years) that you’ll say “That’s way too far you need to fix this shit now.” Apparently it was used in Soviet Bloc countries a lot to keep the population from revolting, and now I’m seeing it everywhere in our society. In this case, the O&G companies said things like, “Sure! We’ll be generating all your fuel with algae in ~15 years and then we’ll never need to drill again!” and “We’re developing amazing carbon capture technology that’s a mere ~15 years away and will repair all the damage we’re not doing!”

Ars Technica might be owned by Conde Nast, but it has a really smart userbase on average, so I tolerate that fact.

Would they have called that constellation Ursa Major if not for the presence of bears in that direction? Maybe the constellation naming was like, “don’t go too far towards bear country if you don’t want to deal with bears that think of humans as food.” “Bears this way. Bears ahead.”