You’re still making the mistake of treating dems like some single monolith. It’s a coalition of just about everything that isn’t MAGA at this point, covering all sorts of ideals, yours being just one small part. The answer is still “get a majority of reps that aren’t asswipes” and then we’ll get legislation we want.

As to DC statehood, it would have gone through if not for Manchin because the Senate “majority” at the time hinged on his support. We need to win these seats with bigger majorities, period, and then they’ll pass better bills. The overwhelming majorty of Dems support DC statehood, saying “they won’t do it” is not a great take when they literally didn’t have the votes.

Sure, assuming you don’t think the American rescue plan, bipartisan infrastructure act, CHIPS, IRA, and the first massive tranche of funding for Ukraine are useful. I don’t think you realize how short 2 years is for the legislature and how narrow the dem margin was. They achieved significantly more useful legislation than I thought possible. Unfortunately they didn’t codify Roe, overhaul SCOTUS, or harden our institutions against fascism, so maybe you’re right. Who knows what they could do with a larger majority and control of the House/Senate for 2 more years though - it would be fun to find out, if we could avoid getting all worked up blaming different people we mostly agree with and vote big against fascism.

We’re a lot better at standing, walking, and running long distances. Not sure if I’d say objectively worse, just better at different things (but objectively way less cool than peeling a banana and eating it with your feet).

What kind of ice are you riding on? Snow, even packed snow it usually ok, but turning/braking on ice is a disaster without studded tires. Source - I’ve crashed on ice several times despite being a very competent rider in all conditions for 3 decades.

There are lots of folks working on maritime (and aviation) decarbonization, it’s not being ignored. It’s just harder than decarbonozing other sectors because they can’t just electrify like you and I can do with our cars and homes. The solution is likely to be synthetic fuels of some sort, ammonia, hydrogen, biodiesel, etc. We’re seeing sails come back, there have been innovation hull designs, etc. You could even call tarrifs a partial solution here because building locally reduces shipping needs. It’s just not as cheap/easy as installing solar panels/wind/batteries though. We need policy to drive change here, which puts it on a different level than the personal responsibility measures. I absolutely agree we need to do all of the above though.

As to the source, I don’t know but it’s cited in government records everywhere. They have a good handle of how much fuel is produced everywhere, we know exactly what ships exist and where they go in real time globally, we know how efficient they are, so it doesn’t seem nebulous enough to me to have any real doubt in. NASA can probably track all their emissions from space too.

I don’t think the issue is whether it’s effective in isolation (clearly we can alter the environment), it’s the fact that it’s likely to be used as a shitty band aid to continue emitting carbon and it’s likely to have unforseen consequences. We need to stop burning fossil fuels, all of them, immediately.

Shiping represents about 10% of the 25% of global carbon emissions from transportation, so 2.5%, similar to aviation. Yes, it’s a problem but it’s not the boogeyman you seem to think it is.

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-transport

You seem to supporting the concept though. More people didn’t keep voting left, they voted center/left which sounds like has been moving right, so things stayed the same/went right. Who you vote for matters too - we have multiple opportunities to vote between “dems”. To me OPs comment is a simple truism - we can’t move left by not electing leftist individuals (and parties by extension). Any other strategy is some pie in the sky game theory.

Maybe the garbage brands. Milwaukee, DeWalt, Makita, etc are very well made, and significantly more powerful than they were 5-10 years ago.

I appreciate your lived experience, but at the same time the rest of us will seek answers in basic physics concepts, none of which help explain such phenomenon. Is it possible you just got stronger or subconsciously tried harder because you wanted the heavy bike to be faster? Did you add weight but also make sure your bike was well tuned? Tire pressure and a greased chain go a long way. I certainly agree that the weight weenies can go way overboard though.

Wat? The law of conservation of energy tends to disagree. Commuters are generally starting and ending at the same elevation so there’s no trick. We’re not going to convince anyone to carry heavy loads on bikes by saying “pedal more downhill to smooth out the power requirements if you hate grinding it out on uphills”, the answer is just ebikes.

Are we just going to ignore the millions of acres of vast grasslands that supported like 50 million buffalo in the US 200 year ago? Healthy grassland ecosystems and ruminants are a thing.

The real issue is one of attribution. “Traced to” isn’t the same as “responsible for”. I have a hard time blaming Saudi Aramco for massive volume of oil consumption in the US. Yes the oil companies are eco terrorists too but the binary take is absurd.

One part of the answer is enforcement. Ticket the shit out of dangerous behavior and people will do it less. I literally never see anyone pulled over for traffic violations anymore, whereas it was common 10-20 years ago. What happened to traffic cops, and why don’t we have cameras that detect this shit? In Colorado people don’t even bother to renew their tags and there are no repercussions. It’s like fucking Mad Max out there, I hate it so much. Obviously making the world less car reliant is critical, but the lack of any visible enforcement is absurd too.

I recently picked up a Lenovo 7i 2-in-1 (I got the Intel Evo version due to a nice sale, but wanted AMD) and am currently dual booting with it. No issues with Ubuntu at all that I’ve encountered.

I don’t have anything useful to add other than Steve Huffman is a greedy pig boy.

And how does Idaho vote exactly? Is it different than OR, WA, CO, CA? Do you think the way these states vote might have something to do with it? You’re disproving your own point.

And who’s to blame here? Have you considered blaming the invading force, or does it have to be the west for your sensibilities? Everything would be great if we all just rolled over when invaders arrive at the gates!

“Pennies on the dollar” refers more to the fact that we have mostly sent old equipment that’s already paid for and would otherwise never see the light of day, while also avoiding the use of any US/NATO manpower to massively undermine an adversary. It’s a great deal, i.e. pennies on the dollar.

I guess it’s edifer to just call everything a “narrative” though than try and understand current events.