Yes, but knowing how to install a toilet the difficult way (instead of hiring a plumber) was replaced by knowing how to install a program the difficult way (via a command line instead of an installer).

Now, Zoomers aren't stupid or tech illiterate, I have a Zoomer friend and she's more tech literate than I am. The issue is that installing a program the hard way has been replaced with minimizing your carbon and digital footprints. That's not the skill of a super predator, its the skill of prey. We've been reduced to prey for the shareholders of corporations.

Surprisingly it's not the only one. Dubai is honestly the center of (what remains of) the hub-and-spoke air travel network because it's the closest point to every other landmass on Earth. Middle Earth was supposed to be Tolkien's locale for a hypothetical creation myth of modern (well, then-modern) Britain. Alkebulan (the native name for Africa) is the cradle of humanity and the only continent where everyone there agreed what said continent was called for all of recorded/known history. I'd say being in a geopolitically central location, even if that's really just dumb luck, is something cultures have taken pride in for a very long time.

ChimeraOS. If you have a non-steam gamerdeck, I recommend backing up the Windows 11 install and replacing it with this outright. It's based on the Steam Deck OS and makes the process of selecting a game much faster because Windows 11 is bloated as shit.

...

You're right. My fault, I looked it up and don't know where that came from but the evidence doesn't seem to exist at all and I'm not sure why I remembered that as being a thing.

Neurodivergent, my ass. I literally have been diagnosed with Aspergers'/Autism Spectrum Disorder/whatever since I was 8, that was 25 years ago, and knew it had to be the "privacy" "partner" CEO that had data broker connections. This is either lack of knowledge (reddit was easy to use and then turned evil) or lack of brain cells, but to be fair... That grammar is implausibly awful, like someone was trying to punish Mozilla...

City planning and de-car-ification videos. This may be the c/OpenTTD mod account, but it's not solely because of the game; I'm just fascinated by transit and have realized car-centric infrastructure is almost always extremely inefficient.

What's worse is, not only can we do it, so could the Egyptians.

Concrete. We build skyscrapers out of it. We make it from sand and various other common minerals. If you make it from Cretian volcanic ash, like the Romans, you get concrete that is even more stable if you use it with seawater, and can be used to construct submerged concrete structures in shallow coastal water without draining away any of the liquid.

And if you grind up Egyptian sandstone and add freshwater like from the Nile? You can make huge blocks as smooth as polished marble that a razor blade can't fit between, transport it in more manable quantities and forms than giant stone blocks, and it will last tens of thousands of years (not including the ~5,000 it has already lasted) unless the humidity of the Sahara goes through the roof.

I'm not saying Egypt was or wasn't advanced, just that they were sufficiently advanced to convincingly look to a more advanced civilization like magic. Or in this case, "aliens" or "ancient astronauts".

The only reason I would not be surprised if hieroglyphs were found on the moon is because we did it before we could fake it. If faking the moon landing couldn't be done without modern computer software or LED lightbulbs yet actually doing it is trivial enough that it was done 55 years ago, why resort to aliens to describe how that's possible? For all we know you could get to the moon with a railgun built from hand-smithed iron and the lumber of California Redwoods, doesn't mean its superhuman if you figure out how to actually do so.

Then it's likely cheaper to make a bluetooth headphones phone than include a 3.5mm jack? Or they could just be greedy, although I would hope FairPhone won't turn to the dark side so soon.

Excuse me, this is meant to be an admin account for c/[email protected] so I'll have to return to whence I came.

To be fair, it seems like I may have had bad luck in the first three solarpunk works I ever experienced. My issue against the whole idea is "this is a society that can no longer afford to value non-practical pursuits, it is the future we are headed towards, therefore our present society can no longer afford to value non-practical pursuits" that was somehow in all three solarpunk works I encountered.

The three in question were Girl in Wave: Wave in Girl, the Necroverse by "RichM", and a story that a fair-weather friend wrote that I no longer have a copy of that showed a dystopian cybersolarpunk hybrid where "Covid-19 has ended the modern age and now everything is powered by wind turbines because most of us are dead".

As a result of such bad luck, I may have overestimated how central that theme of "self-sufficiency or die" is to the genre.

That seems to be the actual case, yes.

The idea that each person had their own name for Africa is interesting to learn, thank you!

Am at an Edo's as I type this, can confirm it reminds me of stacked California Rolls. Can also confirm there is no real reason that the YouTube logo should remind me of sushi.

Modern globalized society is in the same boat, but yet at the very least it is the least-impoverished empire in human history.

When the gamer you play Call of Duty with could be a kid living in South Africa (and yes, I do mean an average black South African and not the kid of some wealthy expats/diplomats/colonial old money) or Nigeria (ditto) and the world's largest country is a democracy (India, it recently surpassed China's population) yet we're still convinced the future is doomed to be The Hunger Games, I think it's time to admit that the anger of 9/11 and the Great Recession not only led to hate led to suffering, it then led to cynicism, defeatism, nihilism and finally outright anti-humanitaianism.

You want something to be scared of? Even monsters like the Nazis had an ideal, you clearly just want the world to burn because it's easier to sit in a chair reading social media and doing nothing to actually solve the problem until things get bad enough that you have a perfect excuse to go hurt whoever you disagree with. You know who was doing that during and leading up to WWII? The sheeple that let the Nazi party take power. Don't be a fucking tool, especially not a tool of oppression. Careless realism costs souls, regardless of whether a soul is immortal or a scientifically-quantifiable finite mental construct, and even if you honestly came to the conclusion free will is an illusion it would mean our entire moral and legal case against slavery comes into question.

Seriously. Find an ideal, please, especially if its one that keeps you from hurting people instead of blindly hating anything that could be achieved. I don't know you, but I know the internet and I've been seeing this pattern of existential anti-humanitarian (my best attempt at a philosophical label for it) behavior online since 2017 and I do not like what I'm seeing coming. If you don't find something to live/die to protect, then someone seeking a mob to do their dirty work will, and if that happens the "ideal" you will be serving will be a lie and anything but ideal.

It might not be a mere country by a long shot but the one thing I find most interesting about Africa (IIRC) is that despite the linguistic variation and the number of nations being no less than any other continent has ever had, every precolonial culture in "Africa" referred to it as Alkebulan (I think that's the romanized pronunciation) with the possible (partial?) exception of Egypt.

That said, my memory about that feels sketchy. Can anyone confirm or dispute if Alkebulan is the actual name used by the local languages? Claiming I'm sure about this without actually checking feels disrespectful, but I no longer trust DuckDuckGo or Startpage because their use of Google's algorithm means NewPipe is censored from all search engines except Bing and Ecosia and search results have been uninspiring since ~2017 thanks to enshittification.

Hold on, checking Wikipedia...

Edit: No trace of the word itself on wp, but it did bring up the Akebu language when I searched it. Anyone know how much I was wrong? Or is this just survivorship bias due to me only knowing how to speak/read English?

Tell that in respect to (ha) Southern Ontario and Montreal to a British Columbian, Albertan, Saskatchewanian, Manitoban, Yukonite, any First Nations Canadian or any resident of Atlantic Canada or the Northwest Territory, and see if they think differently about Ontario-Quebec than most Americans think about the Republican party.

Oh, did you know 90% of Canadians are well-to-do or upper-middle class residents of Southern Ontario or Montreal who produce less than 10% of Canada's GDP and vote for anything that lets them continue to take advantage of the rest of the country? Yeah, our population density is horrifyingly low AND yet we have a profit-off-of-artificial-scarcity-induced housing shortage? Fuck you for supporting tyranny by majority, it's still possible for the majority to all be in with the rich pricks, whether the minority is 49% or <10%.

Mainly because, at least as far as I've seen, solarpunk societies requires "taking responsibility for your survival into your own hands" which I am mentally incapable of doing, and not from lazyness or lack of effort. Trust me, if I could hold a job I wouldn't be able to afford to not be working right now. I might have a mild form of oppositional defiant disorder or a bad case of PTSD, but when someone is a jerk to me I take it personally and hold grudges, making working with people who give me orders or take orders from me essentially like ordering a cat to herd sheep.

Okay, to be fair, I was assuming the nuclear trains would be doing cross-country freight hauls and never for passenger service.

Upvoted for the hydrogen, you're probably right about fuel cells being a better option.

The main problem with electric is also distribution. 95% of all North American heavy rail lines are unelectrified.

I can see taking a risk on hydrogen trains might not pan out, just saying electric is something that draws from the electrical grid (which is at capacity in the Pacific, Texan and Atlantic grids) and there's no easy/single solution. If only for avoiding pirates by staying far from shore indefinitely, ships should at least have the option to be nuclear but require a US Navy-certified team at the port to inspect it and do needed maintenance/repairs before each time it sets sail.

As for nuclear trains, at the very least you have to admit that it's not as simple as "just transmit power along the rail line from LA to NY".

That doesn't change the fact that you're both not taking the real issue into account; the biggest, wealthiest shareholders are demanding a sustained 25% RoI. That is inherently unsustainable and by design. They want companies to die because monopolies are profitable and the market was booming (until they decided to milk everything dry) so there is money to be made IF you don't value human civilization.

I fucking hate the rich.

c/OpenTTD on feddit.de is mostly in german, while c/OpenTTD on sh.itjust.works is run by a troublesome member of the community who is banned from the forums and the official discord; it also appears the same troublesome member founded this lemmy.zip OpenTTD community (could not see their posts prior to taking control, they deleted their account here) as well as the piracy-focused one on Divide by Zero mentioned in my OP. Their (lack of) loyalty to, well, modern copyright law means I am concerned for how OpenTTD's former reddit community might not realize who is in charge.

While I am not about to confront or name the person in question as they have not yet done anything truly objectionable, I was concerned enough that I decided to claim control over this instance's c/OpenTTD as I noticed this one had been created but was not staffed.

They had to, I'm guessing. At this point nobody is manufacturing headphone jack hardware for smartphones.