There used to be a Firehouse literally 7 minutes from where I live, but it closed a few years ago. :( That used to be my go-to sandwich place, now I’ve settled for Jersey Mike’s (which I expect to start enshittifying now that some holding company or whoever bought them).

Once that happens, I’ll just go back to ordering subs from Italian places. You pay $20 for a 16"-18" sub, sure, but you at least get what feels like $20 worth of food.

The goal was always 1.5°C as long as I’ve been alive, and we aren’t hitting it. In fact, we’re not even on track to hit the 2°C.

The goal posts didn’t move, buddy, we just already kicked the ball into the stands, and you’re screaming that we can still win. Sorry, we lost, but at least we made the obscenely wealthy even wealthier in the meantime.

Oh, and all of the things I’m bringing up, those “shifting goalposts,” are the things I was talking about us not understanding and rapidly building on top of each other year over year. You only keep talking about emissions: ok, cool, they’re important, but they’re not all that’s involved, and even then, we’re still** not hitting our own goals, so we deserve a pat on the back and a cake?

And while we’re at it, how are the millions of people in America alone who can’t afford a $400 car repair going to afford a $30k+ electric vehicle? Or are we going to overhaul our entire public transportation system overnight so people don’t need to rely on cars at all? But then what about all the old ICE vehicles thrown in junkyards, leaching chemicals into the ground?

What about the Ogalala Aquifer and how we’re pumping the water out of it way too quickly for it to naturally replenish? Y’know, the aquifer that essentially waters our entire crop growing landmass in the Midwest. We know pumping all of this groundwater out of the ground out in places like Nevada, Arizona, etc is terrible, yet I don’t see any politicians banning the practice at the local, state, or federal level. What are emissions going to do about that, and what, are we just gonna pump the water back in to the underground aquifers that took millennia to naturally form?

How are emissions going to stop the soil erosion we’ve witnessed since the Dust Bowl? What emissions and electric car policies are stopping the growing of monoculture crops that need too much water to be grown where they are? How are fractionally dropping emissions going to reduce the use of fertilizers to grow the same crop over and over in the same place, not giving the soil time to naturally replenish, and further running freshwater supplies with pesticide runoff? Explain to me what laws regarding emissions and electric cars are going to address that?

While we’re on the topic of food, who’s ready to have the conversation about how you should only be able to buy and eat food that can be grown locally to your region? It is not environmentally responsible or sustainable, especially with current metrics, to ship millions of tons of food stuffs all over the globe, and this isn’t even me trying to be a smartass: you should not be able to buy avocados in Minnesota, you shouldn’t be able to buy chocolate in the Netherlands, etc. It’s not sustainable, and the ships we use to move them are burning millions of tons of CO2 per trip.

Have you taken into account any of the economic factors of what it will take to upgrade our grid to handle that? Or to even get our infrastructure to be more energy efficient in general? Not our driving infrastructure, our actual buildings and dwellings, what’s the plan there to make all of the dwellings in the US more energy efficient?

It’s not just emissions, my man, there are millions of moving parts all feeding into each other in different ways, made even more complicated by our global interconnectedness and vastly varying priorities. But the goalposts never moved, we just didn’t realize there were more of them than we initially thought, and focusing on one or two metrics that we’re not even close to meeting, while also continuing to not also address anything else… Gore was our last shot, and it was robbed from us.

But he won’t.

What is this crap? EVs are all over the place and so is renewable energy. Emmissions are falling. We haven’t opened a new coal plant in a generation.

Ok, and how environmentally friendly is it to dig up the minerals to make the batteries, ship them to the plants in massive container ships, process them through polluting means, put them into cars that were also built from resources ripped from the earth using machines billowing CO2, and then shipped across the globe in container ships that pollute more than all cars combined on Earth?

And ok, we haven’t opened a coal plant in a generation, maybe in the US. China is still building them, as are a good chunk of the world. In fact, the IEA estimates to China’s use of coal will be up about 6% total from 2023, while India’s is an increase of 10% of coal use. They estimate global coal use will be down next year, 2025, the first time since 2016, and it’s estimated to drop 0.3%.

Ok? It’s bad and we’re working to fix it. That’s very different than “we’re all doomed and should stop doing anything”.

Do you understand how biodiversity works? You can’t just run a population down to a handful of that species, and then they’ll make a comeback as if nothing ever happened. There is not enough genetic diversity for a healthy and sustainable population to grow and repair itself from that. 69% of all life on earth has been wiped out, bud, we’re not fixing that.

https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement

Lmfao, “a legally binding international agreement,” yeah, ok. That’s why a single President unilaterally removed us from the agreement, right? Because it’s legally binding? And that’s why all of these countries are taking it seriously and making huge efforts to reduce global emissions, right? They’ve only had since adopting them in 2015/2016 to start making progress, almost a decade, and… Omg… Omg you’re right!!! We’re doing it!!!

Just kidding, from September 2024:

None of the larger, industrialized countries or the European Union as a whole are currently on track to meet the 2° Celsius goal. African nations Nigeria, Ethiopia, Morocco and Kenya as well as Costa Rica and Nepal are named by the Climate Action Tracker to be on track to meet the 1.5° Celsius goal using a fair share approach, while Norway is predicted to meet the 2° Celsius goal. The website analyzed the climate policies of 35 countries and the EU.

Wow, so the countries that are supposed to be leading the charge aren’t even on track to stop 2°C temperature rise, nevermind the 1.5°C we’re supposed to be aiming for.

But we’ve got more electric cars, and we’re still consuming and ordering things from across the globe, so it’ll probably all work out if we just believe hard enough.

Edit: Switching to electric cars doesn’t prevent the pollution of microplastics from tires, btw, another massive part of climate change everyone seems to just be covering their eyes and pretending they can’t see. We found microplastics in the clouds, ffs, nevermind in our own blood and bodies.

Nor do electric cars stop the glaciers that have already retreated way further than they should from retreating further. Where’s all that methane gas, y’know, the more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, remind me, where is all that methane that was trapped in the ice going? Oh, right, it’s feeding into the climate cycle, making things rapidly worse while we twiddle our thumbs and tell ourselves science will fix this for us, nothing else needs to be done.

Lol, sorry buddy, not something I can just… Do. There’s gotta be context/history/etc, lol, they’ve gotta earn it.

THIS is the grifter bullshit. “Don’t bother acting, it’s too late”. Fossil fuel doomer propaganda.

That’s not what I said, I said it’s too late, we missed the exit. Fossil fuel companies hid the research for decades, and I’ve heard nothing my entire life except how we need to act and change the ways we live and interact with the world.

I’m almost 30, and our dependency on fossil fuels hasn’t changed, I’ve yet to see a meaningful societal shift away from the consumerism that drives the majority of climate change.

And ok, we keep driving emissions down, what about biodiversity loss across the planet? How many plants and animals are currently on the brink of extinction?

Let’s bring up developing countries, who are increasing their use of fossil fuels. Where is the international agreement to help modernize these countries with renewable energies? Who’s going to pay for it? We can’t get the countries of the world to agree we’ve overfished the oceans and they’re on the brink of collapse, where’s the international agreement to reverse that?

I would argue I’m giving people a pessimistic reality of the future, sure, but at least it’s based in the current reality. Climate change extends far beyond the overall global temperature, and I’m sure climate and environmental scientists will be the first to say that there are a lot of pieces and variables we don’t fully understand, or haven’t even accounted for, because that’s just how science works.

The effort isn’t enough, and that’s the problem. U.S. emissions dropped 2.7% from 2023, that’s great, but that still means we pumped 4.8 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere (I don’t remember the exact phrasing your article used).

We’re still pumping too much in, and not taking any out, and we’re already hitting limits we needed to avoid. And based on that recent AMOC collapse report that came out, a lot of these climate models weren’t even taking that into account, so I highly doubt we see a reverse of course on climate change as it continues to expound on itself year over year.

The WWF reported a 69% average decline in all animal species populations on the planet since 1970.

We missed the exit, everything until the cliff is grifters trying to set themselves up for the inevitable collapse at your expense.

Blazing Angels. Amazing flight simulator fighting game that I still have the discs of for either XBox or XBox 360.

The game is still listed on Steam, but you can’t buy it. I absolutely loved that game growing up, making your way through the ranks, taking part in some of the biggest air battles of WWII.

I told a cousin once I wasn’t going to be lectured on morality by a woman whose sole contribution to society was how much money she could spend at a liquor store. That whole post I wrote was honestly, according to my brother, some of the best criticism he’s read, quote, “You called her a lush without ever actually using the word, while also going up one side of her and down the other, saying everything the rest of us wanted to.” That cousin, to this day, will not interact with me at family gatherings.

I also once threw shitty advice I was given back into my boss’s face in my resignation text, to the point where he mentioned it felt “personal” when he called me to try to get me to stay. That was the resignation friends/family told me I should be a writer because, “You have a knack for telling people to go fuck themselves in a way where they thank you afterwards.”

My go to, though, when someone insults me is to usually respond, “I’ve been called worse by better.”

Are you saying the driver is wearing the seatbelt, the passenger(s) aren’t?

And how does the death result? Is it because of an accident? Are they messing/moving around in the car? Are they legally allowed to not be wearing a seatbelt in the vehicle?

There’s too many undefined variables I think for anyone to give you a solid answer.

America: our mail system is. USPS processes 23.5 million packages per day, and processes and delivers 318 million pieces of mail every day, to every single household in America, 6 days per week (7 days per week for packages).

They will throw mail sacks onto the backs of donkeys and trek them down into the Grand Canyon to deliver to tribes down there. They will deliver by bike, plane, boat, truck, car, etc. Hell, name any other organization where you could hand someone a letter and $0.62 and ask them to take it to Alaska for you, and they’d say no problem.

“Post” roads in the U.S. are named as such because they were roads built specifically for the movement of “post” across the country, and people have even argued that USPS (then the Postal Service) created the layout of the country as we know it.

And despite what many may think or know, USPS is incredibly efficient when it comes to mail and delivery compared to other countries. I remember them telling us during our orientation (I used to be a mail carrier) that back around 2013, representatives from USPS were actually flown to Germany to teach and help them start delivering 6-days per week. USPS taught Germany how to be more efficient at something 😂

This is where I’m at. These changes to the climate are going to exponentially compound on each other, and feed back into each other.

Like, we’re causing a 6th mass extinction event, and people really think we’re going to be able to reverse that and all of the hell that will come with it? Ocean currents are going to collapse, and you (not you specifically, OC) don’t think that’s going to snowball other issues both inside and outside the ocean?

We’re fucked, our futures were robbed from us because of entitlement and greed, and I’m supposed to give a flying fuck about anything because why? Society says so? Society fucked us over, it could all collapse tomorrow for all I care, as a species, we fucking deserve it.

Every person is three meals away from being radicalized. Not my quote, not sure who it’s attributed to, but I’ve seen it on the internet over the years.

I agree, shit will really hit the fan when people can’t find food/water anymore, or at least have it not be readily available. Personally, I think it’s coming sooner than people are expecting just because climate change will compound on itself year over year, and we’re doing damn near nothing to mitigate any damage (still pumping ground water up like it’s an instantly renewable resource to water golf courses in the dessert, for example).

But radical people tend to be desperate for change, and most people get desperate when they start to actually get hungry.

When I was a carrier, I had a business road on my route, all the mailboxes were at the curb for every business. On two or three separate occasions, I’d get to the last box and it looked rougher than it did the previous day. Business owner came out and told me the box had been broken into again, along with several others on the road, and wanted to know what we could/would do about it.

I called my postmaster and explained and asked if USPIS would be getting involved (as the business owner also asked). I was told no, they don’t get involved in those sorts of things, the owner would just have to file a report with the police, and we’d stop delivering on Saturdays since none of the businesses would be open.

I never got a further explanation than that, so I couldn’t say why USPIS doesn’t get involved, but they don’t seem to anymore. 🤷‍♀️

Got it, so gun ownership is for the wealthy and privileged only, according to you, got it. Insurance will not solve this problem, full stop. Auto insurance doesn’t stop people from driving illegally or without licenses, and driving is a privilege, so let’s apply the same logic and standard to a constitutional right.

It’d be a lot faster if you just said, “I don’t think anyone should own guns,” instead of parroting this fake altruism that insurance will make people face consequences. There are already laws in place to issue consequences to those who are reckless, and I would say that should constitute recompense and justice for their victims. So instead of introducing some useless middleman that, again, will only impact the poor and minorities, go after your state AG’s for not prosecuting gun crime.

Or, as I’ve said repeatedly, subsidize firearm training and make it required twice per year to maintain your licensure. That’s on top of the required class to get your conceal carry license, and everything else associated with it. Insurance providers will only make those requirements and monetary hurdles worse, so again, you’re making a constitutional right a privilege for only those with money.

Make our current medical insurance providers (y’know , the ones who don’t provide the services you pay for when you need them for arbitrary reasons) actually pay for mental health care so maybe people can have healthy ways to deal with any issues they have instead of shooting up a school/mall/whatever. Get rid of the social stigma around mental health in general, and require background checks before every gun sale.

There’s literally a myriad of other directions we could and should take gun control, but introducing and requiring insurance for something that is a right makes it a privilege for those with money. This reeks of the same justifications people used to pass the first big wave of gun control laws when the Black Panthers started showing up to rallies with firearms. It even reminds me of the voter ID laws being pushed, since the only people burdened by them are those who can’t afford to get an ID, y’know, the majority of whom are minorities.

The person you’re responding to is right, though: adding insurance costs takes a constitutional right and turns it into a privilege only for those who could afford it. We’ve seen what the insurance industry does with medical insurance, homeowners insurance, and every other type of insurance: they fuck the little guy over every chance they get. So you’re just telling gun owners to throw money at a company that is just going to keep it, rather than tell them to take that money and attend biannual (twice a year) firearm safety training to remain in compliance with their license.

Not a single person in this thread has talked about subsidizing firearms training and making it mandatory, you all just want less guns in the hands of fewer people. So just say that, instead of hiding behind this false-altruist “Well, it’ll only affect the bad eggs,” yep, that’s why good people are never denied medical treatment from their insurance, because it only effects the bad eggs.

Ok… I didn’t say you were free from consequences, I said by adding insurance to the equation, you’re putting an unnecessary financial burden on the poor amd minorities to practice a constitutional right, all while creating an opportunity for some middleman to get obscenely rich off something that won’t change gun violence at all. By adding mandatory insurance, and letting insurance companies handle all of it, you’re taking rights out of the hands of minorities and the poor alike. And there are already consequences for improper gun ownership: they’re called prison sentences, so maybe focus more on your elected officials who aren’t prosecuting irresponsible gun owners instead of adding insurance premiums and costs to an equation that doesn’t need them.

If there is an unreasonable monetary barrier for an individual to practice a constitutional right, it’s no longer a right, it’s a privilege. So congratulations, you’ve taken away the rights of minorities/poor folks, and allowed those who already have the means to face no consequences continue to face no consequences. Just like the firearm’s stamps: the prices are high enough to keep those weapons out of the hands of the poor, but not out of the hands of the wealthy, so only the wealthy have the privilege to own more dangerous weapons.

And once again, all you are interested in, clearly, is just taking firearms from people. You proposed an idea (firearm owners insurance), I pointed out why that may be a bad idea, and you immediately doubled down on it while making a comparison to another constitutional right that doesn’t have any financial barriers like you describe.

Plenty of people have been hurt and/or killed by the speeches/words of others, yet not once have you said there should be speech insurance, so your premiums can go up the more inflammatory your speech is, that would be fair, right?

You also completely dismissed everything I had to say about subsidizing firearms training for those who want/need it. So let’s not try and educate our populace, no no, we’ll just create another privilege for the wealthy and the poors can just deal with it. 🙄

You’re just creating a tax on the poor for them to practice a constitutional right. Insurance providers 1. Aren’t going to pay out anyway, that’s their whole thing, so much like health insurance, it’s money being thrown away every month, and 2. You’re adding another middleman from an industry most people think is greedy/corrupt AF, and why would that ever be a good thing? Plus, you know damn well once the insurance companies get involved, all of a sudden minority gun ownership numbers are going to drop because, mysteriously, all of their premiums shot up overnight for totally racist/homophobic/transphobic/misogynistic unknown reasons.

I’m all for requiring more training, or licensing, background checks should be required for every gun sale, I’m just saying this to show I fully support gun control measures.

Require more training, but it needs to be made affordable. Every gun control bill is just banning firearm models, or limiting magazine capacities, or whatever. None of them every talk about subsidizing firearms training for those who need or want it. Even my blue state only requires one 8-hour class and one live-fire test to get your conceal carry permit, and the instructors even talked about how people ask about taking further training, but when they hear the cost and time (almost all the classes require taking time off work, which some can’t do) involved, they just say they can’t afford it and they’ll just watch YouTube or whatever.

Edit: Not sure how “creating an unnecessary monetary barrier turns a constitutional right into a constitutional privilege for the rich, all while enrichening a corrupt industry that will absolutely fuck this up” is such a controversial take, especially when I’ve added that training courses should be mandatory and subsidized so that finances aren’t a barrier…

They have churros on my local subway menu, as well as a pizza, and a footlong pretzel stick.

We’re in New England…