Wind power does seem to be generally not quite as good as photovoltaic solar power. But yeah every source of electricity has some downside. I don't have any good reason to care more about the possibility of rotors breaking or how to recycle the turbines, than I do about the possibility that a natural gas peaker plant might suffer a mechanical failure.
California has very expensive residential electricity. This isn't solely due to the amount of solar and natural gas in the electricity generation mix, but it does mean that what California is doing is not a great guide to what other jurisdictions ought to be doing.
China's Leninist command economy also burned (and still does burn) tremendous amounts of fossil fuels to generate energy, just as the command economy of the Soviet Union did, and just as the more-or-less free markets of the western world did and still do. People burn fossil fuels because the energy that they generate is incredibly useful for everything in the modern world, regardless of the economic system governing any particular jurisdiction.
Signal genuinely isn't, or other end-to-end encryption chat apps. But yeah, WhatsApp and Discord and others are run by American companies that follow US law.
I suspect it's because the people who write for The Verge are themselves non-black progressives who think it's morally important to engage with black businesses in a way they see as anti-racist. So scammers deliberately creating fake black people to make emotional, anti-racist appeals to buy scam products particularly offends or seems relevant to the specific individuals at The Verge who pitched, wrote, edited, and approved this article.
According to the byline, the author of this article is a person named Nicole Froio. According to her personal website: https://nicolefroio.com/about-nicole/ and MuckRack page https://muckrack.com/nicole-froio/articles , she is a Colombian-Brazilian journalist who describes herself as an "anarcho-feminist", has multiple academic degrees in humanities fields with some kind of intersectional feminist bent, and has written for various progressive publications in her career.
In other words, she is exactly the kind of person I would expect to find it personally morally and politically important to buy products from actual black creators, and so to find scams about black creators being personally meaningful, and worth specifically writing about.
Yeah I'm very confused by the original commenter's claimed ignorance. We went through this bleating at full tilt during and after covid and it being forced onto everyone at all times where "if you don't like it you're affirmatively racist" was one of the reasons voters went back to Trump. Why is it so incredibly hard for Americans to have a memory, or cognition of any sort?!
The internet is less American than it ever has been. The internet was almost entirely invented in America, by Americans (or at least people living and working in America), and funded and controlled by American companies. This has been the status quo ever since the Internet was 200 hosts in a hand-maintained TXT file in the mid-80s; and is only less true now because there are now substantial internet technology companies in countries genuinely-rival to America. Say what you will about TikTok, it's not controlled by Americans and a lot of people around the world care about it anyway.
> Drip, drip. Klein in 2005. Snowden in 2013. And yet, today, we are still using the American internet—the surveillance-prone, easily interdicted internet. Because Klein and Snowden were individual leaks, we put our buckets out and hoped things wouldn’t get worse. Instead of migrating off the American internet, we tried to regulate the tech giants. We pretended that the problem with Mark Zuckerberg was that he was the wrong guy to be the unelected, permanent social media czar with total control over 4 billion people’s lives, rather than confronting the fact that no one should have that job.
I'm not a fan of how Doctorow abruptly switches between talking about secret US federal government surveillance that was publicly exposed more than a decade ago, and the fact that Facebook is a gigantic and privately-owned social media platform. The main effect of the Snowden revelations was to create meaningful pressure to add encryption to everyday technologies people use to access the internet, an effort which has largely been successful. I talk to lots of people on Signal these days, which is great. And it has nothing at all to do with the fact that billions of nontechnical people around the world use Facebook or Instagram or one of a host of other private social media platforms as their sole internet presence.
> Here in Canada, we racked up an embarrassing string of abject defeats in our attempts to rein in big tech. When we tried to get Facebook to pay for news, they just deleted the news. When we tried to get Netflix to put some CanCon in the catalogue, they refused. When we tried to get them to pay a largely symbolic 3 percent tax, Trump rattled his sabre, and Prime Minister Mark Carney folded like a cheap suit.
I don't really see trying to impose some Canada-specific taxes or local content mandates as reigning in big tech in any meaningful way. I don't really care if Canada has a law about Canadian content requirements, but I also don't care if Netflix resists this, or any other country-specific local content law for places I don't live in and probably don't speak the language of.
Anyway, most of what this essay is talking about is Doctorow's standard argumentation against centralized technology platforms that are used by huge numbers of people. I'm basically in favor of this, although I think he weakens his argument by grounding it in the idea that the problem is that centralized social media is run by American companies specifically, and that Canadian (or in general any other country's) local companies would do any better, if they built a thing people actually wanted to use. Indeed, one major benefit of many internet companies being run out of the US is that the US has better legal free speech protections than basically every other country on earth. So much speech is illegal by statute in Canada or various EU countries that is unconstitutional to make illegal in the US.
But really, the actual problem is that there's a small number of privately-owned social media platforms in the world that huge numbers of people use because of a combination of genuinely solving user problems, and the network effect of large numbers of people already using them. There are all sorts of interesting decentralized, free-software technologies that are trying to replace centralized internet services used by millions or billions of people - and all of those services have extremely small user bases and often a bad user experience for things that the average person cares about. Solving that problem is a lot more important than trying to get Canadian companies in Canada to compete with American (and Chinese, and Russian, etc.) social media platforms.
Why do you think this is an accurate characterization of how the Islamic Caliphates of the medieval world worked? How much of what we label "science funding" was happening anywhere at all then, why was this more important to the European Renaissance than traditional explanations like "an influx of Byzantine Greeks with ancient texts fleeing the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453"? (And how much of what we characterize as the European Renaissance involved" science" or "institutional science funding" as we understand it today?)
I think you're taking an extremely basic, high-level narrative of history - something like "During what westerners call the middle ages, European powers were backwards and the Islamic powers at the same time were flourishing and did a lot of scientific discovery" - and then immediately using your basic understanding of that narrative to argue for a policy position today, without thinking at all about any deeper historical complexity of what was happening across an entire civilizational sphere centuries before our time when the entire world was different - what would an ancient Islamic caliph have actually understood about the value of basic scientific research funding by the state, for instance.
And this bugs me mostly because it's such an unscientific worldview.
I was saying intellectual curiosity. As in one morning waking up and realising everything your ancestors believed in was a bunch of bullshit.
That attitude became heavily discouraged in the Islamic world.
Is it actually consistent with intellectual curiosity to wake up one morning and realize that everything your ancestors believed in was a bunch of bullshit? It seems wildly implausible that every single belief held by your ancestors was wrong, and probably some beliefs were correct and others were incorrect and it's not necessarily trivial to distinguish which ones were which; or even to know from many generations removed which beliefs your ancestors actually held.
> There's a difference between "I choose to send my family to Charter schools because the public schools are in bad condition" and "we should close down public schools rather than fix them to make room for more profit in the child education industry"
The case for closing down public schools and replacing them with a for-profit child education industry is that it's systematically easier for all parents to get a better education for their children by abandoning bad schools and only paying good schools in a free market, than it is for parents to participate in the mass political process of fixing public schools, which are government institutions intended to serve a broad mass of people.
Also because different parents have different ideas about what constitutes a good education for their kids, different private schools can differentiate themselves in the marketplace by specializing in different styles of education and attracting different student bases; rather than parents having to democratically coordinate to enact the changes they want in the same mass-scope public school system (and fight against rival groups of parents who want incompatible things).
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