A lot of people in this thread are deliberately missing the point because they don’t want to hear it.

They want to live in independent suburban homes, in isolated subdivisions where you can only get to jobs or groceries or social events by car, with big yards soaked in pesticides so they don’t have bugs in their houses, etc, etc.

They want to live high consumption lifestyles. They don’t want to live in resource efficient, high density housing because they imagine it will reduce their standard of living.

So they nitpick the image and make up reasons why it’s unrealistic because they don’t want to admit the kinds of homes seen on the left are unsustainable and unrealistic in the long term.

There’s a difference between “renewable and abundant” and “infinite”.

It would take the resources of five Earths for everyone on the planet to live like an American. More solar panels aren’t going to change that.

What will bring sustainability is Americans, and other people living wealthy Western lifestyles, learning to live comfortably with fewer resources. You can be comfortable without eating beef for dinner every night. You can be comfortable living in a resource-efficient apartment instead of a sprawling subdivision. You can be comfortable taking public transit instead of owning a car, or teleworking instead of commuting daily, or having a low flow shower in your home instead of a tub.

Home ownership, car ownership, a meat heavy diet, fast fashion, disposable technology, plastic everything, are entitlements that you receive as a benefit of living in the imperial core. These are not necessities of life. You just think they are because patriotic and corporate propaganda has convinced you of it to make you a collaborator in its colonial extraction of the world’s resources.

A sustainable comfortable future doesn’t just mean improving the standard of living of the poorest in the world. It means the world’s wealthiest need to check their entitlement and learn the difference between comfort and luxury.

This thread is an object lesson in why the whole world hates Americans.

Yes, and, once established, a grove of trees can continue providing biomass for literally centuries. Look up coppicing.

“Poor Americans don’t deserve electricity because rich Americans are privileged and wasteful” is certainly one of the takes of all time.

You spent a lot of paragraphs on a “dumb” argument. Sounds like, despite your insistence it doesn’t matter, it really does matter to you.

USians gonna US, I guess.

When you think about it, it’s kind of offensive to call ourselves (US residents) “Americans” as if in all of North and South America we’re the only country that matters.

You might look up cohousing.

In this case, the “who” is human biology. Humans evolved in tribes, not nuclear families.

There’s always the “cool aunt/uncle/friend with no children who’s always available to babysit” option. Communal child rearing generally starts with extended family - those without minor children pitch in to help the adults with minor children - and you don’t need kids of your own to help out that way.

But you do kind of need a trusting relationship with those adults first, so they’ll be willing to trust you with their kids, and it’s hard to build those relationships from scratch, or rebuild them with family members if you’ve lost that trust already.

Done

Your faith in the U.S. legal system is touching.

In many parts of the United States, if any parent or child sued over mandating the Pledge of Allegiance, their family would have to flee town for their own safety, after which the local judge would throw out the case for lack of standing because the student isn’t enrolled anymore.

Laws are pieces of paper. They mean what the men with guns say they mean. And in red America, the men with guns say shut up and salute the flag.

Clearly not.

Musk’s target audience are liberal, West Coast, technocratic, white or upper caste Hindu, brogressives and techbros - men (and the occasional token woman like Elizabeth Holmes) who give lip service to equality and talk a good game about social justice, and then go home to their gentrified neighborhoods and beat their wives. The kind of people who vocally celebrate the anti-capitalist ethic of Burning Man and then spend the burn in a luxurious private compound with dozens of servants and sex workers getting high off their ass while artists perform for them like Venetian nobles patronizing Renaissance painters.

His target audience are precisely the people who would name drop the Culture when promoting their latest startup but revert to moralizing about “traditional Western values” the instant someone actually behaves like a Culture member.

Helps keep them from questioning why they serve and obey the state as adults.

the homeless are more akin to pests as far as the money is concerned.

I’d go one step further. Homelessness, and poverty in general, are necessary to capitalism. If the consequences of poverty weren’t so bad, workers wouldn’t fear losing their jobs so much. Homelessness helps maintain the authority of the boss over the worker and the corresponding hierarchy of capital over labor.

Yep. The race to the Moon was just a dick measuring contest between the US and USSR. Manned space travel is a meaningless ego trip for governments. Unmanned space travel is equally useless in practical terms - learning about other planets does nothing to help the proletariat on our own - but at least wastes less money.

Global internet connection via satellite, and GPS, on the other hand, have helped the proletariat in actual practical terms. It’s a shame it took all that billionaire ego dick waving to get there.

I sense sarcasm, but you are literally, unironically, correct.

If faster than light travel does not change the material conditions of the ordinary person, then it’s not radical or revolutionary - it’s just another toy for the rich and/or dick measuring tool for governments to boast about.

The “evidence” can point to many conclusions.

Not when reviewed objectively.

Also, from personal experience, I’m not at all convinced we are causing global warming. And I’m not even convinced the earth, on average, is warming rather than cooling.

Global average surface temperature has been rising since 1850. The ten warmest years in the historical record have all occurred in the past decade.

The earth is getting hotter. This is an objective fact. Facts don’t care about your feelings.

Remember when kids used to play “cowboys and Indians”?