• 2 Posts
  • 37 Comments
Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: February 17th, 2024

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  • I think this is an unfair article, and it reads like someone who’s obsessed with right-wing talking points substituting their political allies and enemies with Texas and California.

    The real relevant section is the one right before you posted the chart. Texas is bringing people building data centers, Bitcoin mines, and has a high demand for air conditioning, therefore it has a massive power demand that California doesn’t have. It’s unreasonable to expect Texas to compete with California on a metric of Clean GWh per Total GWh when California has less than half the power demand. The fossil fuels infrastructure is already established so of course it is going to be relied on in a place like Texas to support their ventures into data centers etc.

    I think a better perspective is to notice how, despite a reliance on free-market forces (and as another commenter mentioned, a relationship between politicians and oil companies) Texas’ clean energy scene has grown to be the biggest in the country. It clearly indicates that there is an apolitical nature to the inevitability of clean energy. Anyway I prefer that conversation to getting swept up in whatever Matt Walsh has to say.





  • Great point! I considered that when I started learning and have spoken to it with my colleagues here who are also learning the language as well as Basotho- native speakers. Basotho who speak English fluently mostly agree that English has a broader vocabulary.

    I’ve observed that Sesotho relies on tone and emphasis on parts of words more than English. There isn’t a whole lot of writing in Sesotho so I can imagine that the language hasn’t needed to develop ways to be descriptive that couldn’t be delivered with one’s voice.

    Moreover, when I speak with Basotho that aren’t very proficient in English, I notice they very freely use words that a native English speaker would consider extreme, such as “perfect,” for mundane things because there is no explicit difference in Sesotho between “perfect” and merely “very good.”

    The video I linked gets into it a bit that English is helped by being an amalgamation of several languages, and thus inherits multiple ways of describing a concept.





  • So be it, I guess. If that turns out to be unrealistic I would just have to be careful about the content of the messages I send. Discord and WhatsApp have to go, obviously, but I think I could convince most of my friends and family to download Signal if push came to shove. Maybe I could look into hosting a small Matrix instance if I felt comfortable with whatever risks would come with that.

    I don’t think a second Trump administration is going to force me into complete anonymity, at least not overnight. I do want to commit to keeping my finger on the pulse so to speak, and staying a step ahead of whatever threats to my rights may be introduced. I have friends that would be much more threatened by Trump 2 than myself so if I can familiarize myself with these tools then I think I can help them feel safer.