I’m talking about things like this: https://www.cleanairkits.com/products/luggables

These companies are getting this pressure because they are well known and because of coordinated collective action against them. By all means, avoid them. That said, there are tons of reasons that people still buy from these companies.

For 3M, they produce the most readily available and performant masks, respirators, air filters and adhesives, which are a necessity in a lot of situations. For instance, I build my own air purifiers using standard HVAC filters and PC fans for myself and friends/family (so that they have have repairable units that use standard parts), and often 3M filters are the only performant ones that I can buy while avoiding Amazon, another company worth boycotting. In addition to that, 3M products are used in sooo much stuff these days that it’s very easy to support them without thinking about it.

For Starbucks, I know of quite a few towns where Starbucks is the only coffee shop (because they aggressively forced out the competitors), and there is no library or similar public space available. I’m sure as hell not going to tell the people of that town where the only quiet place that they can read or work or get a coffee that they are the problem here.

There are tons of other, similar situations that force or heavily influence people to buy from shitty companies.

On top of that, I’m positive that the vast majority of alternatives are similarly bad, and they just haven’t been the target of collective action yet. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.

This whole argument gives very “yet you participate in the system, how curious” energy, and is pretty divorced from reality.

Most poorer people straight up cannot afford the better option up front.

Lots of things are basic social requirements if you want to have access to lucrative careers. If you’re not wearing the right clothes, good luck at job fairs, interviews, networking events, etc. Can’t afford the pricey ones that will last? Your options are get the cheap ones or have a worse chance at income that you need to survive. This is, again, not a free choice.

On top of that, again, the distribution of climate impact is skewed heavily toward the rich. Without including that in these arguments and articles, and simply saying everyone needs to do these things, people are biasing the burden on poorer people.

Finding good secondhand options takes a lot of time. So much so that it is literally a job that people have. More often than not, the decision is frumpy clothes that will make you stand out in a bad way that can easily affect job prospects, self esteem, how your kids are treated at school, etc. or to buy the cheap stuff online.

Most of the time, the stuff at the thrift store isn’t much cheaper than the cheap stuff online, and often it IS the cheap stuff that will break soon that people have discarded. Take a walk through your local thrift store and it’s probably overflowing with clothes from Shien, halfway broken knockoff IKEA furniture, and cheap (probably broken) single-use kitchen gadgets.

None of this even touches on the carefully targeted advertising on social media that primes people to have the kind of consumption behavior that fuels these companies to begin with.

I agree to an extent. More often than not, the purchasing decisions of “consumers” are not free choices, and even if they want to do things that are more ethical, sometimes those ethics conflict.

Until recently, I didn’t have the luxury of caring about the supply chain of most of my purchases because I didn’t have enough money to buy anything but the cheapest version of what I needed.

I also try to buy or build repairable devices to reduce waste and make it so that I am buying fewer things in the long run. Unfortunately, primarily because of decisions made by large companies and investors, the components to do this can often only be found on AliExpress. There are no local options, and there are no options that have a transparent supply chain.

On top of that, the monopolistic companies and the politicians that support them have created a system with a lot of inertia that removes options for “consumers” by undercutting the market and buying out competitors until nothing but the monopoly remains. Lots of towns only have a Walmart and/or a Dollar Tree where they can purchase household items because those companies put all the local shops out of business. The people there are stuck at no fault of their own.

The people who do have the money to make better climate decisions with their spending are definitely in a better position to make more free decisions, but, again, companies have not designed products to have interchangeable parts or to be repairable at all. Often times alternatives just simply do not exist.

Cell phones, laptops, cars, etc. are all basically required for people in the US because of decisions that individuals have no control over.

And finally, the distribution of impact of an individual is heavily skewed toward the rich. The changes that poorer people can make do have some impact, and there are knock-on effects that make those impacts stronger, but to frame this as the fault of anyone outside of capitalists and their pet politicians is pretty disingenuous.

In short, people usually can’t make free decisions about how they spend their money, and even if they could, they don’t have all the information they need to make good decisions, and they are actively being fed mis/disinformation to further keep them in the dark. To blame them is probably wrong, and to think that individual action is worth putting effort into at the cost of collective and political action is a bad idea. It should really only be a supplement.

100%

Conclusion of the article sums it up best:

“Our true responsibility is to use our choices as political agents in the world to try to shift power, take power away from the people who are blocking the transition away from fossil fuels and give it to people who will lead into a livable future,” [Genevieve Guenther, the author of “The Language of Climate Politics”] said.

Do what you can by yourself, sure, but only as a supplement to doing the hard work to solve the problem via collective and political action.

As you have in your post, Logical Increments is a good place to start.

As others have said, AMD is your best bet currently, mostly because of raw performance compared to recent Intel offerings. If you have no limited budget or power requirements, here are my recommendations:

If you have the paid version of Davinci Resolve, AMD does not have the best selection of hardware encode/decode options, but people have reported that Intel Arc GPUs work, so I would get and Intel A310 as a secondary GPU if that is something that you need.

If you want the best of the best GPU, without going Nvidia, the AMD RX 7900XTX is it. Also, AMD has stated publicly that they are moving away from high-end GPUs, so there probably won’t be a better one coming out anytime soon.

If you want to plan for more gaming than you stated in your post, the Ryzen 7800X3D is the best gaming CPU on the market, so I would get that. If you plan to focus on video editing, the 9950X is the best, but probably not worth the cost compared to cheaper 9000 or 7000 chips.

If you go with a Ryzen 7000 or 9000 CPU, get DDR5-6000 CL30 memory.

If you’re getting an air cooler for your CPU, don’t pay more than $50. There are a ton of great, cheap options these days.

Get either the new Antec Flux Pro case (when it’s available, probably this month) or the Fractal Torrent if you care about best thermals and quiet operation. Everything else is a compromise.

If you need HDMI 2.1, you’ll need a DP -> HDMI adapter on an AMD GPU because of a licensing squabble.

Those are things I could think of off the top of my head. I don’t think I missed anything big.

If you’re on a budget and can get 12th gen parts for cheap, I guess

Even if we stopped giving out drilling permits and closed all marginal wells tomorrow, emissions would continue to increase. There are lots of oil and gas facilities that have permitted wells that they haven’t drilled yet, and newer facilities that will probably emit more as they age.

Actively reducing emissions in aggregate over the whole country, not just reducing the rate of increase in emissions will either require a lot of time or decisive action from Washington to force states to cancel permits and ban drilling, which is pretty clearly not going to happen without a massive shift in political leanings in the House, Senate, Presidency, and the courts.

It fucking sucks, but without massive political pressure I don’t expect much on the federal level anytime soon.

In the meantime, vote for state candidates this cycle that say they will do the most, and pressure them to do the most they possibly can and don’t ever let up.

It does for me. And it has for over a year. I have to reset the cache every day or it slows to an unusable crawl. The web client works fine, though

Edit: github issue: https://github.com/element-hq/element-android/issues/6617

Schildichat is the only client I can use on my phone that implements both spaces and threads and doesn’t have a memory leak.

It won’t have the same performance as a PS5, but the new Minisforum MS-A1 with a user-upgradable CPU is a really interesting proposition. The Ryzen 8700G is pretty good, but I would expect solid upgrades to be available in the next few CPU generations.

I currently have an Nvidia Shield Pro (2019), and it’s fine. I have Moonlight installed and can stream from my desktop PC using Sunshine (I do this on my Steam Deck, too), but I don’t expect that Nvidia will make a replacement, and I don’t know if I would get it if they did.

The software outside of Steam’s big picture mode isn’t ready for a full Linux couch experience, but it’s close. The two projects to watch are KDE Plasma Bigscreen and Waydroid (some people are starting to get Android TV working) which would be a nice bridge to use apps designed for a TV UI until native Linux versions become available.

Probably not, but she won’t gut the EPA either, and the Biden administration did send out truckloads of money to deal with oil and gas emissions in the form of Climate Pollution Reduction Grants, so she is clearly the better candidate on this issue.

I just started using super-productivity to help with this kind of thing

Also, the fact that they’re backed by a bunch of web3/crypto companies is not great. They say they’re not a web3 company, but it sounds like they’re building UI and tools specifically for Sui wallet and crypto games and letting users opt-out of these “features”.

I don’t want to touch that with a 10-foot pole.

Oh 100%

Also, people are influenced by the beliefs of their community, even if they don’t agree on everything.

For those instances, I’d suggest that it has to do with a few factors:

more rural areas tend to be more right leaning,

https://source.washu.edu/2020/02/the-divide-between-us-urban-rural-political-differences-rooted-in-geography/

right leaning people are more likely to be more racist,

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/08/12/deep-divisions-in-americans-views-of-nations-racial-history-and-how-to-address-it/

and right leaning people tend to be more uncomfortable with things they are unfamiliar with

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S019188699900135X

My experience in the US is that as soon as you leave a densely populated area, the good, interesting food options drop off a cliff. In car dependent suburbia, these are often the best they have

Yeah, I need something to collaborate with my partner in realtime. We’ve got a hacky setup in Obsidian using dataview to join separate notes to a read-only one, so we don’t have collisions, but I would love something better.

Soundiiz -> last.fm or spotify playlist -> Newsbin or torrent + lidarr