If you live on planet earth unfortunately you do have stakes in it. The US is still powerful enough to influence the life of everyone around the world.

Hillary won the primary by orchestrating the other candidates to drop out and unite behind her, when it showed Bernie was starting to win. Exercising her dynasty power (since we are talking about heirs) to pressure the delegates into a swift pro establishment decision.

Clinton is a far right war hawk by other countries standard and still a war hawk by US standards.

Also it is not something new to the US system, that the popular vote is not the all deciding factor, so blaming it on the voting system, especially after 8 years of Dem presidency and before that 8 years of Hillary god damn husband being president in the 90s is laughable.

Biden administration gives us four years of progressive policy and we can’t wait to hate it.

Record deportations, building Trumps wall, funding genocide in Gaza… Meanwhile not enacting any change to protect the US political system from Trump, after January 6 and just glossing over it as some singular event never to happen again, instead of understanding it as a clear sign of deep systematic issues that need urgent addressing.

You and i have very different understandings of what is progressive.

The Quran is not anti-banking per say. It is anti interests, anti predatory and scamming businesses and anti crime financing, which the Torah and the Bible are too. Problem is for Islamic banks it is practically impossible to participate in the global finance system without also being exposed to interest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_banking_and_finance

For Jews eventually the discourse shifted that they first allowed seeking interests from non Jews and eventually from everyone, despite the Torah being clear about it.

The sinful business practices of the time were one of the main things Jesus challenged according to the Bible, but Christianity has always been very flexible with interpreting the life and teachings of Jesus.

I also find this infuriating. I had a service offer TOTP for authentication. Installed an open source TOTP Aap, scanned the QR and voila.

The service meanwhile can control whether they want to generate a new token or give out the old one again, for instance when a device was lost.

It is the most easy, most convenient solution both for the service provider and the client. There is no excuse for any other 2FA system to be used.

I always found that deeply problematic. Here is some obscure path to follow to set some obscure value where half of the naming does not indicate what exactly you are doing there. Also if you don’t set the data-type exactly it wont work. For a fucking 0 or 1 off/on value flag.

I had none of these issues and i don’t know what you are talking about.

If you install programs through your package manager they come with a start-menu entry just as easily findable as in Windows. If you don’t install programs with an installer in Windows you get the same problem.

Also mounting HDDs made its content accessible to all my programs so far, without any issue. I think you must have chosen extremely obscure distros or fucked things up by yourself during install processes.

The US is the inventor of Banana Republics.

And yes very much so. White Supremacism and American Exceptionalism are both deeply ingrained in the US political system and most of its actors.

I installed Mint on an old laptop with low specs and it ran very well in that context. I switched to Manjaro for my main computer because KDE and i have to agree. Manjaroo is also very easy to use out of the box.

Meanwhile otters and dolphins are raping baby seals for fun.

I wonder if in like a million years or so we get to see MOs or even higher order organisms that will have conquered the asphalt wastelands as a new habitat. Or whatever remains of the asphalt wastelands when they aren’t maintained by humans anymore.

Also i would expect banks to use some sort of 2FA where you have to manually confirm any transaction on your mobile device, or enter a code generated from there into your computer.

I remember an article from last year or so that German washing machines ended up being sold to Russia through Kazakhstan and other places where they stripped the microchips to repurpose them in their missiles.

https://time.com/6226484/russia-appliance-imports-weapons/

Do people take their waste to a football match and burn it there?

Food is also consumption. But without food people die, so this consumption directly contributes to keeping the value of the economy up by keeping the workforce alive.

As for the poo safely removing it in WWTPs also costs more money than what can be recovered in energy or hopefully phosphate in the near future. Also the capital investments are significant and as they age and need replacement this value is also gone.

However the alternative is people dying of Cholera and other shitty diseases en masse, so both the investments as well as the expenditures are well spent.

Again looking at the map of Germany as well as the article from the BBC stating an increase of Microplastic by over 1000% compared to the baseline shows that fireworks are a very strong additional pollutant.

People in the US drive their cars all the time. During rush hour more cars are emitting in traffic jams than are driving to a football match. Yet we see these huge spikes in pollution when there is fireworks.

Think about it: Everything form a firewokr that does not turn into CO2 will stay dispersed in the air or fall down as debris. This is most of it, as the op pointed out himself the GHGs to be only a small part. Meanwhile for cars the vast vast vast majority of its emissions in quantitative terms are CO2 emissions, with particles, NOX and Microplastics being much less. They also pose a massive problem, but because of hundreds of millions of cars on the road every day.

What represents the value of money? What you can buy with it. What determines what you can buy with it? The total capital stock available and the services offered through labor.

This part of the capital stock is gone. Literally into smoke.

Money is not some abstract independent entity. Its value is directly linked to the real production of the real economy.

i am quite certain that people do not emit particles or NOx like this. In particular nobody is just exhaling heavy metals.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240703-how-4-july-fireworks-pollute-the-air-and-might-damage-your-health

Here is a map for New Years in Germany with a nice slider. Particle concentration increases up to 1000x the base-value of that day (which already includes people setting off fireworks earlier)

https://gis.uba.de/website/silvester/

Unless it is normal for people at football games to ignite pyrotechniques, or they all smoke 5 packs of cigarettes each during the game, there is nothing that would make a comparable pollution.

Against which reference would you test your teachers qualification? I would argue for that you need a standardized expectation of what teachers need to be able to do and therefore you will have a standardized curriculum for teaching teachers how to teach. You will have the same situation for electrical engineers, for doctors, for air traffic controllers…

So for all these people to be able to learn the standardized qualifications necessary to do their jobs reliably they need a standardized higher education. And that standardized higher education needs as standardized main education to build up on.

In my country we have state level curriculums. They are like 90% the same, but for some topics they aren’t. This was causing quite a headache for instance in university with maths. Some people already knew some Linear Algebra from high school, others already had imaginary numbers and yet again others had learned their trigonometry with hyperbolic functions instead of the standard sine and cosine for some reasons. Would have been better if the supposedly equivalent diplomas from the different states actually were equivalent.

Yes they are. Somebody extracted the ressources. Somebody processed them into materials. Now someone put them together into the pyrotechniques and finally someone set it off.

All of this labor and capital usage went into creating a short display of pretty lights and bangs, of which afterwards nothing but smoke and memories remain. This is the purest consumption in the economic sense.

Compare that with people using that labor to produce cars instead. Those cars take years before needing renewal and they can be used productively, so they are investments in the economic sense.

Finally lets take clothes, while also consumption they address an immediate human need and are reuseable for some time, so while they are also consumption they are quite different form fireworks.

The problem is pollution, not GHG emissions. Particles, NOx, Plastic debris…

On top of that your local fauna is not at all prepared for the nosie and light pollution.