Is burning bunker fuel in international waters very polluting and should someone try to do something about it? Yes it is and yes they should. And the good news is that they have been working at it: https://www.imo.org/en/mediacentre/hottopics/pages/sulphur-2020.aspx

But were the more polluting cargo ships from the past more polluting than “a continent”? Probably only if that continent was not Asia, Europe, America or Africa. If they were and I’m wrong, then I would love to see a source. Telling me to “google it” is not a source, I already tried looking for it when I first asked the question and I could find no info about this claim. It seemed like a hyperbole comparison that they made up.

I also tried looking up your claim that 10 ships pollute more than all cars combined, and the first result was an article debunking a similar myth (about 15 ships): https://www.oldsaltblog.com/2021/04/no-sixteen-large-ships-do-no-pollute-more-than-all-the-cars-in-the-world/

Which continent? Antarctica? It wouldn’t surprise me, but it seems like an entirely useless comparison to make.

FYI, some numbers. The guardian article is still definitely worth reading, it just had no statistics.

*Nationally (USA), Tesla drivers had 26.67 accidents per 1,000 drivers. This was up from 23.54 last year.

The Ram and Subaru brands were again among the most accident-prone. Ram had 23.15 per 1,000 drivers while Subaru had 22.89.

…

As of October 2024, there have been hundreds of documented nonfatal incidents involving Autopilot and fifty-one reported fatalities, forty-four of which NHTSA investigations or expert testimony later verified and two that NHTSA’s Office of Defect Investigations verified as happening during the engagement of Full Self-Driving (FSD).*

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevebanker/2025/02/11/tesla-again-has-the-highest-accident-rate-of-any-auto-brand/

Compare it to western Europe or Canada and people will be shocked as well.

Compare it to Stalin’s gulags or call it stalinesque and I am appalled. Stalin’s gulags were so much worse that the comparison is either made out of historical revisionism or out of ignorance. And since this meme first appeared in a period when Putin was working on historical revisionism, it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if it was deliberate misinformation.

Yet it still wants to draw the impression that the then USA prison system is somehow comparable or worse to Stalin’s gulags. That’s the thing about implying something: even if it’s not explicitly stated, it’s still part of the message.

Omissions of key facts, misrepresentation, just asking questions, dog whistles, unspoken implications, … None of those are explicitly stating what they are implying, so should I just accept stinking memes like those because whatever falsehood they are implying is not spelled out word for word? Well I’m not, I’m going to continue calling them out as misinformation.

I’ve made 2 other comments in the oldest comment chain of why I find this particular meme so awful, but I’m not going to give the same replies in each new chain.

This is an old meme, it’s easy to look up a fact check, here’s one: https://www.truthorfiction.com/under-stalin-repression-was-so-severe-that-soviet-gulags-held-22-of-the-worlds-prison-population/

But the meme was not about that percentage, Stalin’s ussr had a much higher % of the population incarcerated and consequently also very likely a much higher percentage of the world prison population than the USA has now. This is not checked in the fact check and I doubt enough numbers are even available, it’s just deduction from population numbers. The meme doesn’t care about it either, it’s just doing Godwin’s law to draw a comparison of USA prisons to something like this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazino_tragedy It might as well have been a meme comparing Nazi concentration camps with USA prisons (not the new republican ones that are being opened now, but the ones at the time the meme was made). It’s a completely misappropriate comparison to make.

1950 is 75 years ago, not 40. I won’t bother with the rest of your math, just thought I’d pick the low hanging fruit.

I can’t resist to add though, that this meme is drawing a direct comparison between the present USA prison system and the USSR gulag system at it’s worst and somehow wants us to believe that the USA is worse. Now I get that tankjes are all about misinformation and misrepresentation, but I still believe this is an absolutely awful comparison to make.

This is a misinformation meme that gets reposted from time to time. Relative to the population, the USSR at it’s worst had about 2x more prisoners than the USA at it’s worst (so far).

With the new ice budget it seems like the USA republicans will be trying to beat Stalin’s numbers, but so far, this meme is still blatant misinformation.

A link to an old discussion about it: https://lemmy.world/comment/6354847

Another of my comments from then, with some actual statistics for the USSR:

I find back about that it peaked at 1.4% or 1.5% in 1950 in a few sources: 2.5m to 2.7m prisoners for about 180m citizens. So significantly higher than what you found.

On Quora a Russian posted a nice graph, but I don’t see a source for the data : https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-Soviet-citizens-were-incarcerated-at-any-given-time-The-US-has-0-7-of-its-population-in-prison-and-I-was-wondering-how-that-compares-to-the-old-USSR

Having read testimonies of the nazino island gulag and a few Russian prisoner novels, the Soviet prison system really shouldn’t be compared to the USA one. Those percentages might not be far off (“only” 2x more at the worst), but numbers don’t tell everything. Stalin’s reign of terror was so much worse than the modern day USA dystopia. Compare the USA to modern day Canada or western Europe and it will highlight much better how bad it is doing.

Nazi Germany kinda had to start wars because their spending wasn’t sustainable: they had significant yearly deficits and they were always looking for ways to push forward the day that Germany would become insolvent. They stole the assets of outgroups like the Jewish minority, financially raided the banks, had the treasury print money to pay of debts, implemented price and wage controls to stave off inflation because of printing too much money, … None of it was sustainable in the long term. The longer term plan was to conquer other nations and plunder those.

And very unfortunate for the world today: the spending by usa republicans isn’t sustainable either + the usa has a very big army. Some people would say that the usa republicans couldn’t possibly be that stupid to rob or invade their peaceful trade partners, but … a lot of republicans are pretty damn stupid and short sighted, including the president.

Yes, many times. Historically, it seems like the very strong empires first defeated themselves and once they were sufficiently weakened for outside forces to be able to threaten them … they still kept being self sabotaged by their own elite who prioritized maneuvering against each other for temporary power/wealth grabs over working together to face the outside threats.

The late Roman empire has a bunch of good examples: blatant corruption, over taxation of the poor, many assassinations, sabotaging their peers that were trying to improve the situation, constant civil war, the battle that destroyed the military backbone of the western Roman empire was fought between romans, … And all that while the empire was being torn apart by outside invasions.

Or a more recent example: the polish Lithuanian commonwealth had a paralyzed government thanks to corrupt elites with veto powers in their parliament of nobles (sejm) and only once the nation was mostly destroyed and the nation on the cusp of final destruction, did the sejm introduce some sensible new laws, but it was too late.

With smaller regional powers you can have cases like “they were in a golden age and had never been as powerful, but then the mongols appeared”, but with hegemon empires the failure of their inner workings is always going to be instrumental in their own demise.

For the other nations in nato it would be for the best (imo obviously). Republican usa is not a reliable ally and the other nato nations have not all come to terms with that new reality yet. If the usa quits nato, then it instantly removes all doubt and the remaining nations of NATO can immediately start work on improving the alliance, instead of being stuck in limbo for a few more years while they’re hoping that the usa will somehow magically unfuck itself.

The article/slideshow I linked is not a specific scientific study that was done in London, it’s a summary/aggregate of other studies that are referenced at the end of the slideshow. It was a study summary made for London, but the science behind it is a lot more general.

I’m from Belgium and from my own personal experience, I find that well done low speed zones really do improve the flow of traffic. Cities in the Netherlands have been at it for probably over 2 decades, Antwerp has followed their example since about a decade and now other cities in Flanders are copying Antwerp’s homework. When done well, it works really well and almost noone wants to go back to how it used to be. You’re right in that coordinated traffic lights are a big part of why the traffic flows much better, but in congested streets, a lower speed is needed to keep that flow going.

In Belgium we also have a big example of how to not do street renewal/traffic improvement programs: Brussels.

The evidence of studies says that you are wrong.

Here are some key points from a study summary that was made for London: 20mph zones do not appear to worsen air quality and they dramatically reduce road danger. They also support a shift to walking and cycling, generate less traffic noise and reduce community severance. In 20mph zones vehicles move more smoothly with fewer accelerations and decelerations. This driving style produces fewer particulate emissions.

https://content.tfl.gov.uk/speed-emissions-and-health.pdf

My bad for assuming wrong.

And yeah, sarcasm with just text doesn’t work very well, got to add something for making obvious that it is sarcasm, or plenty of people (me included as you saw) will assume otherwise.

Starting with pulling on the door is already impolite imo. If there is no visual cue as to the occupancy of the room, then the first thing one should do is knock. If the light is off or the occupancy signal says it’s free, then sure, try the handle. Otherwise knock first, give the person who is shitting there a chance to reply with “occupied” or to knock back. But looking through gaps or trying if the door opens with the handle and then going “oops sorry”, please no.

Same goes up for offices, meeting spaces, bedrooms etc, when the door is closed and it could be occupied, always knock before attempting to enter. Less bad when someone does it, but still, one could just knock.

Fault? I didn’t mean to imply that China is responsible for starting the latest bout of civil war in Myanmar, because they weren’t. There’s really no reason to believe that whenever something bad happens, some outside big boogeyman is entirely to blame. If you want to know what caused the current civil war to start, try looking it up, but please don’t make assumptions.

If you can’t look it up because of time constraints or other reasons, then accept that you don’t know. It’s impossible to know everything, so there’s nothing wrong with not knowing some things. But imo not knowing something and knowing that you don’t know, is a lot better than making assumptions and inventing alternate facts.

Why didn’t you try knocking? Knock twice 2 times, with a few seconds pause in between, if no response, then you can try the door. Going straight to looking into the gap is … creepy imo.

Edit: this was in reply to “The only way to know was to look in the gap.”. And no it wasn’t. Knock for fucks sake, have some manners.

China is a direct neighbour of Myanmar, with a history of political meddling in Myanmar and also of setting up illegal exploitative businesses by entrepreneurs. But even without the meddling, they are direct neighbours, which should be enough reason for Myanmar journalists to want to know what is going on in China.

The internet did not end up in the trash heap after the dot com bubble burst. Ai too has real world uses that go beyond the current planet wrecking bubble.

Fascists don’t respect democracy or even other people’s rights, so it’s logical that democracies should not trust them in positions of power. It’s basically the paradox of tolerance: “if a society extends tolerance to those who are intolerant, it risks enabling the eventual dominance of intolerance; thereby undermining the very principle of tolerance.”

And if you want to see what happens when these kinda of people are left unchecked in the cause of retaining the “moral high ground”, just look at the USA. The USA democrats have been giving in for 40 years against increasingly perverse transgressions by republican actors, and now it’s a dumpster fire on the cusp of becoming a full blown dictatorship.