Green roofs do need more support. But think of it by percentages. A one-story house is going to need significantly more structural stability than a normal house if it wants to support a green roof. If your building is already built to support 10-20 stories, the additional weight (and cost) of the green roof and the reinforcement underneath is not as big a concern.

Personally, I would prefer solar panels on roofs and green spaces on the ground where the public can enjoy their benefits. But more green is better than less.

I have another tip!

Michael Pollan has a dictum for health: eat “real food”. And by “real food” he means food containing only ingredients your great-grandmother would recognize.

(Or someone else’s great-grandmother in some other region/culture, if you’re eating food from somewhere else. Food you’d see on a farm or in a market before the rise of industrial food processing, is the point.)

A way to do that in a modern supermarket is “shop the edges” - do most of your shopping in the produce section, the bakery, for non-vegans the meat and deli sections, the fresh unprocessed food sections that are located on the edges of the building in a typical American grocery. Then duck into the middle of the store for staples like rice and beans and oil and stay far away from the frozen food section.

And when you do that - when you avoid pre-processed food, buy fresh ingredients, and make your own food - it’s easier to eat vegan because you control every ingredient that goes into your food. Your food will not have mysterious chemicals that may or may not be animal derived. Your food will just be food.

And not only will you be eating more ethically, you’ll end up a lot healthier.

Vegan meat substitutes are still fairly healthy compared to actual meat.

I agree, although that’s more a function of how unhealthy meat is than how healthy meat substitutes are.

And I think there’s a significant difference between traditional meat substitutes, like tofu and wheat gluten, and modern meat substitutes like impossible burgers, with high levels of sodium and saturated fat and chemical binders and industrial processing and so on.

Congratulations!

My two best tips are:

If you remove non-vegan ingredients from non-vegan recipes without adding anything else, or substitute vegan meat/cheese/dairy for the real thing, you’ll always think something’s off because it’s never going to be exactly the same. And meat substitutes that are highly processed to try and match the texture and flavor of meat are as bad for you as highly processed anything else.

So my recommendation is: practice cooking recipes that are naturally vegan. There are a lot of vegan dishes in Indian and Chinese cuisine, for instance. There are old recipes from before factory farming when meat was for special occasions instead of every day.

Pizza is flatbread with sauce and toppings, and there are a ton of naturally vegan flatbread recipes. Experiment. Go wild. I’m not telling you not to try vegan cheese, but also try pizza dough with (eg) pesto, shallots, and four different kinds of mushrooms, and see how that goes 🍕 🍕

My second tip is: forgive yourself if you slip.

Food is an addiction. And I mean this quite literally. Fat is psychologically addictive, sugar is psychologically addictive, meat is psychologically addictive. Millions of people in the West don’t feel a meal is complete without a meat dish - by which I mean they literally don’t feel full unless they know they ate meat. I was one of them. It took months before I could finish a vegan meal and not still feel hungry after.

Doing the right thing is hard when the world wants you to do the wrong thing and your body agrees with it.

So if you have cravings you can’t beat and go buy a pizza - forgive yourself and promise yourself to do better tomorrow.

The form factor is the problem. We carry a propaganda faucet slash ad delivery service with us 24-7-365, we check it obsessively for a quick dopamine fix throughout the day, and we have convinced ourselves this is good for us.

Taking away a billionaire’s private jet, as cool as that would be, won’t cut your electric bill. Shitty Euro bakery curtains will 😆

Of course it’s satire. I’m kind of shocked how many people don’t recognize it as satire.

It’s like the Hobbit taught us: traveling is good, but coming home is better.

This is Trump’s strategy too. Make a brutal enough example of a few universities, or law firms, or immigrants, or other countries’ economies, and the rest will comply in advance. Like Trump said in his West Point commencement speech recently: "As much as you wanna fight, I’d rather do it without having to fight. I just wanna look at them and have them fold.”

Reminder: Ender Wiggin is not a fucking hero.

And when Kamala had the entire DNC establishment behind her, what was stopping her from distancing herself from Biden? What was she afraid of?

My guess? The entire DNC establishment wasn’t behind Harris. They were behind Biden, and supported Harris as Biden’s successor rather than on her own (nonexistent) merits. She hadn’t earned their support, and knew it.

Exactly. And the Democrats made it even worse for themselves by claiming there was no economic crisis - that Biden had beaten inflation, beaten unemployment, and claims of a bad economy were just Republican propaganda. The American people looked at their paychecks and grocery bills and called bullshit. Harris was right that Trump would govern as a fascist dictator with Project 2025 as the roadmap - but the Democrats lied to America’s face about the economy and that made everything else they said sound untrustworthy too.

If the Dems had taken America’s economic struggles seriously, Harris would be President now. But Biden refused to admit his economy was bad and Harris didn’t have the guts to contradict Biden. And here we are.

Unfortunately not. She’s already moving to run for governor of California in 2026, as a platform for another 2028 Presidential run.

Was it really an imaginary rule? I think it was Original Sin that talked about how Biden made his support for Harris contingent on “protecting his legacy” - ie, no criticizing Biden, no claiming she would do things different than Biden.

Edit: the claim comes from “FIGHT: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House”:

But the day of the debate Biden called to give Harris an unusual kind of pep talk — and another reminder about the loyalty he demanded. No longer able to defend his own record, he expected Harris to protect his legacy.

Whether she won or lost the election, he thought, she would only harm him by publicly distancing herself from him — especially during a debate that would be watched by millions of Americans. To the extent that she wanted to forge her own path, Biden had no interest in giving her room to do so. He needed just three words to convey how much all of that mattered to him.

“No daylight, kid,” Biden said.

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5191087-harris-trump-biden-harris/

I see your argument being brought up all the time - it was especially common a year or two back when the 15 minute city had a moment among conservative conspiracy theorists. “But what about people who like to live in suburbs?” “How dare you force people into filthy crowded crime ridden projects?” “Do you want to live like a poor?”

And my response is, people who don’t want to live in those dense walkable urban communities don’t have to live there.

Even in an idealized sustainable civilization where neighborhoods like the one in the video become the model, there will be other types of communities.

Here’s the thing. Life is a series of tradeoffs.

People want the big home, lots of space, and no neighbors, and also want all the benefits of dense urban centers - jobs, stores, services, community, etc.

And that’s what gave us suburbs, and urban sprawl, and car culture, and unsustainable mass consumption to fuel all those individual daily commutes from the urban center to the suburbs.

Because what we traded for the current American civic model, which lets wealthy people have both big houses and lots of land and all the benefits of densely populated urban centers, was using enormous amounts of land, and energy, and resources of all kinds, to build and maintain unreasonably large sprawling megacities, and the transportation infrastructure for daily commutes, and the fossil fuel infrastructure to fuel all those commutes, and so on and so forth.

But that’s not sustainable. It’d take the resources of four additional Earths for everybody to live like a suburban American. And the more climate change (and the attendant economic upheaval) impacts our resource acquisition and supply chains and so on, the harder it’s going to be to funnel those resources to the cities. The suburban/urban sprawl model is on its way out.

So how does one live in a city and get all the benefits of living in a city while consuming a sustainable amount of resources?

The tradeoff for a sustainable urban community is losing the suburban “bedroom communities” with the big houses and the daily commute and the unsustainable consumption. If you want the benefits of city life you have to actually live in the city.

If you want to live with a ton of space and live sustainably, on the other hand, there are rural communal models that allow that.

But the American car-centric urban sprawl lifestyle has an expiration date. If we don’t give it up willingly, geopolitical realities will put an end to it sooner or later. And accepting we can’t maintain the privileged lifestyle we’re used to is something we’re all going to have to do sooner or later.

Yes. Exactly. Harris lost, and it is her fault, and her responsibility.

The average American is not a political expert. (Duh.) They rely on information, and persuasion, from the actual political experts, to decide whose policies fit their values and who their best choices as political representatives are.

If a political party has the best policies, but fails to make the case for those policies to the American people, the fault is not with the American people, but with the party that failed to make its case.

In this case, Trump waged a vicious propaganda campaign based on blatant fucking lies. And the Harris campaign was too incompetent or cowardly to effectively call out those blatant fucking lies - partially because Trump was so much better at social media than Harris, and partially because Harris was afraid to stand up for the trans people and immigrants and other marginalized groups Trump was attacking.

(Biden shit the bed so badly nobody in his administration could have won by running on his record, of course, but that doesn’t absolve Harris for her own failures.)

Any political party that starts blaming voters for not agreeing with it, instead of accepting its own responsibility to convince voters, is headed to permanent minority party status. And as happy as I’d be to see the Democrats permanently marginalize themselves and make room for an actual progressive party, right now they’re the only roadblock in Congress against Project 2025.

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Is Craigslist shit now? What happened to it?

But look on the bright side, I bet some politically connected contractors in Oakland made a whole lot of money off building it. That’s called investing in the local economy 😆

I’m not a huge fan of Porter. But between her and Kamala fucking Harris, whose big takeaway from the 2024 election seems to be “we didn’t run far enough to the right…”

I don’t know if I used the right term by saying “surcharge”. They built an extraordinarily expensive trolley line from BART to the airport about ten years back and are charging high fees to cover expenses.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakland_Airport_Connector

The San Francisco Airport, on the other hand, has an actual surcharge - the main BART line goes direct to SFO but they charge like $5 extra. But SFO also has the same surcharge on taxis and rideshares :/