I was wondering when someone was going to mention the waste. I don’t like the destruction that nuclear waste passes on to our descendants for that many years. That’s being a bad ancestor.

Excellent point. Thank you.

Some kids are told about it in school, and then that chapter ends and the lesson moves on and the kids forget about it. Beyond that, Americans have to actively seek out that information.

With Trump making moves to erase all evidence of the history I mentioned above, it’s about to get a lot worse.

My sincere hope is that they’re rescued before this goes too far. Is that Polly Anna? Probably. But I’m hanging onto that.

Yeah. The more I listen to older generations about the shit the US government pulled in the past, the more I realize that this shit happening now is kind of par for the course for good ole America.

Like. The government killed black protestors in the civil rights era. Outright killed. Right now, though deportation is awful, there are no deaths, yet, that we’ve heard of. And thousands of civil rights activists were jailed for peaceful protest, which is happening again.

And McCarthyism was the government targeting those that didn’t agree with their desired economy, essentially political dissenters. People lost their jobs and more. So. The government ruining the lives of dissenters isn’t new either.

And disabled individuals lost their humanity in the forced sterilization era, and innocent Japanese were forced into concentration camps. So the dehumanization of trans people has precedence.

Yall. America sucks.

This has been my favorite response so far. It explains nothing, but the mental image is priceless.

I’m glad someone else asked this question.

I haven’t had any tears. Hard to say whether it’s my VCR or the tapes doing the jamming. I’m not very tech savvy, and I was a kid when these were all in use so I haven’t learned how to fix these things. When something doesn’t work right, I usually just take the top off the VCR and wiggle a part, and all goes smoothly after that.

What is a fiat currency?

Oh, I just looked it up. So it’s the USD.

These are great, but they don’t explain what a crypto coin actually is.

I still own a VCR and a vast collection of VHS tapes. I mean, I also pay for streaming services, but without the old 90s commercials for Disney World and previews for movies that were released in 1995, the movies just don’t hit the same.

But what you said there is literally the end of my understanding of what crypto is. It has something to do with computers solving math problems, and somehow that’s worth money.

What?

It’s an interesting thought experiment!

We can just look to indigenous cultures for this. They’ve been doing it for tens of thousands of years before being colonized. Like, indigenous Australian cultures sustained themselves for 60k-100k years without ruining their environment while also living in commune-type societies. Native North/South Americans did it too. We can hand off our kids to untouched/minimally touched cultures to learn how to relate to the environment and each other. There will always be human conflict. It’s how we handle that conflict that we need to learn again, and how to appropriately handle conflict needs to be retaught by those who know how to do it.

Communes (and my run-away-to-the-forest idea above) will never work without the proper cultural education and social rules to prevent that kind of behavior. To relearn how to build a socially sustainable culture, we should look to cultures that have been around for thousands of years and have done it successfully. It would be a really hard transition because it requires a complete restructuring of how we view other people and how we relate to them. Which, honestly, I think we should be doing anyway, commune or not.

This is going to sound out of left field, and I do understand that, but I’m legitimately ready to go learn how to forage year round, build mobile tents out of natural materials, and live in a small band of 10-30 like evolution intended. Let’s pool our resources to buy land back from the idiots who are enslaving us and fuck off into the forest to live a genuinely free existence.

Civilization was a mistake.

Also, being paid by a private company can pressure even the most moral of people into obeying orders to lie or release fudged information. Scientists hired by oil companies in the fifties to study the impacts of fossil fuels didn’t say anything publicly when told not to by their bosses. This is dangerous for everyone.

Americans are speed-running climate change, leading to the death of Earth as we know it. If I was the head of another country, I’d consider this behavior an act of war against my citizens.