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I guess we should start barbequing pet dogs then. At least that’s less cruel than factory farms, fwiw.

I agree that many urban areas need a lot more and better public transport, which is a systemic solution.

In rural regions it’s not practical to build enough infrastructure to replace private transport though. Electric cars are a good solution there and will also get more affordable in the next years (over the lifetime they are already roughly as cheap as gas cars).

BP and Shell only have that much power exacly because people buy fossil fuels from them. If demand would drop, their profits and political power would drop accordingly. As long as we don’t even hold the biggest financiers of these companies responsible, how can anything change? Demand drives supply.

It’s like saying “As long as hitmans exist, I won’t give a shit about the people who pay hitmans, all consumption under capitalism is unethical anyways so anything goes.” As long as we ignore those who actually fund the problem, we won’t be able to fix anything.

I’d be surprised if any country responded militarily. It’s not in the interest of anyone to risk WW3 over Taiwan, and China knows this. In contrast to Russia, they are probably competent enough to take Taiwan in a day or two before anyone can send significant aid.

There would be massive economic implications though. The most effective deterrence that western countries have are sanctions, and they can’t let China invade without consequences to keep the deterrence effective (also for other countries), so they’d have to be used. Investment in China would probably be banned for decades to reduce reliance.

If hundreds of millions of Chinese fall back into poverty due to the invasion, that would be a serious threat for political stability in China.

Even if they managed to recover all chip factories after a full scale invasion (which the Taiwanese could easily sabotage), the production is based on a lot of western technology, which they couldn’t replicate for decades. So the factories would be of little use.

Chinas economy is also very reliant on exports to western countries (US, Japan, Europe), if they invaded Taiwan that would plunge the world economy into the worst crisis ever seen that would hit China especially hard. They’re already struggling with serious demographic and other economic issues that will put them into a difficult spot in the next decades. Invading Taiwan would be very, very terrible for basically everyone, and suicide for the CCP.

Mods always used to be passion projects by volunteers, motivated purely by the love for the game and the community and the vision of the mod. This is what made the modding scene special to many. Is it really suprising that people are sad to see this culture being changed by monetization now, especially if they suddenly can’t afford mods?