What’s so sad is that compared to a lot of other commercial transportation (air, trucking, shipping boats, etc.), rail transport CAN be one of the safest and most environmentally conscious mediums. That’s unfortunately contingent on holding the rail industry to a high standard of safety and properly maintaining the associated infrastructure — both of which have been ignored and excused in an effort to cut costs. Even the standards of workplace safety are drastically under par from an OSHAA standpoint, as we’ve been hearing about this year.

It’s easily the best romance-comedy I’ve ever seen on comedy, personally

That, or a gauche and bad-faith attempt to cash in on very real suffering by pretending it’ll solve those real problems.

Lmao I was just talking to someone about paper straws — that’s a good comparison to draw. Like, yeah, it’s technically better than plastic, but doesn’t solve the underlying issues like trash in the ocean OR the ecologically destructive nature of both the plastic AND paper industries. If that weren’t bad enough, it also is super unpleasant to use and actively makes people dislike environmentalist causes.

The housing one bugs me, similarly — the issue isn’t building materials, it’s that housing costs are massively over-inflated compared to wages and we’ve sold our nation’s soul to the renting/AirBnB markets. The housing crisis is a feature of the housing market, not a bug, and single-family zoning keeps saturated housing areas similarly sparse of actual home owners.

This is where the difference between performative progressiveness and actual progressiveness crops up. If talks of change threaten markets and businesses taking advantage of the disaster/crisis, we’ll just be thrown resin hovels and disintegrating paper straws.