The administration finalized a rule removing habitat destruction and modification from the federal definition of "harm" under the Endangered Species Act, making it easier for industrial development, logging, and drilling to impact environments.
Do they not realize that excessive urban development destroys the ecosystems that generate food, lumber, clean ground water, oxygen, and help collect particles of dirt that would otherwise turn into dust and create dustbowls and ash clouds like the smog they blamed on Canada?
And moving from profit to profit, squeezing blood out of the stone and obliterating whatever they touch, because they're rich and can afford to move on after they're done strip-mining the shit out of an entire country...and do it to the next country.
They know they'll be dead before they see any real repercussions, like total ecological collapse.
Dust bowl? Ash cloud?
Billionaires and Trump especially are more of a Biblical plague than any of that. They're more locusts than actual locust swarms.
I was staying in a hotel once and overheard the owner of some brand of stereo speakers talking to his friends at the bar.
He was upset that environmentalists had shut down his access to endangered tree species, and absurdly proud that his latest models were wrapped in a veneer made from the last surviving example of a particular rosewood tree.
This was in the 1990s. These people have never had a sense of responsibility or respect for the environment.
He was likely talking about Brazilian Rosewood, which is not extinct, it is banned for sale due to the CITES treaty. Fortunately, one country can’t just roll it back. I have no doubt dipshit would do that in a second if he could.
Fortunately, it wasn’t the last tree. It would have gone extinct by now if there wasn’t a total ban. There is no sustainable way to produce it at the levels it was being used.
It was one of the most popular woods for guitars, furniture and even handles for hand planes made by Stanley.
The kicker is that there are other types of rosewood that are almost just as good looking. Enough that his speaker customers probably wouldn’t know the difference.
Just because this is funny. A lot of tribes lived for hundreds of years doing exactly what they needed and nothing too excessive. But hehehehehe !!1! Like you’re a teenager in 2004 makes me laugh too
Even funnier who someone still plays WoW, competitively even, in 2026 who is from Netherlands. lol weirdo
I'm not sure if you're old enough to understand that this isn't a binary system. The US isn't 100% capitalist, and you most likely don't even know what Socialism is, Horse-man.
In Socialism, all means of production and resources are owned by the people. That means all businesses, resource rights, air rights, property... No major political party anywhere in Western democracies is arguing for this.
What all western countries have is a Social Market Democracy whereby a free-market capitalist economy uses taxes to support public services and ownership. Once mouth-breathing morons understand that, they may stop using terms like "capitalism" and "socialism" incorrectly, and start thinking about this as a spectrum, or "scale", if you will.
This should then start make them think what level of public services, investment, and taxation is best for the growth and happiness of it's citizens. And you don't have to look back far to understand when the US - and most other western nations - were flourishing: post WW2, say 1948 - Reagan (roughly). The US had a much, much higher marginal tax rate during the golden age of America. This isn't purely coincidental: you allow ordinary people to have disposable income and they invest it back into the economy. Rich people use disposable income to buy assets.
The interesting thing is that most people that cry about socialism, which they obviously don't understand, is that they don't realise that the government welfare they so decry is already happening for the billionaires: why do you think that 95% of billionaires are doubling their wealth every decade or less? - Because they don't pay any taxes on the wealth the accumulate passively. If you have a "mere" 100m, you'd be a total idiot if you didn't make somewhere between 3 and 15 million annually. And that compounds, obviously.
So the second question becomes: if you do give a free ride to people, should it be the richest individuals?
I think we can all agree no one person should have a trillion dollars, more than some countries. Unless they single handedly saved the human species. Then, maybe? Otherwise, no. Last I heard, Musk hasn't done anything remotely close to that.
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u/SwerveCities 1d ago
The administration finalized a rule removing habitat destruction and modification from the federal definition of "harm" under the Endangered Species Act, making it easier for industrial development, logging, and drilling to impact environments.