Luckily my county election commission pays for return postage, and since the ballot is tracked and I get emails when it's received I feel safe mailing it a couple weeks early. If for some reason it's not counted before election day I'll cast a provisional ballot but so far that's never happened

I feel like our motto could be "We've been here the whole time!"

It does seem like things have gotten a lot better here lately but... we don't know what we don't know

👀 i will definitely be checking these out

yer damn right

don't need to worry about that

yeah not gonna lie I didn't really notice the emphasis on Southern Europe, but I'm aware of a lot of really counterproductive incentive schemes in other parts of the continent

(to expand on that - people haven't grokked that aircon is actually not that energy intensive, it just looks like it is because the US power grid has historically been much more idle in the winter because we burn gas for heating)

In my observations there's also a lot of cultural momentum. Air conditioning is seen as a wasteful American thing and actively shunned, and not enough people know the heat pumps are just air conditioners running in reverse. It's a mix of ignorance and snobbiness infecting policy in dumb ways.

I'm less concerned about that group of people than I am concerned about the many well-meaning individuals who are very strongly aligned with the idea that electoral politics is the least effective means to progress and then make the leap to not engaging with it at all.