Similar to mine!

-Fuckface

-Facejam

-Serious Trouble

-MBMBAM

-ANMA

An alternative universe where the Economist turned out to actually practice introspection

Asinine to present things like this, pretending all black tea is the same or all green tea. I have green tea around 10mg and I have green tea around 130mg

Apple. Not the most evil, for certain, but they have the highest percentage of high level business choices that piss me off. Just so antithetical to my philosophy and consumer preferences. All closed, all hyper controlled, low customization, anti-repairable.

Do it their way or go fuck yourself. Something break? Fuck you, it’s your fault, buy another one. Want to play games on their very capable hardware? Grow up, no compatibility. Want to make their OS work on other machines? How dare you. Thief.

The only thing happening in the industry is the same thing happening in every industry and most of the first world:

The wealthy owners and executive leader roles have learned that COVID, COVID supply lines, interest rates, ‘consumer sentiment’, and inflation, are all very easy scapegoats that both the public and investors will easily buy as reasons for lowering product quality and availability, while also firing employees, squeezing the non-fired ones to death, and raising prices. This has lead to almost 2 straight years of corporations showing record profits (even adjusting for the inflation that they are largely responsible for in the first place).

This downward spiral will continue until some force with nearly as much power pushes back.

This is typically and ideally a representative government in the form of regulation or taxation. But the US government has suffered decades of regulatory capture and congressional gridlock.

So the only other potential option is a large amount of highly populated unions. Which have to fight against nearly 100 years of media and political demonization and nearly 150 years of ‘american independent attitude’.

The perfect modern system has all 3 parties; unions, government, and corporations, equally strong and antagonistic. Just as the perfect modern government would have the executive, legislative, and judicial branches equally strong and antagonistic. Neither could be much farther from the case here.

Stronger bigger unions. Weaker smaller corporations. And a government that actually functions. All are necessary to fix our current shit show.

VRchat is similar to second life in terms of what it provides to the player, and is very popular with VR users. Second life is still around but it looks like puke and has an impenetrable culture.

Yeah VR is a good thing to point at as a message for “this is where we are heading and it will make the problem worse” but the current problems stem from the broad internet (the big apps) taking away real socialization time without giving much in return, and also cultural identity problems that are vast and complex.

The fact that it’s Chinese really isn’t even a blip on the radar imo. The censorship sucks and a lot of US platforms do it too ( I mean shit look at YouTubes content rules).

Their content algorithm being really good at showing you what your brain craves in an endless stream is the real big problem. It’s creating such strange micro cultures. Live streams of people slowly filling balloons with food coloring and water, on a bunch of white printer paper. Teasing the water. Like an hour before it pops. 1,200,000 views. It feels insidious in such a weird way.

Brb, putting “suckfull software developer - 12 years” on my resume.

The country people of the 1890s are not the country people of today. Big city folk were a significantly smaller part of the population then, and the college educated population was miniscule. The ability to become educated is the largest relevant metric here. Now you can hit up khan academy and stanfords YouTube channel and get a world class education for free. Back then you had to be straight white wealthy connected. The excuses for ignorance are gone, for current country people.

But yes, these problems can and should be reversed, and done best communicating outside of the specific “lie-beral pedo demonrat vs racist Jesus warrior firearm creep” paradigm; placing things in terms of labor vs ownership class.

I freed myself from these chains years ago now, It was definitely worth it. understandable if you are locked in for work though.

This is a big one for me, I currently have NVIDIA gpus on all my machines, (i am going to avoid them in the future, the corporate price gouging is unacceptable) but at the moment that makes switching to linux for my gaming pc quite a bit more obnoxious.

Long overdue, another great Biden admin change that will probably fly under the radar for most. I have quite a few friends in the military and this system was BEYOND fucked.

ice sheets form as snow builds up, with each year’s snowfall preserved as a single, visible layer. There are measurable chemical differences in snow formed at different temperatures, so ice cores provide a record of polar temperature going back around 250,000 years for Greenland and 800,000 years for Antarctica.

Yearly banding is also found in fossilised corals and lake sediment deposits, and each band has a specific chemistry that reflects the temperature when it formed. Growth rings in tree trunks can be wider or thinner depending on the climate at the time of growth, so fossilised trees can reveal the length of growing seasons. And fossilised or frozen pollen grains allow scientists to determine what plants were growing in the past, which can give us a good idea of the climate at the time.

Marine sediment cores provide temperature records spanning millions of years. They contain the fossilised shells of tiny marine creatures that preserve a chemical record of the sea temperature when they lived.

-the guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/mar/07/past-climate-temperature-proxies

I really dont understand how anyone can look at the modern era of politics without a consideration for game theory, it is so useful for resolving these more nebulous or philosophical idea when it comes to thought conflicts. If your ‘opponent’ is constantly escalating and you arent responding, you are functionally forfeiting. and we all know the fascists are escalating as often and as hard as they can. if you seek peace or de-escalation you have to negotiate, and they wont do that. if you seek neutral ground you have to respond with equal escalation. and if you want to win you have to apply overwhelming force.

most conflicts in politics are not zero sum like this so its not a useful tool most of the time, but fascists are literally out for the destruction of democracy by definition, its existential by nature.

it makes sense that only the people who are meh or okay about the situation are left lol