The Algorithm has been A Thing long enough to have impacted young adults during their formative years.

At 25 I’m barely old enough that I entered adolescence just as “youtuber” became a career for many people (around 2012ish). The Algorithm has been part of it all my teens though I witnessed it becoming increasingly eldritch throughout and teaching its final untethered form in the second half of the 2010s. Today’s 20 year olds never knew anything else as they were 13 when elsagate was in full swing.

TL;DR how are your knees grandpa?

The phonology of “moth” is just bad (not just subjectively but in a way that I’m sure linguists could pick apart). It’s adjacent to “moist”. That’s the kind of name you give something you don’t like, a name made to be spat out. Contrast to other monosyllabic names like “fly”, a decidedly more despicable insect but with a much prettier name. Which one would be easier to use in a song?

Also I just checked and moths are butterflies, etymologically it’s just that old Germanic peoples assigned a different name to the less colorful butterflies.

I didn’t even know disliking moths was a thing until recently.

Guess why? In French they are called “night butterflies”. It’s just a nocturnal butterfly so of course it’s brown, duh.

This feels like the Orca/Killer Whale debate again. Why do the English give such terrible names to animals like they’re trying to give children nightmares?

I’m not a revolutionary and I disagree that the semantic difference is unimportant.

“The system must be destroyed” implies, assuming we’re talking about national politics, at the very least a short period of very deep constitutional and institutional reform, but really refers to nothing less than civil war, violent revolution, and the systematic dismantlement of existing institutions from which proponents of such action generally assume that their preferred method of government will naturally emerge.

This is opposed to a belief that, flawed may they be, democratic institutions also act as safeguards against the tyranny of the majority as well as the tyranny of whoever has the most money/guns, and slow incremental change to these institutions is preferable to their dismantlement.

Of course everything in the world isn’t so black and white. Nonetheless the existence of gray doesn’t diminish the difference between black and white. “The system must be destroyed”, by virtue of the violence it implies, is an extremist statement and different in nature to “the system must be fixed”.

The FBI apparently learned some lessons on how to deal with Russian interference since 2016 and made some arrests this time around. Way too little too late though, and in January Trump’s cronies will take over and that’ll be that. Other countries should take notes though and start being much harsher on Russian trolls and their puppets. Unfortunately Von Der Layen recently fired the guy who was prosecuting Musk over Twitter so I’m not too confident anyone in power learned their lesson. Which is mind-boggling because russian-backed far-right parties are a meaningful electoral threat to people like Von Der Layen.

I mean, she did try other things as well and that characterization is a bit reductive. More correctly I think we can say that “she’s not him” is the only thing the Sanders->Cheney spectrum could ever agree on and nothing else she did “stuck”. Sanders wasn’t happy about the pro-israel stuff and Cheney probably wasn’t happy about the “tax the rich” stuff.

Choosing one clear ideology and sticking to it might sound great to the progressives on here (and to people like Hasan), but I don’t have the hubris to think she or anyone within the Democratic party establishment actually had the charisma to pull that off either (maybe Michele Obama but she didn’t wanna do it so that’s the end of that plan). Especially considering Harris had like 4 months to pull a campaign together and did not have any previous popular good will to rely on.

4 months is very short and no matter how right you play your cards a lot of voters will not know anything about you other than “she’s not Him”. Sometimes you can do everything right and still lose (not that she did everything right but I think a postmortem will need to look back way further than that at Biden and Hillary and those who supported them).

Everyone from Sanders to Dick fucking Cheney endorsed Harris. Anyone who was paying any attention and wasn’t a literal fascist voted for her. The direction of the swing seems irrelevant.

The swing fell short because it’s not so much about direction than strength. Macron in 2017 ran the most “hard center” presidential campaign imaginable. Difference is it worked, not because his centrist program was particularly novel but in large part because he is a very charismatic figure and managed to create a voting base of hopefuls for himself. The same can broadly be argued about Obama (whose first act as president was to essentially absolve the previous administration and Wall St of their many sins in case anyone forgot how moderate he was).

Harris ran on a platform of… “I’m not him”. Which to any reasonable person is an obvious “yeah OK”, but unfortunately most Americans are apathetic cretins who will refuse to move their asses to a polling station if the guy on the telly doesn’t promise them a blowie at the voting booth. And the Democrat establishment is simultaneously too big to fail and incapable of producing an actually charismatic leader.

Well, all that and the obvious election interference from Musk, Putin, and the ontological inability of traditional media not to platform literal fascists.

My cheap scale will not work with my freshly recharged amazon basics AAAs. Apparently those do not hold up well enough under load. And of course any set of batteries that does work, discharges over a few months.

So I just bought a cheap mechanical scale (not from Amazon) and I eyeball it for weights under 50g. Good enough and dead reliable.

Cop-out answer. Ending capitalism and ending ST are not the same fight. I’m not confident I’ll see the former happen in my lifetime, but the latter is a distinct possibility (though the pro-ST “I hate to see the sun in my free time” people have a slight edge where I live). Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

Also I’m not even sure how ending capitalism is actually relevant. My skillset is office stuff, and until further notice humans still need to collaborate to get things done and therefore have a concept of “business hours” (though those don’t have to be 8-6).

I see the “8 hours of work is too many” angle, but that problem is mostly orthogonal to capitalism. Capitalist societies can (and have) changed the standard number of working hours. Communist societies are not exempt from the concept of mandatory labor either (quite the contrary for all historical examples!). If you’re looking for an economic model where everyone is free to work whenever they damn well please, I’m afraid you’ll have to bring the replicator thingies from Star Trek into existence first.

Oh I’ve got a window alright. It is set up perfectly right so that on the day after ST takes over I can see the sun set 6 minutes before I get off work. Sun’s down, guess I can go outside now!

That is absolutely devilish. I have to get to work so I’ll wake up whenever to get there. But all outdoors evening activities are, at best, a complete joke 5 months of the year because of fucking ST. Wanna take a quick jog around the neighborhood? Bad news bitch, it’s pitch black outside. Here’s to hoping I don’t get run over by a fucking bus.

“Sun rises after work starts” is a setup for caffeine addiction, but “sun sets before work ends” is a setup for crippling alcoholism. Literally nothing to look forward to all day long, five months a year. I will not take any shit from so-called morning people about this, there is one objective truth here and it’s that standard business hours being the worldwide standard that they are, ST the absolute fucking worst for office workers.

Source?

In the EU at least this is demonstrably false. LNG has slightly risen since 2000 but other fossil fuels (namely coal) have gone way down. Total consumption has been steadily declining in the past few years and is down to 2004 levels. So overall our electricity is a whole shitload cleaner.

The story is even starker for domestic heating. Gas and coal are vanishing since the mid-2000s.

I haven’t seen anyone here “support Israel”. Almost everyone agrees that the Israeli State is not free of guilt, far from it.

What people really disagree over is whether that alone makes Palestine right (nuanced) and whether it justifies Hamas’ actions (unhinged but unfortunately semi-common take on here).