MisterDizzy

By that logic, removing LGBTQ literature from school libraries is just "consequences" then. They don't have to listen.

Careful, fascist! /s

In all seriousness, this is dead-on. Promotion of families and long-term relationships would solve a surprising amount of societal ills very effectively, but it would also require a concerted, society-wide effort to embrace the consequences of our actions, promote responsible social behavior, and above all, telling some people "no" who have been taught to believe that telling them no is a violation of their rights and "literally violence." An extremely tall order.

This should be a bigger story, but rent control is one of the higher classes' compassionate-chic opinions that are all the rage right now.

Forget student debt forgiveness, what about all debt forgiveness, and illegalize charging interest?

What baffles me is how OpenAI keeps its doors open. They're paying Microsoft to be able to exist, plus their product requires huge amounts of electricity and infrastructure. OpenAI is unsustainable.

They were a disaster during covid. Something like half of our imports go through California, and California's psychotic political whims can shut it down at any moment.

Hate speech is free speech. "Not being able to use other people's computers" is nice, but when private discussion forums make functionality changes that help to alter the outcome of elections, things start getting deadly serious, and we need to stop dressing up what we're doing in nice language like "not being able to use other people's computers/bandwidth". Just say it: we need to reserve the right to censor some individuals at will.

What I saw was a death of despair in my family during lockdowns, and my own very bad adverse reaction to a shot I was strongarmed into taking (transient global amnesia).

Free speech is person-to-person in the sense that it only works if a person has it in practice, regardless of where the suppression is coming from.

Stay with me here: this is what actual democracy looks like: people sometimes saying and doing some offensive crap.

Free association and decentralization appear to be at work here (upon a casual glance, at least), and what results is something that highlights a commonplace social norm that does exist and has existed for some time, namely the old "avoid the ghetto in your directions" meme, which was something of a joke in the pre-GPS and early GPS era.

Real democracy means making sure your worst enemy can freely say some horrible nonsense, because that means you can still offend them too. People have lost sight of this in the era when we view ourselves as the Avenger in the movie and think we are fundamentally unlike our enemy, because they're "bad" and we're "good".

"It's bigoted!" Okay, so don't associate with those people. That's your right.

Not defending Musk, but the UK government does not believe in the equal application of law or basic human rights. They have positively no moral high ground to stand on.

Covid really was the moment I had to check out for my own sanity. Very suddenly it was as though everyone around me, people I believed to be intelligent and rational people, became absolute pawns who were breathlessly, desperately, frothingly doing as they were told, and making sure that you were also. All that was required of them to enjoy unchallengeable moral superiority was to remain afraid and follow instructions. The easiest possible path to gain power was to be weak and scared. Everything is different now, and future generations will see Covid as the moment it shifted. Because "this time it's different, it's too important." They were wrong, and I will not be forgiving them.

Another "IF" product like Stadia. It would be really great for the company IF there was a market for this, but nobody wants it.

Big Tech seems determined to strap a live network-connected HD video feed with sound to everyone's head.

This is the main difference in politics, as far as I can tell: Some people push for things that seem really compassionate and intuitively good and right, but actually make the problem a lot worse. But to argue this is almost always futile because all most people seem able to absorb is that you're disagreeing with their intuitively compassionate position, not that you're trying to posit a solution that actually functions, so in their eyes you're an existential threat to them.

We subsidize unhealthy food and wonder why most of our food supply is full of gluten and sugar and other slow-acting poisons, then we take meat and other essential animal proteins that people survived on for millenia and either process them until they're basically nutrition-free or make them so expensive that it's no longer viable. If people in charge thought solving problems was good for them, they'd do that instead of creating them. It's far more profitable to create a problem so that you can sell an expensive treatment for it.

There's a username and password prompt.

This is why it's getting annoying to see this sort of headline. "Nobody should own the public square... Unless it's a cadre of young San Francisco leftists who represent one of the most extreme left factions in the country. They should own the public square."

No one seemed to think twice when Twitter was using its social media platform to amplify left wing views. Not just left, but one of the furthest and most fringe left parts of the country, San Francisco.

America has a natural memetic immune system that precludes things like being a Nazi from public life, but it has no such immune system for the extremist left, some versions of which did many times the damage of the holocaust in the second half of the 20th century, the half we don't really learn about. Don't believe me? Walk down the street wearing a swastika and a hammer & sickle and see which one gets you attacked faster.

We need to develop some memetic antibodies quickly.

Why??

We're exploring some options for implementing something like adblocking on all traffic. I don't think people would care if we did that. Some may not even notice. Maybe they'd be happy that some sites were cleaner and faster.

Google's ads have been a headache in the office for a while. Older users don't know to ignore the first screen or so of fake promoted "results" in favor of the actual search results. This has led to multiple phishing attempts.

They ought to be going after drug manufacturers directly and forcing them to publish 100% of their research on every new drug they create. They should also incentivize finding off-label uses for existing cheap generic drugs, and disincentivize repackaging technically-distinct versions of old drugs as soon as the generics pop up. There is a lot of room for improvement in this whole sector, and this isn't where it is.

Hardly surprising. This is very Google-like behavior. The question is do other Chromium browsers have this? Edge? Brave? Chromium? Ungoogled Chromium?

Let's see how long it takes them to realize they should have gone with the latest nuclear power tech and will eventually be unable to meet demand with anything but coal or nuclear (unless something changes).

I get the sense that Nuclear energy is inevitably going to be the future of the West, especially given recent advancements and safety improvements in the tech (mitigating meltdowns, less radioactive waste, better efficiency, etc). It seems like old ideas about nuclear energy being scary and dangerous are sticking around stubbornly though, and as a result countries radically cutting fossil fuel use who are not replacing it with nuclear are struggling.

Pile the rise of electric cars on top of that and you have a situation like some places in the West where the common position for a largely disengaged, ordinary individual who wants to be compassionate and socially aware is essentially a position of anti-industrialism. One could be forgiven if they assumed leadership of such places is intentionally disrupting the ability of the countries to continue growing, or even to maintain existing functioning institutions. What's more, the people doing their best to limit growth and move toward deindustrialization don't believe what they're selling in regards to the planet and its future.

I've said for several years that my estimation of the United States military's treatment of its enlistees makes it basically indistinguishable from psychological torture in my eyes. I'm glad there's finally research that says something essentially similar.

This reminds me of an XKCD[1] where the character marveled about an obscure piece of single-purpose hardware running Java.

[1] https://xkcd.com/801/

I've been thinking for a while about the "reality is a simulation" idea. It may not be literally true, but it certainly is useful to try on as a temporary LARP. The more you think of things that way, the more it starts to make sense in a weird way. Nearly all media, that is to say nearly all stimuli/input, is irreflective of reality. Nobody knows what's going on.