Yeah, I think that the chaos once the 25th clearly needs to be invoked (i.e. Trump is facedown in a puddle of his own piss but still alive) is gonna put the Death of Stalin to shame.
Gentleman adventurer, mostly decent bastard, only slightly pessimistic optimist. I ride bikes, tinker, program, and read way too much. White, cis, straight, US male if you need the context. It's a fucked demographic; wasn't my choice to be born into it.
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Yeah, I think that the chaos once the 25th clearly needs to be invoked (i.e. Trump is facedown in a puddle of his own piss but still alive) is gonna put the Death of Stalin to shame.
In the richest country in the world people are baking to death at home. Richard Chamblee died in Arizona two days after the central AC broke and the family couldn’t afford to repair it. His core temp was 108F/42C. He was just 52 years old. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
...those are the words of a man who's been repeatedly hit over the head with a shovel.
I have a hard time with more traditional beliefs because I really feel like there'd be a lot more active smiting of evil bastards and a lot less suffering of innocents going on if there was a god whose morals actually aligned with basic ethics.
One of the *many* sins of ID was that it attempted to cast the thoroughly explained as "unexplainable" because its goal wasn't explanation or meaning but, rather, promoting a specific religious belief using public education funds.
Anyways, my own personal view is that if god is essentially nothing more than a force of chance and chaos upon the world, there isn't much use in worshipping them or even acknowledging their existence.
I have more respect towards that view than I do towards the proponents of Intelligent Design, whose whole thing was finding *anything* that they could use to get religious instruction - however abstract - back into schools.
"Well, I'm sorry if you don't understand how the immune system evolved, but these other scientists don't seem to have the same problem."
The best part of the Nova documentary on Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District is the scene where the plaintiff's lawyer heaps a mountain of papers on the evolution of the immune system on the witness stand in front of the biologist who claimed it was too complex to have evolved on its on.
ID was *supposed* to make all the pieces fit, with the concession "ok, well animals can evolve *a little* on their own" married to the concept of Irreducible Complexity which was "Well... this thing is too complicated to possibly have evolved on its own, so it *must* have been designed!"
Only if you *aren't* doing young-earth creationism - most of the time. That was the whole niche intelligent design was supposed to fit into.
Wouldn’t be a Labor Day without the best union public service announcement ever made (parody or real) youtu.be/_3mw49mk_x0
So, who's walking around in his flabby orange skin suit then? Is this a Dave (1993) situation?
For anyone who hasn't been paying attention, THEY WANT TO GET RID OF BIRTH CONTROL AND NO-FAULT DIVORCE AND PUSH WOMEN OUT OF THE WORKFORCE. Seriously, they're telegraphing their every move on this shit. We need to break them.
Nah, still not like ChatGPT; you aren't going to get easily digestible pap in response to your question - the answer might even include *nuance*
The number of biologists who manage to recognize that evolution happens but insist that all animals must've been created by god is kinda nuts. I personally know of two. Which doesn't seem like many, but it's still absolutely insane it happened twice.
Huh, that is neat. Makes me want to see a tiny little stock tank windmill fan on top of the whole structure to run the pump that gets water to the tank at the top. I imagine that might be too ironic for people in the market for a country estate though.
I'm not fond of the ground floor, just because it feels *very* cookie-cutter modern, but it is well-executed, even if stylistically it feels like a missed opportunity to me. ...but they put a bathroom of all things on top of the tower?!? Mind-boggling. Water pressure must be terrible.
Most people are *really* shit at identifying what actions they can take to improve their situation once they're off a script that they know, so they try to grab for *anything* - and the things they're most likely to grab for are the ones being sold as cure-alls by charlatans.
The model of a bad gambler who's making worse and worse bets because "eventually my luck will turn around and I'll win it all back!" really seems to me to be the best explanation for the phenomenon of "low-trust" people in our society.
GOP Senator Barrasso, wrote an op-ed in WSJ DAYS ago complaining about how effective Schumer has been at forcing hearings to waste floor time to block appointments. 53 is bigger than 45 + 2. Every Dem & Indy can vote no. If a nom gets tanked it’s because of pressure on Republicans, not Dem no votes.
.@velshi.com “Head in the sand”? Please. Part of the problem is limp news coverage that turns every Dem wobble into a five-alarm fire while treating GOP extremism as background noise. That’s what depresses our base.
Consider it almost like a person with a very bad gambling problem, but for basic beliefs and reasons for being; "I lost my savings in crypto but, if I double-down on this next bet (Trump, AI, anti-vax, Anti-Trans, etc) it'll all be ok!"
I'd guess that the prioritization of novelty and the history of getting burned are two self-reinforcing sides of the same coin; previous failures must mean that something radically different is necessary, and the brand new things that's *radically* different might just be the ticket this time.
Of course, the chance of them glomming onto vaccines would be about the same as them glomming onto, say, astrology or Jade vagina eggs, as long as they had never seen either before.
So your prototypical low-trust person, if brought up in a society where vaccines were demonized, would have a good chance of glomming onto them as the miracle preventative they are when first introduced to them, not because they're efficacious, but because - to them - they're novel.
I feel like a lot of "low trust" behavior is better explained as a prioritization of novelty to the exclusion of everything else. This is why they are willing to invest a lot of trust into ideas that are new *to them* in ways that routinely burn them.
Tragically, it doesn't seem possible to buy Cheez Wiz in the UK - I assume that it must have additives that made whomever regulates your foodstuffs go "NOPE." However, there is a second-best option: www.amazon.co.uk/Nabisco-Easy...
We have Wiz'd cheese too! Let's make sure we cover *all* our bases - particularly in this case as I'm confident that the very concept of Cheez Wiz would give your average Frenchman an aneurism.
Wait, so a restaurant is a place of restoration? Frigging French, man...
Crazy that the time she goes off the road isn't even the longest stretch of her staring at her phone.
My dude, that boat sailed when a bunch of people from rural red counties refused to vote for the nice competent black woman and instead elected a fascist.
Old Soviet joke for today: A man walks into a newsstand every day, looks around, and leaves. After a long time of this, the owner says “Can I help you find something?” “I’m looking for the obituaries.” “The obituaries are in the back of the newspaper, comrade.” “Not the one I’m looking for.”
Again, I don't think so; I think they've played their hand and they don't have any cards left that they can play without making things even worse for themselves.
I find myself wondering how an elite effort to blow up democracy would be different from what we've already seen; it strikes me that the elites who are interested in blowing up democracy already have their foot slammed all the way down on the antidemocratic gas pedal, and they're still losing.
The Union also had some worse generals than Lee (*cough*McClellan*cough*) but, yeah, ultimately the Confederacy was put down by men more skilled *and* of better character than Lee.
Oh, the question of legal liability is still standing, but it's different from *professional* liability. I did conflate the two in my original post but, simply, if a certification body found written logs showing a therapist doing what ChatGPT did, that therapist would lose their license SO FAST.
Bad craftsmanship with good wood still suggests "show off the good wood" unless the bad craftsmanship has been bad enough to compromise the good wood (i.e. Lots of filter, ugly nail holes, etc.)
Well, yeah, models aren't held professionally liable if they enable someone's paranoid fantasies while actual licensed therapists *are*. I feel like doing what ChatGPT did would risk landing most professional therapists an accessory charge - and, at a minimum, would result in decertification.
Hey now, these are the domestic tastes of *most of history* - if you had a pretty enough woodgrain to show off, you showed it off. Paint is supposed to hide ugly cheap stuff.
Possibly? I'm not a specialist and I'm not personally sensitive to it, so I can't really say with any authority.
Holy photosensitive epilepsy batman, that is an obnoxious gif.
Does the listing entry include that? Because, if so, loooool.
Company which compulsively engages in fraud found to be lying in court.
Noone gives this take the other way round, do they? No one advises conservatives that calling their enemies communists, extremists, anti-semites, Britain haters etc. "doesn't work" Because political name calling plainly *does* work, if done regularly at sufficient volume with a big enough platform
The organic part is *highly* relevant given that it makes our perception of things variable depending on specific circumstances and, as a direct result, we learn about those differences in perception, how to overcome them and - very importantly - how to recognize them in others' behaviors.
We *really* need to ban AI chatbots. Not regulate: ban. They provide no value that couldn't be provided by other people, and their harms are becoming increasingly apparent.
bsky.app/profile/dasd...
Scene: a cave in 41,000BC "Here in ptrglph. 1 we can see the present method of hunting: chase animals until they collapse from exhaustion. In ptrglph. 2 we can see my proposed refinement to this process: have some dudes hide in a bush with pointy sticks. In this lecture I will establish..."
I love that nerds have always built long and extended arguments for their preferred manner of doing things as long as nerds have existed.
Sen. Smith: The number one cause of fatalities for young people in this country between 1 and 19 are firearms. This is a choice that we are making in our country. No one thing is going to solve this, but we can't just sit back and say there's nothing we can do
A progressive Democrat flipped a staunchly Republican seat in *Iowa*— won it by 10 points, in fact— by running *As A Progressive* focusing on issues of education, and making housing, child care, and health care affordable. Stop running to the right. Stay left, and fight.
You really need to infiltrate the IRS if you want to actually make money with your religion.
RKF Jr. is a dangerous man who is determined to abuse his authority to act on truly terrifying conspiracy theories and disinformation—leaving us unprepared for the next deadly pandemic and snuffing out potential cures while he’s at it. My full statement.
That's easy; anyone who voted Republican. They might have been too dumb to realize that the Republican obsession with cutting taxes and spending was going to close their hospitals, but the fact someone was too dumb to realize what they were voting for doesn't change the fact they voted for it!
There can’t be any gun restrictions because we have to protect against federal government tyranny, and if kids get shot we just have to live with it. Also the President can send troops to cities because the federal government can do whatever it wants. These two ideas are consistent and reasonable.
You, uh, haven't studied the history of the first millennia much, have you?
Every lawyer should get the day off in observance of the fact that they actually failed to indict a ham sandwich
Yeah, but also charcoal was really only necessary for applications where you needed a fire to get *a lot* hotter than wood and, because it was expensive compared to wood, it really was only ever used where those much higher temperatures were needed - which was basically just metallurgy.
...if anything, it should *increase* said culpability.
*deep sigh* It *is* Alberta, so I'm hardly surprised they're doing things the least-climate-friendly way possible but, also, it is Alberta, so I'm kinda surprised they aren't using a petroleum product instead.
(shit, I forgot to talk about ash and what a pain it was to clean up *after* you were done cooking. Oh well, another time...)
There's more that could be said but, briefly, gas stoves were a true paradigm shift over what came before and we should respect that. 27/27
And today, with induction stoves, we're looking at a significant refinement on what gas stoves allowed - but there the big changes there are almost entirely on the logistics and climate side; the improvements to user experience are relatively minor, though still positive. 26/
Put it all together and you have something that isn't just a minor change that makes something slightly better, but rather a revolutionary technology that makes lives *significantly* easier, cleaner, and healthier. 25/
So you have a lighter stove that only heats the cooking surface, no necessary chimney, no extra cleaning up of coal dust, no coal storage, hell, no local storage of fuel at all (in cities with has infrastructure) - AND IT GETS HOT FASTER! 24/
Gas burns *much* cleaner than coal, to the point where you can directly expose the cooking food to the burning gas without issue, which lets you get rid of the gigantic 100% cast iron stove that gets insanely hot all over! 23/
And gas stoves *almost completely eliminated* all of these problems: 22/
And we haven't even touched on the air quality issues because, boy howdy, were they baaaaaad. 21/
But that's not the only filthy thing you get to deal with! You'll also have to hire chimney sweeps on a regular basis to clean all the soot out of your chimneys so that you don't get a chimney for, which is a terrifying way your entire goddamn house could burn down. 20/
All of this means constantly dealing with the nasty byproduct of handling coal: coal dust. If you have a coal stove, you're forced to deal with the fact that there are parts of your house that are just going to get filthy, and one of those parts is your kitchen. 19/
This means whole industries dedicated to storing and hand-delivering coal. This also means you're going to have a part of your house *exclusively* for storing coal, and you're going to have a bucket of the stuff sitting in your kitchen. 18/
Because coal stoves need *coal* - physical chunks of black flammable mineral. You can't get coal through a pipeline (at least not in a form usable by a stove that needs solid coal) so you need to get it delivered in bulk, and every time you need to use it, you gotta carry it around BY HAND. 17/
But, while all of those are problems that gas stoves so not have and make the experience of using a coal stove deeply unpleasant, we haven't gotten to the *real* problem yet, and that's logistics! 16/
But regardless, you are going to be in a situation where you're dealing with - and manipulating - a whole lot of hot, heavy metal. This sucks *very* badly. 15/
If you have a single compartment for burning coal there are methods you can use to adjust temperatures to, say, boil one thing and simmer another, but it requires a fair bit of skill. 14/
Furthermore, because this thing is dependent on heat generated from burning coal, temperature control is rough at best. It's easiest if you're working with a version that has coal burning directly under the cooking surface but, otherwise, you have one temperature control for *everything.* 13/
This makes cooking on a hot day an absolutely miserable experience; imagine the hottest, muggiest day you've experienced, except now, to make dinner, you need to spend time in a room with a china-cabinet sized radiator in it. And that heat is going to seep into the *rest* of your house too. 12/
Now, there are obviously some *massive* downsides to this system: for one, the fact that hot gases circulate through the whole stove - and the whole stove is cast iron - means that the whole damn thing is HOT. 11/
The details of where the coal burns vary; in some cases there is a single compartment, in others there are many, and sometimes there's burning coal directly under the "stovetop" and sometimes it's just hot gases. But the consistent thing is that hot gases from the coal *never* touch food. 10/
The coal stove has a compartment completely separate from the food being cooked and completely enclosed where coal can be burned. The hot gases from the coal then circulate around the cook surfaces before being extracted via a chimney. 9/
So, because the only affordable heat source is one that smells really bad when it's giving off its heat, you need a system for burning it in such a way that its smoke doesn't touch the food you're cooking. This is somewhat tricky because both smoke and heat mostly go up. Enter the coal stove. 8/
Now, you *can* cook directly over refined coal - coke - which has had its volatiles distilled off, but coke is much more expensive and somewhat less available than raw mineral coal, so it was really only used in applications where it was needed to replace far more expensive charcoal. 7/
And you *can't* just do open hearth cooking with mineral coal because mineral coal smoke is TERRIBLE. It's sooty, it smells bad, and anything you cook directly over it will be essentially inedible. 6/
This is highly function, very cheap in terms of equipment, and pretty cheap in terms of operation - so why didn't people just keep doing it? Well, as cities continued growing there just wasn't enough firewood to let everyone cook over an open hearth. 5/
This also requires some more background; prior to the development of a coal stove, the primary method of cooking was over an open fire in a large cooking hearth. Pots would hang from hooks or be set on racks over the fire or coals, or be set next to it. 4/
Now, while a coal stove could be fired with many different fuels - on the Prairies of the US they were often fired with dried buffalo droppings - the key feature of a coal stove is that it can be fired with mineral coal and still produce edible food. 3/
First off, let's establish what we're talking about here - *this* is a coal kitchen stove. It is essentially a gigantic cast-iron cabinet. These things were *obscenely* heavy and quite expensive, though very functional, and incorporated a lot of cool features. 2/
So, I want to rant for a minute about the transition form Coal to Gas because - in our decadent age of electric stoves, gas stoves, and burrito taxis - I don't think many people realize just how much coal stoves SUCKED. 1/
I personally haven't found agentic search to be a significant improvement over pre-enshitification Google and, moreover, that seems a very low bar to clear for "immensely useful."
Immensely useful for what? Because the only actual use I see for it that can tolerate the hallucinations - without the productivity hit of acting as ChatGPT's editor and fact checker - is fraud. Gas Stoves were a *serious* productivity and environmental improvement over older Coal stoves.
"move fast and kill kids" seems to be what's going on here. Generative AI is bad for *so many reason* but the dead-eyed sociopathy of its creators is definitely one of the big ones.
The John Birch Society was so rabidly libertarian that they'd consider anyone who wants a state to existing in any recognizable form to be a communist.
Dear journalists: The President has not fired Lisa Cook. The President is *trying* to illegally fire her. Your words shape people’s reality. Please be accurate in your reporting.
Yuuuup. bsky.app/profile/dasd...
This is the fundamental problem with authoritarian leaders: the only people who are willing to work for them are the frauds and idiots who don't recognize that they'll be hamstrung by the authoritarian's demands *and* hung out to dry whenever the authoritarian is under pressure to do something.
This is where I got with Breaking Bad; it was entertaining, interesting, and well-made, but Walter was just too odiously evil for me to want to keep watching past season three.
In retrospect, it does really seem that "unrepentant assholes who hurt innocent people *cannot* be the heroes of popular media" was one of the load-being pillars of our society of adult children.
...but there is the hilarious option of a skydiver realizing he picked the wrong landing site and steering away at the last minute, only for his chute to catch on it and get all tangled around.