Joined the Mayqueeze.

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • But you only know in hindsight which ones were true or not. So there is no value if 50% or more turn out to be bullshit.

    Not all old people are wise with age. Most old people can be led down the garden path just like the rest of us.

    I think what you experience is hindsight confirmation bias. Granny was right all along about this clandestine network of rich child molesters. That bit was true but there are another fifteen layers of outrageous Q Anon bullshit heaped on top of that, which now fade in our memory, as we have to face the fact that there was some truth to it after all. But without actual evidence and bare chested men in native American getup prancing about, I don’t think we could have known. Like you couldn’t know which story from ye elders turned out to be true.






  • Merz is in his 70s. He is not the most gifted politician. One nickname given to him by a journalist is “the unavoidable” in reference to him having no good competition for leadership in his party after a perceived century of Angela Merkel in charge who had successfully sidelined him. For a reason, it seems.

    He is very good at dropping shit like this in the media and then having it walked back or watered down. I do not see this idea getting a majority in the country where Google street view is useless because people rebelled against having the public facing side of their buildings photographed for easier navigation. And I can see a few arguments that would occupy the supreme court for a decade, were this to become law.


  • Why? What’s stopping you from finding news sources you trust on your own and bookmarking them? I understand the defeatist stance for some local stuff where most of the news has hidden behind paywalls - although paywalls can often be creatively avoided. But when it comes to coverage of the continued American embarrassment that is 47 on the world stage, the world is your oyster. You have news from other English speaking countries, of which there are loads. And a lot of public broadcasters and news organizations that normally speak or write in something else will offer English language articles. If you stop at consuming what is presented to yourself by our friend Al Gorithn, that is a choice.

    Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage.

    While the Kant certainly wasn’t referring to consuming news in the digital age, his abridged quote can be wiggled to apply as a motto in this context as well.


  • Get your head out of this “the media does this or that” gutter where they are maybe part of a big conspiracy by the man to keep us docile. Media has never been perfect, reporting on all stories fairly and balanced and all that. That’s an unattainable ideal. You have to pick and choose what you read. They always jump on the big stories and neglect the smaller ones, especially if they operate under a need to generate profits.

    47 came up through reality television. He will stay on topic as long as it generates headlines. Whether he is heel or hero doesn’t matter. There is also the behavioral pattern of TACO, he looks to play chicken with the world but backs out of it again quite quickly. And BTS he works to make himself and other rich people richer. Anything he does can pretty much be explained through this prism, after the fact.

    Greenland, like wanting Canadian anschluss, generated headlines. He looked like he had a grand plan, the real estate developer in him came through. There was opposition and with it attention, which he likes. And then even members of his cult were sceptical to critical about this neo-imperialist bullshit. If the world had rolled over and let him have it, he would have took it. But European leaders managed to group up on him and gave him the most face saving out out of this bullshit. And it took away attention from other things, like the famous pedophile case.

    He is not a details guy. They say anything that cannot be put on a single page with lots of pictures he will not take in. The agreement the US has with NATO ally Denmark already allows for 99% of his grand plan. They packaged the info he never absorbed into something that looks like a win for the great deal maker. And they probably awarded him the clubman of the year trophy to please his ego. Good enough, for now at least. Now, let’s escalate tensions in Iran or kidnap a south American dictator.

    If you dig for European sources, you can read about developments that are the long tail of this failed Greenland grab. Officially, no European leader but maybe Spain’s Sanchez will be on record saying the US are no longer a reliable partner for anything. But off the record, that’s their tune. Efforts are underway to de-Americanize the defense industry and spending. Another slow building wave is the European desire to break free of dependence on US tech firms. These stories maybe would made the news in North America, if there wasn’t the bigger so-called AI bubble inflating at the same time.






  • I suspect the lack of experiences of being with or even having a significant other is what drove the majority of these bastards to this proto-SA. Where they can be powerful grunt grunt and dress up in GI cosplay. There is this lordofthefliesification that takes place when all these frustrated men get together. Anyways, that’s why I suspect this is almost a trick question. How can you detect if you’re dating an ICE prick? You won’t have to. Chances are they are socially very awkward, behaviorally weird and therefore undatable. It’s this quality that set them on an authority loving, very likely misogynic, for various reasons chronically underfucked path in life where they thought hunting and terrorizing innocent people and shooting them if they can get away with it is a great career choice. It shows.




  • I sympathize with your point of view here. I feel like that ship has sailed though. Messaging is the preferred means. That ship is not coming back any more.

    Email is not well protected unless you and everybody communicating with you is taking extras precautions. Signal is E2E encrypted, WhatsApp also but owned by Meta so barf, Telegram’s encryption status is complicated but probably better than plain email. There is a privacy advantage.

    I treat instant messages that have the content of an email as such. I’ll reply in my own time. Just because I got it instantly doesn’t mean I need to act on it right away. I have some groups and contacts muted and have set quiet hours on my phone for evenings and nights. My advice is to look for ways to manage the stress you feel about this. That could mean going off the chat apps all together but I think you can also tweak settings and your behavior.



  • You grew up in a world where Rock’n’Roll already existed. They liked it because it didn’t before and it took a while to slap a label on it. You grew up in a world where people bought music or paid to stream. When Rock’n’Roll started sheet music was the big seller. They had just introduced vinyl as a medium. You are exposed to all sorts of music today. Back in the 1940s US, predominantly, white people listened to white people music and black people listened to black people music. It’s only when some white people saw the black music was better and then unabashedly copied it for the more economically impactful white audience that this became a hit. It’s not just the quality of the music; it’s the culture and the change within it that came with it. It’s a big package.

    I remember listening to Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit when out came out thinking this was the roughest rock could ever go. ~30 years later it sounds rather tame. That’s the way our musical ears work. We tend to have a hardcore recency bias.


  • One thing that what they call agenetic AI will undermine might be a lot of the subscription based biggies of the industry. I’m thinking about Adobe in particular. They charge a monthly premium for having user-friendly, low learning curve software that often has become industry standard. But there are open source alternatives for many of their big hitters (Inkscape, GIMP, etc.). If the agenetic model needs a tool to design a logo or expand an image - and you probably already pay for the privilege of using the agent model - this may prove to be a boon to the open source development of these intermediary software tools. Because the relative difficulty to use them as we hear from Adobe heads all the time won’t matter to the computer. And they are free (with a request to donate). So a chunk of interest and probably money and effort will move from those subscription services to open source alternatives and their development. This is just one positive effect so-called AI could have for some open source projects.

    Sadly, at the same time we squander resources and kill polar bears.