Beware, mods removed NYT reportage along similar lines as it applied to Russia when I tried to post it. Some topics are forbidden!

It felt like cosmic justice when he was on celebrity jeopardy. He didn’t know a damn thing, which was true to my idea of him.

I totally blocked from my memory the very brief period when holograms were a thing

Yeah, I think some corner of my brain I knew this was exactly the kind of thing that would make us go wtf after some time had passed.

This was a longstanding fediverse complaint, which was quite remarkable to me. It was described as a “missing” feature even though you never had this ability anywhere else let alone the fediverse.

If you get a new email address, it doesn’t bring your contacts or your history of emails with you. If you make a new twitter account, same thing. And of course, don’t even think about trying to port, say, your facebook stuff into a youtube account. But if the fediverse can’t, then it’s a dealbreaker.

If you truly want to channel the limitless depths of human creativity, give a Comment Section Skeptic ™ every fediverse feature they say they want. Then wait and watch as that creativity goes into action, as [insert new feature] is now the new dealbreaker. It is and always will be an endless game of whack a mole.

social hierarchy studies have primarily been done on lobsters and wolves

I’m skeptical. I’ll grant you wolves, but even then, wolves I feel are no more or less studied than a bunch of other species which are subject of extensive interest, especially primates, dolphins and orcas, but also lions, hyenas, meerkats, bees and ants. At least those are all studied well enough that we have plenty to pick from.

I appreciate your point though that its ideologically driven anyway and that it’s all moot and 100% agree.

It wouldn’t even matter if it was “right”. The idea of looking to wolves for models of ideal human behavior is wrong for like 17 different reasons, even if it were technically true as a description of wolf behavior.

P.S. why do AlphaBros specifically look at wolves, or lobsters, to instruct us on social hierarchy? There are so many other animals, those seem pretty random choices. And pretty far afield from humans. Wouldn’t you at least want something more proximate to us humans on the evolutionary tree? Heck, why not just use humans as a reference point?

And the original concept, as it pertains to wolves, is evidently not a thing. So if we’re just saying things, the software metaphor is as good as any other.

This article depicts Elon Musk trawling for plaintiffs so he can fund lawsuits against Disney. Peter Thiel has publicly said in interviews he funded lawsuits aimed at Gawker as part of an intentional strategy. So that is in fact a perfectly legitimate comparison despite your protestations to the contrary.

You can find Gawker’s behavior objectionable, that’s fine, but that doesn’t have anything to do with anything insofar as it relates to my comparison, since that is not the element I was comparing.

Edit: Also, be sure to downvote and run away without engaging with what I said. Thanks!

Edit 2: Thanks for your compliance.

Echoes of Peter Theil’s strategy to destroy Gawker.

Right, and to your point, part of that is stymieing focused, direct action and ramping up of industry in the western world. So it makes perfect sense to be a global leader in every part of the EV supply and manufacturing chain while being interested in sowing division elsewhere so there’s no convergence of public interest and policy momentum that grows competitive industries. There’s no contradiction between those two things insofar as they serve China’s interests.

Sounds like the heydey of the Geo Metro, which got astonishing MPG for its time.

is one where our impact as private citizens is as close to nil as it can be

Individual choices aggregate into large scale consequences, and individual choices do matter at scale.

When Taylor Swift’s JET ALONE produces more carbon annually than 1000 individuals driving their car daily, it doesn’t matter one iota what kind of vehicle the average joe drives.

Amazingly, you’re missing your own point. If it’s not about individuals, well, even Taylor Swifts jet by itself is a rounding error when considered in the context of global emissions.

But more importantly, it seems like you are contradicting yourself in a pretty fundamental way. You are perfectly comfortable taking Taylor Swift’s emissions and holding her responsible for those due to her belonging to a class, namely folding her into membership of “corporations/billionaires”. So Taylor, insofar as she represents the collective actions of that class, gets moral responsibility.

But individual consumers are also contributing significant emissions when conceived of as a class, which is a way of conceptualizing individual actions that, by your own Taylor Swift example, you are perfectly comfortable doing.

It doesn’t mean it’s the only thing we should strive to change, but it definitely is one of them, because the global collective emissions of people using internal combustion engines is in fact a significant input into CO2 levels, and we can reason about these things at those scales if we choose to.

other than limiting exhaust, or is that it?

Gee, when you say it like that, it makes extinction-level events sound not so bad! It is That Bad, so that would be the most direct answer.

The important thing to note is that even though some electricity is generated from fossil fuels, EVs eliminate the path-dependency that ties transportation to fossil fuels.

F-Droid is the best starting point. It’s an app that is basically a Google Play style app store, but all the apps are FOSS.

https://f-droid.org/

Right, this is what it means to have a sober and comprehensive look at the issues that separate the parties. Nobody who says both parties are the same ever seems capable of participating in this type of conversation, they just talk in memes.

I agree that there is an unfortunate bipartisan consensus on national security issues that is normalized bombings.

I would nevertheless say you can find significant differences on foreign policy. And, you can find huge huge huge differences on domestic policy, on things like respect for the rule of law, on the type of people appointed to courts, on economic policy.

So I think you raise a legitimate concern, but then you proceed to completely abuse it by trying to make that concern stand in for the whole of everything that matters about political decisions.

Yeah, I would love to get an inside look at what information led to the decision to publish that report.

Wow, I actually believed in this one. Is there a short text version of what the videos are explaining?

I don’t think this is actually a myth. I think there’s an extreme version of the statement, but it nevertheless is true that there are specialized taste buds and that they aggregate on sections on the tongue.

And I think there’s a whole rabbit hole here, of overeager “corrections”, that are not in fact corrections but just someone engaging in bad faith with a statement that’s close enough to the actual truth. It’s actually more wrong to categorically dismiss it, then it would be to note the difference between it and the truth, which is to say while they are not strictly regions, they’re nevertheless as attested to be the NIH:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8956797/

There is undoubtedly a spatial component to our experience of gustatory stimulus qualities such as sweet, bitter, salty, sour, and umami, however its importance is currently unknown. Taste thresholds have been shown to differ at different locations within the oral cavity where gustatory receptors are found. However, the relationship between the stimulation of particular taste receptors and the subjective spatially-localized experience of taste qualities is uncertain. Although the existence of the so-called ‘tongue map’ has long been discredited, the psychophysical evidence clearly demonstrates significant (albeit small) differences in taste sensitivity across the tongue, soft palate, and pharynx (all sites where taste buds have been documented).

In my opinion, the more interesting phenomenon is understanding how these facts, and the temptation to correct, challenges our ability to sustain nuance and to carefully differentiate between degrees of truth, instead of just making blanket denials.