I know it won’t, but I hope this makes the conservatives so completely snakebit that it takes another 60 years before you can even talk seriously about them without getting laughed at. I hope their defeat is so complete that Thatcher’s coffin inexplicably belches black smoke for a month, and BoJo, Sunak and Co. end up having to immigrate to the US just to keep from being clowned on everywhere they go in daily life.
This is hella cool, but I do want to say that it seems like there’s been a flood of news articles talking about how we’re sooooooo close to cracking plastic recycling and microplastics ever since the UN had that big push to try and regulate global plastic production. Seems like the industry is on a PR drive similar to the one for big carbon and oil; “no, you don’t need regulations, that’s ignorant, you’re being ignorant, a tech solution is just around the corner, we swear” etc. That’s primed me to view all “plastic solution” articles with more suspicion.
Been there. Senior dev told me not to write comments, but write self-documenting code instead.
Ehhhhh… On one hand, I think that most novel diseases will probably play out like COVID has. It’s hard, but all they have to do is be fucking competent and message people consistently enough that it’s hard(er) for grifters to wiggle in. On the other, the worst case scenario is the accidental (or otherwise) release of something that’s already adapted to us that we’ve stopped being immunized for/ infected by. There’s still two countries, IIRC, that publicly admit to having smallpox samples, and that’s the US and Russia (because of course it is). What’s more is that the gene sequence is publicly available, and synthesizing the smallpox DNA sequence from scratch is something that’s well within the scope of a state level actors with a decent life sciences program. If, for whatever reason, smallpox got out, we are NOT ready for it. The US DOES have a stockpile of smallpox vaccines and some domestic production capacity for them, but that stuff is hard (slow) to ramp up. Smallpox is both highly transmissible and highly virulent (virulence is how sick it makes you), and the number of people who have immunity against it these days is probably the lowest it’s been in recorded history. A lot of people will just flat out die in the interim.
A really good point I heard is: this was likely a state actor attack, so how many others just like this are out there, undiscovered?
I’ve met this bird. It only prioritizes issues as urgent; when interacted with, it’ll say “yes, this is part of MVP”
I identify as a time radical. We should switch the entire world onto GMT; +/- not a goddamn thing. Is it perfect? I think so, but all those people who might be confused will probably find it a lot less confusing than trying to make sense of the difference between timezones.
Huh, it looks just like that one chart that shows wages and productivity divorcing in the US around 1971. I’d be interested to know what happened in 2007-ish that created this lasting change.
Lmao at Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter being similar toxicity. Lmfao at YouTube somehow looking less toxic than those three. And also a strong “holy shit” for Gab, Telegram and Voat blowing Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook out of the water.
This is just the very tip of the iceberg. I fully expect truth to drown under an absolute tsunami of ai-generated bullshit this election
Fiscal responsibility would have been preventing climate change instead of paying 10(+)x the cost mitigating it on top of still paying to slow it.
Fiscal responsibility would have been not bail out and continuously subsidize free market failures.
Fiscal responsibility would have been to cut defense spending ever. Or maybe just don’t invade Iraq the second time for no goddamn reason.
Fiscal responsibility would have been building a robust public transit and freight rail infrastructure instead of continuously building and rebuilding roads that destroy themselves faster and faster under more and heavier vehicles.
Fiscal responsibility would be not spending more on means testing than it costs to just give people help who ask for it.
This next one’s going to be real hard for people who aren’t math geniuses like me, but fiscal responsibility would also mean having enough taxes to cover your spending.
I hate this. A trillion dollars is a completely stupid amount of money. All of World War II cost four trillion dollars in 2015 dollars, and we’re somehow blowing through that in a little over a year. For that price, the USA should be a fucking incredible place to live, a shining beacon of trains running on time, high quality of life (and I’m not just talking cheap TVs and big trucks), and nobody slipping through the social welfare cracks. Instead, we’ve got a weird police state that’s not only hell-bent on destroying itself but strictly doing so in a fashion that only benefits the very wealthy. It’s difficult to imagine just how we’ve managed to fuck this up this badly, but this is the fruit of decades of consistent policy choices by our leadership. As such, if we do manage to undo it without balkanizing or starting a war, it’s going to likely also be the result of decades of policy choices. I don’t see those choices happening any time soon, least of all under a republican administration.
Hi, American here. All I want is decent bike lanes and affordable rent, but we can’t have that because guys like this just cannot mind their own goddamn business. I’m going to dig a hole and scream into it.
It’s not even like the kind of phenomenally bad that you have to try, it’s just the most completely mediocre fried chicken you can imagine. Last couple times I tried it (in laws always order it when we visit for some reason), it’s been soggy with grease, not even crispy, and all the oil stops you from really tasting anything. You might as well just slop some bread crumbs into some vegetable oil if you really want the KFC experience.
Don’t make me tap the sign:
Authoritarians owe their allegiances first to hegemony, and second to murder.
That’s how Israeli state officials can vibe with actual fucking Nazis and still turn around and say that you’re a Nazi if you want them to stop murdering non-combatants in Palestine. If they see it as helping to enforce hegemony, to create civilization out of the barrel of a gun, they can (temporarily) set aside the murder they plan to do to each other.
I tried to convince my small company to put an account on Mastodon instead of X. Our social media person opened a Mastodon account, but decided it wouldn’t be run until Mastodon was a little more, well, relevant.
Okay, so, as others have expressed in this thread, I don’t completely trust Sabine as a science communicator. Can someone who knows what they’re talking about about shed some light on this paper and/or Sabine’s video?
I can’t believe it’s not cum
The US government saving big money on fleet expenses by all travelling in the same clown car.