ternnoburn

This admin bends to money. They all do, of course, but this one especially.

Maybe this whole late stage capitalism isn't the most efficient way to allocate resources after all...

Covid is no less virulent or no less serious than it was 4 years ago. Among well vaccinated populations, the seriousness of infection decreases, but among populations who cannot get the vaccine it is as dangerous as it ever was. It has not evolved into something less dangerous over time.

Source: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7...

On top of that, long covid remains a serious concern, and rates of long covid remain steady: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5...

COVID also increases autoimmune disease risk by up to 40%, which can have life altering impacts. Source: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.01.25.23285014v...

Given the author may be from a place with poor healthcare that doesn't support the disease or autoimmune diseases well (e.g. the U.S.) or may be close to someone with a weakened immune system, it's very reasonable for some people to be cautious about covid.

Nick Fuentes is celebrating the "Nazi salute" (his words) musk did on stage this week.

If you have actually neo Nazis saying you did a nazi salute, and you have leftists saying you did a Nazi salute...

I think more people are realizing that the stories of startup success in 2013 were heavy on survivorship bias, and that over the past decade people have become aware of just how predatory and unequal the VC model is.

New founders have less wool over their eyes, and increasingly run the numbers and say, "wait a second, that's the expected success rate? That's the pressure I'll have to grow grow grow? Those are the terms? Nah, I can work 40 somewhere, get paid more, and put in fewer hours."

We've stopped romanticizing killing oneself for the hustle too.

Read up on 1557 changes and title ix changes, which include language that specifically permits institutions to say, "we do not discriminate based on criteria X, y, z" when they discriminate against trans people.

It also affirmed that they felt they could supersede state law to protect caregivers (doctors, etc) who provide care against the law in their state (gender affirming care). They declined to exercise that authority and explicitly said they would not.

They also said they would consider provider discrimination only on a case by case basis (which they are not funded to do, and leaves poorer people more likely to suffer discrimination).

They added language stating "nothing in this rule imposes a requirement that covered entities provide gender affirming care".

They specifically struck the following language: "a providers belief that gender transition or other gender affirming care can never be beneficial for such individuals is not sufficient basis for a judgement that a health service is not clinically appropriate." Basically giving doctors the explicit right to say "I don't believe in gender affirming care and will not provide it".

In no universe is Musk a centrist.

It's not a direct criticism of the PG article, the OP is examining a broader cultural phenomena right now. PGs scribbles were just one example.

Anti communist or anti Stalinist? Or even anti Marxist-Leninist?

Homage is a complicated book to place because it's been interpreted so baby different ways across eras. But it's hard to imagine someone going and fighting for POUM and praising them post facto would ultimately be anti communist across all flavors of communism.

I think it's human nature under capitalism. I think before the 1800s there were loads of different societies that valued things like community and mutual support over "got mine".

This is the fundamental assertion of anarchism -- people generally like helping each other and like feeling useful. If basic needs were covered, we'd use most of our time doing things that felt meaningful, and those things would make everyone's lives better.

A party that wants to kill my and a party that wants to kill me politely are the same. Yeah, sure, I can discern one is smiling, but practically the "choice" I have is die or die (politely), which really isn't a choice at all.

Neither party is offering anything different.

The Dems are writing and sponsoring anti lgbtq laws nationwide. Biden removed anti lgbtq discrimination rules, permitting local municipalities to discriminate against trans kids. The Dems aren't just side liners here, they are active participants in the erosion of lgbtq rights.

It's worse than this, actually. Biden administration removed anti discrimination statutes that both Obama and Trump had in place around discrimination in healthcare care and education. Biden changed the rules to permit discriminatory behavior by states as long as it was not "systematic". So, of course, states and municipalities will discriminate against trans folks and then claim they were all unique cases.

Yes, you are right Biden did nothing to protect LGBTQ folks, but he did also take action to harm them.

Yep! Thanks for finding the source. I was on my phone, couldn't get the actual text.

It's worth remembering that Orwell was a socialist, a leftist, and was anti authoritarian not anti communist. (Which isn't opposed to your comment, the Soviet Union was authoritarian.)

It just gets brought up so often that because he was anti Soviet, he must be anti communist, which wasn't the case.

Are you familiar with Malcolm X's speech about the fox and the wolf?

Given the past four years have seen things like shutting down labor strikes, support foreign wars, expanding arctic drilling at record pace, increased police budgets, erosion of women's rights, erosion of lgbtq rights, and a steady increase in corporate power... I think the difference we'll see is in degree, not in direction.

I believe the patent was highlighting an additional issue and providing a pretty clear follow up question.

Not equating the two questions.

The law has a provision permitting the President to grant 90 day exceptions. Trump has indicated he'll sign one tomorrow. This isn't going around the law, it's just the law as written. We can debate whether the law was good or bad, but this is an outcome the law directly supports.

You say I'm naive, I say you've been had by jingoistic propaganda. You are more concerned about a foreign boogeyman, I'm more concerned about the one that's governing me.

The US government has shown, time and time again, what it will do with power once it uses it.

You think he changed because he was worried about either admin? I think he changed because he sees the outcome of an election as an endorsement of his beliefs by the populace.

You use these words like they are axiomatically evil.

Like, "it's a foreign project"... so is my Nintendo. Are you afraid or worried about foreign things? A lot of the world does a lot of things better than the U.S.

"It's a communist party project"... first of all, plenty of great communist projects out there, and the Chinese communist party is really only a very very narrow slice of communism so your brush is absolutely over broad. But second, so what? What do you own that didn't pass through China in some capacity?

"It's a psyop"... it's an app with funny videos on it. I think you need to set that tinfoil hat down and pause a bit. Does it have a different cultural root used to moderate it? Sure! Are they making moderation decisions I would make? No. Does that make it psyop? Of course not. Don't be absurd.

"Why would an adult not hit someone when that someone hits them?"

Some people believe that not retaliating stops cycles and systems. Some of us have principles beyond the very childlike, "well, they did it first".

If you believe state censorship is bad, you should oppose it when it is deployed, even if it's deployed against someone you think is also bad.

Like, I think using slurs is bad. I oppose using slurs, even against people I loathe. I have a principal, and I do not violate that principle even if it would hurt people I would consider my opponents.

Same here. My commitment to my principal that "state censorship is bad" far outweighs any feelings about China.

Do they? Do they actually? I'm not sure the U.S. has control sufficient to exercise meaningful jurisdiction, even if it exists on paper. Big companies have too much influence in Congress and with politicians to be meaningfully reigned in in practice.

I see this thought posted frequently. It makes no sense to me... what power could China exert here that wouldn't also be a bad power for anyone to exert? Surely, if they started exerting power on their platform in ways people didn't like, people would leave, right? And also, what's the path to pressure bytedance by the ccp?

It all just smacks of protectionism and isolationism to me.

The drones are also clones (?) of the prior queen. They are unfertilized eggs, so they contain a genetic copy of half the queen's DNA. Mating with a drone from you hive would be like mating directly with your genetic mother. It's going to result in real bad inbreeding real quickly. Especially since queens mate a single time, and live for only a few years.

Use the technology you know and move quickly in. For a game like this, personal preference is way more important than optimal language/technology choice.

Kids with dysgraphia sometimes can successfully write in cursive and cannot write in block letters. I don't know where I fall on how hard it should be taught, generally, but it's clearly very helpful to some kids.

Europe and the U.S. are miles (or kilometers, I suppose) apart of human rights policies.

Another poster pointed out Guantanamo, but our prison population is unreal compared to Europe. We're rolling back child labor laws. We're burning and banning books. We don't have universal suffrage. We're actively and enthusiastically participating in a genocide against the Palestinian people. We've got a "border zone" in which our cops have huge authority that extends 100 miles in from every border. We're letting Americans starve, sleep rough, and die from preventable disease because taking care of each other is considered "communist". The right to protest is being heavily curtailed. And we've continued to gerrymander away democracy across our nation.

No, we're nowhere close to the human rights or democratic positions of Europe. Which of course, is also not perfect, but along those two specific axes? The U.S. is far, far away.

Then again, if you can stall a nascent polluter before it becomes entrenched, maybe that's the right time to intervene. Getting people to not eat meat is hard, we've been eating meat forever. Getting people to not use LLMs? That's where most of us were up until very recently.

Per capita beef consumption is down by 35% in the US since the 70s. From 62kg/person/year to 35.

Beef produces ~100kg CO2 per kg of meat. That's a reduction of 27,000kgs of CO2 reduction, per capita.

That's not nothing. By simply reducing beef consumption by 1 kilogram a month, you can prevent more than a metric ton of CO2. If 5% of Americans cut 1 kilo of beef a month, that'd knock out 15 million tons of CO2.

Small changes can have an impact on aggregate, and just because someone else is not making those changes doesn't excuse us looking at ourselves and saying, "I could choose something else this time".

"Other bad things exist" does not mean this thing isn't bad. Or absolutely could be that all these other things are huge energy wasters AND chat gpt is an energy waster.

We have to stop thinking about problems so linearly -- it's not "solve only the worst one first", because we'll forever find reasons to not try and solve that one, and we'll throw up our hands.

Like, we're well aware animal agriculture is a huge environmental impact. But getting everyone to go vegetarian before we start thinking about any other emissions source is a recipe for inaction. We're going to have to make progress, little by little, on all of these things.