uriel238

@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Practical Magic⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The thing is, this isn’t a curse.

  A curse is what happened to Bill O’Reilly, to Tucker Carlson, to Glen Beck. Either there’s a scandal reckoning, or the guy believes his own rhetoric a little too much and says something kooky or too far out the Overton window, or draws the stupidest chalkboard diagram and someone in FOX notices his average viewership is 72 years old, and retires his show.

  They take a serious demotion in popularity and a pay cut and all but retire. That’s how witch’s curses work when they do.

  However Kirk did suffer one of Charles Dickens’ many curses. ( …Charlie Dickens – Charlie Kirk – coincidence?) In A Christmas Carol the chapter on the visitation of the Ghost of Christmases Yet To Come. Wealthy people who have not empathy with nor sympathy for the rest of us folk eventually die and then are not grieved when they’re gone (except by those who have to gain by presenting a sad face). Kirk wasn’t one of the moguls, but he spread their rhetoric and was one of their ruthless minions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Too soon?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Not soon enough.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Time to bash Americans again⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Narrator: The problem wasn’t the kids it was the US.

  Clarification: venues getting shot up is a specifically elevated problem in the US (exacerbated by availability of guns, but that’s not really the root of the problem). The thing is, the root of the problem (right-wing-leaning low-information constituents – lumpenproletariat in left-wing speak – suffering from precarity sometimes turn to violence) is being visited on European nations where two-party systems have taken root, and neoliberalism has set in. It’s the old King Log vs. King Heron problem. We’re seeing violence and counterviolence in the EU, just with less frequency and fewer guns, but it will catch up to them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's been downhill since 2020⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Everything I can is scant little. But some people object to my removing my footprint entirely. While I separate out my recycling from my landfill, perhaps you can explain how I can better encourage multinational corporations to consider sustainability as something other than a marketing tool.

  Yes, we have bacteriaphages which serve as treatment for XTR Tuberculosis, but things like this do scant little for people who are infected as autocratic interests work to dismantle the global disease control state. Yes, young people are better learning left-wing politics as our education systems in the US are being systematically dismantled around such efforts.

  I am sure you can find small ways things are improving. After all, we are closer to manned Mars expeditions even if they’re decades away. We are closer to fusion power even if it’s still approximately the same thirty years away it was in the early 1990s. There will be a point we can stuff hydrogen into a power plant and get a net energy output by fusing it into hydrogen, but that is a long way away, longer than our time left if our international community doesn’t take immediate action.

  But yes, I’m bitter. In the 1980s when I was a student and young worker I was expected to give 110% (despite that is oxymoronic, it was the rhetoric of the time) and since then I learned that our leaders, our representatives, our officials don’t even bother to act like adults while holding office and allegedly conducting their duties.

  We are watching the decline and fall of civilization. USSR went, now the US, and the EU and China stages are already destabilizing, and that’s not merely from climate change, but our refusal to distribute political power.

  So I can’t be entirely sure, my friend, but it appears from over here, from my (granted, cynical) eye that you are missing the forest for the trees.

  The climate crisis is only the first of great filters humankind is imminently careening towards and has yet to show effort towards navigating. We are rapidly turning into the example for future intelligent species of what not to do… assuming they can discover that example from the geological layers, determine how we killed ourselves and then actively choose a reasonable response where we failed to do so.

  But I don’t say this as a doomeristic / beatnik approach. I’m saying this as a sober assessment. We’re not going to get to enjoy the benefits of 2020’s era progress for very long, assuming we can hold it as autocrats wreck all we’ve wrought for their own personal gain, and the world literally burns.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's been downhill since 2020⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  We’re running out of water for agriculture. The zoomers may be middle aged, and the alphas, adults, when the climate crisis fully catches up with us. And if the human species is lucky, it’ll happen first in the US or Russia or one of the old-guard powers, and the new order can use their renewable energy surplus to create new desalinization technology.

  But current estimates (by those few climatologists willing to say other than it’s going to get very bad. ) estimate the upper limit of the sustainability projections are a global population of about a billion people, if the international community chose to act today on all fronts. (Obviously that’s not happening in the US, or in autocratic regimes, who imagine – falsely – they can create a self-sustaining colony on Mars – we’re a century or more from that).

  That is a best case scenario unless we discover some miracle technology.

  All other scenarios get worse than that, from a population in the hundreds of millions to human extinction. There is a ray of hope near the bottom, since Homo Erectus had at least one period of tens of thousands of years with a population under 10K before they would populate the world again, until they were out-competed by other hominids (e.g. us. Homo Sapiens). So we might have a tiny society that survives for an eon, but don’t expect any culture (from wet burritos to Beethoven’s Fifth to the 道德經) to survive. And a fuckton of science will have to be rediscovered.

  So seriously bad shit for all of Human society is, at this point, for all intents and purposes, inevitable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The internet kind of sucks right now⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Let them scrape. AI as it currently is, is still autocomplete with extra steps, and still prone to hallucination. As it is it will be usable to make cheap, passable content, but not hit those moments of inspiration of human art (yet – there are real AI groups looking to make AGI)

  It is a bubble which will pop and AI will be seen as a tool (a resource-costly tool) that requires its own set of experts independent from the experts that use ACAD or write editorial copy or do investigative work. Id est, it’s not the replacement of employees that boards of directors want it to be.

  And AGI is centuries from being efficient enough that you can make Rosie the Robot who cleans your house and makes a good upside-down pineapple cake.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Plenty of women – teenage parochial schoolgirls, specifically, get impregnated as virgins when the definition of virgin is not having coital sex or having an intact vaginal corona (hymen). When boys and girls who love each other very much make out and get overly involved, yet their pregnancy concerns (and guilt) keep them from engaging in actual coitus, even a small amount of jizz on her vulva might make their way through the vaginal canal and cause conception.

  Plenty of medical doctors have encountered unexpected pregnancy of women who’ve never had sex and who had intact vaginal coronas.

  However at the beginning of the common era, virgin was assumed of any unmarried woman unless known otherwise, and was a shift of property value of the woman to the father or husband. Mary who was unmarried, would be a virgin by default as a young woman. Though her pregnancy is evidence that she isn’t a virgin.

  Too be fair, in Hellenic culture Zeus raped me was a common excuse when a young woman fooled around without license, and ended up in a family way, and before the era of the Olympian, Poseidon was the one going around having his way with young women. In fact, the classical myths teem with children sired by gods. This isn’t new.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨*your order is delivered*⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  💯

  Full Goblin Mode.

  In my defense, either I dress, or I turn out all the lights at night so no-one has to see my undressed form, except as a shadow.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨hygiene⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In the summer here (July and August during heatwaves) my office goes between 80°F - 90° so no, I don’t wear a thing, hence the towels.

  On my regular furniture, if I’m wandering around unclothed and need to sit down, I’ll drape something, often my briefs, before planting my butt.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨hygiene⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Personally I call shenanigans having executive and standard office chairs made of leather, pleather and nylon mesh.

  None of these are comfortable on the bare butt, and even will get sticky once you start sweating against them, so I’ve _always had to drape towels between me and the chair.

  Also do not get leather / pleather if you have cats.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨hygiene⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If you can’t afford one, or rent, or wander around, travel bidets are about $20-$30 and are a water bottle with a hook-shaped wand-spout and an air valve.

  My proctologist has a personal vendetta against wiping, and I messed up my piles from ages of wiping too hard. Bidet and dab to dry.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Great Advertise⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I had art I personally crafted accused of being slop (gen-AI free!). Dunno if it’s a compliment or a criticism.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"ok, imagine a gun."⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Shotgun is an America thing, coming from the stagecoach era. The shotgun in question has a shortened barrel for reduced storage footprint.

  The BMW R12 has a sidecar mounted with an MG 42 light machine gun. But no-one calls sidecar gunner

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Florida ounces⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You can’t convert them. Fluid ounces are volume. Regular ounces are weight (which isn’t quite the same as mass, though they’re used interchangeably on earth).

  1 fl oz = 1 oz when the substance is water (at slightly above freezing). Any other substance would involve a specific mass factor.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tucson City Council votes 7-0, unanimously to kill AI Data Center⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Bezos has tens of billions, if not hundreds. He could support development of heat-resistant microchips, which would have countless applications.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meet the AI vegans: They are choosing to abstain from using artificial intelligence for environmental, ethical and personal reasons. Maybe they have a point⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve never used AI, even when wanting to give it a try. There was either a queue or a fee, or must click-wrap agree to terms and conditions for free two months and I wasn’t going to do those.

  I never did an NFT either.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ICE agents pointed guns at a US citizen when she walked out on to her yard to ask why they were arresting her (legal immigrant) partner.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I am failing to find either a list of ICE abduction / detention victims or a list of ICE officer-involved homicide.

  In 2015 police officer-involved homicide (that’s a euphemism for when a law-enforcement officer kills someone) averaged four victims a day, and those are the ones uncovered by activist groups who tracked incidents through news and obituaries.

  So I cannot imagine a quota of 3000 abductions a day is going to proceed cleanly. Technically, they’re succeeding at about 1100 abductions a day on average. We’ve seen their violence discipline and deescalation skills are wanting.

  The only news I can find about ICE killing someone is from the Biden era, and only a few are reported.

  So if anyone knows how often ICE pulls the trigger and kills (or seriously hospitalizes) members of the public, and can find me sources, please let me know. We should be tracking them, and we should be saying their names.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Imagine not being able to shower, because AI slop generator machines need that water!⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  How strong is Fair Maps Texas? Assuming it’s sincere in its effort to redistrict Texas fairly, Maybe they need more brickthrowers saboteurs sign wavers and clerical volunteers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Peter Thiel’s bestie going mask off⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh he’s retired now. He worked on CloudSat (and just retired it; it served a long time to scan storms and hurricanes even after it started malfunctioning). He also worked on OCO (Orbital Carbon Observatory), and its successor, but the faring on the rocket failed to disconnect both times and it fell into the South Atlantic. Launch vehicles don’t come with a warranty, I learned.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Fixed but still funny.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Imagine not being able to shower, because AI slop generator machines need that water!⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  During the 1986-1992 California drought, we were informed in the San Francisco Bay Area region that water service prices were going to go up unless we conserved strictly.

  They said this to a bunch of California hippies, on account that we were in California.

  So we way got on board. We stopped flushing. Any water that was rendered non-potable we’d repurpose for watering plants or filter it for second use. Japanese naval baths (weird tiny bowl seats and a sponge, used in the Imperial Navy, WWII) got popular so people were keeping clean via a tenth of normal water usage.

  We conserved too much according to the water department and they raised prices anyway.

  This sparked some investigations (by journalists, since investigative journalism was still a thing then) and found that agriculture got water for much cheaper, and was still using it once before flushing it (now laced with pesticides) out into the sea. Needless to say, we conservationist hippies were livid.

  It’s still a problem, as the utility companies routinely lobby our congress and governor (and Newsom may know how to be a California liberal, but he’s still a Dianne-Feinstein-style ( / Nancy-Pelosi style) money-grubbing neoliberal. He just has game, especially when opposed to far right idiots. The setup in Monster’s Inc (power crisis in a city where scream is the principal power source) was inspired by the Enron fraud affair leading to rolling blackouts and Texas siphoning off California’s general fund. And our governments from Schwarzenegger (who I will never forgive) to Newsom are in the pocket of PG&E. (I’m on SMUD now and my bill is conspicuously less.)

  Also, according to Climate Town, the Sauds own a lot of California farmland, where they grow alfalfa to import to the mid-east to feed their cows. Alfalfa crops are one of the most water hungry, and is one of the big ways beef is driving the climate crisis (and towards a massive food shortage and global famine!) and the water tables, to which they have access and first-tap rights, gets lower every year. 🕙

  So I suspect that the Texas AI centers are getting water at a cheaper rate than private homes. Maybe it’s something to get active about.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Curiously, in our society, killing is less of a taboo than sex, especially in fiction.

  Since the aughts, I feel it is a disservice we do to censor out the horror of warfare in games like Call of Duty or Medal of Honor. I haven’t seen what they did with Six Days In Fallujah (by a vet of the Iraq War who experienced Fallujah and wanted to share his experience) but we’d have more respect for the gravity of war if the tragedy and immediacy of combat was properly expressed. In the Arma series, it’s very easy to die, but it uses a similar engine used for training purposes.

  It’s our Christian values (more specifically, our Paulinian values – he thought Christians should not have sex if they can abstain entirely¹ – which has turned into taboos against sex without strict licenses, that has made our society super-prudish.

  1. Paul actually also prohibited having additional children, the end being neigh and all. Later biblical interpreters would have to deal with the world’s failure to end, and Christ’s failure to return in their lifetimes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  So let’s say you’re in the market for a credit card. You can choose from:

  iChar-Jit: We are ethical. We don’t sell to Nazis. You (and your kids) will be safe from buying questionable products or from questionable sources.

  MoneySLAM Our card is usable by anyone, for anything, anywhere. Bangladesh; In orbit around Jupiter; Russia; Sex; Drugs; Bombs.¹

  1. Some products may be dangerous or unethically sourced; Please spend safely and exercise good judgement.

  Assuming all other factors (interest rate, online accessibility, confused foreign sales reps etc.) are more or less equal, which card will you get?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft confirms it made $27 billion after laying off 9,000 people, and its CEO physically cannot stop talking about AI⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Seriously, I think most rich people are mentally ill and are compelled to keep accumulating and hoarding until they own everything.

  Carnegie became critically aware that J. P. Morgan would totally kill him to take his assets. Carnegie even wondered of such a monster lurked in his own heart. ( Narrator: Yes. Yes, it did. )

  We don’t know the point at which people get greedy and lose empathy with their subservient co-workers, but even small business owners are stereotypically mean employers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A fair punishment for the obscene hoarding of wealth⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  If we assume Hell isn’t real and dead people don’t exist, it means we’ll have to create our own justice.

  But since billionaires are pretty consistent tyrants (exceptions exist, but they’re rare) we should just have an intervention after the tenth million.

  Then the additonal money in circulation can be used to post-scarcity up our society so that everyone gets a burger and a milkshake whenever they want one.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Peter Thiel’s bestie going mask off⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  My dad is a literal rocket scientist with an illustrious career at NASA navigating satellites and space probes. University of Missouri, but CalTech / MIT material math wizard.

  He’s full MAGA now. The scary part is now he regurgitates FOX News sound bites he’d disagree with twenty years ago.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Peter Thiel’s bestie going mask off⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Slept his way though college?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Peter Thiel’s bestie going mask off⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  A century ago fuck! About a century and a quarter ago this was the sentiment regarding new-money industrialists by old money landlords.

  Remove the racist layer and it’s class conflict all the way down.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dirty slut for water⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I remember a point right after gay was a generic derisive (e.g. That’s so gay! = That sucks! ) for a short while I’m gay for meant I like this so much I’d be willing to do sexual favors to get it (e.g. I’m gay for mineral water right now )

  Similarly when we talk about architecture porn we mean stuff that would excite people really into architecture. In some places, we still see it. ( _Gun porn, food porn, grammar porn, etc.)

  It’d be awesome if we generalized sluttiness the same way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This was actually posted by the Owasso Police Department⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Fine, adding a useful link to my comment above.