Now that tัump has formally aligned America as subservient to his mater putin there is only one option left for Ukraine.
— denbelblack.bsky.social (@denbelblack.bsky.social) February 18, 2025 at 10:17 PM
Ukraine probably should’ve restarted their nuclear weapons program in 2014, after the first Russian invasion.
Boomers and near-Boomers are very, very worried that the younger generations might do anything at all that endangers their house prices or might cause them to pay slightly more taxes for the benefit of anyone else.
This keeps them up nights and makes them extremely defensive when anyone even barely implies that times are hard, or that younger generations have it tougher in any way than they did. Boomers want to believe that jobs are plentiful, that you can just walk into a place in the morning, shake someone’s hand and have a good, high-paying job by that afternoon.
That world, though, is long vanished — and in their hearts they know that they hoarded all the benefits and boons of a a better world for themselves while frantically pulling up the ladder behind them.
And that makes them deeply despise those scrabbling below them for the scraps they deign to toss down.
The Man Madison Warned Us Against.
Why Democrats Wonโt Throw a Real Punch. Because they are weak losers.
This New Airbus Jet Is Bad News for Boeing.
How Dirty Money From Fentanyl Sales Is Flowing Through China.
Alice Hamilton Waged a One-Woman Campaign to Get the Lead Out of Everything.
Why the Number Line Freaks Me Out.
Resilient algae darken glacier surface and may speed up Greenland ice melt, study finds.
Japan, South Korea, and Poland need nuclear weapons immediately. Alas I agree. Germany too, as scary as that is.
Trumpโs true enemy isnโt China or Russia but liberal democracy.
How DOGE Could Spark a Financial Crash.
Indeed. I now put the chances of a Great Recession-like event in the next two years at 90%, which is the highest I ever go for any systemic event.
This is directly due to the immense destruction being wrought by President Musk and his lapdog Trump, to be completely clear.
I read this but have no real opinion on it because I do not listen to nor care about albums. But I did read it all because I love music.
This bit made me laugh:
Britney Spearsโ 1998 debut album, โฆ Baby One More Time, is a journey through the mind of a heartbroken teenage girl as imagined by a small team of male songwriters and producers, hailing largely from Sweden
That’s the whole problem, too, with Lorde’s albums after her first one. Stupid-ass Jack Antonoff and company took over songwriting and she lost her authorial voice. Lorde went from sounding like a tetchy, bratty but intelligent young woman to what an unimaginative and unexceptional 36-year-old man’s idealized version of what such a person would sound like.
And that worked about as well as you’d expect.
I have seen hell…it was a job interview.
Another case of a company just wanting free work. I’ve seen more of this in the past few years. If this happens to me, I am going to definitely produce something that will blow up production if they use it.
And then I shall laugh and laugh.
If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown.
On David Lynch’s Revenge of the Jedi.
The Sony FX-300 Jackal: A Holy Grail technological marvel of the late 70s.
Why canโt we remember our lives as babies or toddlers?
Trump administration fires thousands for โperformanceโ without evidence, in messy rush.
Terror on repeat. A rare look at the devastation caused by AR-15 shootings. Worth reading again.
I’m doing a lot of eugenics lately since I work out often. I plan to do some more eugenics tomorrow (today is rest day).
Also, Covid has not done a thing to me. Absent another pandemic, I’ll never mask again.
Any peace “deal” regarding Ukraine would just be there to allow Putin and Russia to rebuild military strength and take the rest of the country in 2-3 years.
Of course. Anyone who thinks anything else is a full-on idiot.
what the fuck does this mean https://t.co/2eTGgdwokX
— Misha, Photographer, Eligible Bachelor (@drethelin) February 18, 2025
Sometimes I wonder if people cannot read or remember things they lived through. Or it’s just some sort of weird trolling or clownin’.
NATO invoked Article 5 after the 9/11 attacks — the only time it’s ever done so. Many NATO nations supported the US afterward as a result of that article’s invocation. That’s what it fucking means, damn.
It has been really sad to watch the mighty United States develop mental illness and commit suicide over the last 24 years.
Weโre consumed by irrational hate and poisoned by nonstop disinformation. No one can think clearly about anything.
This will not get better. These are our death throes.
— Kevin Gaughen ๐บ๐ธ (@gaughen.bsky.social) February 16, 2025 at 11:51 AM
Might be right, might be wrong — but we have heard this before. Read documents and commentary from the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was chaos. There were riots, the Weather Underground bombed the US Capitol building and people believed society was about to dissolve into anarchy and mass death.
But it didn’t. And that’s mostly forgotten now, even in some cases by people who lived through it.
My personal guess is that we experience a pretty bad WWIII against China, Russia and North Korea, the US pulls together and we and Europe emerge stronger with China diminished and reclusive once again.
But Trump is doing the US much damage that will not be easy to repair. I agree that it is not looking good.
An LLM or AI with no intentionality is irrelevant, and without embodiment intentionality is impossible. The AI debate’s terms are ill-defined, but even those AIs who ape or even best human achievements do not pass the test as they possess no impetus, no internal drive, and merely operate with a mere shadow of intention borrowed from the whiff of humanity that permeates the silicon. There, these nascent pseudo-consciousnesses subsist on the fumes of minds beyond measure risen from only mud.
We might ourselves be ChatGPT most of the time. However, ChatGPT is a person engaged with and embodied in the world none of the time. And that makes all the difference.
I broke every browser on my system tonight but also found a load of good new music.
Yeehaw.
This is good advice, and my response is also going to sound terribly arrogant. But I also terribly do not care: I am only interested in deep friendships with people who can keep up with me intellectually and unfortunately that’s a really small slice of the population. And it is very difficult to find this cut of people I could be friends with, especially as even the “very smart” usually aren’t all that bright in reality.
I don’t need my friends to know the disparate things I’m aware of or be involved in all the weirdo crap I like. Frankly, I don’t think anyone can know all of what I do because you have to read dozens of books a week for a couple dozen years to do that. And not many can or probably should undertake such a project. And, just so there’s no misunderstanding, I do not need these friends to agree with me.
But I do need people who don’t have brain stall-outs out when I talk about Noether’s Theorem or describe the philosophical milieu of early 20th Century Germany or whatever crap I’m going on some too-lengthy spiel about.
These things both will not be interesting to most people and their brains can’t hold them enough to have any sort of conversation, either.
I tried to be a polymath. It worked a bit, but it can also be lonely. That said, I am what I am, for better or worse. I’m happy, too. But there are maybe a few score thousand people like me around the world and they are very hard to find in all the din and distraction.