Jesus Christ

Idk if oil being negative was a good thing per se. It was a signal that the economy was suddenly grinding to a halt and energy demand was cratering.

Because most people do not follow the news very closely. They learn enough to form an opinion, often against their will, and then try their hardest to pay attention to things that don’t torpedo their mental health.

I don’t have a source to point at but I think the first trump admin, followed by covid, broke people. There is no good news and no clear action to take to make the bad news stop. So people tune out. Some news slips through with their FYP or whatever but even then what they get is predigested and filtered so that the emotion hits hard and goes away fast. The most popular form of media is designed not to inform, so people are not informed.

Have a kid at 25 -> kid has kid at 25

I do not see the problem. You could bump both of those down to 20 and she’d have a 10y/o grandkid. Multiple grandkids even.

E: Aside from all that, teen pregnancy happens, and while it’s not ideal it also doesn’t make the mother some kind of untouchable pariah.

Tbh many people don’t use PCs at all, and the advent of cheap generative ai for image manipulation makes this kind of creative task more accessible to those people. I hate it. I would like to put the touch screen genie back in the bottle. But it is too late.

Clearly seen where exactly?

“We thought having the ai voiced by ai would be cute” would have been acceptable, had they paid a voice actor to train the model. It doesn’t say in the article but I’m assuming they used some off-the-shelf model, which is tantamount to theft unless the company selling it in turn paid for use of everything in their corpus.

The “take that, liberal snowflakes” framing is beyond crazy.

People see a paper cup and dont think about how they make it waterproof

The CEO of Ford drives a Xaomi. He could have any car he wanted, and he chooses a Chinese car. It’s ostensibly for market research but he’s said he really doesn’t want to give it up. So yeah they’re cheap, and also I think China might just genuinely make better cars at this point. While China has been investing into manufacturing and consumer tech the big three have been dragging their heels and kicking and screaming because they see engineers as cost centers and that is biting them in the ass as well.

Company’s that own a patent can release spores causing cross contamination, then sue a farmer at harvest for their crop containing copyrighted genes.

No they cannot. This little bit of common knowledge is bullshit on several levels.

1. nitpicky, but plants reproduce by pollen and seeds, not by spores. okay, since i’m being nitpicky potatoes and sugarcane don’t reproduce with seeds. potatoes are tubers and sugarcane uses cuttings. some plants reproduce with rhizomes but we usually don’t eat those. point is spores are for mushrooms and ferns and whatnot.
2. the big seed producers pledge not to sue for trace contamination
3. monsanto was preemptively sued by farmers in 2013 because the farmers were afraid of the windblown lawsuits and wanted to get monsanto’s patents on genetics struck down. court said no, because Monsanto could not be sued over a threat that did not exist. That is, Monsanto had never actually sued anyone for windblown genetics. But given the above point the court also said monsanto is legally not allowed to sue for windblown genetics. because they promised not to.
4. copyright and patent law are two different things. seeds and their genetics are covered under patents. that’s either better, worse, or sideways depending on your perspective but it is different.

big ag is evil and they fuck farmers over constantly but you don’t have to bullshit to make them look bad

no wait this page is still usable on ADSL, you need MOAR CDNS. MOAR HIGH RES IMAGES. MOAR VIDEOS! MOAR TRACKING PIXELS AND SCRIPTS MOAR MOAR MOAR

i resent living under a government run by such unserious people. i mean trump himself is circling the drain but the fact that anyone in that room went along with it is just disappointing more than anything. these people respect nothing, least of all themselves.

it would be very funny for Minnesota to stop extraditing to Texas. Zero shot but it would be funny.

Canada does a lot of things better than we do, but all the things, really? They, too, have serious problems in their healthcare and educational systems. They’ve got severe staffing shortages in hospitals and long wait times, and their IEA scores are dropping across multiple subjects relative to international standards. Most younger working class Canadians alive today do not expect to buy a home maybe ever.

I don’t mean this as a tu quoque, we have huge problems here too and like I said Canada does a lot of things better than we do, but this kind of starry-eyed adoration can only end in disillusion.

PS don’t look up when the last documented “starlight tour” was

I am in my mid thirties. Someday age will catch up to me on this front, but it doesn’t seem to have noticed me yet. I can still out drink most 25 year olds (which does not make me cool). Some of us are just Built Different, and by that I mean that through a combination of genetics, tolerance, and being, ahem, “big boned,” my body is fantastic at absorbing, buffering, and metabolizing ethanol. A blessing and a curse in equal parts. Other people will stop at two drinks because their body tells them to and they have the willpower to listen to that signal. My body never sends the signal. Unless I’m in a situation where I have to drive home, my internal “probably shouldn’t do that” doesn’t overcome the disinhibition. So on a Friday night at home with nothing to do I can easily knock back enough to still be drunk the next day and still not get hung over. Sounds awesome, except that the ability to process alcohol efficiently doesn’t protect me from alcohol being a carcinogen or neurotoxic.

The simple antidote to all this, of course, is to not have the first drink. Which pains me, because alcohol rules.

I’m not holding my breath but I’m still hoping for a groundswell of electoral opposition that puts someone competent in power so he has to impotently watch P2025 crumble and get reversed. Also, y’know, a fair trial for his crimes and getting sued into oblivion by all the people he’s stolen from. If he just has a massive stroke they’ll keep him in power as long as he’s technically alive. Its like 40k but way dumber

several reasons, but the dumbest is probably because evangelicals believe the existence of Israel is a prerequisite for the end times.

if they ban jenkem I’ll have to find a real hobby

…i should probably make it clear that I’m anti-prohibition, I’m just being silly here

Infrastructure is important, and walking back from these gigabit targets is awful. There is no replacement for fiber. We all deserve to have access to fast internet.

But to yell at a cloud for a moment, if we’re being honest most people should not need gigabit. I know everyone is a gamer now, but let’s forget about bulk downloads. For normal browsing most people should not need much more than about 12mbps. 12 mbps is fast enough to have two 1080p h265 streams running concurrently. And yet, when you try to use the modern web at that speed, it’s a terrible experience because of all the adtech bullshit that gets crammed into every page. When I measured this Ars article it was 6.53MB. That is, to borrow a yardstick from a blogpost I reread recently, long enough to fit 3 or 4 of the great Russian epics inside. It is bigger than the shareware version of DOOM, big enough to fit the entire python standard package library documentation. For one article.

Don’t let this cheapen the FCC being chickenshit and captured by specific perverse corporate interests, but publishers have sold us a bridge when it comes to the modern web. Web3 was supposed to fix all this with micropayments. I’d gladly pay whatever my paltry share of Ars’ CPM they expected to get out of my pageview, wouldn’t you? But cryptobros turned it into a get-rich-quick slopfest and then it died.

edit: having meandered over to my computer because I just cannot sleep, I decided to measure the page as I access it, with ublock, noscript, and umatrix turned on. That article now weighs just over 724kB. Way better. Reader mode loses the images and gets the article down to 2.49kB. Meaning the actual content is roughly 0.04% of the delivered size of the original page. The stylesheet alone is many times the size of the content. I know I’m really indulging my old man energy but web pages do not need to be this large. I know cache exists, and that’s fine, but it’s still a bit ridiculous. Some people in this world do still use dialup and/or pay per MB. Your 6.5MB web page might cost somebody a nontrivial sum to read, relative to their means.

The irony is not lost on me that my home instance itself is not the most lightweight web app. The page I am using to edit this comment is 1.9MB. With the cache active it’s <100kB transferred per page load but still, if I weren’t a hypocrite I’d probably switch to a Piefed instance.

edit 2: added emphasis

i suppose they should have just gotten bombed and done nothing