Lava monster

There’s no world where a blonde white Muslim setting a Ramadan timer gets a plane to make an emergency landing.

While I’m sure I’m subject to this in ways I’m not conscious of, on its face this is pants-on-head stupid to me, but also I’m not competitive to the point where it has probably hurt my life not trying to “get ahead.”

This would make the 2015 Syrian refugee crisis look like a neighbor coming over to ask for some sugar.

Yeah that seems to be true for the largest models as they become more popular. Early on training dominated AI energy use but now LLMs have been shoved into so many things that ongoing use is the problem, especially since most of those uses are varying degrees of stupid.

Just to chime in, the manufacture of a new automobile uses almost as much energy as the car can expect to use over its entire lifetime by burning gasoline, which is why buying even a dirty used car is less impactful than buying new, even if it's an efficient model.

Liberal politicians now in a flat-out race to become right-wing caricatures of liberalism and promise free stuff at absolutely zero cost to the vast majority of their voters.

Promises that this is revenue neutral are about as believable as when Republicans claim the same about their tax cuts.

I think there are structural reasons for this, in that Mayor of NYC offers way, way more opportunities to Do Stuff, whereas Congress is where good ideas go to die. Even someone who doesn't compromise their ideals isn't going to be steering that train from its tracks.

A lack of intellectual curiosity is an almost violent turnoff to me.

I genuinely think I was inoculated against this by 90’s era Star Trek, where competency, empathy, and decency were repeatedly shown to go hand in hand.

Why be a Dr. House when you could be a Dax?

To an extent, but some of them, most notably Elon Musk, seem to genuinely spend significant fractions of their time obsessing over trans people. It’s not just red meat for the proles, the oligarchs hate us too.

Yeah it’s cases like this when I’m reasonably comfortable using the term “red fascism.”

I’d say the US has lots of different internal cultures that are very much home-grown and only loosely related to their ancestral cultures from other societies, but there’s no real monolithic “US culture” that isn’t corporatized slop.

Also if not enough people are working on curing disease the cause is absolutely 0% that too many people are interested in astronomy. That’s not even on the list of contributing factors to some research fields languishing.

It’s a lot easier to be pro-war when the nearest bombs aren’t even falling in your hemisphere.

This is also how you get insane anti-West campists praising the likes of Bashar al-Assad and the Taliban for being vanguards of anti-imperialism.

People realize the West is bad but still want to keep a clean good guys/bad guys political mythology.

This still hurts workers though by making capital owners think they don’t even need labor to make money because number go up even in an economic downturn.

That’s when you get ghoul shit like “maybe a climate cull wouldn’t be so bad” from the tech fascists.

It’s not even that anymore I think, with stocks like Tesla being pretty clear cases of rich people gambling on their ability to take other rich people’s money by goading them into buying overvalued stock.

The only hope is a Congress powered by a level of spite for the enemy that would embarrass Radical Republicans circa 1868.

Headline about a proposal for Charlie Kirk commemorative silver dollars.

If this happened lots of them would absolutely end up with the neck of Kirk’s bust vandalized.

Yeah the vast majority of cults don’t survive their leaders. Why this one? At the very least something went down that kept at least a core following very energized.

I used to be friends with a super nice progressive guy named Ben Shapiro. I still feel bad for him, he did nothing wrong.

It means the pay sucks.

Greater Idaho except only people who live within 20 miles of I5 can vote.

I remember there was rampant speculation when it happened that it was the Second Intifada spreading out of Israel, but by September 13th or so basically everyone had moved on from that. Some people are just 25 years behind the curve of understanding world events, apparently.

A lot of the US right definitely sees things this way and wishes for an alliance with Russia.

I had a couple passively evict me and my friends by constantly neglecting repairs and then proposing a huge rent increase. When we responded with giving notice we were moving out, they tried to negotiate a lesser rent increase but we held firm. The house went on the market almost immediately after.

I’ve rented multiple of the latter type, and these retiree mom and pop landlords are often completely terrible. They are inexperienced and often unprofessional, and then when the market gets hot (lucrative) they’re liable to sell the home out from under you or remodel and massively increase rent.

Also a large of the Panera drink was 390 mg, and that was the size implicated in at least one of the deaths.

Considering he was a Baptist minister I am pretty sure I would have disagreed with him pretty strongly on LGBT issues, but he didn’t advocate on them either so no sleep lost.

Polls after the Kent State massacre also showed solid majorities agreeing that the National Guard acted appropriately.

As hideous as the American electorate is now it used to be even worse, since now “kill protesters and bomb the brown foreigners” is only advocated by a large minority.