To be fair, I may have stopped getting updates anyway? I suspect what happened is typical, that some Win10 update bugged the update process and I was supposed to either roll it back or get the next one by hand and just… didn’t.
It is my intention to start looking at linux distros and have one installed by Summer 25…assuming I haven’t immolated in a wildfire or been sent to a detention center by then.
Some people started businesses. Some people turned their entire house into a Lego garden.
More likely someone scared and misinformed and has a bit of the old attitude polarization (which comes when not schooled on critical thinking.) We naked apes are smarter than the average hominid but with uncommon exception, not that much smarter.
Funny how White Christian Nationalists so readily ignore things like Whatever you do for the least of us, you do for me [Jesus as in their god and ticket holder to the backstage party] and Whatever you do to the least of us to do to me.
Funny enough, in the OT there were also calls about uplifting the beggar, the widow, the migrant and the stranger, and an example was made of two cities specifically for not doing this when they were embarrassed with riches, specifically Sodom and Gomorrah.
Not that women don’t get short shrift in the bible, but the current crap about contraception and abortion are a stretch misreading of passages, and are drawn from the same resources that say don’t have kids, the apocalypse is neigh and it’s not nice to do that to people who won’t even get to grow up.
The fifth circuit believes regional monopolies should be exploited to control consumers.
With proper competition, banning someone for suspected misuse would only chase them to competitors.
The fifth circuit is incompetent.
Tradlife Vlad makes a valid point: 19th century life wash harsher, and we have better stuff now. We shouldn’t want to go back.
I pronounced it like cayenne pepper until someone corrected me. But I learn a lot of words from reading them before hearing them. HEJeeMOHnee.
Related, Celtics (soft C) are a basketball team, Celts are a ethnic demographic and a Selt is an ancient kind of knife.
Until I was 24 or 25 I believed that women were disinterested in sex, and that sexual relationships were wholly transactional. I also thought I was hidiously undatable.
Nope. Wrong on all counts.
I assume Geebo is a data-mining and malware distribution client?
Someone please tell me that if we stop Trump, Musk shouts NO IT WASN’T SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN THIS WAY! and then spontaneously, melts, or shatters like glass, or gets swallowed up by a chasm, or eaten by hyenas.
And then every cybertruck, every tesla, every Spacex capsule and every Starlink satellite simultaneously turns into magic dust before evaporating into nothing.
The ownership class will tremble before a communist revolution! We have nothing to lose but our chains! <Bolshevik chorus swells>
Shareholders love lootboxes too.
And one party autocracy.
It depends on where evolution takes us, but yes, the mechanisms of evolution are too slow for us to count on them helping us adapt to the new paradigm.
When we went agrarian enough to stop migrating, it came with the responsibility of being able to defy our instincts for small, clean societies. Stationary agrarian societies need large numbers to operate, and this is susceptible to parasitism, e.g. corruption and demagoguery.
Then we moved on from agrarian to industrial and from that to digital. The thing is, the corruption has been there since the dark ages. But with the internet and the free-flow of information that it offers, we can detect the corruption more easily. However we’re used to socio-political systems to solve these problems without resorting to violence, and those are either ineffective or corrupt themselves.
The horror of it is that we are individuals in giant social movements, and so participate by adding our tiny amount to mechanations far bigger than ourselves. And many of us are going to get harmed or killed in the stampedes.
We might evolve to where we are able to better make rational choices rather than do what we feel is right, but more likely we’ll have to invent psychological tools to make sociological changes. We see this with Charles Schultz adding Franklin to the Peanuts gang, or Mr. Rogers soaking his feet with Officer Clemmons. SMBC has approached the idea more than once, but we haven’t yet found a breakthrough to solve critical recurring problems like over-prioritizing boys sports in education, sexual harassment and exploitation in the workplace or police brutality, all which seem to be informed by dominance hierarchy.
Still, some warblers learn to identify and group-attack cuckoos to chase them away from nesting areas. Birds in Australia teach each other to flip cane toads over to avoid their poisonous back glands. We may yet get lucky.
The Permian-Triassic extinction event was mostly cyanobacteria farts. They took over the world and methaned up the air.
Worked out for the dinosaurs, I guess.
I recently had the idea of making a shape box with rigid holes and foam shapes, so that young people might learn that aligning the correct shape with the correct hole may make it easier, but forcing it also works.
Nope. We’re all dumb the world around. We can individually be taught, but to make that work we generally need to get more people than not front loaded with what we’re trying to do (in the modern world, make societies of tens of millions, even hundreds of millions, not fall apart, say from corruption at the top).
A recent Kurzgesagt video Is Our World Broken stated the problem in very hagiographic terms. It comes down to this: Evolution takes a long time, and we’ve gone from small migratory bands to stationary agrarian clans to nuclear families in industrial societies very fast, and our brains still think feudal loyalty hierarchies are a better idea than the fixed principals applied equally as a social contract. We still think society should be small, that we should know everyone personally, and that being odd (wrong skin color, worshiping the wrong god, talking with a dialect, etc.) are signs of infectious disease which will potentially kill off the entire clan, and we should throw rocks at them and burn the bodies.
The White Christian Nationalist movement isn’t unique to us and Germany, but is a purification movement that is behind every witch-burning epidemic, and is visible in the fall of the Mayan and Roman empires; the despair of kings and high lords as they cling to power slipping away.
The interesting thing this time is we commoners are talking about it on the internet. We get to hear academics who have studied this stuff not only tell us the bad that can happen, but how other instances have been able to prevent that bad. So we might be able to slow it down, prevent it altogether, or find a less tumultuous path through it… so we can deal with the great filters, like the climate crisis and plastic crisis that might kill us all.
My piece of the elephant is this: All of our billionaires and 100 millionaires seem to be possessed with making more, even though their hoard is well beyond enough to take care of their family, and is only being used to gain more wealth, lather, rinse, repeat. Not a one of them is considering giant humanitarian projects that would assure a bronze statue of them was erected in every state park. And that shows us our stupidity of who we are in the dark.
Obligatory:
That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
– Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot
Ty Warner (creator of Beanie Babies) demonstrates excellent billionaire conduct by intentionally staying off of social media, according to a bio on the You’re Wrong About podcast. This isn’t to say he’s a jerk that shamelessly stole the ideas of other people. He did a whole bunch of that. It’s just once he got his riches, he shut up and ran his company.
As Elon Musk was considering buying Twitter, a lot of tech wonks examined the situation and came to the same conclusion: to retain his company value, Musk needed to let Twitter do its thing without changing its policy and if possible without commenting from his account. It was already doing the best it could.
Musk didn’t and now X / Twitter is worth very much less.