today in things i say that apparently will generate vitriolic hate trains against me: "oligarchical consolidation of media is bad but also there are limits to what can be done given the nation's size and its deeply-rooted tradition of a free press."
Adrian Tchaikovsky's Tyrant Philosophers series has been a big one for me this year. The 4th came out about 1 week ago.
funny to think about a far future where anthropic is a large, mature, boring public company and its founders' belief in the imminent machine god is a bit of funny trivia like wk kellogg believing bran stopped masturbation
Is it not explicitly a fairy tale? I guess it's darker in some ways, at least for a modern audience expecting modern fairy tales...
And idk, I watched Pan's Labyrinth at just the right age and life conditions that it remains maybe my favorite so this doesn't fully compute
Even go back 5 years and I may have considered a Tesla when I'm ready for an electric. Now I'll look for nearly anything else 🤷♂️
Obv tech and options have improved so actually having some competition helps, but all the same.
When Park Chung Hee realized he'd lose the next election, he told his prime minister that he was considering something 'special'. A year later, he abolished democratic elections and crowned himself as leader-for-life.
Yesterday, Trump said that there shouldn't even be a midterm election.
I will say it sounds way more like an epithet this way, but gd it seemed to come out of nowhere when it first started, so I still suspect there's some smoke filled room Atwater shit going on here
Has someone done the research on this phenomenon? I started noticing it around 5 years ago - is it as simple as attempting to disaggregate the Democratic Party from the concept of democracy?
Tbh this whole history is not something I knew, but Robert Reich makes so much more sense in the Clinton admin with this all in mind.
It really didn't quite click for me given the prevailing sense and narrative of the Clinton legacy and how Reich moves in the world
Not sure where you can watch it yet, but I think Rental Family is so worth it
Not to nitpick too much but isn't it att - t-mobile.
I find any add playing on the weird country wisdom trope a tad bizarre myself
I choose to believe that one day Billy Bob Thornton and Luke Wilson will come to actual blows as their weird AT&T-Verizon ad feud spirals out of control.
The new Miya Folick album this year was so damn good
To clarify - I mean the electoral results
The turn back toward a real industrial policy and utilizing an at least Keynesian economic approach was so so welcome and I'm concerned the results will teach far too many the wrong lessons in the years to come
The internet contains everyone, but is there anyone serious actually arguing against the utility of fossil fuels? Like come - that's kinda part of the whole problem. They're VERY effective - and yet
I stfg this man
I do suspect at the time coming off the oil crisis and a relatively shirt time since Vietnam kinda broke some brains at the time - and some of those brains went on to be modern dems 🤷♂️
(This is obv not sophisticated analysis)
Tbh I'm too young to have any real memory, but do read a lot of history - and yikes, the amount of things that can be traced right back to the guy is really astonishing and imo should be disqualifying for an opposition party
Almost every problem we are dealing with right now can be traced directly back to this fucker right here. People want to talk about the confederates were never appropriately punished for the Civil War but bc this man was likable, America has never really even acknowledged the harm he caused.
One of the more insane things out of far too many Dems' mouths
Father's anger at girl's potentially fatal testosterone dose The child, who was 15 at the time, was given the prescription by the private GenderGP clinic after one online counselling session
He has lost contact with his daughter - he does not even know what she got in her GCSEs - and now that she is 18, he no longer gets court-ordered medical updates. In the final one he learnt that she was booked in for surgery imminently.
Now he drives over with birthday presents but is not allowed in. He remembers the last time he saw her, after she had started taking testosterone. Looking at his photographs, he remembers dropping her home: "When she said goodbye, her smile was the same girly shy smile she had as a little girl. Somewhere in there is my daughter."
You might think from the headline that this is a story about a trans kid suffering medical consequences from a large drug dose but nope! It is just an interview with an estranged father who is angry that his child happily transitioned.
archive.ph/Tmthz
I went on a potentially fatal walk with my dog this morning.
J’s blood was assessed by Dr Russell Keenan, a consultant paediatric haematologist at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital, Liverpool, who advised that the results were effectively normal when compared to reference points relevant to an adult male (which Dr Keenan considered was the appropriate comparison in this case).
The testosterone treatment had had a positive impact in building J’s confidence and reducing anxiety.
Shocking twist, there is actually some debate about whether the testosterone dose was too high. Overall the kid seems to be doing better with it than without it.
There is literally no story here other than "Father Objects To Son's Happiness."
www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/u...
To be quite frank, this already feels like a decent assessment based on how some corners of the right already discuss AI.
Sometimes it can feel a bit Potemkin since they still throw in with ppl like thiel and Andreesen, but the emotional tenor *is* there to tap into 🤷♂️
For the first time since the outset of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, a Christmas tree has been lit in Bethlehem, the Palestinian village where Jesus Christ is believed to have been born. www.nbcnews.com/video/shorts...
Every so often the admins of any site get pulled into ongoing site conflicts and end up radicalizing themselves against their own users. Jack Dorsey's true innovation was going off to a yoga retreat to do peyote about it for two weeks
well you see, in "he said, she said" journalism, it's important to bury the truth halfway down the page in a quote by an activist or academic (if you mention it at all) as easily-dismissible opinion, otherwise Republicans will get mad and insist you aren't being fair and balanced
not sure how to square ‘no one person can be reasonably expected to pay for every media subscription’ with ‘sorely underpaid writers need to make a living’ but my inclination is not to locate that problem with any of the broke ass people on either end of the complaint
The answer is ads. It’s always been ads.
Commercials are what pay for media because consumers won’t do it willingly, and we’ve had a nearly two decades long experiment with streaming services to prove it
You know what all the streaming services are doing now? Putting in ads.