I will check it out, thanks!

Why does no one realize Dylan Thomas wrote more than one poem

Well shoot, thanks for the heads up.

The Stuart Ritchie piece adds some useful context for the turn into the anti-medication takes at the end of the book.

“But when you reach that level,” nominee of one of the two major parties, “you have to be the face of capitalism, militarism, and neo-colonialism.” Harris, Davis warned, “has told us she will be that face, that she will build the most lethal military apparatus ever.”

And then next time we have to for the next face of capitalism, militarism, and neo-colonialism so that the most lethal military apparatus ever doesn't get placed in the hands of the next fascist!

When do you suppose was the last time Musk read a poem (that was not generated by an LLM)?

I've been reading Stolen Focus by Johann Hari. I don't know if it contains anything particularly revelatory, but it does do really well to line up all the evidence that tech (and our culture more generally) is designed to wreck our ability to concentrate. Anecdotally, my partner teaches and the number of kids who have issues with their phones and video games seems pretty high. COVID is probably accelerating the development of all these problems.

Also speaking anecdotally, I haven't had any major illnesses since the pandemic started and I've been massively struggling with mental health. I think we're just able to sense that our culture and society are both in a terrible place and that's causing a lot of mental strain.

It's an app like Grindr but also for straight people

Predicting right now that the proportion of users that are men will be the same for both apps

Suppressing the urge to strip naked and run through the halls shouting "Everything we do is fake!" is getting harder with every passing day and it's mainly the fault of this web site.

Assuming this isn't just evidence that the methodology sucks or the sample is crap because they picked a single right-wing crank site to serve as the functional outgroup, it seems to be pointing to a distinct lack of liveliness. The debates are all over lurid speculation about the diets and religious practices of immigrant communities.

Yes, first you will be upside down and this will be very distressing, but then a carefree fellow will come along, get you right side up, and then leave you with a cookie.

Blows my mind that there are people who'd rather have billions of dollars and live in a bunker for the rest of their lives than have a comparatively modest existence in a flourishing environment with fresh air and sunshine, and that those people are being trusted to make decisions for the rest of us, but here we are.

Oh, okay, I wasn't following the fact that the bomb threats were also coming from his camp.

Sounds like the breakfast of champions to me.

In the discourse, a heckler's veto is a situation in which a party who disagrees with a speaker's message is able to unilaterally trigger events that result in the speaker being silenced. For example, a heckler can disrupt a speech to the point that the speech is canceled.

How is Vance - despite his being a well educated idiot - not describing a heckler's veto?

In the 13th century, breakfast when eaten sometimes consisted of a piece of rye bread and a bit of cheese. Morning meals would not include any meat, and would likely include 0.4 imperial gallons (1.8 L) of low alcohol-content beers. Uncertain quantities of bread and ale could have been consumed in between meals.

Reject modernity, return to tradition

Caption: "Oh my goodness! A book that proves me right! Let me put my flag down so I can read it!"

Now we know why Kamala spent so much time at the debate talking about natural gas.

Silicon Valley is currently stuffed to the gills with people trying to escape their own products. Turns out knowing all the tricks to get people plugged in to your product does not make you immune to them.

I'm sure it's only a matter of time until checks notes political dynasty scion Gavin Newsom presses the communism button in California

Do they think they just sorta dig wells in random spots and never think about the science of it?

I mean yeah, kinda. The Three Cups of Tea guy built a bunch of schools that are being used for storage sheds because he didn't have any idea of what it would take to run a school in Afghanistan. Peace Corps is basically make-work projects for idealistic college grads with no real world experience. The Gates Foundation built high tech toilets for rural areas that were stripped for metals pretty much immediately. Tons of nonprofit money is wasted because anyone can raise money thinking the solutions are simple and then discover that the reality is a lot more difficult.

Effective Altruism had the kernel of a good idea in that it initially proposed that interventions be evidence-based and actually help the most people. But then they got bit by a radioactive Utilitarian or got lots of money from someone who knew that the real purpose of philanthropy is reputation laundering and suddenly it was all about kajillion simulated space consciousnesses and flimsy justifications for protecting the incomes of software engineers at Facebook.

Well yeah, degrowth is a precondition to any of the mitigation technologies on that list. The water's coming in into the boat way faster than we can bail, so the priority should be to plug the leaks.

The chart reflects the fact that CCS is an immature technology that will be a nice to have if we can drop the energy requirements and store carbon in a form that's stable at normal room temperatures and pressures. There's some bench-scale experiments that have had promising results to that effect, so I don't see any reason not to fund that research. We spend more money on worse stuff by a country mile.

Plus, all the other bars on that chart have their issues. The mineral requirement to build transmission and storage infrastructure for wind and solar at current rates of energy demand growth will require massive increases in mining for copper and lithium. Agricultural carbon storage has error bars you could drive a truck through because no one can measure it. Attempts to pay farmers for soil carbon sequestration have been a mess and we're not sure about what the turnover rates for soil carbon pools might be under a warmer and wetter climate. Forest preservation just avoids future emissions and many forests are switching from carbon sinks to sources as they catch fire.

Fuel switching to natural gas: A recent study suggests NG is probably worse than coal. Plus quantification of leakage is notoriously messy.

We're kinda boned and CCS only really makes sense under FALGSC conditions, but it could help if we manage to pull out of our capitalist nosedive.

While I get the skepticism about CCS because capitalists are idiots, I don't know about "can't work"

CCS is great if:

• We have a compact and stable form of storage (salt mines may be leaky or a seismic hazard on the very long term)
• We're producing carbon-free energy in excess of what we need for everything else (i.e., China figures out fusion), or we have low-energy methods of extracting carbon from the atmosphere that don't require substantial power draw from the grid and are easily scalable (certain kinds of catalytic conversion that haven't made it off the lab bench could work, but the scaling question hasn't been addressed yet)
• The captured carbon is not being used to extract more fossil fuels (strange how many people miss this step)

The elephant in the room here is time, because you can't just hoover up gigatons of carbon overnight. So long as it doesn't take resources away from more immediate forms of mitigation and adaptation, I think it's research worth pursuing. But the IRA's drafters didn't get that memo.

If anything, letting Democrats win the next few major elections could spell doom for the Republican party as a whole, and give us a chance to introduce some actual competition to the Democratic party.

Why is there a time traveler from the year 2000 posting on lemmy.world?

"We lost? It's because we didn't do enough to appeal to conservative voters!"

"We won? In the spirit of unity, it's time to work across the aisle with our Republican colleagues."

Stein is mostly a gadfly, but gadflies get attention. The dems have no incentive to court leftist votes if they assume we're too small to make an impact or we'll fall in line no matter what they say. The possibility of the Green party becoming viable is one way to demonstrate that that isn't true. I prefer PSL as well, but it looks like the Greens are marginally better known and currently ahead in ballot access.

As for AOC and the DSA, the latter rescinded its endorsement of the former, so I don't think you can treat them as associated. As for why that endorsement was rescinded, it was because AOC got that power and then refused to use it to advance the DSA's objectives. She executed on a plan to gain power, sure, but she's not putting that power to good use, so I don't know what the lesson is there. It's easier to get power if you submit to the establishment?

Jill Stein living rent free in AOC's head has been extremely funny.

"We have to make compromises when there's a fascist on the ballot."
"Why was the fascist allowed to be on the ballot in the first place?"
"..."
"What will the allegedly non fascist party do to prevent fascists from getting on the ballot next time?"
"..."
"Weren't members of the allegedly non-fascist party responsible for helping the current fascist win the 2016 primaries?"
"..."
"Weren't historical fascist movements able to rise to power despite electoral defeats?"
"Well what are you doing about it? At least I'm voting!"

Aw, thanks

Obligatory serious answer to silly question: there is an alternative called gomme syrup, which uses gum arabic as a thickener. Drinks made with it are supposed to have a richer mouthfeel, but it's a pain in the butt to make and goes bad relatively quickly without preservatives, so I've given up on trying to keep it around. I think that qualifies as a complex syrup.

It's probably not worth engaging on a logical level because the people making that argument never reach it. From my perspective, it looks like the argument is a product of retrofitting an existing justification (Kamala is the harm reduction candidate) onto a specific issue (Palestinian genocide) and getting an incoherent result (Palestine will be genocided less). What motivates someone to put that incoherent result out into the world rather than, like, considering it, is probably a product of the shallow thinking social media encourages, an unwillingness to engage with the idea that we don't truly have political agency in the US, and a feeling that there are no other options.

In my less charitable moods I've viewed the argument as an attempted sop where the person advancing the argument does not actually care but does know that if they say as much they'll come across as a monster. So instead they do the bare minimum to retain what they view as the moral high ground in the extremely restricted landscape of the two major parties. Pointing to even higher ground outside that landscape can then be attacked as virtue signaling (anyone can tell that it's unreachable; this is the highest attainable spot) or trickery (anything that looks more complicated than this very simple reasoning must be some form of subterfuge, so I can continue to appear the most reasonable if I just keep hammering on "less genocide"). Absence of pushback from anyone with too much power to be dismissed as a troll or a curmudgeon allows the idea to enter the discourse, at which point other people pick it up and reinforce it.

But it's such a self-evidently weak claim that I can't do anymore than spit ball. It's an argument defeated easily even on its home turf of utilitarianism; any attempts to do that, though, just sends them back to the "Trump is worse" binary.

One could potentially argue that Trump's rhetoric of "finishing the job" means that he would do something to accelerate things by directly committing troops/planes/whatever. But we don't know exactly what would happen, so even then voting for slower genocide is more like voting for some unknown probability X that the genocide will be slower. Everyone in Kamala's corner is parsing her statements according to what they assume will be true and then projecting that into the future with 100% confidence.

That was a funny response because shortly before the debate there was a Hexbear post about a report that compared China's rate of technological progress to the US's and found that the US was behind China in all technologies but two. Guess which ones? Someone on Kamala's team must have also seen it.

I tried to find the post but I'm not sure where it went.

Just a good ol' bad cop/psycho cop routine.

To be fair, being an A student in the US is way more about complying with power structures than it is about knowing things.

Source: "BodyBySisyphus consistently fails to follow directions" x 1,000,000

Well put!

So what you do is you take a nuke. Drop it in a hole. Then drop another one in. Then another one. Hope you brought a lot of nukes. Eventually the gas law (Pv=nrt baby) dictates that you end up with an atmosphere dense enough to be breathable plus you're definitely low enough down that you're shielded from radiation. Bring some looooong cables to connect to solar panels up on the surface, crank up the heater, hang up a grow lamp for your potatoes, and live large in the miles-deep, yards-wide prison you dug for yourself.

The funny thing is She of the Real Time Fact Checkers lied her ass off the entire time. She lied about the Chinese Covid response, she repeated the Hamas sexual assault allegations that the NYT chose not to print, she either lied about her love of fracking (less likely) or her belief that climate change is an existential threat (more likely)*.

The thing is those lies are all within the Pale of Discourse so they go unchallenged. Trump is such a gift to the democrats because they get to go as far to the right as they want while still keeping their cherished veneer of intelligence and maturity.

*I suppose she could think both and either be a bona-fide threat to humanity or a complete idiot who doesn't know what's causing climate change

Their method of data collection is - and this is not a joke - "We asked 5 academics to rate each country on a scale of 1 to 10 and then average the result"