- 9 Posts
- 132 Comments
No love for radical skepticism round here I see.
302·13 days agoI tend to think at some point that was true, that Tesla was about saving the planet and SpaceX was about making humanity multiplanetary.
It could be he was always a wretched creep and just really good at hiding it, but it seems to me that the wealth and power just ruined him. He wouldn’t be the first person to fall in that trap.
I’ll append my confession here.
I supported Ron Paul once upon a time. The non-interventionism appealed to me in the context of the Iraq war in particular, and the rights-based libertarian philosophy seemed sound. I was young.
Problematic - it’s just so lazy. Makes me doubt whether the speaker has any coherent reason for why they don’t like the given thing. Might as well say ‘yucky’. It’s the kind of word one uses when assuming everyone already agrees with you, and if they don’t, well then they’re probably problematic too. /rant
255·17 days agoI don’t know much about Machado, but I do know that polls conducted under dictatorships are often not worth much.
The last time I recall having engaging, thoughtful discussions on the internet was way back in the days of forums. And that was so long ago I’m skeptical of my own memory of it.
Lemmy comments may be different from Reddit comments, but they’re not better. I’ve concluded it’s structural. This format simply does not produce useful conversation.
None of the other social media formats produce it either. Perhaps it’s the result of optimizing for attention, which all social media does, whether by deliberate design or natural selection. Platforms that get attention grow. Those that don’t, languish. It may be that things which gather attention to themselves best are repellent of deeper, slower, more careful thinking.
Actually, maybe I can think of one example. I’m stretching the definition of social media, and I haven’t firsthand experience, but the way that Wikipedia operates may be a clue toward how to build a platform that produces useful dialogue.
For those of us whose German is not up to par.
4·2 months agoJust in time for Grijalva to be sworn in
https://www.npr.org/2025/11/12/nx-s1-5606350/adelita-grijalva-swearing-in
17·2 months agoI know a lot of hockey fans would be mad at me, but I would ban hockey fights. I’m not really a sports guy, but I can enjoy hockey and its socially useful to follow at least one sport. But hockey fights just make my eyes roll.
91·2 months agoThat experiment has been pretty thoroughly discredited.
71·2 months agoI am also not a frontend dev, but you got me curious, so I did a little digging. Sounds like if you think you may ever turn it into a mobile app, choose React. Otherwise flip a coin between Vue or Svelte.
Modern replicas of many of these historical weapons are often twice as heavy as the real thing. A field Zweihander would have been somewhere around 5 lbs.
641·2 months agoFinally got my last PC switched off Windows. It feels good.
I think there may be more opportunity for success here than your argument seems to suggest.
I agree with the focus on inequality. The sense that society is fundamentally unfair has a corrosive and a radicalising effect on politics. People can react to it in very different ways, from redistribution to out-group scapegoating, but the underlying motivation is that people see that there is vast wealth available in our society and they’re still struggling.
Where I may disagree is that most people are non-ideological. Not everyone, but a healthy majority. They aren’t focused on the philosophical roots of a candidate’s policies. They care that the candidate
- Sees, likes, and cares about themselves and their group
- Has a vision that gives them hope for something better
Many people can find that in candidates with a variety of ideological positions. The overlap between people who supported Bernie after the great recession, and went on to support Trump is bigger than one would expect.
So the equation is much less zero sum. You don’t lose one reactionary for every radical you bring into your camp. There really aren’t that many committed radicals and reactionaries.
The most toxic message today is the economic moderate. “Hey, it’s not so bad. Things could be a lot worse.” This is the zero sum relationship. You can’t keep both the people who are doing well and like how things work, and the people who are struggling and want the life they deserve. The material difference isn’t left vs right, it’s status quo versus change. There’s a lot more room for flexibility in the change camp.
Fucking cool, and also remember to leave your phone at home, or at least on airplane mode.
Pretty sure they’re typically publicly owned. Maybe some places lease them. Couldn’t find a national survey, but here’s at least one example of a county that bought some machines and a service contract.
Maybe a car fleet is a good example. Ford designs and builds the cars. Counties buy them, and often buy service and maintenance contracts to keep them running. The counties still own the cars.
I suppose counties could receive the source code, have it audited, and then compile and load it themselves.
I thought about this for a second, and I don’t actually think being open source would do any good. It’s not like we can compile and run our own voting booths. There’s no way to know what’s actually running in the machine at your polling place.
And voting machines are publicly owned, but perhaps you meant designed and manufactured by the government?
Exactly. They’re trying to scare us off. A little courage now may spare us the need for really scary things later.
Revealed preference strikes again.