ts227.bsky.social
152 posts
233 followers
193 following
Discussion Master
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Good article, but this made me laugh:
“Tesla reports that Vin’s Cybertruck has depreciated by more than $35,000, representing a decline of over 35% within a year.”
Thanks, some of us have difficulty calculating percentages of 100,000.
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Especially since, you know, if a bunch of isolated backwoodsmen all start hating bears all at once, they may all be reacting individually and separately to an external stimulus, but we’ve literally put gen z in a ‘what if you had to react to peer influences 24/7?’ experiment since they were like 9…
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Exactly. If you think the silence is eerie, wait till you hear the not silence
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Honestly even regular ChatGPT is pretty obsequious. I could give it some pretty wild ideas - rice is the most calorie dense food per acre, what if I flooded my garden to grow rice? - and it’ll be like ‘hey, that sounds like an interesting idea Tom’
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The problem isn’t spending so much as recruitment. www.euractiv.com/section/poli... young Europeans just really really aren’t into joining the army, and it’s going to take more than a cash injection to turn that around short-term
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But is this just a carelessly worded sentence or the crux of the whole article? Is it comparing post-tax, post-school costs disposable income of 100k+ earners against TOTAL, pre-tax income of minimum wage earners? Because disposable income on minimum wage is tiny, unless you’re a teenager w no rent
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It’ll be stupider than that. It’ll be ‘Xi is the new Hitler (in a bad way)’ one day and ‘Xi is a smart guy. A great guy. I think we’re very close to a deal’ the next day on repeat for months on end
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Especially when the shortages are now baked in.
He could beg Xis forgiveness and arrange a humiliating climbdown this morning and the shortages will still be severe for at least a couple of months.
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Yeah, it’s bad. Also puts particular emphasis on the ‘prove’ in ‘prove that that tree is seriously diseased or dying’ – post hoc unproved assertion won’t do.
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www.theguardian.com/environment/... ongoing debate about this in the UK rn
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But some old men speak of a land far beyond the western oceans where the knowledge was not lost, and webcomic figurines are plentiful as fallen leaves in autumn…
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I just finished reading through it now. Brilliantly reasoned defence (and explainer!) of history as a discipline.
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A bit like the cartoon with the climatic wasteland and the guy saying ‘but for a while, some people got great return on investment’ so with this.
Yea it’s Gilead. But for a while, I got great social media engagement. Little thumbs up icons. It activated my dopamine receptors. Ask your parents.
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The deeper truth is that FPTP is the original sin. A proportional parliament or death. Vive la Bundestag
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Plus a bunch of regional or state-specific parties - the Texan Freeholders, the New England Interest, the Midwest Assembly - but honestly, I think a lot of US neuroses would be mitigated by a pluralistic, proportional parliamentary legislature where these groups have to form coalitions.
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As an Irishman, honestly, if it does come to redcoats burning the White House down again, I won’t even mind
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I mean, yes, but that’s been the social media model since Zuck was a teenager. Make a good, free platform, hook millions of people, then turn it into an ad portal.
The question is, what’s the alternative? A monthly fee (hey Elon)? A taxpayer-funded public good? Lossmaking vanity project?
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Says who? The courts ordered them to bring a guy back and they said ‘sorry, nope.’ What if they send a US citizen and the courts say ‘hey, there’s no legal justification for this’?
If they just respond ‘eh, national security, they’re antifa or whatever’ whos going to stop them?
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Patton was at his best when commanding an imaginary army and keeping the Germans in the Pas De Calais
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We could easily fix this. If you go public you’re a proper PLC with a proper board. No individual gets to own more than say 5 or 10% of company stock
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Right, but part of that redemption has to be a fundamental restructuring of how tech companies work. OK, you and 3 other guys were the first to come up with the idea of a same-day-delivery custom salad dressing app. Cool. You get to be rich, but not 51%-of-stock squillionaire rich.
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I could also see some dark-horse nuclear power emerging in south east Asia if the incentives are there. Taiwan has already been mentioned, but Vietnam or Indonesia also possible
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Imagine getting to 95 and still managing to die suspiciously
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They were feeling the subliminal pull of IS THIS NAZISM?? AM I JUST LIKE A VICTIM OF THE NAZIS RIGHT NOW?? centuries before the Nazis emerged
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Funny that this is basically what Macron (deliberately) did to weirdly outflank both established parties from the center. Basically instead of taking a blandly moderate position on every issue he’d steal one pretty radical leftist proposal one week, then a fairly out-there right position the next
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He was always (genuinely) the coolest door
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In fairness, the Fort Knox people with their tons of gold are going to look equally stupid
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Otherwise I’m left thinking “well what’s the alternative George, Badenoch or Farage?”, but that’s a defect in the system, not in your argument
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What we need is voting reform. There may be countries where FPTP is better than proportional representation, but Britain isn’t one of them. Yes it would give Reform a lot of seats, but a system that allowed for the full plurality of opinion would be 1000% times healthier
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If we do I’m all for it. I don’t need work for my self esteem. If I got paid to sit around and scratch my balls my self esteem would be fine
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Call it the ‘Brexit Effect’ - the Brexiteers were convinced it would trigger a domino of other states leaving, and basically collapse the EU. Instead it massively solidified support for the EU basically everywhere
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What’s funniest is, I bet he was breaking open the champagne on November 5, celebrating a rightward turn in North American politics
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Only if we all clamber in once it’s built, just to check
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Like one of those medieval kings who bankrupted the state with endless church donations, but in recompense at least the monastic chroniclers made sure he’d always be remembered as ‘Ludwig the Good’ or ‘Otto the Pious’ or something
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So just as ‘defund the police’ people need an answer to the question ‘but what if I’m the victim of a crime’, so pacifists need to explain what should happen when a militaristic, fascistic state invades its pacifist neighbour.
And ffs PLEASE don’t mention the UN 🙄
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A bit analogous to law enforcement - the whole police and judicial system could in theory become unnecessary, since in an ideal world there’d be no crime and no need for police, but some people do commit crimes, and we need some collective, institutional way to stop them.
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Top oatmeal tip - whack a fried egg on top, with a more than generous amount of pepper. Ambrosial breakfast of the gods
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Kissinger’s question - “when I want to talk to Europe, whose number do I call?” - just got answered
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There’s at least something clarifying about Trump cozying up to Putin - the authoritarians and the oligarchic bazillionaire mega-capitalists are all on the same side. Anyone who still thinks the Irish left should be ranged alongside them is out of their mind.
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The charitable explanation for this bizarre fondness for murderous dictators is that it’s an expression of knee-jerk, atavistic anti-Americanism. The less charitable is that they just prefer autocracy.
Now that Trump has aligned the White House with Putin, the next few weeks will provide an answer
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I think it’s a political mindset that almost requires a decent amount of adult life spent outside professional politics. Or, often, even more specifically, time spent in an army fighting for liberty, thereby learning both its value and the (self)discipline needed to uphold it.
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The ‘we need to let the far right dictate the topics of public discourse’ crowd never acknowledges that we keep doing that, and it keeps making the far right stronger.
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Russia 3 years ago: we’ve got a lot of endemic problems. You know what would solve them all? A good old fashioned war of aggression.
It’s never solved anyone else’s problems ever, but I think it just might work for us.
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I love how “as someone who joined a cult in his 20s” now constitutes an argument from authority.
“As a former public masturbator myself, my views on the governments new anti-harassment legislation may prove of interest…”
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Yes. Plus a shadow secretary of defence (to mix Westminster and Washington terminology) to call out hegseth’s shit. Same for health and transport. People with a specific brief to hold their opposite number accountable and provide specific alternatives
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And the thing is, people think it has to be perfect, but you get the MOST goodwill when you put yourself out there even when you still stumble sometimes and make grammatical mistakes.
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I have the same Mercator projection world map on my wall as Trump, and I can confirm that the bits you’re talking about are at the complete opposite ends of the map. No connection whatsoever.
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youtu.be/JQ_R8QBeYvs?...
She was a low-down hoochie coocher
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Our Nissan Leaf is basically that. Not many bells and whistles, but comfy, decent range, reliable. We bought it second hand 5 years ago and no problems yet touch wood.
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It’s one of the structural problems of the far right in Europe - the glories one far right party celebrates are precisely the national shame the neighbouring far right party is trying to expunge by blood and fire.
It makes international cooperation awkward.