being a cop, or being in the military (western). It’s not the act itself which is unforgivable, but joining either of these groups shows that you lack judgement and that you are untrustworthy, which i don’t have the patience or energy to navigate in my life.

Encouraging people to get the depopulation (emergency use authorization mrna) shots is also disqualifying to me, especially if you claim to be scientifically or medically literate, these people definitely should have known better. Usually you have to go back a few years in a person’s post history to find how the behaved during covid. Not believing in bodily autonomy or informed medical consent when it really mattered is bad enough, but the unforgiveable thing to me is the lack of basic first-principles reasoning and also an inability to read scientific journals criticially. Like if you are going to bother reading them, especially if they are otherwise out of your wheelhouse, you can’t just uncritically accept all of their findings without critically assessing the method, and comparing the results to other more established research. Super basic shit. But the bar is so low and was even lower during covid that just reading an abstract was enough to make you an expert. And the actual ‘experts’ were so cautious about losing their jobs and professional reputation that any scepticism or red flags they raised in their research were worded very subtlely or even pushed down into a kind of sub-text. Don’t read a single article and then pretend you are an expert! for a complete noob you’d be better off understanding some of the important concepts, then developing a first-principles understanding of the problem space, and then to read specific pieces of research to improve the resolution of this picture.

But people don’t read these things to learn or improve their understanding. They do it for a million other boring, pathological or career reasons.

In my weaker moments i shrug my shoulders and figure that these people aren’t going to be great to have in the human gene pool anyway, but this dehumanising malthusian thinking is itself disgusting. I avoid depopulation advocates (knowing or unknowing) not because i value their lives (even though i do) but because i find their method of thinking repulsive.

Also anybody involved in real-estate.

wouldn’t an option to ‘mute’ rather than ‘block’ people achieve the same outcome? that’s how it works on twitter iirc

similar problems in aged care honestly. Many people would rather sign away the equity in their parents’ estate to an aged care provider, then actually care for their aging parents in their time of absolute vulnerability.

incredible news!

go cheap on the paint, and premium on the masking tape and brushes man. Water-based paint is mostly all the same, it’s the technique that will give you a good result and quality tape and brushes make that way easier

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shakespeare’s measure for measure had a big impact on me as a high-schooler

you’re saying they voted out the guy who rigged votes for 16 years?

no, the ALP support the genocide of gaza and also support banderite neo-nazis in ukraine, just like every major australian party

national economies handle being welfare states just fine, which isn’t so different from what a UBI would be. Also developed service economies live and die by consumption. A UBI would stabilise and stimulate domestic consumer demand.

yes flat earthers are used by the social designers to ‘poison the well’. What’s so funny? it would be strange if they didn’t exploit (and cultivate) the immense stupidity of the median person. It makes the job of lying to them easier (and cheaper)

Something like this already happened when we traded the long-term health and fertility of the topsoil for the immediate high yield output of artificially fertilized crops.

By outsourcing the repleneshment of fertility to the relatively fragile and unreliable supply chains and social organisations of man, we assumed management over a delicate balance which previously belonged to nature.

I’m not arguing against industrial agriculture and its commodification of fertiliser by the way. If carefully managed it’s possible to imagine an endpoint of equilibrium where global supply chains increase total system fertility by selectively resting soil and relying more on imports to then switch once local fertility peaks and so on. Really just sane and unmolested market forces should in theory discover such a negotiated endpoint.

Fertility alone is not descriptive enough to capture, say, the importance of biological diversity or the load bearing capacity of local environments to support ecosystems, while also producing exportable outputs suitable for maintaining population growth in humanity.

Perennial crops are also ridiculously underused in overall food supply chains. They are more difficult to monetize in existing commodity forms because their overall system value is not captured numerically.

I don’t have an overall solution, but any solution will require at its core a way to assign value to the work which nature already does to replenish its own local fertility and to price that effect very cautiously in such a way that it becomes cheaper for intensive producers to rest unfertile soil until it becomes fertile than it is to compensate for unproductive soil by importing chemical fertiliser from somewhere else

not really, this place basically is reddit only with a smaller user base and even more of a sanctimonious-liberal-PMC kind of vibe. If this became a place that cared about and defended free speech it would destroy the hugbox and alienate their core users, who themselves are reddit refugees. This isn’t really a good place for difficult discussions which deviate too strongly from accepted mainstream talking points. It’s more a place of comfort for people who are exhausted by the relentless nightmare that is modern life.

What would we even argue about? which products are better to purchase? which form of labor pleases oir employers and landlords the most?

did you see the modern adult swim seasons? i loved the OG episodes and haven’t gotten around to seeing them yet

here’s a few i haven’t seen mentioned yet:

oz - uncompromising US prison drama

garth merenghi’s darkplace - deadpan british tele-horror parody

the mighty boosh - absurdist musical stage-theatre from the UK

dirk gently’s holistic detective agency - fast-paced comedy with an interesting premise that plays out like a douglas adams novel

happy - netflix series which combines a gritty procedural crime-drama with a cartoon mascot. Very violent and dark humour

maybe he was onto something

the ‘no domestic surveillance’ is just language that mirrors some limitations (from their pov) from the patriot act. They’re still willing to surveil people outside the USA, and in fact all they have to do is route domestic traffic through an international part of a network and they can legally spy on domestic americans which is what already happens.

how much data do the FBI get from telegram? do you think the russian owner (who got arrested in france for refusing to make changes demanded of him by glowing authorities) is very likely to give any of your info over to american 3 letter agencies?

the minimum would be transparency for the algorithm. If users can see exactly what a social media algorithm is doing with their content feed, they would always have a way to identify and escape dark patterns of addiction.

But this minimum itself would require powers to compel tech companies to give up what they would describe as intellectual property. Which would probably require a digital bill of rights?

The most practical option would be to just ask your kids directly about the kinds of content they’ve been consuming and why. Dinner table conversations can probably reveal those dark patterns just as well