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Actual facts. And I'd do it again, and I'll probably do it again.

Pretty much everything since PayPal has been a vanity project. What's so bad about advancing science and engineering on electric cars, space ships, and robotics?

Honestly if I was an idle billionaire I'd do a lot of those things. I might even buy Twitter to piss people off.

One of the most important things is "reduce reuse recycle" is in that order because the earlier choice is always the more desirable one for the environment.

It wasn't until I started drinking from a water bottle using tap water that I came to understand just how much waste prepared drinks create by contrast.

Up here in Canada former prime minister Jean Chretien (liberal party guy but he balanced budgets so I generally liked him) gave a speech supporting Trudeau going "Canada is not broken!" Even though it's clearly broken.

I feel like these old guard party guys need what they're saying to be true because if the current leader is totally incompetent it directly reflects on them as members of the same party, on top of what you're saying which I fully agree with as well.

Hollywood can even screw up an anime based on batman. Kinda impressive

I know, it's one of those annoying names.

"The new gate"

THE NEW GATE anime started off with an interesting premise of a main character who was the victor of an AI deathgame coming back to the world of the deathgame after 500 years had passed. It's on I think the final episode this week, and it really ended up disappointing. I'm gonna finish the last episode, but it won't be getting a season 2, there's no way (and I won't watch it if there is)

In a lot of ways I think Americans need to learn more history than just World War 2.

The current situation has many historical parallels that are more interesting than just Hitler Hitler Hitler.

I think there's a lot of things besides World War 2 that help us understand the current moment in time.

One example is about 80 years before the end of the Roman Republic. Tiberius Gracchus was a member of the Populares faction, populists in opposition to the aristocracy, the Optimates faction. Gracchus' populist reforms caused increasing tension in the senate. In 133 BCE, he was assassinated, and it would go down in history as one of the first assassinations in a practice that would become increasingly common in the republic. 84 years later Julius Caesar would cross the Rubicon River, a moment indicating the end of the Roman Republic. In this context, consider the venom with which the word "populist" is thrown around as a pejorative term, and the unprecedented actions taken against the candidate who is running for president under that banner presently.

Another example is the time right before the beginning of the French revolution. King Louis was printing money at a rapid rate, and it was creating a huge bubble for those within the fold of the government, but mass harm for those who were not. It was a time of extreme inequality, and many people were rushing into the capitol to try to get in on the gravy train causing overcrowding among the have-nots. Contrasts between the American revolution and the French revolution are quite important, given that the former led to a world superpower, and the latter led to an unstable nation that is today on I think it's fifth republic.

Yet another example is the Spanish empire during the exploitation of the new world. Spain treated South America like a true colonial holding -- unlike the United States where colonies became places people lived and built their lives, South America was a place primarily centered around exploitation of the local populations and natural resources. One result of this was a massive influx of silver to the Spanish government, which minted more coins and released them into circulation, causing high inflation because there was more money chasing the same amount of goods. Ultimately, this was one of the factors that brought one of the two most powerful empires on the planet into becoming a relative backwater.

Of course there's more things to learn from regions other than Europe. The Song dynasty in 9th century China and the Brahmins in India around the same time both had regimes that were more interested in writing poetry about how bad the invaders were or building more temples, respectively, leading to both countries losing considerable territory during this period.

Wang Mang in China around the 1st century became emperor through virtue signaling about Confucianism, and his incompetent rule based on an ideology that had massive holes led to tens of millions of deaths in a world that only had a couple hundred million humans.

In spite of the progressive paintjob on the modern bureaucracy, we have millennia of history from Imperial China about the risks of bureaucracy, including deep conservatism. The English reached china trying to trade clockwork that was centuries ahead of anything the Chinese had made, as well as guns and other technologies. They were turned back, a situation that ultimately led to the century of humiliation and the end of Imperial China.

The Islamic world has a few cautionary tales. The Islamic golden age saw the Muslim world as the center of the world in terms of much science and technology, as you can see from our use of algebra and the name of chemistry derived from alchemy, and our use of a numbering system out of the Islamic world. All of it came crashing down due to various factors leading to the Islamic world that once thought it would take over the world becoming a playground for other empires.

In the Mediterranean and the modern middle east, the bronze age collapse showed us most of the civilizations of the era being destroyed. Only a few civilizations remained, and some such as the Minoans were erased so thoroughly that we didn't even know they were real until shockingly recently in history when someone decided to look up the locations mentioned in Greek myth.

Around the same time period, the Harapan civilization, also called the Indus valley civilization in India tells us the entire self-contained story of a massive civilization that was born, rose, survived for ages, then declined and totally disappeared.

So to focus solely on one tiny piece of history is to really make a huge mistake. We have more than one case study, more than one lens to look at the world through, and not all of these lenses reveal the same story. Sometimes they reveal quite different stories.

I have a hypothesis about things. People wonder why they kept Biden in so long and think there was some sort of big master plan at work to draft another candidate in like Ricky Bobby. To me, it makes sense through the frame of "everything Trump says is a lie at all times" being the core message of the Democrats.

From that stance, something as important as the core of the Republican's entire push against Biden for the past 4 years must not turn out to be true no matter what, because if something like that which the entire establishment pushed back against turns out to be true, it's devastating to their frame.

If it turns out the Democrats were lying about something that important all this time, and the Republicans were telling the truth, what else were they telling the truth about? What else were the Democrats lying about?

The election is in only 5 months (It's June, election is in October), and so if they do get Biden to step down it'll be crushing to the Democrats for different reasons, so I doubt they wanted to do it now but the horrible showing in the debates is forcing their hand. I think they were hoping Biden could power through, and if they could get him through a couple solid debate performances then slide into the presidency through pure hatred of Trump. In that case they'd have 4 years to groom a successor. As things stand, they'll be putting up someone for president who didn't win any primaries and just got jammed in at the last second.

Their other challenge at this point is going to be figuring out a way not to make Kamala Harris the candidate because she's not seen as likable or competent, it would be a red wave like Reagan if she was the candidate. Forcing Kamala out would also end up proving a second fact the Republicans were saying, so it'd be a one-two punch explicitly saying neither of them is fit for the job despite constantly saying they were.

It wouldn't be so devastatingly frame breaking if the reality distortion field wasn't so critical to their electoral strategy. They need to be the sole source of truth so they can tell the electorate the sky is green and grass is blue in order to sell what they're selling.

Given what they actually do, I still think that your viewpoint is more nihilistic than mine. A phyrric victory where nothing of consequence actually happens and they'll keep doing whatever they want because fines are just a cost of business is meaningful? Maybe in a universe without meaning, value, or sense. Especially if as I predicted they've already extracted the value out of the data and so even if they do exactly what they said they did they've already gotten what they need.

What would be meaningful wouldn't be to pause extracting data out of user data, it would be to back up and take out all the data that they've already used, which clearly from the wording of their statement they haven't done. It's like you steal the Hope diamond, and then you say "we will pause our diamond stealing plans from here on out" -- I mean, good for you, but you already have what you wanted...

It depends on your definition of nihilistic.

For me, nihilistim means a value system that is devoid of meaning, value, or sense. I don't think that that's fitting with what I'm saying at all.

My value system holds honesty as paramount, and I don't believe that meta is an honest company. Therefore, it is well within my non nihilistic value system to believe that even if they are saying that they are pausing a thing that nobody wants, there's absolutely no reason to believe that they're not doing it because they've already done it and they don't need to continue.

Has the legendary US President George W. Bush once said, "There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again." (A lot of zoomers don't remember this, but George W. Bush was in fact an idiot)

It's unassailable fact that meta just keeps on getting fined again and again for breaking the law when it comes to data, so it is stupid to trust them, not nihilistic to mistrust them. The right thing to do is to completely disregard meta, stop giving them data stop giving them patronage stop giving them money through your eyes on their advertisements,. And go all in on the fediverse, which is a free and open source social media Network you can post on your own hardware or on a posting plan you personally control.

In that sense, it's irrelevant because they're going to keep on doing it regardless of whether they lie about not doing it anymore or not, and to just keep on letting them is what's nihilistic. What would be the opposite would be to go do something about it like deleting your Facebook.

Which I did. Among many other things.

I wish everyone would agree to public schools being the place where only the most milquetoast boring commonalities are taught.

Of course, one major problem with that is that a lot of people are going to claim that there's a lot of things that people dispute and don't agree on, but I would actually dispute that back in turn. The overwhelming majority of people agree with the sky is blue. The overwhelming majority of people believe the Sun is hot. The overwhelming majority of people believe that one plus one equals two, and that a e i o u and sometimes y are the vowels and all of the other letters are considered consonants, and that you can go to the dictionary to figure out how to spell most words. I'm not talking a 51% majority here, I'm talking like 80 85 90 95%. When you get right down to it, most of the big arguments are over a pretty trivial number of things, and so it would make sense to me to just say "hey, we are a government institution we are not here to teach controversies in either direction, we are here to make you basically competent" and then a core message of school becomes "we are not going to teach you everything, you need to go in the world and learn without us"

Nobody will like this opinion, but I think public schools should be more heavily regulated than cigarette ads. Anyone using government mandated and funded schools is immediate jail time under a universal hatch act.

For the concepts of "academic freedom" and "free speech", those things don't exist in public schools for teachers. If you want freedom to say whatever you want, or to teach whatever you want, you should have that separated from mandating that you get people's money and mandating that you get people's children. Yet another good argument for private schools, where you would be able to teach more or less whatever you wanted as long as they reach basic levels of competency.

Speech by government employees in public schools that children are often mandated by law to attend is not free speech. Such people are the organ of the state, and so anything that they say carries the authority of the state. Therefore, what they say must be deeply controlled. Speech that you are mandated to attend that's paid for by the government and operated by the government is essentially mandated speech, especially if your grade is going to depend on your willingness to conform to the dictats of this agent of the state.

A lot of people have a problem with the idea of tightly controlling public schools, which to me is just another good reason to make it into a free market question like they did in Arizona. In that case, instead of a monopoly of public schools, there's a certain budget that follows the child and can be used for whatever, and I'd suggest there should be some basic competency levels kids must reach but otherwise leave it alone. One thing I'm imagining would be a few parents getting together to hire an extremely competent instructor for a few kids, someone educated that they trust.

With respect to disparities in education caused by a funding only model, there are dozens of cities throughout the US that have dozens of schools that graduate sometimes thousands of students and not one of them is able to read, right, or do math at grade level. And far from being a problem of not enough money, and some of those situations such as baltimore, those schools that are failing to put out a single literate child from high school get some of the highest amounts of money per child in the entire state. In other words, government education is failing on a systematic level. Meanwhile, in other schools or other cities, there are tons of kids who come out fully capable of reading a grade level and who go off to have productive careers and lives. A lot of people think that you're going to solve the problems of inequality with government, but anyone who understands anything about government knows that that's the opposite of reality. You just end up with the people who are best able to convince the government to give them more money and power. If you could have it where people were actively trying to find the best education then I suspect you could get a huge benefit from that.

So that's what all the famous German engineers have been up to!

In retrospect he was scary *and* a piece of total garbage. But somehow still better than Kamala which is impressive for her...

Amazon goes "hey if you like books from Japan about getting iskekai'd you might like this one!"

I'm surprised they let that through. Were the Karens who control the algorithm off for the long weekend?

Nothing nihilistic about thinking a giant company is lying.

I feel like there's a good chance "pausing plans" will be irrelevant because they're probably already done...

If your peers are losers, who cares that they reviewed something?

That seems like a dangerously specific thing to base your entire career around.

But there's people who make a living playing Pokemon yellow all day so I guess there's a market for anything...