FBXL Social

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zUCh7qh_uI

"Just watch, this idiot will watch someone repair tires for 20 minutes!"

Well.... They were right......

Honestly, a small group can have an outsized impact by voting for a third party. If a party got 5-10% and it wasn't one of the big two, that'd be where they start doing some soul searching trying to figure out why they didn't get their share of those votes since 5-10% would be enough to change most American elections.

Honestly, I've got a somewhat nuanced opinion on Project Warpspeed and the jab. At the time a lot of people thought covid was actually a big deal, and it makes sense under such circumstances to fast-track whatever you can that might make things better. In that sense, it makes sense to try to make an untested experimental vaccine available.

The difference is when you drop the level of scrutiny on the jab, but then mandate it for a bunch of people. Trump didn't do that second part, as far as I recall. He certainly didn't do it in the rest of the world that decided that authoritarianism was the order of the day.

Of course then it turned out that covid was kinda bullshit all along, but hindsight is 20/20

I think it's safe to say that if you have to choose between a giant douche and a turd sandwich the obvious choice is the giant douche, but it's still a giant douche and not a good political candidate.

I tend towards xubuntu or kubuntu instead of base Ubuntu but I'm also surprised.

If mean orange man doesn't win, America will be mocked until my throat is sore.

Eventually you actually do have to question questioning things.

What a lot of people will do is if you don't come up with the answer that they want you to, they'll just keep on trying to get you to question it, hoping to spend the roulette wheel enough times that eventually it lands on the answer they want and then once you've arrived at the answer that they want they'll throw a padlock on that roulette wheel and it's no longer acceptable to question anything.

So that's why you question things until you've come up with answers that you are satisfied with, but once you have some answers at your satisfied with you don't really need to go back and relitigate everything constantly. In some ways, that's why spinster exists -- the powers that be asked you to keep an open mind and question everything right up until they reached the answer they wanted, and now in a lot of places around the world they want to make it illegal to question the new doctrine that they impose.

In modern Western philosophy the skeptics questioned even the idea that we exist. Eventually, skepticism was defeated to a degree by the famous phrase "I think, therefore I am". The idea being that simply being a thing that can think for itself proves that that thing must exist. Exufficiently skeptical person could continue to be skeptical, but this answer was considered good enough that then those same modern philosophers could move on to different questions.

One of the criticisms of Western postmodern philosophy is the fact that postmodernism effectively acts to smash down all Grand narratives without ever intending to rebuild those narratives. Regardless of what answers you come up with you just keep on questioning and deconstructing. This is one reason why for philosophers they moved on from postmodernism to other ideas such as metamodernism which tries to keep a degree of the skepticism of postmodernism while returning to at least accepting the concept of a grand narrative from modernism, or entirely different philosophies which actually try to solve The world's questions rather than just ask more questions.

Certain people get all worked up when they see parking, in a bad way. Like "oh this is terrible we could be using this land for so many other things!" -- that might be an argument in Europe where everyone is crammed into a relatively tiny piece of land, but in the United States and Canada land is not at a premium! We can have parking lots so that you can go and park your car and go to the event or the store or whatever it is. People who don't like having parking can always just move to Europe. I hear they love migrants there.

If this is the story that I looked up, first of all it doesn't look like Microsoft is going to own that power plant, it is going to continue to be owned by the current owner. Microsoft is going to invest in the Three Mile Island facility to get it back up and running, and then we'll have a 20 year agreement to purchase energy from them. According to the article, that would add 800 megawatts to the grid. By my account, that would add 672 gigawatt-hours to the grid assuming that it runs 24/7.

Unless there is another story somewhere else that has them investing in nuclear power...

A completely random observation: it seems to me that bubbles tend to have a color, and that color seems to suggest the lifespan of the bubble. The ones that I can see seems to start with a dark blue, followed by purple, followed by yellow, and then it becomes sort of a clear white with no particular color, and then it pops. The mechanics of each bubble seem to change with the color as well, yellow or clear ones seem to be generally more buoyant than blue or purple ones.

I think what's going on is there's a certain amount of liquid in each bubble, and over time the water making up the bubble evaporates. The different amount of liquid in the bubble forms thicker bubble walls which have a prism effect, which is why the color spectrum changes, and as the water evaporates there's less Mass so wind currents can pick up more easily.

I can think of absolutely no practical application of this information, but I thought it was interesting to observe.

You're goddamn right.

I basically lived off of these at work during the pandemic. I just bring a big box of them, three of them a day and don't think too hard about the nutrition information.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hy8kmNEo1i8

When people are like "these gen z kids with their skibidi" it's just an indication that a lot of people don't understand the culture that they grew up in.

I'm not even a big pop culture guy, but of course I know scatman. It's not even a big deal...

Lots of people make fake posts about their 2 year old giving opinions about politics that either never happened or the kid was just parroting what they've been told by an adult.

Honestly, even if a child says something I agree with, that's unimportant. Even if *my* child says something I agree with, that's unimportant. Kids aren't particularly wise, the best they can do is imperfectly reflect what they've been raised in.

But something happened both times I took my son to the park today, and I'm proud of what I saw: He saw litter on the ground, picked it up, and put it in the garbage. He did it a bunch of times, too. It wasn't a fluke.

I think that's a good habit to be in at the age of 2. If he's reflecting service to the community, then I'm not just proud of him, I'm proud of myself for presenting an image where he mimics doing something like that. It reflects a growing virtue in him, and potentially virtue within myself that he sees.

And to be real for a minute, kids are a lot of different things. I was just about to hit "send" on this message, and I hear him giggling, and I'm like "aww hehehe....wait a minute, I know that giggle", and sure enough he was taking a mouthful of water from his bottle and spitting it all over himself making a huge mess so I had to go clean it up. He's still 2, after all!

I'm probably one of the earlier people to ever want a modern electric car, but no matter how much you want a thing you still have to be able to live with it and a lot of the trade offs of electric are only acceptable if you are rich enough to buy a new car every few years or a Hollywood actor who doesn't really need to be anywhere most of the time.

One thing to keep in mind even with these numbers is that a lot of people call it the CPLie because if anyone runs the numbers they immediately find out it's totally fake.

For example, anyone who pays rent knows that rent is up hundreds of percent compared to the past. They mess with that number as they mess with all these numbers.

As for an example of what might look like a more representative number, if you go back to the 1980s they measured inflation one way, probably a more correct way back when they were actually trying to find out what that was, in the 1990s they switched to a slightly different way, and in the 2000s they went whole hog with a third Way. Websites like Shadow stats show what inflation would be based on those previous methodologies and they're overwhelmingly higher. Going by those previous methodologies, the world has been in a Great depression for decades.

It isn't really possible per se.

The moment you have a share in a company you are affected by it. Typically, you have to sell your time to somebody else, and then those hours of your life become money which then you invest in stocks. So just from that point, those stocks represent an investment of time that you had to take to make the money to invest in the company. If the value of those stocks go up, then investing that time as it paying off, if the value of those stocks goes down, then investing that time did not pay off. If the stock pays a dividend, you will get it and if it doesn't then you will not. It's even possible for the stock to go to zero, and then you lose your entire investment of time in that company.

Anyone who works for publicly traded company has the option to turn the money that they make doing work for the company and equity. It's entirely possible for someone who works at McDonald's for example to take a chunk of their earnings and invest it back into mcdonald's, and then they own the company that they work for in part. Often people don't want to do this because they just want to make their wage, and they don't want to have to worry about the ups and downs of the market or to have money tied up in investments when they could just spend it.

Now I'm more complex thing would be the topic of limited liability, and that's something that I would be a little bit more grayscale on because I wonder if it's really okay that if you own shares in a company that kills a bunch of innocent people all you can lose are those shares. If you own a share in a company that is worth a dollar and it feels the Grand canyon with toxic sewage, it doesn't really seem just that if they had made millions of dollars filling the Grand canyon with toxic sewage you would have gotten a share of that, but if they were caught you'd only be on the line for your investment. It's asymmetrical. Unlimited upside, only 100% downside. That's one of the reasons why in the past I've talked about the idea of eliminating limited liability as a legal concept, and so anyone who invests in a company is putting themselves on the line if that company commits a crime heinous enough. It would certainly change the equation when companies decide to break the law.

Consider a few things:

1. The dollar has lost 97% of its buying power since 1970 due to inflation, which some economists consider to be a tax. After all, it means that if you had $1 in 1970, it is lost 87% of its buying power. If that dollar had maintained its buying power, it would be the same as 8.11 today (and that's assuming th CPLie is right). To be taxed on the unrealized games on this, you would end up paying overwhelming taxes on that dollar in spite of the fact that the buying power hasn't gone up or down -- the only thing that happened is the government printed up a bunch of money through the central banks to fund what has become half the economy.

2. The income tax itself began as a tax on people who were the equivalent of multimillionaires today. "Don't worry, we're just taxing the richest people so that they can pay their fair share" they said. How's it working out for you?

3. A lot of people who aren't the richest people in the world are going to end up getting hurt. Your Boomer parents? They are planning on retiring based on the market not permanently collapsing. As well, debt is such as loans or even government debt rely on people being willing to invest in america, and if prices drop every year because the richest people in the world need to drop a significant chunk of their portfolios to pay some arbitrary and capricious tax on money that they don't have in their hands, who's going to want to invest in that?

4. The law of unintended consequences is often surprising. There's no reason to think that rich people couldn't just find ways to suppress their apparent wealth. Or what those might be or what the consequences might be of those ways. Let's say a lot of the rich cash out entirely while they can and move their wealth to countries that will never implement a tax like this. What happens next? Well, it isn't good for the country that suddenly might not just have its money and stuff leave, but have it's talent leave because smart talented people end up chasing the money to wherever it ends up. Ask South American countries which thought they could become rich by having the government take all the wealth. Protip: it didn't end well. The rich stayed rich, the poor don't get to eat anymore.

That is hilarious.

I don't know who the third one is, but the first two ended up leading to overwhelming majorities of conservative parties and their provinces. It's been two elections, and the Ontario liberal party isn't even an official political party yet because she fucked up so bad.

You know, from that point of view, letting her win the election might actually be worth it. "Oh, you want to drive this car? Okay here you go" [4 years later there is no official Democrat party anymore]