FBXL Social

Seeing a lot of normie media is on flipboard which is on the fediverse was pretty neat. Obviously not every normie media outlet is worth the space on your timeline (even if it's updating at 1000 posts a minute), but a few might be interesting to certain individuals and this means they're available.

Sort of reminds me of when the Biden administration was like "ok taliban, don't forget to maintain our dei policies! If you don't we'll be very cross with you!"

It was the funniest thing because the tonal disconnect was hilarious. It only became clearer later when interviews with western news outlets came out and the interviewers were like "So you're going to treat women well, aren't you?" and the taliban were like "we're the taliban. We'll treat women well by making them wear hijabs and never letting them leave the house."

"We expect the Taliban to uphold the basic rights of the Afghan people, including women and girls. The international community is watching."

"Future engagement with the Taliban will depend on their actions in protecting the rights of minorities and women."

Just the same sort of performative rhetoric.

Ngl I'm surprised the birds allowed themselves to get caught, let alone dyed from head to toe.

If my wife was like "catch a pigeon and dye it for me" I'd be like "do it yourself" and that would be the end of that conversation.

On one of the SPC movie nights they had an episode of that show on in between the real movies. I had no idea what it was, and I had no idea what the premise of the show was, and maybe I wasn't watching closely enough but I never realized what the premise of the show was until long after the episode was over.

I didn't get the vibe of a celebrated success story from that show, even without knowing what the premise of the show was, it seems to me like a bunch of exceptionally well-adjusted kids trying desperately to keep their mentally ill friend away from sharp objects or lengths of rope.

I guess it's reality TV so the producers can show us whatever the hell they want, but it definitely didn't look like a show about a happy person.

Imagine being a member of the reddit brigade in 2025. Already a fate worse than death.

It isn't like there wasn't enough warnings not to rely on these companies.

A lot of well-read individuals have predicted civil war by now in the US and throughout the west.

I think the thing they haven't considered is the biggest strength of liberal democracies: Buy-in.

If these were monarchies, obvious oligarchies, or tyrannies, people certainly would have revolted by now, but people who hate what's going on are going "Ok, let's keep trying to vote the buggers out".

The "Civil war" in the US for now was giving the Republicans the whitehouse, the senate, and the congress. The "Civil war" in Canada for now was kicking Justin Trudeau out of power.

However, we know from history that revolts do happen in liberal democracies. It just takes longer, and when it does happen it's ugly. The US civil war was one of the bloodiest wars in history, killing more Americans than either of the world wars. The collapse of the Weimar republic led to a global world war. Spain collapsed when it became clear none of the elites intended to allow democracy to continue. Lebanon collapsed when the balance of power it maintained no longer represented reality on the ground. Czechoslovakia collapsed when the nearby German regime became too powerful and dangerous to ignore. None of these examples ended well for those involved.

So that's an explanation for why we haven't seen the things we expected to see, and also why it could still happen, and if it does happen it'll be uglier than we feared.

Patent for "A thing wut does security"

According to Bloomberg, the auto industry tariffs are going to add $2,000 to the cost of a new automobile.

So how about the other $50,000 most new vehicles are overpriced by?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-19/auto-tariffs-seen-hiking-car-prices-by-nearly-2-000-per-vehicle

And at first the big company does the work really well for free, and over time it degrades and you have to buy more and more potions but you've already levelled it up so you're stuck between starting with another corporation at level 1 that does the work really well for free, or staying with the same corporation at level 99 that doesn't work very well and is really expensive to use.

I think this is getting too real for me irl

9 years ago, I watched the Epic Rap Battles of History between the eastern and western philosophers. In it, Nietzsche has a line where he dumps on the classical philosophers.

I left a comment: "Nietzsche was a philologist. I doubt he'd deny he's a student of the classical philosophers."

Then, 6 years later, I saw it again and forgot I left that message and was going to leave a comment to that effect, then instead I left a comment to myself: "Good point, 6 years ago me."

The irony of people who blindly follow the orders of some random blocklist because they want to avoid "nazis" is humorous. Like thoughtlessly hating certain people because you're told to by some faceless list has nothing to do with what happened in Germany in 1938.

I don't have many lefties following me, but here's a bit of reality check for US lefties who talk about "how you don't need to pay for anything with Canadian Healthcare"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPQ2bhtRVqM

Skullagrim is Canadian, and he's selling his sword collection to pay medical bills.

"That can't be! He's in Canada, and not even a scrub province like Alberta!"

It isn't a magic lamp, of course there's limits -- and he's running up against them. The surgeries take forever to get even if they are free, but ancillary services are still mostly private.

Oh noooooooo

To be fair, budget Hawks like me have already seen this movie.

Is that how much a horse typically is? Seems like a reasonable price.

To be fair, both humidex and windchill are common metrics intended to better illustrate the way someone feels heat depending on actual attributes -- either reduced capacity of the human body to cool itself in high humidity or increase heat transfer during high winds.

Something like this is incredibly common in Canada because you end up in those edge cases where it's cold and either windy or not windy, or it's hot and either humid or not humid.

There are actually a few examples of small businesses being owned by the super rich. In fact, something that qualifies as a "local small business" can secretly behind the scenes owned by larger aggregated funds that hold ownership in a bunch of small local businesses. The family that owns the mega corporation Uline owns a number of small local businesses within a fund that holds such things.

As for an example of families who own what look like mega corporations, franchise rights are a good example of that. Yes, the sign on the door says super ultra megacorp, but it's actually a small business operated by a local family who ends up kicking back a portion of the proceeds to the franchising company.

Notwithstanding the fact that publicly traded companies can be held by for example pension funds, meaning that no individual rich guy holds that company, instead it's collectively held by a large number of working-class people who want to retire someday.

Regardless, for the sake of my argument I don't need my hypothetical to exist. I simply needed to have the capacity to possibly exist. There's nothing stopping Scrooge McDuck from opening up a lemonade stand, and people who look rich because they own something big and important regularly end up penniless.