FBXL Social

sj_zero | @sj_zero@social.fbxl.net

Author of The Graysonian Ethic (Available on Amazon, pick up a dead tree copy today)

Admin of the FBXL Network including FBXL Search, FBXL Video, FBXL Social, FBXL Lotide, FBXL Translate, and FBXL Maps.

Advocate for freedom and tolerance even if you say things I do not like

Adversary of Fediblock

Accept that I'll probably say something you don't like and I'll give you the same benefit, and maybe we can find some truth about the world.

Ah... Is the Alliteration clever or stupid? Don't answer that, I sort of know the answer already...

Same ad in 2023:

$7,000

I know what I got no low ball offers

[admin mode] quick power bump, everything is back up now. At some point I should invest in an unreliable power system.

Careful showing an image like that on the public feed. The kids are always telling me about that "ohio rizz"

Which doesn't sound pleasant at all.

Does Bluesky force posts you never asked for on you like big tech or something?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14848997/Bumble-sacks-hundreds-staff-Gen-Z-ditches-dating-apps-love-old-fashioned-way.html

If the headline is correct, thank goodness.

Online dating is like the light from poltergeist: don't look into the light, don't go into the light. It's bad for you.

There was a paper recently that suggested there could be enough white hydrogen in the earth's crust to power human civilization for 100,000 years. That's where this idea came from, that if we were to power civilization by burning large amounts of hydrogen over long enough timeframes, we start having to worry about oxygen depletion.

Geological or even long human timeframes really mess things up -- even stuff like planting trees doesn't matter because the trees die and rot and forests become deserts when the tectonic plates shift. On the other hand, microscopic organisms like diatoms dying over time can cause overwhelming geological changes -- such things are how we ended up with most forms of sedimentary rock for example.

So-called "White Hydrogen" has been proposed as a carbon-neutral fuel source.

In the short term, the lack of carbon is a feature, but I'd argue over geological timeframes, it's a huge bug.

CO2 vs O2 at least has a cycle for replenishment. If we just burn H2 and use up an O, i can imagine we would reduce the O and we could only use processes like electrolysis to get it back.

It might seem like photosynthesis is a counter-argument to this, that plants "make oxygen" and so we'd be OK for that reason. My counter-argument would be that geological history is important to understand. The earth once had a CO2 atmosphere at about 25 atmospheres today, and the cyanobacteria converted all that CO2 into oxygen and sugar. That led to the biggest extinction event in the history of the planet, called the oxygen catastrophe. The carbon cycle takes that oxygen that was produced and recombines it with carbon to release energy, which then ends up getting split up again. The oxygen released is part of that cycle. It was part of the sugars produced, and it remains in that cycle. The carbon cycle has functioned for billions of years because it is cyclical -- the oxygen is released, consumed and returned to CO2, then released again.

As I said, photosynthesis does convert water and CO2 into sugars and O2, but the O2 is tied to the carbon cycle, and that same carbon cycle can use up the O2 just as quickly. We've actually seen that during the period where humans have been using lots of old sugars from fossil fuels, and the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere has dropped slightly (but at least it'll be returned because of the carbon cycle)

Contrasting that with burning hydrogen on its own, the hydrogen combines with atmospheric oxygen, and does not get released directly through any similar cycles. The fact that the carbon cycle releases O2 doesn't change that, because the carbon cycle was what released that O2 in the first place, and if you burn away O2, it doesn't get replaced by the carbon cycle, it just stops being available. It isn't a problem today, but it chips away at the planetary resources without any way to actually replenish them on geological scales.

There's no reason to believe that the carbon cycle would be able to produce enough oxygen to support all life on earth and all combustion and also a magical excess for billions of kilograms of hydrogen soaking up oxygen every year. It doesn't fit, it's not cyclic at all. In fact, we should have way more oxygen on earth in the sense that much more was produced through the process of photosynthesis in that original thick CO2 atmosphere was eaten up by other processes such as rusting iron or burning of combustible minerals

We'd end up in a century or two right back where we are today, stuck requiring massive public works projects to figure out how to release more elemental oxygen in the O2 form before we all suffocate. It's something way scarier than releasing too much carbon into the atmosphere, because at least nature has a way to deal with too much carbon!

It's a cargo cult of education -- People think the piece of paper is a magical spell, when in reality what matters is the level of discipline and skill it takes to get the piece of paper.

This is why you need a masters degree to be a line supervisor at Denny's.

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

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