Maybe it was just because of the situation, but I briefly meet him about 15 years ago and he was perfectly pleasant. But it is different meeting someone one off and working with them. He was fairly old even then and I am still amazed he is with us.

That film is 25 years old! Time slowly steps along unabated.

I hope Beef prices go to $1000 a pound so that we can end that horror show of torture on cows and the planet. Wendys be damned!

I would only argue that it was Biden fault because he didn’t step aside earlier. Only giving Harris 2 months run up wasn’t enough to get it across the line.

Nothing worse than a confident fool.

You can build and run data centers to be quiet and not guzzle water, it is just cheaper up front for them to do these quick and dirty data centers because they don’t give a damn.

“Never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel”

I just wonder how the voters feel about this. I couldn’t imagine voting for someone only to have them immediately skip the country because they lost. What a great show of strength and power. 🙄

I do realize I may be allocating too much introspection to the majority of voters of Bolsonaro.

As someone that pays for premium, my subscription is very very VERY vaguely tenable at best.

It is worth the price of access but just barely, it is a case of it the quality dips any further or the price increases even slightly then I will be back to the old path.

Alas, with Google intent on closing the side loading gap on android, things like Newpipe are going to go the way of the Dodo.

It is amazing how long Shatner has kept going. But that is the power of ‘Denny Crane!’ ;)

Pretty much. Most have an image of how they wish to go, peacefully in their sleep is a good one. But to have that combination is to be in such a dreadful state. Alas, it is not of our choosing at the end of it all.

Thank you! Said it better than I could.

There is the argument of the ‘bend not break’ model which I think is admirable. It is the path we should take but are unlikely to do so. The pessimistic take is that we don’t avoid the problem, we have to endure through it. Basically the entire capital enterprise crumbles under its own weigh as the resources to maintain it diminish. This is a rough path down but there is a bright side. We won’t be extinguished but we shall be greatly diminished. The meek shall inherit the earth.

Think of the Lodgepole pine cones. They are the seed of the tree that have sap so dense that you cannot break into them. And yet when the forest fire comes through, the heat of the destruction melts the sap and they are free to seed. I am starting to feel the is the path through. You cannot prevent the disaster but you can provide a parachute on the way down so that something can be rebuilt on the other side.

The stories of the greedy are going to be the myth of the future and they will not be kind to the people of our times.

This is why I talk about degrowth, I don’t believe we will do it by choice but by force. But it is best that we have a structure in place for the worst of the fall.

Pretty much. They already had this tendency, it is just accelerating and now the technology has kicked it into turbo.

I do genuinely think that short from content has done far more damage to society than even the more pessimistic people give it. It is the final form of ‘The medium is the message’, the medium is saying that everything should be brief and surface level at best.

Don’t get me wrong there is a skill to brevity, especially in writing. Some books could be a fifth the length and they would only benefit form that. But short form video ain’t it this. Peoples attention spans are simply gone, I do not know if they can ever be brought back.

Is this what they mean by ‘Line must go up’? 😕

In the Confucian philosophy of Li, it is loosely translated to ‘right’ or ‘equity’. It is considered that those that enforce laws but are willing to bend them based on what seems right on ethical and virtuous means, those are people that have good Li. To know that while the laws are written in ink and stone, they do not have to be enforced in the same manner.

Don’t forget ethics. Legal is codified authority, moral is a social construct as defined by doctrine, ethics is what one holds dear internally beyond those two. Thus ethics differs between all people.

I argue that we should abolish copyright. However to be a bit more pragmatic, if we were to keep copyright, it should be for 10 years from publication. You can apply to have it extended another 10 years but with a fee attached to approve it per work. This means people can still have some control of the work for a decade after completion and if it is still worth while, they can get another decade. But after that, it is public domain.

“It’s legal” is a great example of ‘Thought-stoppers’. Little phrases that people use so that they do not have to do the mental work of thinking of the larger systemic issue. “They will think of something” is a great one when it comes to climate blow back and technological issues.

But all thought stoppers are like ignorance, ignorance is bliss but the consequences are dyer. So when people tend to go to reductionist thinking on complex issues, you tend to get a form of conformity that can be manipulated. Not consistently but enough to cause large power structures. Alas, for every complex issue there is a solution that is simple, easy and wrong.