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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • I would say that based on whatever calculus/evidence they have access to, Canada has decided that the threat of an all-out war, or least Israel carpet bombing Lebanon with munitions the US just sent them is high enough to warrant evacuation. That’s an above-average signal that something bad is about to happen, because it’s a big deal to evacuate all those people. It doesn’t mean something is definitely going to happen.

    That said, bibi needs forever war for the time being because he’s facing jail if he gets punted from his position, and they’ve pummeled Gaza about as much as they can at this point while still pretending that they can end Hamas, so murdering civilians in another country is probably starting to look pretty appetizing to him. They’ll still keep slamming Gaza but he needs something big and existential for his domestic audience to keep them from taking him out.

    So long story short, I’d say the probabilities of something like regional conflict happening have been raising pretty sharply lately. Hopefully the Canadian evac will prove to be alarmist, but our timeline hasn’t exactly been going the way I hope last few years so…



  • Everything about this screams fake. It also all sounds like a horrible idea. They’re basically discussing traumatizing inmates at 10x speed. Given that a lot of criminals come from a background of trauma, I’d wonder here if you’d be doing more harm than good. There’s claims in this article that are absurd, without some form of clarification. What the hell is a “creative scientist” as a title—I’m not familiar with that discipline. Also, let’s uhh say am that all this was real, and possible. This tech would be a net evil in the world. If you can use it to brainwash inmates into cringing when they think about doing crime, you can also use it to torture dissenters into conformists. Given that the tech is already aimed at an element of the state security apparatus, there’s like no chance this wouldn’t get used for much worse purposes. I think they’re also misunderstanding how prison is used in many places. In NA, prison does not seem to be about rehabilitation, but just punishment and getting free labor.






  • Dude I don’t think even the democrats would float this sort of plan. It’s one of those weird moments between planning the three stooges reich where he just glomms onto some idea that is actually super progressive without knowing it. Ultimately trump is apolitical personally I think—he acts based on narcissistic self interest, which is why it’s possible for weird shit like this to happen. He also just takes notes from whatever whackos are around that day, so you can be sure that any actual good or progressive ideas will get removed from the platform by one of the far right grifters he has in perpetual orbit, but still amusing to see.

    The democrats would say they wanted to do this, then complain they’re not allowed to, and then produce a plan that provides green cards to foreign grads if they agree to live in an underserved neighborhood for 5 years, have a specific blood type, and complete a post-secondary degree within 5 years with the intention of working in green energy development after. Like some caveated-to-hell means tested crap that lets them say they tried, while effectively making it near-impossible.




  • My experience mirrors yours. Back in the day I used to have to do clean installs all the time, but I haven’t for years now, and I’ve swapped lots of hardware and disks, etc. it’s fairly problem free for the most part, except for the creeping sense of doom I feel with each new piece of adware they cram into the user interface. I am definitely planning on switching to Linux, I have an Ubuntu server and have installed a flash drive version of arch on my laptop before, but I just haven’t hit a wall yet that makes all the work of completely switching necessary yet.





  • Hotspur@lemmy.mltoAnticonsumption@slrpnk.netreinventing cable
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    2 months ago

    This is absolutely true. But Uber and lime etc also directly undermine useful mass transit. Over the years I’ve found myself in situations where I’ve gone to a place thinking that I will easily be able to get back via Uber, and then found that there are no drivers, or no drivers that want my fare for the return trip. So far after some time I’ve been able to finally find someone, but it’s become more frequent and I’ve been concerned I wouldn’t be able to get home.

    A more amusing anecdote: my brother was in a Midwestern small city for a conference. His flight out was at 8am, airport serving the town was about 20mins away by car. He woke up and tried to get an Uber, Lyft. No dice, no one out driving. Tried calling the one remaining cab company, but they didn’t have any drivers out. There was no airport shuttle, or mass transit. Freaking out a bit, he finally spotted one of those electric scooters, and sighing, he signed it out. He was dressed in his conference gear, and had his bag. The city was very hilly, and he found that with the extra weight of the bag, the scooter didn’t have the power to get up hills, so he had to kick push to augment it. An hour later he gets to the airport, soaked in sweat, to see multiple scooters discarded along the road, others had clearly used the same method recently. The cost for the scooter was close to 40 bucks, 2.5 times his Uber fare in from the airport. Anyhow, an isolated incident, but sort of funny depiction of how the transit landscape has degraded a bit over time, and how Uber etc is not as instant and reliable as it sells itself to be.




  • I can’t find the specific article, but it was basically arguing that prions are an unavoidable existential crisis that will eventually kill everything on the planet. The basis was the fact that they are virtually indestructible, can lie latent in our environment indefinitely and basically just always make more of themselves.

    Mind you, the time frame for this particular apocalypse would be pretty big. It was still an eerie thought though, just like this inexorable accumulation of alien/bizarro world proteins that would eventually kill/convert everything. I guess it’s kinda like the grey goo planet theory.

    Anyway, we’ll almost certainly kill ourselves via climate change or massive war first, so no need to worry too much about prions.