my favorite is the 100% fake EV manual transmission patents. They’re afraid to add any new input methods. Like CVT cars should have a way to set the desired RPM so you can choose how much power is ready to go

If you’re driving a shitbox already I will strenuously defend the value of having it be manual. My starter died Monday in the middle of a road trip to see the eclipse and I just bump started it until I got back home. Unfortunately they are no longer cheaper to maintain than autos since replacing the clutch is usually an absurd amount of labor even if parts are cheaper.

But it’s not hard to learn. A 15-speed bicycle is more confusing. Anyone can buy a stick shift and be getting themselves around within a couple weeks, the only reason Americans don’t know how is most of the cars are automatic.

HUH

we need a cultural revolution

Not viable. It’s a vulgar materialist misunderstanding of Marxism. Class consciousness and material conditions tend to develop in concert, i.e. dialectically, but class consciousness doesn’t automatically develop in response to changing material conditions. Otherwise we could sit back and let the revolution plan itself. I think socialists should lead struggles, tailored to the current material conditions, for things that will help the working class in the short-term while also making the possibility of a better, socialist, world feel more realistic in order to build class consciousness. If we’re leading efforts to make things worse for working people, why the hell would working people become socialists?

Besides, it’s not clear that the left has the power to “do” accelerationism anyway. Vote for trump? What would it matter, there’s probably a thousand active socialists tops in each major city.

2050 will be Year of the Linux Desktop

For four years the people who voted for Joe Biden have seen him “call for” universal healthcare, a (conditional) ceasefire, etc. You’re the fucking president, do something about it! He is going to lose.

oh shit if it’s a recurring abscess get that drained ASAP. good luck

Chicago has had one of these for years. NYC #2 as usual

hold on how are you harvesting this waste heat, do you have these prisoners strapped to Peltier pumps or what?

the next step in capitalist dystopia: riding a generator stationary bike while you are making license plates or something with your upper half

read them vegancirclejerk every night and your child will get bullying superpowers. If this person is raising their kids Catholic aren’t they also making meatless meals on Friday?

There’s no moral argument to raise kids with omni Western pattern diet instead of any other diet, it just has to be healthy and tasty. You can’t practically prevent them from eating animals outside the home, but you can make it clear to them why they shouldn’t and that you’ll be disappointed if they do, like how you’ll tell them not to do drugs or steal cars.

If they really cared about the human rights they purport to be standing up for in Palestine, they wouldn’t be flogging and stoning Yemenis to death.

30k dead Palestinians 11 dead Yemenis? tough contest

(But yeah critical support)

Recurring infection might be from physical but stable cause, e.g pericoronitis from partially erupted wisdom tooth. So infections can be cleared up with antibiotics and don’t progress if they’re stopped in time. In general yeah, infections in your head are not good and you’re rolling the dice.

What does it mean to “believe” in something you can’t observe or understand? There’s a sort of frontier where you make observations, form and test theories, and grow to understand the observations. We agree that crank theories, without evidence and unable to prove anything, are indistinguishable from the supernatural. So what good does it do us to consider them? We should explore things within the frontier - does infrasound cause ghost sightings? if so, does that summon ghosts or change the brain? - on a materialist basis, like some of the fringe scientists are trying to do. Invisible teapots that humans will be able to see in 3000 years should be dismissed as idealism.

$1200 is in the insurance range! I bought dental insurance for wisdom teeth extraction (surgical). $60/m, off the top of my head it will pay out 70% of the operation up to $2.5k a year. The yearly maximums don’t go much higher than that. Extractions will still cost me a couple hundred bucks but much less than sticker price. But to prevent people gaming the system like I am and buying insurance only after they develop problems, they have a waiting period of 6 months before you can use it. You should see if the dental school accepts insurance and start shopping for plans.

Materialism means we believe in a world that exists independent of our observations. This external world is in dialogue with people. There is not some kind of third thing that’s not in the world, not in the people, and fundamentally unobservable/unknowable, like God or souls or woo in general. (See Engels on agnosticism in Socialism Scientific & Utopian.) Either these things are real material phenomena, in which case we can use science to analyze ghosts or whatever, or they’re not. There is room in a materialist worldview for like, cryptids, but most “parapsychology” is stuff that requires discarding huge chunks of knowledge. For instance premonitions violate causality. If you give that up, what’s left to be materialist about?

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no

i feel like this would be solved without sex work with better coordination mechanisms and destruction of patriarchy. There’s few people inexperienced/annoying/unattractive enough that you couldn’t find some other inexperienced/annoying/unattractive person to pair off with. Right now they don’t because

1. sucks to use an app mostly full of hot people that don’t like you, so they leave
2. objectification of women means men “get” something from sex; sex for pleasure is a labor parallel to sex for reproduction. Hence highly-gendered sex work for hundreds of years
3. there are more male “bad partners” than female because of socialization under patricentricity. this means no-strings sex is dangerous for women

So sexless men search and find nothing (or resort to economic coercion) and sexless women don’t search. We see healthier sex “economies” under socialism, e.g. GDR. I think that when people can fuck without getting stalked or hurt they will do so freely.

hey sorry if this is too prying, but have you tried to look for short-term things? I feel like (shitty) hookups are considerably easier to find than actual partners, and you might feel better if you’re not touch starved