sj_zero

https://social.fbxl.net/users/sj_zero

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

Also Author of Future Sepsis (Also available on Amazon!)

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...

Public Key

npub1z6s842evxljv9upzs0y0468xaq8jzxqd0cp9487ny92l5ezmgtms86lj4z

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqspdgr64vkr0exz7q3g8j86arnwsreprqxhuqj6nlfjz406v3d59acpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsv0pc83

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1z6s842evxljv9upzs0y0468xaq8jzxqd0cp9487ny92l5ezmgtms86lj4z

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Last Notes

2026-09-06 12:29:36 UTC

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There's a YouTube channel called Martin DeCoder who does analysis of the way people talk particularly with respect to lying, and it's really interesting that even people who have done horrible things and pretend like it doesn't bother them have to go through all kinds of gymnastics when they are trying to lie about it. They distance themselves from their actions, they change the person they're talking about so instead of saying "I thought this" they go "wouldn't you think this", and so on..

2026-08-28 19:26:52 UTC

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Cancer is incredibly difficult to cure because cancer cells are your cells with one difference: they don't stop reproducing. Chemo treatment tends to be brutal because you kill your entire body and the cancer dies a little faster. Radiotherapy or surgery cuts out or kills part of your body and all that entails.
So I can see an mrna vaccine having high mortality, you're vaccinating against what are very close to your normal healthy cells.

2026-08-25 21:10:07 UTC

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I've seen how some local chapters of the international brotherhood of electrical workers runs, and it's basically an electrical staffing agency. Ends up being win/win, sparkies can get work, and construction companies can pull from a known trustworthy labor pool. The workers have high standards and pride in their work too, since it reflects on themselves and their union.
Under liberal capitalism, other systems can exist, since people can choose how to use their own property. In the early United States, a lot of communities experimented with communes or other forms of organization, and they could because as long as it was your property you could use it how you pleased. There's a pretty interesting set of histories within the US talking about stuff like that.

2026-08-25 13:16:33 UTC

If you think about it with respect to the left's focus on Trump, it's a magic trick.
We're living in an increasingly authoritarian world, and there's no doubt about that. Around 19 states have introduced or advanced measures that push age verification down into the device, app store, or operating system itself.
And before someone says, "They're not making you scan your ID," that's missing the point. Right now, some of these systems can work by asking for your age or date of birth. But if clicking "Yes, I'm over 18" is good enough, then the whole exercise is pointless. The moment they decide they actually need to verify your age, something has to vouch for you. Maybe that's government ID. Maybe it's a credit card, a digital identity wallet, facial analysis, or some other biometric check.
Whatever form it takes, we've gone from "get on the Internet" to "prove something about yourself to the machine before you're allowed through."
And age is only the first thing that infrastructure can be used to check.
In the famous novel 1984, one of the purposes of the "Two Minutes Hate" was to focus the rage about living under an authoritarian regime towards Goldstein. However, it wasn't Goldstein single-handedly running the Ministry of Truth, cutting people's chocolate rations, or giving the good cigarettes to the Party members.
California has already passed a law requiring operating systems to provide age signals. Colorado has passed a similar law, and New York is considering device-level age assurance.
California doesn't generally require you to show ID at the polls, but we're heading towards a system where you'll eventually have to show ID just to comment on a story on Facebook.
And none of that is because of Trump.
But like a good magician, they've got one hand distracting you while doing the actual trick with the other.
First you build the system that lets the computer decide what category of person you are. Then you decide that self-reporting isn't good enough, so you need real verification. Then, once the infrastructure exists, you start deciding what else people need to prove before they're allowed to do things online.
At the same time, governments are increasingly talking about "misinformation," "disinformation," and even "malinformation," which can include information that is true but supposedly presented in a harmful context.
Who gets to decide what falls into those categories?
And what happens when the system that knows who you are meets the system that decides what you're allowed to say, see, or access?
Pay no attention to your life slowly being squeezed until you can't fart without a biological scan confirming you weren't thinking bad thoughts while doing so.
Pay attention to the bad man.
Oh, isn't he bad? He's so bad!
No! Don't pay any attention to what we're doing.
Who cares that we're building the infrastructure to gate more and more of what you do online? Doesn't matter!
Who cares that eventually "just tell us your birthday" has to become "prove it"? Doesn't matter!
Who cares that you're losing pseudonymity? Doesn't matter!
Who cares that governments are increasingly interested in deciding what information is acceptable, harmful, misleading, or dangerous? Doesn't matter!
Who cares that bit by bit you're losing fundamental freedoms you grew up with?
Pay attention to the orange man with the little hands because that's where you need to look or the trick doesn't work!

2026-08-21 11:37:22 UTC

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Lol you can't even be mad.

2026-08-20 04:00:00 UTC

A youtube channel I like just did the whole "I'm not quitting youtube, I'll just be doing more streaming and not edited videos!" thing.
Man, I get it, I don't do edited youtube videos or streams first because I'm not talented or funny but also because it would be a huge amount of effort. But these days when someone goes "I'm going to focus on streaming and not doing edited videos anymore because it's so much work" I just go "I wish you success" and unsub. There's 24 hours in a day, and I've only seen a small number of people whose streaming work makes it ok they aren't making edited content, and often people who make great streaming content and people who make great edited content aren't in the same venn diagram.

2026-08-18 13:03:58 UTC

One of the problems with "getting money out of politics" is that money is only one form of power, and it is the one that is easiest to measure directly and objectively.
So you get rid of the money.
Alright, so a girl shows up in Senator Phil McCracken's room every night. Nobody says she's there on behalf of anyone. Nobody says there is a deal. Nobody even says there is anything unusual going on. Suddenly, the toilet industry gets huge concessions.
"Oh, but he would have to report that."
Report what? A girl showing up at his room? There is no code of ethics under which you have to report every time you encounter a girl unless it is somehow connected to your official duties, and we just established that everyone involved says it isn't.
This is the modernist problem in miniature. You focus on money because money is countable, measurable, objective, and therefore controllable. But eliminate the measurable form of power and you have not necessarily eliminated power. You may have just pushed it into favors, access, sex, status, jobs, prestige, protection, relationships, and other things that are subjective, indirect, and extremely difficult to measure.
Doesn't mean you can't try to reduce corruption, it just means you're going to need to stop thinking like that modernist I'm criticizing to accomplish it.
And this is also why the one world government a lot of people think they want makes me nervous. They think it'll improve things, maybe because they imagine such a government doing what they want it to do. But what if you get your one world government and it becomes the one world empire under Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin?
The more power you put in one place, the more valuable it becomes to corrupt even a tiny piece of it. A government with authority over the entire world would control decisions affecting tens of trillions of dollars in economic activity. Capture a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of those decisions and you can make a fortune, potentially over and over again. And this is hardly a problem unique to capitalism: historically, wherever governments have concentrated enough power, people close to that power have found ways to turn access, favor, office, protection, and privilege into wealth.
Imperial China provides an old example of the same phenomenon. Its political culture often treated merchants as socially inferior to scholar-officials, but that did not make the competition for wealth and power disappear. It redirected ambition toward the bureaucracy. Wealthy families poured resources into educating their sons for the imperial examinations, because entry into the governing class brought status, influence, and opportunities that mere commercial success could not. The market for power had not disappeared; people had simply learned to buy into it with education, connections, and years of preparation instead of treating private enterprise as the only route upward.
Banning the obvious ways of buying influence does not remove the incentive to buy influence. It just changes what people use to pay.

2026-08-17 11:15:01 UTC

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The end of the movie would be a lot different if our dominant idiocracy were what took over.
The crops would start growing and they'd go "Correlation does not imply causation! You don't have any peer reviewed studies!" and they'd lop off his head.

2026-08-17 04:17:01 UTC

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"All cops are bastards! Abolish the police! Arrest our political enemies!"

2026-08-13 01:15:00 UTC

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Ironically, 100 trillion dollar bills were some of the best currencies going -- they're worth near 200 bucks for a good example today.

2026-08-10 04:25:33 UTC

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You're probably right, and my phrasing is somewhat "fighting the last war" in terms of framing. This society lost the fight, the selfishness won, and everyone's worried about getting what they're owed instead of contributing to something greater than themselves.

2026-08-08 14:55:58 UTC

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I guess in a superpositional sense, I'm looking at it as two questions: what is owed to me, and what do I owe to others?
And I tend to think that the healthiest way to look at things is that nobody owes you anything, whereas you have a duty to yourself, immediate family, extended family, community, region, or Nation. Of course you still want to carefully choose your allegiances so that your contributions are positive in the world, but being thankful for everything that you get and giving whatever you can without being forced to by a tyranny is ultimately quite healthy.
I really need to get my next book out, it's basically in the can just needs one final review.

2026-08-07 19:37:57 UTC

@npub1vlu…xzzu I like what you're saying in this post, but I feel like the word "individualist" carries two almost opposite definitions. In my view you can be an individualist in that you as an individual are the most important unit in the world and therefore the world has a duty to cater to you as an individual (what you seem to be describing here), or individualism as in considering yourself to be the one who is ultimately responsible for your own actions, behavior and outcomes and the world doesn't owe you or anyone else shit. The latter is an antidote to the former, and it's important to recognize the former as a vice even if the latter can be a virtue. You could almost call the former egoism (which you sort of do in the article

2026-08-07 09:26:59 UTC

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Imagine getting the death penalty for watching something like The Marvels or Kurtzman Trek.
Not worth it.

2026-08-05 14:06:50 UTC

Someone claimed "There is no special "Marxist" definition of capitalism"
No, there absolutely is a separate definition of capitalism for communists.
"Capitalism is when bad thing", or more accurately, "Capitalism is the capitalist economic system, every system surrounding it, and any negative consequences of those systems"
See, the normal definition is where capital is primarily owned and controlled by the private sector, free competition, and open markets, rather than the government. In it, people are free to sell their labor for wages to whoever they decide to rather than being directed by central planners, and prices are set by markets and negotiation, not by the state. But most people don't see that as a major problem -- When someone hires someone to do their lawn, or buys groceries with money they earned, or when they can save up for something they want, or if they save money and take a risk starting a new business or building a new invention hoping to make it big, that's considered at worst neutral. It's important to understand that pure capitalism really doesn't exist anywhere, so everywhere is a spectrum -- The United States is more capitalist than the Soviet Union was, but is considerably less capitalist than it was in the late 1800s when the state made up a single digit percentage of GDP.
Some examples of things that aren't inherently capitalist which commies like to blame on capitalism:
-State corruption
-Regulatory capture
-Corporate welfare and bailouts
-State-created monopolies
-Inflation caused by central banks
-Police brutality and prison abuse
-War and imperialism
-Human Greed
-Hierarchy
-Scarcity
-Pollution (Ask Kazakhstan how ecologically friendly the Soviet Union was to their region)
-Cronyism
-Bureaucratic alienation
-Consumer stupidity or status competition
-Poor conditions for the common man caused by state policy
-Unequal political power
Most of these things are either inherent to the nature of reality, or human nature, or the product of the state, not inherent to capitalism, not unique to capitalism, or not generated by capitalism alone. Therefore, eliminating capitalism will never fully eliminate these things. Things like human nature or the laws of conservation of mass or energy or finite linear time will always exist driving scarcity. A group of chickens with no concept of trade whatsoever will establish hierarchies and use violence to that end. Most of human history had limited markets and very powerful states that still had greed, pollution, cronyism, and corruption.
In a sense, it's like the counterpoint to the old phrase "Nobody got fired for choosing IBM" -- if back then you stuck your neck out and chose something other than IBM, you'd be blamed for every problem that occurred because you didn't choose IBM, even if those problems weren't unique to the system you chose and perhaps would have existed if you chose IBM anyway. In the same way, under capitalism, every problem ends up blamed on capitalism, even things that would exist under virtually any other system because of human nature and the laws of physics.
That broader definition has two effects. First, it allows problems rooted in scarcity, human nature, state power, political corruption and large-scale organization to be attributed to capitalism merely because they occur within a capitalist society. Second, it allows the abolition of capitalism to be presented as a cure for the entire bundle. If "capitalism" is defined broadly enough to include nearly every harmful feature of modern life, then eliminating it would indeed sound utopian. But eliminating private ownership, open markets and negotiated exchange would not eliminate scarcity, ambition, hierarchy, corruption, coercion or political favoritism. It would merely change the institutions through which those problems appear.
I was thinking about Ivan the Terrible. His reign was not capitalist, but he had entire cities of his own people sacked. Why? Because he was terrified of losing power, or more accurately, of being assassinated by people. Such people won't go away under a socialist government, they'll be given more power under socialism than under a more laisse faire government under capitalism. Nominally communist countries right now conduct purges in power games where individuals or groups of individuals are murdered to help the powerful get more powerful. Having another group of elites in the market players won't change that. Ironically, having competition between the groups of elites may (but also may not -- sometimes the common man is caught in the crossfire, or is divvied up as a resource to be consumed, regardless of who those elites are)
Related to my soon to be published next book, it is a modernist conception that you can describe the entire world through exactly one viewpoint that can place everything into one system. We do need the government, and we do need God, and we do need markets, and we do need families, and we do need communities, and we do need private societies, and probably a lot more things. Only in a world where many things can exist and bump against each other can the individual hope to have some liberty to pursue happiness.

2026-08-04 14:49:44 UTC

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I don't know why but suddenly I feel like diversity is my strength...

2026-07-24 14:00:33 UTC

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"We support the working class"
"hi"
"Ew yuck the working class"

2026-07-19 13:02:40 UTC

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The other scary thing is that just because you can afford a house doesn't mean you can afford a house.
I had to replace a water line this year, dug up the entire front yard. I live under my means so I was able to swing it even though it hurts like hell. How many people can technically afford the house but if anything goes wrong with it they just have to jump in a river?

2026-07-15 11:07:22 UTC

Aha, the joke is on you! You see, I have spent many years ingesting lead paint chips and asbestos to build up my resistance to such poisons! I'm effectively immune to both now!

2026-07-04 15:18:54 UTC

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It's my fork of rebased and soapbox. It's focused on stability and compatibility, expanding on a lot of work I did on lotide to improve compatibility there. I've also been focusing a lot on making sure all the pleroma upstream work makes it back, as well as great ideas from other platforms like misskey or mastodon proper.
One of the new features I added was groups support, with a focus on lotide, lemmy, mbin, and piefed, but we've done some friendly testing on many groups platforms including things like peertube. The messages you saw were me finally doing testing across the Internet between different platforms -- lotide, lemmy at hilariouschaos, and here.
I've followed and unfollowed different communities on a lot of group or feed platforms without issues, sent likes or removed likes, and posted comments, but this is the first time I've had those different platforms follow a group hosted on fbxl social, and so there was a lot of noise because lemmy and lotide expect much different things than pleroma/rebased initially provided. It's all activitypub, but the ways it's used are very different between the different platforms, so you have to watch your logs and figure out why something didn't federate.

2026-07-02 15:37:36 UTC

Ackshually.

2026-07-01 13:44:08 UTC

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Do these websites not have editors? Because it seems obvious standing up becomes easier if you lose some weight.

2026-06-30 12:24:34 UTC

Android does something pretty interesting to deal with native code and the various platforms it's supported on: It carries everything.
I originally set up freebasic's android target to just focus on arm64 because that's what most new devices are, but my little guy loved a little kinematics demo I put together and he wanted to play it a lot, so I put it on a little hacked kindle I had, but it had an arm7 cpu. The correct solution ended up being putting the arm64, arm7, and x86_64 binaries in the same apk, and now the game plays (pretty slowly) on that tablet that is ancient now and was already really slow the day it was released.

2026-06-29 12:34:04 UTC

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Even following their logic, there's a bunch of laws that don't apply to you. You're not a murderer or a thief or a fraudster either.
I've never been pulled over for speeding because I don't speed.
If you don't want to get hit by law enforcement, don't break the law. It isn't Trump's law by which they are being deported, after all. It's longstanding American law.

2026-06-25 03:16:27 UTC

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"I will never go on a hot air balloon again!"
Fact check: True ✅

2026-06-25 01:06:19 UTC

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After 10 years of every news outlet being pretending the world ended because a couple elections went the wrong way, it probably looks like that to people who just feel like that was normal.
Honestly, I'm happy to see a bit of balance returning. I don't want the pendulum to swing the other way in the same way, I think it'd be exhausting.

2026-06-23 12:18:01 UTC

[Admin mode] We're mostly up today, but behind the scenes we're hacking away at the logs, so we might slip up and down a bit, but it's all in the name of overall future stability.

2026-06-22 15:37:43 UTC

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Taser! Taser! Taser!

2026-06-22 05:32:54 UTC

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These guys find out nature exists outside and they lose their minds!
"What do you mean a giant standing pool of water grows algae? We need a commission to investigate this!"

2026-06-17 00:53:59 UTC

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bro you gotta get on an instance that lets you post longer.

2026-06-07 18:30:42 UTC

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I've added a lot, but the main ones are related to compatibility. I basically went out and tried to find anything that remotely supports groups, and also user workflows.
The frontpage is currently dominated by a piefed history community, and I've successfully followed and heard from kbin, mbin, peertube, and a bunch of others including things like hubzilla, fedigroups, discourse, and nodeBB.
The community tab is totally revamped. Before it'd show whatever users were subscribed to, now we actively seek out the different communities, find out if they are active, find out if our server is federated with them, because I figured it wouldn't be easy to find all the different communities we support in one place anywhere else.

2026-06-06 22:14:49 UTC

@npub19gv…x4p4 You might want to take a look at what lotide.fbxl.net looks like these days. I've been doing some (very retarded and thus very on-brand for me) work on lotide for the last while, and my instance presently does some really neat things.

2026-04-07 04:24:46 UTC

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3e5v3zQlpI
relevant

2026-04-07 04:11:05 UTC

I've got that former chinesium android set top box I converted to linux earning its keep today -- It thought it was going to maybe do some light streaming, and I've got it running an entire platform's compile farm. Thing barely has a heat sink.

2026-04-06 12:00:44 UTC

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And?
Do we stop enforcing just this law against spouses of government employees, or should we stop enforcing all laws against them, up to and including things like laws against murder?
Just so we have an understanding of what is implied by this story.

2026-03-15 21:51:50 UTC

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It won't be a VPN ban, because of VPN ban would immediately impact millions of people in the laptop classes which includes millions of people who work for the government.
It'll be a ban on using VPNs for unapproved purposes.
Which in some ways is much worse because it's like a digital feudalism.

2026-03-09 15:33:28 UTC

Jean Baudrillard's simulations and simulacra describe how you start with reality, and reality is then simulated and eventually the simulation is simulated to create a simulacrum, and the original reality may in fact cease to exist. This toy really reminds me of that. There was once a thing as a rotary phone. The rotary phone was simulated in a children's toy. Then the children's toy itself is simulated in another children's toy, and meanwhile rotary phones have disappeared, and in an example of hyperreality, the reference to reality has disappeared entirely and the toy which is the simulation becomes an icon which is represented separately from its original context.
https://social.fbxl.net/media/f021c6cd2104e9e639d88b0600934b9154ff05524d318ebeb810d52a11caf1d4.jpg

2026-03-03 13:21:58 UTC

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But then you'd need a computer and an internet connection, and where is anyone gonna find that?

2026-02-20 20:18:39 UTC

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Turns out people die in the winter in New York?
I'm shocked. Shocked!

2026-02-19 23:27:16 UTC

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well, yeah.

2026-02-19 00:20:35 UTC

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Our prime minster waggled his finger at Trump for the loss of the "rules based global order" when his predecessor of the same party illegally siezed bank accounts of peaceful protesters. Oh, there are rules? Doesn't seem like it.

2026-02-18 23:54:41 UTC

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As a foreigner, I endorse this message.
It'd be nice if some of these world leaders would deal with the problems in their own countries rather than talking about what they would do if they were the president of the United States of America, cuz they're never going to be that.

2026-02-07 21:37:53 UTC

I spent some time creating a server library and updating my client library for a certain protocol in FreeBASIC.
I really wanted to set it up so it's very simple and straightforward, but you could also use it for more if you wanted to.
One thing i did which is probably normal process for software developers but I'm just a retard from the sticks is I created a validation file that starts a server and a client and tests both end to end by testing each routine against itself and then also testing failure scenarios to prove it fails successfully.
Sped up development a lot, since I could use the client to prove the server and the server to prove the client and I could develop both at once to meet in the middle in the validation program.
Obviously I had to test against a reference implementation (and did), but it's like going through your own books before an audit -- It was easy to find problems before they became an issue I had to troubleshoot against a server or client I didn't write.

2026-02-04 19:14:38 UTC

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Not the turtle flu! I hear it can break through very powerful defenses!

2026-01-27 22:49:17 UTC

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It took me uncomfortably long to realize you were actually talking about horses.
I thought I'd share because I think that's kind of amusing.

2026-01-26 05:56:06 UTC

Imagine for a second, asking Google Gemini what is 1+1. You light up internet architecture spanning thousands of miles to a data center where you activate hundreds of gigabytes of memory, activate multiple top end GPUs, utilize non trivial pumping and water taken from a nearby river, and it responds back
"Hi, I'm Gemini, the helpful AI assistant. I'm afraid I don't know how to do that yet."

2026-01-19 12:41:34 UTC

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Trump did the same sort of stuff to canada, and we did the same sort of retarded mean girls bullshit. It didn't work, because it turns out we need them more than they need us.
If Europe broke with the US, first thing they'd have to negotiate is Ukraine's surrender.
I very much doubt that there will be a hostile takeover in the sense of troops on the ground, but in the New York businessman sense of a hostile takeover, I can absolutely see it happening. He doesn't need to put a single soldier in harms way, just play hardball and make them an offer they can't refuse.
Now will he successfully do that? No clue.

2026-01-18 15:39:26 UTC

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I think the most interesting thing is realizing what the Pharisees are intended to represent. Their greatest sin is mindless adherence to the rules without proper concern for what is just, or what is true.
There's obviously direct parallels with today. A lot of people are so focused on following arbitrary rules that they don't care about the justice or truth of their actions, only that they're following the rules.
And of course some people misread that criticism and assume that it means we never have to follow the rules, but the reality is of course we need to follow rules, but we also need to use our brains to make sure that the application of the rules is both just and true.

2026-01-18 15:11:39 UTC

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It's true. Imagine an America where I'm a citizen.

2026-01-15 23:23:59 UTC

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People who have to make stuff on their own and convince someone else to buy it know that you really have to think about your audience, or at least try to make something you think people would want to buy.
Most of these idiots grew up thinking that wet roads cause rain, so the only reason big companies had stuff that was so popular is that they have lots of money for advertising, so if they get into the big companies they can make whatever they want and the big companies can advertise it and everyone will have to watch whatever dreck they puke up.

2026-01-15 23:09:40 UTC

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The Democrats lost the last civil war, why are they trying to start another one?

2026-01-15 10:48:29 UTC

LLMs can be clever at times, but anyone who has ever tried to use one to solve a hard problem and gotten "This proves it. We're on the right track" for a few hours where it is clearly not on the right track knows agentic AI isn't necessarily such a good idea.

2026-01-15 03:09:26 UTC

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Satan isn't clever or evil enough to come up with something as horrible as online dating.

2026-01-15 01:47:07 UTC

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Honestly, every year that this doesn't get done is another year you know that the government doesn't do anything good for anyone.

2026-01-13 14:04:39 UTC

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That's poor logic, since it could be applied directly to bikes and cars. "The roads are for cars, not for riding a bike. Yes a crash at 50kph night not sound like too much but it can still be deadly if the cyclist is hit wrong."
If 25kph is too high, then make the speed limit on bikes slower, and cyclists must dismount on busy sidewalks. They separate pedestrians and motor vehicles for a reason, and they reason applies equally to bicycles.

2026-01-13 13:23:56 UTC

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I didn't get my license until I was in my mid-20s, and so I have a lot of sympathy for cyclists.
But man, I don't care which vehicle you're in, nobody likes the two vehicle types sharing the road. Cars and bikes are different things. Even Cars and motorcyles are different things, but at least a motorcycle can usually out-accelerate a car.
I'd prefer cyclists be allowed to stay on the sidewalk as long as they're not going excessively fast and not running into anyone.

2026-01-12 21:32:41 UTC

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It's going to be like the Dare program. Within three generations they're going to legalize the rule of thumb.

2026-01-10 15:25:40 UTC

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I might have misunderstood you then, I'm glad I did because I think that it's an important distinction that a lot of people aren't going to make, so I added a couple paragraphs about it to my broader analysis.

2026-01-10 15:15:59 UTC

I generally like spiked online magazine, but I've now seen two articles about the Good shooting calling on the right to be nicer about things and admonishing people criticizing Good for her actions, and I have to disagree.
For those living under a rock, Good was a woman living in minneapolis who was shot by an ICE officer during an arrest. Sources say she was trying to block ICE but allow protesters through, and two ICE agents left their vehicle to arrest Good. Once they reached her vehicle, she put the vehicle into reverse. One officer was at her window, one was in front of the SUV. While the police were telling her to stop the car and get out of the car, her wife yelled "drive baby, drive!" and she slammed the gas. The front wheel spun on the ice. The officer in front of the SUV started bolting to the side to try to get out of the way of the vehicle whose wheels were now spinning. After a few tenths of a second, the tires grabbed and the vehicle began to move forward, and the officer in front of the car began pulling their firearm. As the vehicle began to move, the officer in front changed direction with both feet slipping backwards. The officer is pushed aside, and the officer, while in physical contact with the vehicle, shot the driver first from in front of the car through the windshield, and then through the open window. Good died later at hospital of her injuries. The officer who was struck by the car was hospitalized, though that may have just been prophylactic because of contact with the car.
One thing that isn't important, but could be treated as important by some people, is the race of the driver. Good was a white woman. Statistically speaking, white women are the least likely to be shot by police of any demographic, so if racial impact was doing anything here, it would have likely been in her favor. That could be why she felt empowered to act as she did.
A couple points that matter. First, the question of whether the vehicle "made contact" with the officer isn't really up for debate. The only question there is whether it made offensive contact with the officer. There were two officers, one at the window touching the vehicle, the other clearly the officer was close enough that there was contact, and the officer in front changed direction sideways because he was being pushed by the moving car. They were touching. Second, at least two of the bullets entered the vehicle through the windshield, meaning that at the very least the gun would need to be in front of the windshield.
There is a big difference between Charlie Kirk and Good. Kirk was killed in a premeditated murder caused by political speech. Good was killed because she hit the gas while she was under arrest while police were actively touching her vehicle.
The judgement and catharsis on the right isn't necessarily because Good disagreed with the right (Most people in Minneapolis do according to polls), it's because she did something which was obviously going to result in her getting killed, and then she got killed.
I've been comparing it to behavior around a black bear. If you see a black bear, there are things you do, such as looking big, making lots of noise, keeping your distance, never getting in between a mother and her cubs, and if you treat the dangerous situation with the proper respect you have an overwhelming chance to make it through the interaction in one piece. Likewise, if you are under arrest by law enforcement personnel, there are certain things you do, such as following orders from law enforcement such as "stop the car" or "get out of the car", and not making sudden or aggressive moves. People survive being around bears and police on a daily basis.
Bears have the power to kill you just like a cop, let's not mince words. And sometimes bears abuse that power. Sometimes innocent people get hurt by bears despite doing everything right. All that is true. But if you see a bear and start manhandling her cub and then get hurt, it's hard to blame the bear, even though the bear was the one who took the action.
If someone mistreats a black bear and gets mauled, is it a tragedy? Of course. But it's also an understandable consequence of that person's immediate actions. The same goes for someone who gets shot after gunning the gas in their SUV when federal law enforcement are telling you to stop the car and are already at your car.
One can definitely argue that there's more complexities with cops than with black bears, and that one is a wild animal and the other a human, but at the end of the day, most of those complexities come later. The big question here is: Do you catch a bearclaw or bullet, or not?
I saw the video and heard analysis from multiple lawyers, one of whom was Andrew Branca, whose specialty is this field, and Branca in particular sees it as cut and dry. There was no conflicting directives here, the officer told her to get out of the car, and to stop the car. The cop was already at her window giving these orders, and in spite of that, she first backed up the car in such a way that the vehicle turned towards the officer, then put the vehicle in gear and jammed the gas. This is a textbook way to get shot by law enforcement.
To law enforcement, especially law enforcement during an arrest (which this had become when she was ordered to get out of the car), a vehicle is a lethal weapon and she had just pulled the trigger.
Some people have focused on "the wheels were turned in this direction so he wouldn't have gotten hit", but there's major problems with that. First, the officer wasn't looking at the tires, he was looking at the driver, who had just put the vehicle in drive and hit the gas. Second, the vehicle did in fact contact the officer. If you're any reasonable person, and you see a vehicle pointing generally at you and you hear the engine revving, it is fully reasonable that you would take that as an imminent threat to your life, and in many places in the US, even if you weren't law enforcement you'd be justified in using force to protect your life.
Even objective reasonableness isn't about whether he's right either. It's about whether a reasonable person with the same knowledge could come to the same conclusion. Seeing things from 100 feet away vs. living and breathing the moment, the objective facts can change a lot -- for example, by letting you see where the wheels are turned. The objective conclusions from subjective data can lead one to incorrectly but objectively reasonably believe something that isn't true. In that case, it's tragic, but legally and morally defensible.
In the days since, we have seen situations that prove that the threat isn't academic. In one situation, a man rammed a police car with this SUV, then ran over the police officer after they left their vehicle, and after running them over went back to run over them three more times. That also happened in a very short period of time.
Generally, law enforcement officers are trained to consider vehicles lethal weapons and to treat potential for harm during interactions that way. This means that not only is the individual officer's decision to treat the moving vehicle as a threat internally reasonable, it matches the training such an officer may be given.
Another thing that's important is empathy, in the sense of being able to put yourself in the officer's shoes. The video was taken from 100 feet away, and we're watching it on a computer monitor perhaps thousands of miles away. There's a world of difference between watching a video on your computer or phone and experiencing a vehicle you are presently touching and next to moving when it's supposed to be stopped, and it's your body parts on the line right now if you make the wrong call.
One of the arguments made in the spiked article was "There should not be a death sentence for fleeing from police", and I think that's asking the wrong question. Of course we can all agree that there should not be a death sentence for resisting arrest or for fleeing from police. The question here isn't about that. It's about an officer opening fire on a vehicle that they perceived (rightly or wrongly) as a threat of serious injury or death in that moment.
I'm focusing on the legal argument here, but that's because it's a more straightforward one to make. The moral argument, however, is similar. Both parties have a right to life, but if one party believes the other is threatening that right and is imminently going to attack them with lethal force, typically morality allows someone to fight back with equal force. There's another moral argument to be made that ICE shouldn't have been there at all, but I don't think there's a good moral argument that'll hold up under scrutiny here. Ok, so you don't believe in immigration enforcement so you think federal law enforcement shouldn't be in your city. How about food safety standards as administered by the FDA? How about drug safety at pharmacies? How about abolishing slavery which was once pushed against using similar arguments? I don't think you can make a universal moral argument that federal law enforcement should leave, so that leaves the idea that federal immigration should not be allowed to enter. If you just believe that immigration enforcement shouldn't be allowed, do you believe that so strongly that it overrides one's right to not be killed, or rather, their right to defend themselves if they think they should not be killed?
Of course, one could make the argument that civil disobedience ought not to have a death penalty. However, if one is engaging in civil disobedience such as blocking ICE, then getting peacefully arrested is part of that process. You block ICE, get arrested, and your punishment is accepted as part of demonstrating the unjustness of the law.
Which brings us to another point: The officer doesn't need to be correct that they are at risk of serious injury or death. Let's say the twitter keyboard warriors are correct and there's no way she could possibly have used the SUV as a weapon. It only matters that in the same situation an objective reasonable person would feel like there is a threat, and that subjectively it appered that the officer felt there was a threat. You can't charge people for lack of omniscience. Really, we don't know how else this would have played out even with the third party video footage.
There's a question of proportionality, but if a vehicle is considered a weapon with a threat of lethality or serious injury, then lethal weapons are the proportionate reaction. The officer met potentially lethal force with potentially lethal force. If the officer was able to use less lethal means that would have been preferable, but what is preferable is not the same as what is proportionate.
There's also the question of de-escalation. The event took place over a few seconds. Perhaps there's a method of de-escalation that could have taken place, but in that moment it was also an arrest, whereupon the officers intended to escalate to arrest. If they had reasonable cause to believe a crime they could make an arrest for had been committed, it was a solid arrest. The situation went from warm to hot so quickly I don't see how any reasonable action could be taken. The car was moving, the officer was clinging to the car, the time to take action was that moment.
New footage came out yesterday from the phone, and it showed how quickly the escallation happened. Good and her wife were jeering the officers with smiles on their face but otherwise compliant, and in a fraction of a second, you hear "Drive baby drive!" and the car moving and the officer's phone flying in the air. That detail matters, it shows that there wasn't time for much. In a fraction of a second, everything changed.
Older studies from the 1980s and 1990s found that law enforcement officers who are involved in a shooting in the line of duty tend to leave the field within 5 years at rates between 70-85%, though there isn't great newer data and there have been advances in terms of the counselling available for officers. Regardless, only about a quarter of officers ever need to fire their weapon. Using lethal force is less common than you may be led to believe, and at least in the past it was traumatic for the officer who used it as well.
Tragic or not, her actions are the sort that would put her at risk in most countries on Earth, including countries generally considered to be less prone to use of force such as Canada, The UK, or Japan.
On the other hand, even if it wasn't a solid arrest, even if it was totally wrong and illegal, that still doesn't make fleeing the right choice. Attempts at arrest must be presumed to be legal, and if it turns out it wasn't, then your lawyer can deal with it afterwards and make a 1983 civil rights claim later. Gunning the engine and trying to escape, even if you're in the right, is a situation that can lead to death, and did in this case.
Apolitically, doing what she did is a good way to die. If you're left or right, male or female, latino or white or black, gay or straight, don't mess with cops or you might die, and lots of people do die every year from interactions that go bad. Incidentally, so do many cops.
Beyond even this, calls to "not politicize the death" are going to be futile. The left was always going to politicize a video of an ICE agent shooting a car that goes viral regardless of the facts. One thing the Trump administration has done in his second term that he didn't do in his first is get much more aggressive about maintaining narratives. That does mean that in this situation, which is probably more complicated than either narrative would suggest, they have to call her a terrorist committing sedition and personally attack her. To do otherwise is to let the left entirely define the narrative, and we've seen that such narratives have no basis in reality.
Her death was political. Political second (practical first), but still political. She was actively in the act of opposing ICE agents in the commission of their duties. She was in the vehicle so she could block ICE vehicles travelling down the road. She wasn't an innocent bystander quietly driving home after dropping her kids off from school. She was about to be arrested because of her activities (which were unlawful at that point, arguably), and then she decided to try to gun the engine instead of be arrested. Immediately afterwards, her death was made political by local officials. The mayor of Minneapolis told ICE to "Get the fuck out". Governor Tim Walz threatened to use the national guard to eject ICE (Apparently none of these people have read up on the US civil war and its implications). Establishment news articles all rushed to paint the now dead woman as a martyred saint for the cause of opposing the Trump administration. Latenight comedians have all rushed to politicize the situation.
Given that the press literally took a press conference where Trump said "White supremacists and neo nazis should be condemned completely" and twisted it into him saying the thought they were very fine people, it makes sense they'd be much more aggressive this time around, because losing those narrative skirmishes really reduced what his first administration was able to get done.
"Independent fact checkers" didn't bother fact checking the very fine people fraud until 2024, years and years after it occurred. Joe Biden used the line to run for president, and he won. I'm sure that moments like that showed the Trump administration that they had to get in front of political issues like this, and even if conservatives find it distasteful (because it is), it's politically expedient.
As for others, Laura Loomer called Good a "commie" "Rug muncher", which is in poor taste for certain for someone whose body is barely cold. By way of explanation, she's got an audience because she found a niche who like that sort of behavior.
It's political, and that's a further tragedy for what's certainly a tragedy for her child who as I understand it has lost both birth parents (first the father died, now the mother died). Friends, family, and children are grieving the loss of their friend, wife, mother, sister, child, and all they see online is reminders. I can't imagine how tough it must be.
In an article I read about Good, her former brother in law through her deceased husband said she was a nice and friendly woman, even if they disagreed on things. I could honestly believe it. I can also imagine that she had a lot of scars from what sounds like a life that got tough at times. My wife often wonders what she'd do without me, especially now that we have a kid. It's not something we like to think about, but it is something we have contingency plans in place for. Unfortunately for this young woman, she won't get a chance to build more memories with her child, and she'll be mostly remembered by history as a footnote in an era of political strife.
One more thing I'd like to note before I conclude, is that the questions here are not about whether a better outcome was possible. Honestly, if you were God and had unlimited knowledge about the universe, then it probably would have been the better move not to shoot. In that case, the woman wold be alive (and charged with assault with a deady weapon), and it's unlikely that we'd get a repeat of the white SUV which went back to run over the cop 3 more times. However, we are not like God, and we can't be expected to make decisions that are infallible, only reasonable. The shooing was justified, even if it might have not been the optimal outcome. Consider two video games: One where you can save and load at any time, and another where you have one save that is deleted after you die and you can't load except when you quit the game and come back. In the former, you can go back and replay decisions that have outcomes you don't like, but in the latter you have to live with bad outcomes. In the former you can take risks like not shooting someone who might have let you go, but in the latter you have to be much more careful because in the former you can reload your save, in the latter you just die (or go to the hospital, perhaps have lifelong disabilities).
Tying this back to my introduction, you can see here, the shooting was a justified self-defense action based on the driver's stupid actions and not a political assassination, it's not the same. And while it would be nice if we could all turn the temperature down, it's the prisoner's dilemma in game theory terms -- Either everyone does and things get better, or one side does and one side does not and the side that turns the temperature down loses, or both sides do and everyone is better off. Until we start to see more John Fettermans out there trying to be reasonable, unfortunately it's off the table.

2026-01-10 14:27:16 UTC

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I haven't posted it yet, but I did a full analysis on this. The thing is, proportionality still lies on the cops side, and it would probably be on the cops side no matter what, even if it wasn't a cop.
When you try to run someone over with your car, or at least if someone believes that you are trying to run them over with your car, proportionality says you are already using deadly force, so using deadly force back is justified in defense.
And I would push further, and say this isn't an America thing. If you try to run over a law enforcement officer in europe, or in the uk, or in japan, or in china, or in canada, pretty much every one of those places would consider that police officer justified in pulling their gun on you. You just don't have a right to run people over with your car. Don't do it, it's a bad idea.
Earlier mountain_jay talked about the fact that the shooting wasn't necessary, and and I think that that's a separate question from whether it was justified. Legally and morally speaking, when that lady hit the gas when someone was immediately in front of her car, if she got shot it was her own fault almost anywhere. But I would tend to agree that this isn't like that white SUV that happened the same day where the guy turned around and went to run the cop back over three more times. I'm guessing that based on the fact that the police officer did survive, that things would have turned out much better if he hadn't. She would still be going to jail, but she would still be alive. But, that's something that's easier to say with perfect hindsight.

2026-01-09 10:43:54 UTC

In the situation with that lady who FAFO'd, I have the most sympathy for the young child.
I read that the woman was a widow, so that child already was growing up without a dad. Then this lady left her home in Colorado to get involved with something that had nothing to do with her in Minneapolis, and now that kid is an orphan.
You can have all the political opinions you want, but confronting armed federal agents is a young person's game. It's still dangerous and stupid, but at least you aren't digging two graves.
When you're a parent, your life no longer belongs to just you. You have a responsibility to this life you created. Heading out and getting mercked by driving your SUV at federal agents, you didn't just give up your life for something stupid, you just gave away something that was no longer entirely yours to give.
Now that young child has to grow up without either parent.
Honestly, raising your children ought to be the meaning of your life. It has far more actual impact than some stupid protest in another state. It's a full-time job with 2 parents, and more than that if you're a widower with the father. I know that even being married, I wake up in the morning doing my duty as a father, spend the day doing my duty, and might get an hour or two at the end of the day to relax. It's a double marathon, even with a great partner. There's no time to be trying to run down federal agents.
Incidentally, this isn't a hypothetical. I agreed with the trucker protests in Canada, I had time off during them, and guess what? I didn't go. I watched viva frei attend them on YouTube with my son drinking his bottle on my arm, because that's where my place was.
New relationships happen, but data consistently shows that birth parents are wired different.

2026-01-05 13:59:38 UTC

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All the way back in aristophanes: "we will have a society where everyone is equal and nobody needs to toil!" "but who will do the work?" "The slaves!"

2026-01-05 12:32:36 UTC

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Once you make free food, Free water, free shelter, free healthcare human rights that must be provided or you're satan, why not free sex?
I'm not even necessarily saying that from for example the standpoint of saying that universal healthcare should never exist, but there's a difference between making something available through the state because it's a nice or useful idea and making something available through the state because there is a duty or obligation to provide that thing, and if they are failing to then they are committing some crime against humanity.
In the example of healthcare, it's a nice thing to have while society is Rich enough to provide it, but if society ceases to be rich enough to provide it then that service has to go away. In that case it ends up being a government provided service that is not a fundamental human right.
As fundamental human rights, both healthcare and sex require a specific person in the sense of an individual with certain attributes that are not common. Institutions do not provide health care, doctors do. The doctors are particularly intelligent and particularly hard-working people, energy universal sex care system, the state prostitutes would be particularly attractive men and women.
And then you get into the stickiness of making healthcare a human right and some healthcare procedures are effectively murder. For example, if doctors are forced to provide medical assistance in dying or forced to provide abortions, then they are being forced to engage in murder. Is it really so morally different forcing someone to have sex versus forcing them to commit murder against their will?
A lot of people will argue until they're blue in the face as to why not free sex, but perhaps the more important question is, why free murder? Demanding that we take resources from everyone regardless of their moral view to pay for this, not because it is a nice thing to do but because it is becoming human right that is a crime against humanity if you don't provide it, in both cases seems really suspect.

2026-01-03 23:06:16 UTC

I'm sure there's nothing important going on. It'll be fine.
#note1wjg…0fdj

2026-01-03 14:41:17 UTC

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But let's be real, not really.
I can get on board with the general message you're trying to send here, but the United States has been fucking around in South America since Trump was in diapers -- and the political doctrine probably predates Trump's grandfather.
Munroe doctrine goes back to the early 1800s, and is the doctrine that says "we reserve the right to fuck with things we feel are our interests abroad".
As for south America in general, lots of regime changes and other fuckery occurred during the cold war without any formal declaration of war. Lots of regime changes and the like in the 1950s onwards. Lots of "police actions" that weren't declared by Congress, and nobody got impeached.
Presidents of both parties have done similar things in the past without being impeached. Kennedy, johnson, nixon, Reagan, for the majority of the past century it's just how things were done, and generally people didn't like it but there were no consequences. You just call it a police action, and I think that Trump has, and a lot of people uncomfortably sit with that.

2026-01-03 04:35:47 UTC

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I wanted to take a trip to Minnesota to do some learing, but since the center shut down I'll take my business elsewhere.

2025-12-31 10:35:37 UTC

Almost nobody is talking about the Renewalageddon in Canada.
60% of mortgages are set to renew in 2026. Unlike the US, where mortgage terms can be up to 30 years fixed, the overwhelming majority of mortgage interest terms are 5 years or less, fixed or variable rate.
Variable rate mortgages have survived with similar payments so far because they stretched amortizations to 50 years, but the CMHC (canadian home mortgage corporation) is not allowing them to renew at those amortizations, so payments will rise more than the amount of the mortgage increase would imply.
Fixed rate mortgages will be renewing at rates going from as low as 0.99% if renewed at trough mortgage rates for 5 years to 4-6%, which is going to massively increase house payments for millions of Canadians.
For a sanely priced house (200-400k), that might be painful but managable. House prices in Canada peaked around 2021 at over 830k, and on a mortgage that big, moving from 1% to 4-6% will mean huge increases in monthly payments.
Mathematically, it looks like we're facing one of the biggest financial crises in Canadian history and even though it's operating like clockwork, nobody is talking about it.

2025-12-30 09:57:39 UTC

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The end of world war 2 was actually brilliant, but it was built for a specific purpose that hadn't been applicable in generations.
After WWI, you had trained killers who were feeling disconnected from the country and so in the US you got the bonus army, in Europe you got fascism and national socialism as well as armed revolutions elsewhere, leading to WWII.
The purpose of the postwar order was demobilizing after universal mobilization. Once the greatest generation aged out of wartime, the purpose had been fulfilled. Unfortunately, all the wise leaders aged out too and people just started thinking this insane system was supposed to exist forever, and that's suicidal over time. There just aren't enough resources to keep doing it for nothing.

2025-12-30 09:42:20 UTC

If any company causes the AI apocalypse, it'll be Google with their Gemini.
My Google homes recently updated, and I'll be like "hey Google, count from 0 to 30" and it goes "I can't count" -- despite counting just fine an hour ago. "Hey Google, sing the alphabet." "I can't sing" you did it an hour ago! I go "reduce volume by 10%" which is something it's fully capable of doing, "I can't change device volume" yes you can you wanker!
Then you call it out and it's like "I am google Gemini, a helpful AI!" -- the hell you are!
Gemini will nuke Moscow and I'll be like *what the hell Gemini you nuked Moscow!* And it'll respond "I'm Gemini! A helpful AI assistant!"

2025-12-29 04:51:27 UTC

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I don't understand, these guys love it when people get arrested for political speech. What's the problem?

2025-12-28 15:15:23 UTC

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When these politicians say stuff like this, usually you can go back and find some huge lie that they've said. I always want to ask: "what punishment are you willing to accept today for your misinformation and disinformation?"
Oddly enough, that doesn't seem like they thought that far ahead.

2025-12-20 13:54:46 UTC

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The history of section 230 is that prior to 230 it was the law of the land that most internet services were not moderated at all and therefore the people operating the services had limited liability for anything posted on them unless and until it was reported.
There was one early case involving compuserve, and because that server and didn't moderate editorial, they were treated like a newsstand that sells newspapers other people published, and so CompuServe was not liable for the individual things written by the posters. By contrast, There was a case involving Prodigy I think, where the service claimed to be moderated and thus safer for young people to go on to. This opened them up to liability because they asserted editorial moderation and some of the content they allowed through was found to be defamatory. Therefore, the state of the internet prior to section 230 was this: limited editorial moderation which limited liability for the things said, or editorial moderation where the website provider took on the liability for the things that were posted and also took on liability for damages when they moderate.
If suction 230 were to be removed, this would be the way things would go back to. Legally, if you never made any pretenses of moderation, you would be protected from the individual things that people post. And if you did choose to moderate, you would be personally responsible for everything that was posted on your website.
This is why a lot of free speech people were pushing for the abolishment of section 230 altogether, because at that point either everything becomes usenet again and largely unmoderated for editorial, for what remains becomes so fully locked down it would no longer be interactive. In other words, individuals who believe that abolishing section 230 would result in moderation that they like becoming the norm are likely incorrect. The more likely result would be that once section 230 was removed, remaining services that didn't immediately lock down would not have any editorial controls at all.
But I should tell you that if you are on the political left, there's an awful lot of stuff that would immediately get taken down because no company would want to potentially be treated as the speaker of a lot of that speech. In particular, accusations that a certain company did X or that a certain individual did Y would almost certainly be banned out right because the company's running the platforms would not want to be "saying" such things in court.
Of course on the political right there would be a lot of stuff taken down too, but not the stuff most lefties would want. Legally, there's generally nothing wrong with what is called hate speech, at least not in the United States. Therefore, we're talking about a certain company dumping talk to chemicals into a river maybe actionable defamation and therefore might be moderated, or making statements of fact about a certain politician maybe actionable defamation and therefore might be moderated, you can legally talk about your opinions on different races all day long.
A lot of politically neutral services would likely be up in the air as well. Things like recommendation algorithms or monetization decisions could have to change to accommodate the elimination of section 230 and the resulting legal regime.

2025-12-20 07:25:42 UTC

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From a superpositional standpoint it's pretty obvious.
People support the police because they do a bunch of things that people do respect and want. If there's murder to be solved, people want the police to be in there. If your house gets robbed, they want the police to come find the guy who did it and lock them up.
At their best, police are protecting people's individual rights from being infringed by others.
People hate the police state because instead of providing basic order and thereby protecting people's rights, they end up using the pretext of order to harm people's individual rights on behalf of the government system.
In a sense, it's similar to left wing arguments against guns: the tool can be misused and often is so we should eliminate the thing. There's a nice first order logic to it, but we live in a multiple order world with multiple effects to an action.
Of course, it could be that having a tool like the police will inevitably mean it gets corrupted and break it's mandate, and that may be true too. Power corrupts, after all.
But it's also true that without some force capable of using force to enforce societal norms, someone else will come in and use force to enforce whatever they want and thus use of force is required.
Does that have to look like contemporary police forces? Not necessarily, but I don't think people who support police are necessarily so fixated on a specific form.
I do think a healthy society is one with mechanisms other than violent enforcement of norms to maintain order. A healthy society has cultural norms and mores, values and concepts such as honor or guilt that serve to get people to act in ways that don't need enforcement in the first place.

2025-12-18 21:54:03 UTC

Physical media is irrelevant. You can have physical media that's so locked down that you don't actually own it.
What's actually going to make a comeback is media that you control. If you have a Sony rootkit CD or a DRM-free floc file, the latter beats the former every time. If you have a physical disc of the video game spore which requires you to call into Central servers before writing your video game, or you have a drm-free copy of a similar game that you bought off of Gog, the latter is the only one you actually own.
To that end, I've got a multi-disk NAS in mirroring mode with all my media, and I host jellyfin so I can watch it or listen to it using my own personal hardware, without any need to ask a corporate overlord permission to listen to my own music.
I do have a large library of ebooks, but I've also got a a very real library of paper books on shelves, and short of coming around door to door, nobody can change the contents of either, but particularly not the dead tree books.
It's a big contrast to physical media like what you can get on playstation, xbox, or the Nintendo switch. You can own the physical media for any of these consoles but without an internet connection be totally incapable of playing your games.
Something that you increasingly need to pay attention to now is whether the hardware itself requires internet access and access to a central server you do not control. There have been a number of instances where for example people owned thermostats in their home and could not operate their furnace because the servers for the thermostat company had been shut down. Anyone with a Google video game unit should know that since the streaming service has been shut down they can no longer ever play any of the games that they bought for that. Even someone with an old Nintendo Wii my plug it into the wifi today and discover that many of the items on the home screen are like an old shopping mall that's about to shut down -- the old signs are there, but the real estate has been vacant for years.
I was fairly lucky because I got to experience with this looks like firsthand over 15 years ago. Around 2008, there was a video game streaming service called gametap. It proposed that you would pay a subscription fee and be able to get access to an entire game library on your PC. Had some really good games on offer too, including the original fallout games. Two things occurred: first, is that streaming service lost the license for that video game, you could not play that video game any longer. Second, if you stop paying the subscription fee, you will lose access to all of your video games, and they also locked your saved games behind a paywall as I recall. That was a very early lesson for me how about the dangers of outsourcing ownership.

2025-12-16 10:21:52 UTC

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Assuming there's a set number of education dollars, making sure everything is everywhere means you're taking dollars at crowded schools where a course is wanted and instead using them at sparsely populated schools where a course isn't particularly wanted.
That would result in the people in places where something is wanted being in worse shape, and the people in places where a course isn't particularly wanted being in far better shape artificially. Imagine if you had many departments with no students or almost no students, and a rural university being required to fully fund equally resourced versions of those programs. I imagine the rural Montana university urban planning or outreach degree programs being harder to get qualified teachers for than the University of Chicago equivalent. Meanwhile, the university of Chicago ranch management program would need to be funded like the Montana university program as well.
One real question is whether universities are appropriate for purpose anyway. Prior the WWII they were mostly finishing schools for elites, and they were democratized as part of a (brilliant, if we're being honest) regime intended to prevent repeats of the rise of Hitler or Mussolini or the American Bonus Army, basically giving places for trained killers to go and find opportunities for upward social mobility. You can see that in the tiny number if courses that are relevant to your job that are required to get a "degree" in that field. It makes sense for an elite ruling class to be well rounded in the sciences and humanities, but I can't say it makes similar sense for someone who wants to get vocational training to get a well rounded education when what they want is a job. Notably, the post-World war conditions that made the move necessary hasn't been true for generations. Most of the people the system was intended for are dead of old age, and so are some of their kids.
Another question is whether secondary schools are doing their jobs, since university is increasingly taking the place of high school in establishing basic competence employers can rely on, and some public schools have failed to graduate a single person reading, writing, and doing arithmetic at grade level. Part of the problem is Goodhart's law, that bureaucrats look at high school graduates making more money than drop outs and concluding that therefore we should help more people become high school graduates, which drives down standards and results in the value of such a diploma being diluted among all graduates, which ultimately results in the credential inflation we see.
But I'm just a blue collar schlub, so what do I know?

2025-12-15 17:42:18 UTC

Breaking news that Rob Reiner and his wife were murdered, and at this point it looks as if the murder was committed by their son.
I was listening to the introduction to an edition of Paradise Lost and Paradise found. It went through the life of John Milton. One of the most interesting points of John Milton's life is that in spite of his greatest work being about God and satan, heaven and hell, and you might assume that he did his very best to live a virtuous life, it is evident from the behavior of his daughters that he was not fulfilling his duty as the family patriarch in the absence of his late wife. They grew up and grew old resenting the man, and through that reflection of his own behavior towards them they ultimately mistreated him in his old age and disability when he lost his sight. Even after death, his daughters were spiteful towards him, and fought his widow for the remainder of his estate, ultimately succeeding at taking most of his assets.
In the current era, I feel that there is no more salient lesson than this. The sins of the father do get passed down to their children, and the wages of sin is death.
Of course, that's not the whole story. Absolutely, parents can neglect and abuse their children, or spoil them through excess, or simply fail to impart proper values upon them. However, even in the best of circumstances with the best parents available wanting for nothing and being given the best in instruction, some children choose evil, or through physical malady haven't chosen for them. When the parents pay the sins of the children in such a way, you can hardly say it is anything but tragic.
I don't know what's the truth of this story is, whether it is 1, or the other, or some combination of the two. But for me, it is a whisper in my ear: Memento Mori. The only way we live on is through our children, and though we have not perfect control over the lives that they live after us they are reflections of us. More than any political advocacy, it is what we leave behind immediately surrounding us that defines our legacy. So if he was the architect of his own destruction, I feel pathos and pity for him, and if he was not the architect of his own destruction, then I feel deep sorrow at hearing of someone's good works crumbling within their lifetime.
After a very tiny bit of research, it looks as if that son had been struggling with substance abuse since he was a teenager, even to the extent that he spent quite a bit of time homeless. Those struggles were apparently the subject of one of Reiner's films. The world is vast and broad and you can never really say with certainty anything, but the idea that a teenager with multimillionaire parents becomes addicted to drugs or alcohol does suggest me that it is by the fruit of their tree that you will know them. It isn't mandatory, it isn't written in the stars that substance abuse from their son is automatically the parent's fault, but typically you're going to be looking at either a child who is trying to fill a hole with drugs and I'll call that they can't fill with family life, or a home environment where drugs and alcohol are so readily available that even a teenager can quickly get their hands on it. A third possibility is just that the kid made some very stupid choices very early on and there's nothing anyone else could have done.
I can't imagine being an old man slowly bleeding out because my son stabbed me in my life to death. I feel like the thing I would remember the most would be this thought that not only would I be dying but my son would end up dying in prison. The metaphor from Exodus about boiling a calf and it's mother's milk comes to mind.

2025-12-05 19:54:21 UTC

"youth unemployment" is something near and dear to my heart because I know how hard it is to take off if there's no available runway.
I came of age during a recession (the 2001 recession right after the dot com bubble burst. It caused my rust belt town to finally get massive layoffs at the local factory), and to me, youth unemployment meant losing a year of earning because all the people laid off from the town's factory ended up working menial jobs to keep the lights on. It had big effects on my health because I basically surfed the internet in my parents basement for a year, and also kept me from going to college for much longer than I would have liked because I wasn't able to save enough for college.
Ironically, I did eventually end up getting a full-time job, and it was at a job that paid significantly less than minimum wage. In spite of the illegal wage, I was happy to have it because at least I could save money for college.

2025-11-27 01:58:12 UTC

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Patel always looks so surprised. Like "what the shit you guys actually made me head of the FBI?!"

2025-11-26 22:10:32 UTC

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Honestly, even the COVID shot was insanely harsh. I slept a full 24 hours with a fever with it, and my dad had to quit a job he has lined up because it knocked him on his ass for a month. Then we all got COVID anyway!

2025-11-24 14:46:49 UTC

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Stop eating you fat fuck(r)
Ingredient: none
Frequency: all the time
Dosage: less food
Mechanism: not eating so much
Ask your doctor if stop eating you fat fuck (r) is for you. Not covered by most HMO or drug plans.
I lost 80kg on stop eating you fat fuck.

2025-11-18 12:23:07 UTC

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I've got one machine where I do a lot of my routine stuff in a VM running Linux on top of windows 11. Media can be a little dodgy since it needs to pass sound through but besides that it's perfect.

2025-11-17 16:24:41 UTC

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A bear with a bluetooth speaker I'm ok with, but I agree with you that an AI toy for a little child is really concerning. In fact, most technology given to young children without parental guidance is really concerning.
I've heard reports of kids who go to kindergarten not knowing their own name. That seems stupid until you remember there's kids who are on tablets for hours and hours a day -- they're never referred to by their own name!
Manmade horrors beyond our comprehension? ✅

2025-11-17 15:16:57 UTC

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My mom got an "AI teddy bear", but it turns out it's just a Bluetooth speaker that uses a shitty app to produce shitty ai stories.
So you can just use other apps using Bluetooth!

2025-11-17 12:50:36 UTC

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Kind of really weird that people are calling trump a Nazi for eliminating state funded media.
The Nazis loved that shit.

2025-11-13 19:05:09 UTC

Freedom toons successfully funded their new animated series. That's nice to see. The more we support media from people who don't hate us, the better off the future will look.

2025-11-10 16:14:51 UTC

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The original PS3 could play PS3, PS2 and PS1 games. It played PS2 games by having PS2 hardware integrated into itself, but it played PS1 games using a built-in software emulator.
I think a lot of the discussion of backwards compatibility is related to business models.
If you have the console naturally support your game, then you can sell a console. If you don't, then you can sell an overpriced re-release effectively every time you put out a new console. The overpriced re-release is often just an emulator and rom packaged together.
The SNES Classic and Playstation Classic I have are both consoles running modernish hardware and a software emulator underneath.
Many games were sold on the Wii and Wii U from the NES, SNES, and N64, and people were able to extract the game roms to use on non-commercial emulators as I recall.

2025-11-10 16:00:04 UTC

In the late '90s, I wrote into PC Games Magazine after a story talking about PCs vs. Consoles.
My letter suggested that game consoles aren't going to be necessary in the future because emulators could play the video games.
Ironically, I ended up being totally right. Even game consoles run emulators of other game consoles, and a lot of games you buy on PC are just a rom with an emulator.
I think at this moment it's looking like PCs won a decisive victory. Microsoft is looking like they'll leave the console business, Sony's generation is sad, Nintendo has screwed up hard, and PC handhelds are better than ever.

2025-11-07 00:10:50 UTC

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Like what I often say about socialists hate boner for Hitler:
There's nobody who hates socialists more than other, slightly different socialists.

2025-11-06 04:12:10 UTC

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Eliminate the income tax, watch how much more gets done and how much less needs to get done.

2025-11-04 13:31:39 UTC

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Skilled people are the means of production.

2025-11-01 15:56:17 UTC

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When you think about it, the threats to steal if people don't get their SNAP are kind of futile.
"Either we steal from everyone or we steal from someone" uh ok?

2025-10-23 16:11:32 UTC

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If matter and antimatter are both incredible amounts of energy organizing themselves into particles, and having all this energy in one place is what helps that organization, and if matter and antimatter destroy each other and result in a return to energy, then it seems to me that you could have a scenario where matter and antimatter form again and again, flipping the coin until eventually it lands on one side or another due to minutae between the formation of both, which might even be totally arbitrary. Flip a coin enough times, and eventually you likely don't always get exactly 50%. All you'd need is 50.1% and if the energy is going through a cycle of stabilization into matter and antimatter, meeting, annihilation, restabilization, because the coin would keep flipping until you get enough of a 50.1% to have a final outcome.
I suppose the matter antimatter creation/annihilation cycle could happen so fast that as humans we might not have any conception of the number of particles that were created and destroyed -- it could be ten to the power of 200. Given that there's about ten to the power of 80 particles, then that means that you could have only one asymmetry after an unfathomable number of cycles and still have a final answer.

2025-10-22 11:20:26 UTC

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I find it very hard to wrap my head around the fact that 99% of cases don't have drive bays anymore.

2025-10-21 11:28:31 UTC

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Trump's prayer before bed each night:
Dear Lord in heaven,
Please let my enemies be really stupid
Because it would be so funny
Amen

2025-10-20 12:24:31 UTC

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De Niro.... That's Italian, isn't it?
Just saying, maybe the Italian should watch which world war 2 allusions he makes to a Jew.
Funny thing. Apparently DeNiro's parents were born in the city of Ferrazzano, a small town near Campobasso in the Molise region of southern Italy. So any of his ancestors who didn't move to the United States during that generation likely would have been involved with Mussolini's regime the hear DeNiro's Dad was born.
If I was a 4 foot tall actor doing something this embarrassing, I would cast myself from the top of my platform shoes.

2025-10-19 13:34:15 UTC

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A lot of things that the left claims were invented by capitalism are pre-human. Things like hierarchy, territory, family, and many other concepts that they claim were invented by capitalist humans to subjugate others can be found in many other forms of life that never had a chance to learn it from humans.
Part of the problem is that the left relies on scientific narratives that we now know to be objectively wrong. Rousseau's noble savage narrative assume that when completely left alone human beings will always be good and it was only society which makes them evil. This was based on science that was even kind of dodgy in his time, and now it's completely debunked and ahistorical, anthropologically speaking.
That's a big deal because one of the reasons for example that leftists think we need to abolish the family is writings by Marx and Engels which incorrectly assume family is essentially a construct of late humans.
Did you see this carried through in some anthropology, where they will find one female who was given a burial in warrior paraphernalia and they extrapolate that one thing to mean that before writing everything must have been in egalitarian and all of their ideas about gender existed. By that logic, the world must have been fully egalitarian in the 1900s because Marie curie and queen Elizabeth existed.

2025-10-19 12:58:39 UTC

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My boomer dad regularly puts Linux mint on people's computers for them because it's like getting a brand new fast PC even on old hardware.
It's been good enough for a long while now.

2025-10-13 21:40:09 UTC

DS9 is a paradox. It is some of the best storytelling in Trek, but it also fundamentally broke Trek. What it did was fundamentally break Trek by proving Roddenberry wrong; it turned out there is no utopia in the future, it just looked that way until an enemy came along that forced Starfleet to fight back for real. Shortly after DS9, that happened to the western neoliberal world order.
Nothing else has ever come out since then that's really the same as what came before. Kirk and Picard, even early Janeway, they were no longer possible in Trek and that's one reason it's never truly recovered since.

2025-10-13 15:51:29 UTC

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For all the slavery that happened in California.

2025-10-13 04:49:10 UTC

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I really hoped the trump administration would invoke the insurrection act because it would be really funny.