I already have thousands of plastic straws, but looks like I need to buy more as this insanity shows no signs of stopping.
It’s hard to find information about how long the plastic in the straws will last. It’s pointless buying them if they’ll just decay in 10 years to unusability.
I would personally love to see a Prize awarded to Aspect, Clauser, and Zeilinger for their efforts to turn difficult philosophical questions about the meaning of quantum mechanics into extraordinarily exquisite laboratory experiments. https://t.co/xiqSr0thnS
— Jim Baggott (@JimBaggott) October 7, 2019
Agreed. Their work is brilliant. After all, the point of philosophy is in part to formulate questions that we might one day be able to answer. Not that all of philosophy needs to be or is concerned with such questions, but large parts of it are, contra its perception and how it’s demeaned by useless numpties like Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Scones are fucking terrible. Just why, why do they exist? Every few years, I try a scone, thinking, Maybe I’ve just gotten bad ones, people must eat these for a reason.
But NOPE. They are always Sahara-dry lumps of tasteless cardboard. Why do people eat those?
Likewise, people who say "you're generalizing" when talking about non-math ideas.
Pattern recognition seems like discrimination to idiots.
— LifeMathMoney (@LifeMathMoney) October 7, 2019
Scientists are particularly bad about this. Many of them seem to think that because a distribution overlaps somewhat, that two populations are identical.
Yeah, that’s not how it works. I know it’s a reaction to racist pseudoscience, but hating reality is not the way to go there. It’s bad science and just false. Overlapping distributions does not mean populations are identical.
There’s a bit in an sf novel I’m reading where a woman has a terminal disease that can be cured/removed by sending her through some sort of duplication device that will make a copy of her, but healed. The problem is that the terminally-diseased original will still be around.
The solution to me seems obvious: go into the duplicator unconscious, emerge, and then use something to revive the cured version. The cured one then kills the terminal original.
Can you be charged with murdering yourself? Good luck bringing that to a court and proving it. After all, you’re obviously still very much alive.
This seems to preserve or at least short-circuit the necessary continuance of consciousness that most people use as the standard of selfhood.
Could a person kill their original self? Seems an obvious solution to me but not sure how most people would reason about it.
As I've been removing ableist slurs – stupid, idiot, moron – from my vocabulary, I've been realizing how much more difficult it's become for me to demean other people.
And then I'm like
Oh
That's the point.
— Leah (@9BillionTigers) October 2, 2019
Removing any force and substance from language helps no one. Some people and ideas deserve to be demeaned. It’s the only thing that combats them. Anyway, the euphemism treadmill guarantees other “slurs” will soon take the place of the ones stricken from the record.
The problem with the left — one of them, anyway — is that they don’t know how to fight, and will gladly take the punches with no desire to strike back at all. It’s sad and pathetic and fucking stupid.
The left’s list of forbidden words is typical of the left’s approach to anything: ban something, call it a day. Great.
I want a feature-length magazine article on the behind-the-scenes PR campaign that's been generating all the 'hey guys you should eat insects' headlines across many different outlets.
— Jonah Bennett 🌐 (@BennettJonah) September 29, 2019
Me too. That’s been so ubiquitous lately that it has to be some PR push — but in the service of what? I can understand the drive for plant-based poison food. Those items are actually widely available on the market and can be bought in many places today.
But the insect propaganda has fascinated me lately because I can’t tell where it’s being pushed from and why it’s so pervasive.
My best guess so far is that it’s to offer a false dichotomy between the desired choice of people eating plant-based poison food (fake burgers and the like) or the insect alternative, which no one will choose. It’s a method of getting people to make the choice you want them to make to avoid the “progressives” forcing a truly worse choice, which is slurping insect slurry out of glass bottles in your pod.
In my lifetime in America, I've never experienced a large scale shortage of a necessary good. This is crazy. Current surplus is so high I can barely imagine what actual scarcity would look like.
— marie (@mesolude) October 4, 2019
What the fuck is this. Just as many poor people have and currently do, I have in my life personally experienced shortages of these things:
It’s great that this person was not born in poverty and seems to have lived a fairly posh life, but to mark it as some sort of universal experience, even in America, is fucking ludicrous.
The only people in favor of cancel and call-out culture are those who don’t realize they are just as likely as anyone to be the next victim.
You’re never woke enough when the bloodlust rises.
New, crappy Firefox is completely unusable without TabMix Plus. Bet they lost a few million users just from that no longer working.
What a bunch of goddamn idiots that could easily be bested by pre-schoolers in product management.
Shooting lasers into space and screaming, “Hakuna Matata, motherfuckers!”
I am all for radically changing our society to fight climate change. It’s likely necessary to stave off near-extinction or actual extirpation of humanity. And it’s just a good idea in general. However, I am staunchly and 100% opposed to the progressive “utopia” of living like medieval peasants and all the moralistic and preening performative barmy puritanical fantasias of our sorry fucking excuse for a left.
These two tweets got me thinking about it again:
We can and do so much better than the progressive abstinent false utopia of slurping algae and bugs out of glass bottles while living in 90 square foot pods with a single LED. That will not win the future and no humans will choose to live like that without eco-fascism and then the revolution and giga-deaths that will follow.
To build an alternative to endless extraction and the torching of the planet, real progressives must come up with a superior alternative that inspires hope and human flourishing, not a grim slog through gray days of consuming the bug slurry and wondering when death most welcome will finally come.
"But Noah, what if blocking people makes them happy? What if it makes them feel like they won?"
In that case, great! It's a win-win!
Good fences make good neighbors.
— Noah Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) September 8, 2019
Everyone needs to read that poem again. Is Robert Frost the most misunderstood poet to ever live? “The Road Less Travelled” also has its message missed, and not because of lack of clarity.
The message of “Mending Wall” is to question the tidy homily of “good fences make good neighbors.” Really.
Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.
A great deal of poetry is not really understood, but Frost’s poetry is fairly lucid. I wonder why so often it is misprised?
Mainly, the Boomers seem concerned with propriety and civility above all else. Bomb the shit out of the Middle East, create concentration camps, allow the banksters to have all the money in the world…but keep it civil and they’ll be happy. Play nice, put your Pelosi face on, and no matter that climate change is going to kill their grandchildren and eliminate a good portion of life on earth, it’s all ok as long as you say “please” and “thank you.”
Politesse is their priority or, dammit, they’ll have to speak to the manager.
There’s only one truth, and that’s don’t butter a live parakeet.
You heard it here first. Never forget.