Incidentally: if you front up tens of billions of bucks to buy twitter and BEFORE THE INK IS DRY say "I'm gonna fire 75% of you", you may not have any competent employees left by the time you walk in the door BECAUSE IT'S THE COMPETENT ONES WHO WILL LEAVE.

This always happens!

— Charlie Stross (@cstross) October 22, 2022

Yep. At the first bare hint of layoffs I’m out the door. I’m gone so fast glass shatters for miles around. At one place I worked, the CEO mentioned that there was “no possibility of layoffs” during a call — which is CEO-speak for “layoffs are happening soon.” I found a new job that same week making 40% more.

My former co-workers were all laid off a few months later.

The notion that sex work is a cure-all is asinine. Most johns can get laid just fine. They like paying for it for the power. And most people who are lonely don’t feel better paying for it, because what they want is to be wanted. Sorry things are complicated, but them’s facts.

— Amanda Marcotte (@AmandaMarcotte) October 19, 2022

That’s absurd. Amanda has always believed that, though, so at least she’s consistent. No, most johns do not go to sex workers for power. Just like most people don’t go to the grocery store because they want power over food. It’s fucking insane to think that.

Most guys who go to sex workers do so because they want sex. Shocking, I know. A small percentage of them, sure, it’s about power. But it’s nearly all about sex, which is much, much harder to get for men. I think a lot of women don’t really understand this enormous disparity.

Amanda obviously does not really comprehend this because for her getting laid is easy. For most men, it absolutely is not. Women in the bottom quintile of attractiveness can have sex 10x easier than all but men in the top 0.5% or so of male attractiveness.

Just saw this and I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a perfect description pic.twitter.com/IVDMD7bAbL

— Madelaine Moore (@Madelainefmoore) October 18, 2022

That’s great. I had a dipshit mook libertarian argue with me once about public roads. He said, “The government does nothing for me. I don’t need them at all.”

I usually don’t engage in politics at work, but I already hated this guy and I just didn’t care. So I said, “How’d you get to work this morning, Ben?”

He said, “I drove.”

“Who do you think built those roads you drove on? Where’d they come from?”

He didn’t answer directly, but rather started hemming and hawing about how a private company could’ve done it better with tolls, that the roads would exist anyway in absence of government, and all the usual libertarian nonsense where they think major infrastructure occurs by magic and wishes.

I also commented on the water in his water bottle and the safety features of his car being government-caused or government-provided. No answer to that either. He pretty much stopped talking to me after that, which was fine with me. No loss there.

I like the Star Wars aesthetic but do not care for most of the movies. I think the look of it is awesome: the outfits, the spaceships, the light sabers — all of that presents appealing and powerful visuals.

The plots, though, are usually dreck and/or senseless. But it’s hard to argue with shit like this:

(That’s Felicity Jones as Jyn Erso in the best Star Wars movie, Rogue One.)

I know, not all men and you aren’t supposed to say this, blah, blah, blah, but it sucks being told by women that you are violent and dangerous because some men are violent and dangerous — and not because of anything you’ve done, but simply because you were born male.

Doesn’t really seem right to me no matter how politically incorrect saying it is these days.

Instead of obsessing over taking things away from people, modern liberals should be fixated on increasing the size of the pie equitably and making more resources available to everyone while generating energy to create those resources with less damage to the planet.

But they won’t, will they? No, they definitely will not do that. Hard to base a religion on that.

How many times did virologists say they were not making chimeric SARS viruses more deadly? How many???

Latest preprint shows they made a chimeric SARS-CoV-2 w/ Omicron S gene and ancestral SARS-CoV-2 backbone that showed 80% mortality in humanised mice. pic.twitter.com/KVYGTXPb7E

— Paul D. Thacker (@thackerpd) October 17, 2022

Oh, everyone who wasn’t a clueless wanker knew that GoF researchers have been doing this forever. The denial of the obvious only happened when some Trump supporters began talking about the Lab Leak hypothesis for Covid-19. Then every liberal in the world thought they had to declare — for some reason — that GoF research wasn’t real, and if it was real, it wasn’t dangerous, and if it was dangerous, it was held to very high safety standards, and if those safety standards had been violated, nothing bad had really happened, and if something bad had happened, it was over now, and if it wasn’t over now…hey, look at that kitten! Isn’t it cute??? It’s such a cute kitten.

Reflexive partisanship and being on a stupid political team really poisons your mind.

It’s not universally true of course, but I’ve noticed that nearly every person who has many interrelated health problems is most often extremely obese.

Yet it’s “medical discrimination” causing these problems…somehow. In this country, we don’t just accept the obvious because it hurts too many feelings. If people worried more about not wallowing in loserdom and less about how other people perceive them, we’d all be much better off.

One thing I think would be more productive than bickering about masks (but much less fun!) would be talking about baseline health levels in the US. How can be improve baseline health so that we are less vulnerable next time?

— Angie Schmitt🚶‍♀️ (@schmangee) October 16, 2022

The Fat Acceptance loons and screechers would never let anyone get anywhere with that, though. They’d completely kill it before it got any momentum.