So we’re just gonna sleepwalk into WWIII, huh? Alrighty then.
Month: October 2024
Recognizance
I have trouble recognizing male programmers because they all dress the same, are all overweight to obese, all have the same scruffy poorly-trimmed beard, and all wear glasses 1.
This is a real problem at in-person work functions.
Set Up Us the Bomb
Because the US sadly is now undependable, Ukraine, South Korea, and Japan should probably develop their own nuclear weapons programs posthaste.
Throw Over
I give this a fairly high probability.
Roam
That’s how I grew up, but I was part of the last gen (Gen X) to do so. Often I would go outside at 8AM and not see another adult till 6-9PM. I’d roam miles from home on my own or, more rarely, with friends. This was completely normal back then. Now it’d get parents arrested.
Cargo? No, Drone Go
If batteries continue to get better at their current rate, drones will actually be useful for low-altitude short-hop (0-20 miles) cargo hauling and delivery in 6-8 years.
That’ll be interesting.
Knife
I agree with Noah Smith here.
Although it’s not possible to know for certain what the consequences of a second Trump presidency would be, it’s very possible that it would result in the U.S. essentially surrendering its European allies to Russia and its Asian allies to China — thus dramatically weakening America’s own ability to resist those enemies in the future.
This is an extremely likely outcome of a Trump victory. And that, therefore, will make WWIII far more likely as well. Either that, or the below — followed by WWIII.
If the U.S. abandons resistance to China and Russia, it will go very badly for America’s allies. Europe will probably fracture again, with some states (probably including Germany) falling all over themselves to appease the Russians. Russia will then become a sort of de facto hegemon in Europe. In Asia, China would probably conquer Taiwan, cutting off U.S. semiconductor supplies and establishing Chinese hegemony in East Asia. Japan and South Korea would then be forced to choose between either becoming nuclear powers or becoming de facto satrapies of the new Chinese empire. Essentially, America’s major allies would fall to America’s enemies.
It is indeed, as Noah observes, a very dangerous time.
Emoted
Emotional intelligence is worth nearly nothing. Women are 100x more interested in me now that I got way fitter and hotter. I could be a complete asshole and this would still be the case. Perhaps even more the case as many, many women use assholery as a proxy for dominance, which is hugely appealing to many women.
Emotional intelligence helps some in a relationship. But it helps 0.0% in getting you one. In fact, it probably hurts on net.
Israel vs. Is Fake
It’s not genocide if a terrorist group loses the war it started.
That’s called “just desserts.” Yes, Israel is doing bad things in many cases. But pretending they are doing it just because is insane. The goal of Hamas was to start a war and they knew what would happen if they did.
FAFO.
F Shoot
Yeah, Jesus Christ, way to shoot yourself in the fucking face. Repeatedly.
DDAT
Dumbasses, dipshits, assclowns and tardbicuits, that’s who.
SNATural
It’s not hard to do that by accident if you have a complex network. Say you have SNAT set up and a pool (or, more likely, various pools) of IP addresses that are allowed to do SNAT. Oops, you don’t have MAC filtering and some help desk mook with too much access but not enough knowledge changes the IP address of a device and boom, now you have a potentially-fatality-causing medical device on the open internet.
Just as with lab escapes, that kinda shit happens all the time.
Salal
If we’d allowed designs for safe and small modular nuclear reactors to move forward water would not be an issue because desalination would be absurdly cheap.
But that ain’t what we did.
Ad ID
The future is terrible. One of the reasons we’ve been holding on to all our older and/or unused monitors is that we knew this was coming. And now it’s here. I wish I could personally kneecap anyone who had anything to do with this.
Slurry
Damn I sure hope so! More seriously, her take on the whole thing was pretty wrongheaded because she is an attractive woman who can easily get sex any time she wants it.
Many people agreed with me but many people also disagreed. Some people said I was taking a “female-centric” view to sex and not accounting for just how happy men are to have sex without any consideration to whether the other person is into them. The rationale here is that the vast majority of men aren’t attractive to anyone, so for them it would be the difference between having “fake” sex or having no sex.
I was skeptical. I believe that there are fewer men considered sexually desirable than women, but I don’t think that so many men are considered sexually undesirable (especially in unfixable ways) that sex robots would appeal to the majority.
She was taking an extremely female-centric view, where sex is very, very easy to get. For the vast majority of men it’s extremely difficult to get sex 99% of the time.
To most men, 80% of women between 18-40 are sexually desirable (even if for only a one-night stand). To most women, 90%+ of men are sexually undesirable for anything at all.
This is the huge mismatch she (and most women also) fails to understand.