If you don’t get what’s happening in the video, she’s receiving electric shocks to her face causing involuntary muscle movements; that’s not CGI.

Great news about American wealth.

Noah Smith is smart but because he is an economist, by nature of his chosen profession there must be worm-eaten parts of his brain. This wealth he is so enthusiastic about is an illusion; it’s meaningless. If the value of a house goes up but you can’t sell because interest rates are too high to buy another one, that’s not a true wealth gain. This is just paper wealth of no practical value. The same for your car, etc.

The reality is that inflation is causing real income to plummet while the job market looks rosy in the stats but in actuality is pretty dismal in most fields.

Most Americans have little savings and so if their real income falls de facto 20%, they are much poorer and rightly feel that way. Noah Smith’s numbers are crap and so is his reasoning.

Exact same house and land, five years apart:

But sure, inflation has been defeated.

My wife served me divorce after we return from a family vacation.

Having read more than a few like this, it’s interesting that if you swapped the genders the top-voted reactions would be much different.

This one: Wife abandons family. Man presumed to be at fault, wife given every excuse/justification with no evidence. (Maybe he is at fault, but this is not about blame.)

Gender swap: Husband abandons family. Man would still be presumed to be at fault, and a monster.

This is what I mean that the cultural conversation is largely controlled by women now. Obviously, I do not mean that women hold all positions of power. That’s clearly untrue. However, this means that now women’s narratives and priorities are the dominant ones in the cultural norm-setting sense.

Which is also obviously the case.

How far back in time could I theoretically travel before I would no longer be able to breathe the current atmosphere?

Another person answers fairly accurately. The answer is around 500 million years. (Adapted humans can survive on a bit less than 10% oxygen, though, so could go back further.)

There was some stupid book I was reading where a team went back a billion years into earth’s past with no protective gear. The O² percentage would’ve been around 2.5 percent then at sea level, meaning death within 5 minutes or so.

I did not keep reading that book.

It’s too bad how so much of Covid mitigation became a competition among the auto-déclaré “completely safe” clowns about who could mask the HARDEST, who could stay inside the LONGEST, who could be COMPLETELY SAFE FOREVER.

And that in large part made normal, non-mentally-ill people reject all of it. What a goddamn fuck-up.

One thing that makes America unique: we have more than zero people who can say things like, “This wasn’t my first mass shooting.”

USA! USA! USA!

What is the deal with so many bakeries that at first look interesting having predominantly scones?

Scones are the devil’s pastry. Begone foul dwimmerlaik, lord of bad hlaf!

Intel doesn’t think that Arm CPUs will make a dent in the laptop market.

LOL. Intel lost the plot long ago. My laptop has an ARM CPU in it right now. And other than not having enough ports, it’s pretty great. It’s the only laptop I’ve ever used that both has amazing performance and lasts 15+ hours on a charge with continuous use.

(It’s a 13-inch MacBook Pro M2, 2022.)

The Case for Buying ‘Dumb’ Appliances. Smart appliances are everywhere—and you probably don’t need them.

Do not need them and definitely do not fucking want those spyware-ridden pieces of crap. It’s getting difficult to find anything that’s not “Smart,” where that means that corporations steal all your data for a slightly cheaper price with no way to opt out. No thank you. I really did think the future would be cooler. We all did.

The first ten on today’s playlist:

Why the Nineties rocked.

The generation that came of age in the 1990s, now well into middle age, have a lot of happy memories of a sort that may never be possible to have again. At the moment any possibility of collective joy seems about as realistic as a Miss America contestant trying to wish world peace into existence. In the 1990s we still had the future, a place that you could travel to, that would be cool when you got there, like Australia or the South Pole. Right now we merely have a future, and a murky one at that, and it’s probably more like Kenosha, Wisconsin than Sydney.

Some of the nostalgia is misplaced, but this is true: In the 1990s, we believed — nearly every one of us — that we could and would make the world better, that this was achievable, and furthermore that we were well on the way to doing so. That core optimism pervaded everything, even the soi-disant “pessimistic” works of the era. Every media artifact was imbued with this spirit, ineluctably. Every movie, song, painting, poster, billboard and (even) Trapper Keeper. Everything.

There is no way to describe how different that felt, how variant from now where we believe collapse, catastrophe and calamity are absolutely inevitable. But I can tell you we were living in a different, better world.

And here’s a secret: One of the reasons so many claim to find nearly everything from that era “offensive” is the extreme foreignness of everyone’s belief system and affect from that era. It has nothing directly to do with anything actually objectionable in the sense the offended claim, but it’s hard to blame them because they have not the words nor the experience for what they feel. Rather, the offense is in the incompatibility of our current apocalypse-oriented sociocultural immune system with the more robust and bountiful possibilities from that time. This discordance elicits a sub rosa horror that rises to consciousness as an offense, indeed, though not the offense of the wrong word (which is its surface manifestation), but rather the grief of what has been irrecoverably lost, what has been foregone that could have been realized, what we all could have had.

This extended yawp of unrecognized grief is what we see now, and not just from those who were alive then and conscious of the zeitgeist. No — we all feel it. It pervades our bones, our minds. And as then it has echoed through all media, all we consume, and stains this era just as the optimism of the 1990s tinged that time’s entire nous and expression thereof with much brighter shades.

Who are the 12% of people consuming half of all beef in the US?

It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.

And I do not plan to stop. Beef yum. Me eat.

The first ten on today’s playlist:

Do men actually imagine having sex with every woman they meet?

No the hell we do not. I’d say that happens basically never for me, and probably more often for some men. But even women I find attractive I very, very rarely think about sex with them or what it’d be like (maybe once every 2-3 years if that?). Even then it’s a fleeting thought and not really anything substantial.

This was true even when I was 18-22 by the way.

That men are just ravening sex beasts is just not true.