I would like to see this poll again with “no one” as an option. No one won anything at this debate. Anyone pleased by Trump’s performance would have been pleased no matter what, and everyone else is horrified.

I love the honesty of actual science.

This could be this decade’s Citizen’s United. Neo-liberalism especially among the court has been whittling away at the economy of regular people and the ability of the government to regulate business since at least the 70’s. Privatization never stopped or even abated, regulatory capture has been common, and businesses themselves write the bills for the congresspeople whose campaign they bankrolled to pass quid pro quo. We already have a severe lack of regulation and now we’re going to have no regulation. We just handed the entire country over to a class of gangsters whose morals are exactly the same as Donald Trump’s but wield a much greater degree of violence domestically and worldwide.

Good for Goldman Sachs

The GDP is completely irrelevant to the vast majority of people. The difference between perception of economic barometers like this one is that people used to have more faith in capitalism and it has become so painfully clear that this faith is unwarranted. In the past, people in desperate financial situations could easily delude themselves that they were temporarily embarassed while everyone else in the same situation was probably just lazy. Now people are starting to realize the system is causing it and are much less willing to eat the table scraps thrown to them during times of “economic prosperity.”

I have been reflecting recently that I was not learning the same lessons about the Holocaust as some of my classmates. I got the impression nothing like it should ever be allowed again and we should do everything we can to stop it when we see the signs. I assumed everyone got that impression but I’m realizing that was not the case.

Tabletop in person. I miss it. Secondly, in-person co-op. These are two mediums are being extinguished because of how difficult it is to profit from humans relating to one another in person and giving each other things for free.

Satirical, fake AI-generated clips show Rishi Sunak declaring, “Please don’t vote us out, we would be proper gutted!” and making unevidenced claims about how the Conservative leader is spending public money - including how he will send his “mates loads of dosh”.

I thought this article would be making a case against TikTok.

I think the main issue with 5E is that it’s so dominant and well-known people have been trying to make 5E into the game they want rather than seek a system more similar to their desires. 5E can be difficult, but at the many tables I’ve played at it’s almost guaranteed every party member will survive almost everything to preserve the narrative. It’s a system as forgiving as the table wants, and the table usually wants it to be forgiving.

It’s easy for one person to learn an entire system, but it’s easier for a DM to find players who already know 5E than to find a group of people willing to learn a new system. It can make people feel trapped by 5E.

Personally, I love the system but hate what Hasbro has done to the RPG community. While I’ll still probably play 5E since I’ve already had it for years, any purchase I make in the future will be from a third party or from a different publisher.

And shockingly, no central command compound just beneath it. Another “mistake” by the idf resulting in the deaths of men, women, and children.

Cool, I only ever watched Ghost in the Shell but have recently seen some of the creator’s other work which was also great. Appleseed is next on my list.

It’s an intersting contradiction trying to square what seems to be two completely different approches to housing. You seem to be mainly concerned with having stable housing on your own terms as your priority. This article seems to be targeted toward those whose priority is capital gains. While you and I see a house as a place to live, the market sees housing as a financial asset and the main financial asset available to the average person. Through that lens, this article demonstrates that one could actually lose money on their investment instead of gaining it implying it would be better to invest elsewhere.

The own nothing and like it model works very well for plutocrats since what they “own” are valuable financial assets which can be leveraged to borrow as much tax-free cash as they want for as long as they live, using their unlimited credit to borrow more cash to pay back the loans until they die. A step below that are people who understand that it’s always better to risk the bank’s money than one’s own and live their lives on credit as well. That’s all the capitalists who can basically live through arbitrage. The model breaks down a bit for us workers who are expected to behave like capitalists but without access to the credit that comes from the social classes described above. There are some people who luck out doing this, but this system was not made for regular people. I personally would rather live like a person with a house.

I thought it was moral dissonance. I’m at least glad that in youger generations mass murder is coming to be seen more universally as evil even when committed against groups who are not white. I’m sorry about whatever happened to you to make you this way.

From your initial comment it seems like the main misunderstanding is that nation states unilaterally declared by European powers in Africa and Western Asia from the nineteenth century until around the middle of the 20th century have been utterly disastrous to those places rather than being the only source of order in those places. Although these nation states are seen as legitimate by the powers which established them, in the opinion of many of the victims of these European powers whose population is much larger and much more relevant since they are physically present for the consequences of this establishment, tend not to consider them as legitimate and more of an encroachment. Colonization is not a neutral or natural process but an act of aggression by parties with superior military might on parties vulnerable to that might. If your view is that might makes right, then the issue here isn’t in historical misunderstanding but more of a moral dissonance. If that isn’t your view I’d be willing to entertain a more detailed conversation.

The sleep thing highlights how little we know about the brain. We have no treatment whatsoever which can safely induce sleep. This cliché advice, which is meant exclusively for acute insomnia of those who typically don’t experience it, is the cutting edge of sleep medicine. Humanity and the most advanced scientific research currently available is totally ignorant of everything not covered by these tips.

When I finally accepted that I have absolutely no control whatsoever of my sleep latency and there is currently nothing in all of medicine that can be done about it, my nights became a lot less stressful and a lot more enjoyable.

There are probably more obstacles to my daydream than I’m aware of. That being said there is nothing static about science. Comparing what we’re doing now to what we were doing a century ago, two centuries ago, and three centuries ago we might as well be comparing completely separate enterprises based on almost completely different fundamentals. Academia has never been as organized and wide-reaching as it is today so it may seem like a monolith, but it’s a new monolith which I’m not sure will remain exactly as it is for long (relatively). I think there’s some room for experimentation.

Fortunately I don’t need to have all the answers in my imaginary journal. I imagine it more as a cooperative enterprise among scientists who have become disenchanted with established academic paradigms and are looking to do the research and experimentation in that zone which is of interest to scientists themselves but not necessarily supported by the need to publish in the areas most emphasized by the academic establishment. This is not anything against what exists and what is being produced which I personally consider to be important, only to provide additional avenues to serve science in ways it’s not currently being served.

You’re right that credentials in this model are fuzzy. At least at the beginning it would be composed exclusively of scientists already working in their field who would want something like this. It could be possible that these scientists answering only to their immediate guerilla journal peers may see fit to support the research of an individual with no doctorate but who has demonstrated their self-education has made them capable of designing an experiment which can be quantified, criticized, and re-produced. Whether this standard would be agreed upon by the greater community would certainly be controversial with plenty of politics involved, but that reality it outside of the scope of my daydream.

As for the sustainability, it’s as in question as any open source project. It lives and dies based on peoples’ desire to do it only because they want to do it and others want to support them doing it. This couldn’t be a career alternative to academia because making it into a business or non-profit would defeat the purpose as it would attain the same vulnerabilities to a much more severe degree than the much larger and stable existing model.

Not necessarily. Just because my theoretical journal wouldn’t be subject to the existing academic establishment it does not mean it would accept everything. This journal would be more rigorous because it would be composed exclusively by fidelity to the scientific process. I am not anti-academia, only acknowledging that the existing structures are so large and composed of so many egos that there is necessarily over-focus on some areas and under-focus on other areas as a consequence of the structure. My pretend journal wouldn’t be for everyone rejected from those institutions for explicit reasons of incompetence, it would be for those scientists who want to pool resources to do work that would not be easy to support on the current academic model.

I often fantasize about guerilla science done by serious people outside of official channels. While there are plenty of crackpots who desire this for political reasons, I would really like to see an open-source “journal” by and for those scientists who are in it purely for science and have become disenchanted with the current model which is compromised in some ways that prevents progress on certain concepts.

This is interesting to think about because I might be one of the last generations of people who existed physically with one another more often than we would text or message one another. Since my old man hat is on, back in my day if you let one fly like this there were immediate social consequences. Everyone would go silent and look at you in disapproval and the person who was really invested in expunging the word would, at that moment, explain why saying that word was unacceptable. The person who said it of course wouldn’t have a change of heart, but they would learn that if they wanted to participate socially they would have to watch their language.

Now that it costs $100 to leave the house and most socialization takes place behind in a non-rich communication medium there isn’t really a consequence like there used to be. In most online “communities” no one is actually in community with one another and have no reason to be pro-social other than wanting to be pro-social. Trolling has always been a problem, but now that more of the population in general is communicating primarily on the channels where trolling is happening, trolling is now a political and social problem.