It should be illegal to misrepresent an ad as a post or comment. This exact thing should be against the law. The boundary between advertising and social media is so thin at this point. It has to stop. It's dangerous for consumers. Corporations should have to clearly label themselves at every turn. The usage of AI to intermingle advertising and social media should be blanket illegal.

An unelected billionaire who was appointed by the president to the head of a department he made up is gaining massive control of the federal government.

This unelected billionaire is an unapologetic nazi. He did a Nazi salute twice at the inauguration. He spreads Nazi ideology on his social media platform. He supports international Nazi causes. He is an open white supremacist on his social media platform and an open anti-semite.

He's now being given essentially limitless control over all federal agencies of the United States government. The Nazi takeover of America is already complete.

Honestly, same boat. Our power bill has gone up over 20% this past year like it's insane. Our grocery costs have easily doubled in that time, too. Like I'm doing the math and seeing the numbers like I'm making more than I was 3 years ago, but I wasn't living paycheck to paycheck then, and I'm rationing food today.

I also can't count the number of times prices have gone up on common groceries in the last year. Every time I go in I'm spending more than I did the previous time. And the grocery stores around here have started phasing out their cost saving brands. More and more lately what used to be the expensive brand is the only one left, and I'm paying twice as much for half as much compared to what I was getting before. They're not even trying to hide what they're doing.

The fall of the American empire happening live for all to see. A pedophile president, a government chopped into pieces and fed into a wood chipper, a bunch of self obsessed egotistic billionaires lobbying for child labor laws to be repealed, and a totally deranged political system that has gotten so high on the fumes of its own rotting corpse that it can't even tell it's dying.

The MAGA fascist movement built itself on characterization of its opponents as pedophiles. Its one thing for this to be obviously untrue, its another thing entirely for it to suddenly preoccupy itself very heavily on protecting pedophiles. The entire political elite of the movement are greedy narcisstic egomaniacal sociopaths. Their primary motives have always been personal gain. Attaching themselves to an obvious pedophile is very different than attaching themselves to one who has been documented in the public arena as one. The republican party fascist elite won't risk their own necks for that. I don't know how they will respond. He however is running out of options that aren't "create a police state, arrest all political opposition, and take state control of all media". Its do or die for his dictatorship.

The entire study of great apes and sign language has been based on flawed methodology and subjective and biased interpretation of very small data sets.

Its interesting that apes can recollect abstract symbols. It's even kind of interesting that they can to some extent recollect hand gestures. But it is nothing more than symbolic association at its absolute best. Calling it language is a fundamental misrepresentation of what is taking place. Apes already possess several kinds of 'language' comparable to symbolic association, stuff like emotive language and body language and expressive language. There is no substantive evidence that they are capable of understanding and using an abstract language.

What has largely happened in so called 'studies' on 'sign language' in great apes, has been a lot of animal abuse and fundraising for animal abuse predicated on vague notions of how inspiring the idea of talking apes is. They can't talk. They are nonetheless very interesting creatures and we should be fascinated by them even without them having the ability to speak human language.

The really frustrating part is that they shouldn't have to speak with us for us to feel compassion towards them. The really disgusting part is that wild animals were being abducted from the wild and raised in deplorable conditions while essentially being tormented by disgraced researchers trying to prove that they could talk. They're very well suited to their natural environment (which we are destroying) and are not meant to live lives in concrete cages on the other side of the world being prodded and clicker trained to make vague hand motions. It's just animal cruelty under the guise of scientific research.

This is what they want. See, Trump is utterly destroying America's economy and nucleus of global hegemony. The people are in for increasingly tough circumstances as China just stops trading with America, and all previous allies start to shun the country. Trump is trying to grow the US military to start his fascist wars of conquest both south and north. This will also put the people in increasingly dire circumstances, both with the massive amount of death involved in such a conflict and in the mass reallocation of resources towards war efforts. He can't talk about those things openly to the people because he'd have to admit their lives are going to get significantly worse. So, what can he do instead?

He can do the same thing he's been doing the entire time. Build a fervore for ethnic cleansing and eugencist racialist politics. The people are trained to lap it up without even thinking, and they get genuinely itchy for their next fix. Who's the minority we're hating today? Who's the person of color we're going to commit vile acts of cruelty on today? Where do I direct my homicidal rage at the threat to my inherent superiority today? This is how they are. Every single day, Fox News, Twitter, and the White House all come together to deliver. They fill the bowl, and the bigots heads are down gorging themselves on it while their own lives are horrifically torn apart around them.

It doesn't matter what else he's doing. He's fighting DEI. He's putting black people and women in their place. He's making immigrants, muslims, jews, and the queers afraid again. His support base is unyielding. We know they will never yield because fascists never do. Even decades after the end of World War 2, many former SS and former Nazi supporters STILL thought Hitler was sent from God and that everything he did was right. Even as Soviet bombs were falling on their heads. The ardent supporters of fascism will support it literally until they die. They loved that Hitler was committing genocide. They loved that he was cruel and inhuman. They admired how the image he portrayed so neatly fit with their patriarchal worldview. Its why they supported him to begin with. Economy this, nationalism that, but down to the line it was all about cruelty.

Are the people who support these kinds of tweets petty and childish? Absolutely they are. This isn't even about pettiness though. This is what they voted for. They voted for people of color to suffer. They voted for immigrants to suffer. If it came out tomorrow that he died in that hellhole they'd all cheer.

Bigotry and prejudice. Not necessarily uneducated, but certainly poorly educated.

Idk why this is treated as though its so inconceivable. Greta is hated by conservatives around the world. Most countries have already condemned Israel. They only care what Trump's regime thinks. Their prisons are notorious centers of physical emotional and sexual torture. This is relatively mild treatment in comparison to many of the accounts I've read. It's still awful, but if they were going to invent a story about how vile the Israeli prison guards were, this wouldnt be noteworthy in any way. Barely even scratches the surface of the things that happen in those prisons.

They'd have to shoot me before I will ever deny my own womanhood. Not even with a gun to my head would I call myself a man. I lived in a closet for 18 years and it nearly killed me. It damaged me in ways I have to live with forever. I am a woman. They can say whatever the fuck they want it won't change that. I will not bow my head. If it comes to it, I'll die with my back straight, proud of who I am.

Make fascists fear for their lives.

Wow, 60 years on and they're still raiding gay bars. Can't express how profoundly depressing that is.

Note how they always enshrine gender in biology, but then make all kinds of non-biological statements about what gender is.

"XX is woman"/"Large gametes is woman"/"can conceive is woman"

And then they'll say

"Women aren't as aggressive", "women are more emotional", "women like being in the home more", "those are women's clothes", etc.

The only reason it's so important for it to be biological is because of how it punishes gender non-conformity and makes the lives of trans people hell. Like it isn't ideologically consistent and they know that. They just don't care. If it was just about genitals or chromosomes, then why is it that gender dictates all these social things about us? The only reason to root gender in how you were born is to ensure gender roles are as rigid and immutable as possible.

It's hard to explain how significant the Voyager 1 probe is in terms of human history. Scientists knew as they were building it that they were making something that would have a significant impact on humanity. It's the first man made object to leave the heliosphere and properly enter the interstellar medium, and this was always just a secondary goal of the probe. It was primarily intended to explore the gas giants, especially the Jovian lunar system. It did its job perfectly and gave us so many scientific discoveries just within our solar system.

And I think there's something sobering about the image of it going on a long, endless road trip into the galactic ether with no destination. It's a pretty amazing way to retire. The fact that even today we get scientific data from Voyager, that so far away we can still communicate with it and control it, is an unbelievable achievement of human ingenuity and scientific progress. If you've never seen the image the Pale Blue Dot you should see it. That linked picture is a revised version of the image made by Nasa and released in 2020. It's part of a group of the last pictures ever taken by Voyager 1 on February 14th 1990, a picture of Earth from 6 billion kilometers away. It's one of my favorite pictures, and it kinda blows my mind every time I see it.

The article actually explains that the mushroom is essentially being hijacked for some of its sensory abilities, like light and heat. The mushroom is connected to an electronic circuit. The electronics make decisions about what to do based on the mushrooms' sensory observations.

It's a clickbait title, but the article does clarify.

Fascists are nothing if not predictable. Tariffs arise naturally from far-right ultranationalism. There's a few reasons for this.

One is that it plays directly into notions of national/racial exceptionalism. "Our country/race is better than all the rest. Other nations/races should have to pay exorbitant fees just to do business with us."

Second is that it severs ties with international mechanisms of diplomacy and peacekeeping. It serves as a convenient way to detach a state from its allies (who stand in the way of its conquests). This is typified by events like the Japanese Empire's withdrawal from the League of Nations, in that case not over tariffs but a war of conquest, but tariffs can provide similar opportunities to break apart treaties and start preparing a populace for the conditions of all out war.

Thirdly is that it stops trade with other nations. This forces manufacturing facilities to be bolstered in the nation, isolationism. This means that once all-out war is declared, the nation has the full-scale production facilities to create machines of war at the pace required to sustain large-scale conflicts. This creates the precarious situation of having more production than you do resources (because you can't trade for them anymore), but this problem is solved by conquering territories rich in natural resources.

And fourth, it serves as a direct prelude to declaring all out war. Trade wars are nearly always present prior to full-scale conflicts in modern history. Both Nazi Germany and the fascist Empire of Japan were widely sanctioned internationally in the years leading up to the Western, Eastern, and Pacific fronts of World War 2. These trade wars actually served fascist interests in so far as they made the lives of their citizens already feel constrained and pressured. An escalation to all-out conflict wasn't that great a change when already all their sons were being drafted and common household goods were becoming scarce and rationed.

Trump is not original. We've seen these events play out before under a variety of different circumstances. The move of economically isolating the United States from the rest of the world perfectly serves the fascist conquering aspirations of his Christian white nationalist voting base. They'll grumble about cost of goods, but they lap up his ultranationalist "making the world pay us" rhetoric like they're dying of thirst.

Heaven forbid she lose money. Literally the only thing that could make her stop briefly pause harassing people on the internet.

Oil CEOs pay fines for bringing about a global climate catastrophe. Fascist politicians are given slaps on the wrist for an attempted coup d'etat. Government officials openly commit gross violations of privacy and suffer no consequences.

But a guy hacks a university network and downloads a hoard of scientific articles that should have been freely accessible to begin with and he gets 35 years in prison. I'll admit I wasn't familiar with this case before I saw this picture. Which is kind of insane in and of itself.

"I don't care if you take hormones or get surgery you'll never be a woman"

"If you vote for a woman you are one now" 🫠 my god they're all so pathetic

"If you, my friend, are not acquainted with the juvenile justice system, you will be very shortly," the officer told the child.  Earlier that day, the child allegedly spit at a teacher. Now, he was in handcuffs and a police officer was saying he could end up in jail.  That child — a second grader with autism at a North Carolina school — was ultimately pinned on the floor for 38 minutes, according to body camera video of the incident. At one point, court records say, the officer put his knee in the child's back.  

Jesus christ that is so fucking disgusting. What kind of line is that? Does he think he's in a movie or something? Cops literally live in an alternate reality where they're some kind of action heros or something as they physically assault second graders with autism and threaten them with institutionalization.

KolibriOS, arguably the smallest modern GUI OS at 1.44MB, could be encoded on ~142 of them. I shouldn't find that interesting but I do. MikeOS, which is an operating system used to teach about OS design, could fit on ~74.

Making this a very dumb very impractical but nonetheless legitimately viable method for non-electromagnetic OS storage.