It's not all that much of a conspiracy theory as those pushing this line at the payment processoers openly advocate that since LGBTQ+ references sex by way of sexuality and gender, then that is sexual content, and is therefore inappropriate for children. This, of course, completely ignores heterosexuality and cisgender because they consider queer people existing to be harmful to children. And trying to get through to them about how important age-appropriate sexual education is in combating child abuse is an exercise in frustration.

Burning the US down to divvy it up amongst themselves so they can run their own little technofiefdoms is all but their stated goal. They're talking about network states and crypto-resever currencies, and salivating at the prospect of having entire populations that they control outright to be the grist for their techno-futurist fantasies of being the sole owners of the cyberpunk dystopian mega corps.

If you think the global superpower can collapse without devestating repercussions around the world, you do not understand how interconnected financial markets are and how much thing like "being able to have food at the local supermarket" depend on things going predictably. This is less "USA knocked off the board" and more "kicking out a leg of the table holding the board up"

Yeah, it's only Nazi if it comes from the Bavarian region of Germany, otherwise it's only sparkling fascism.

Focusing on the culpability of individual voters is just reputation-washing for Israel.

It's like stepping over massive fossil fuel companies to blame someone who put plastic wrap in the trash instead of the recycle bin. This is not how to get people to stay engaged with politics between elections, and actually work together to do something now, which is how individual voters can actually impact the situation. Don't instill hopelessness by focusing on the blame of those so far from direct culpability.

Maybe the marketers should be a bit more picky about what they slap "AI" on and maybe decision makers should be a little less eager to follow whatever Better Auto complete spits out, but maybe that's just me and we really should be pretending that all these algorithms really have made humans obsolete and generating convincing language is better than correspondence with reality.

Pepperidge Farm remembers what Nintendon't.

So, a lot of the things the contemporary world depends on requires significant amounts of shipping. Like, honestly kind of mind-boggling amounts, and things that you often think are produced nearby go through planet-spanning supply chains. Now, consider that, as a part of the rebuilding in the post-World-Wars was based on funnelling world oil through US refineries, and backing the world economy on US Dollar, much of the world economy is run on the idea that "the US is good for it", and whatever business is done relies by and large on the US continuing to make timely debt payments (this is distinctly not the US paying off debts).

So, what happens if that stops happening? The whole economy comes crashing to a halt as people no longer have the guarantees they need to do worldwide business. Sure, the Euro exists and it's the second largest reserve currency, but over half of the world does business in USD, but that is a lot of guarantees that would have to shift basically immediately, and something is going to fall through as there just isn't the resources on hand to take it on all at once.

So, how does that wind up hurting Finland, the Euro and everyone, and not just collapse around them? Because im the mad dash to not be the "last ones out of USD" there's going to be something of the global supply chain that doesn't have somewhere to go, and as you may remember from the issues with the global supply chain in 2020, everything is set up to be "Just In Time" with no one having to keep inventory on hand. But when parts of the supply chain can no longer deliver "Just In Time" that doesn't just stop there. Other parts of the supply chain wind up depending on those things arriving when they were supposed to, and have little to no recourse when they don't.

If you want to understand how bad this can get, look at what happened in the 2008 financial crisis, and realize that a significant part of what stopped it from being more of a collapse is the U.S. stepping in and saying "the U.S. is good for it" despite how questionable of a call that may have been.

Ah, yes, the pinnacle of masculinity: whining that people fighting for their survival and freedom didn't pay enough care to the feelings of people who didn't think their struggle was all that big of a deal in the first place.

Maybe if you weren't out to spite the people who you believe have beef with you specifically, you'd realize that the struggle against patriarchy benefits men as well, but you'd have to recognize that there are plenty of men that are specifically marginalized by those that up hold their preferred version of masculinity is the only valid way to be a man.

Or, you could skip all that and blame it all on women hating men because some depiction of a woman said something mean to a depiction of a disrespectful man and take it to have meant you specifically, I guess.

What talking about predict? That was a weekly staple of his first term.

Fox News has already spent decades convincing MAGA that we're out for their blood, and made them terrified of everything outside their home. What were you hoping to do that wouldn't lead conservative media coverage as examples of what they've been telling their audience to be scared of?

And it's sentiment like this that makes it clear that the people clambering for people to "just do a general strike" or "just take up arms" have given no thoughts to how to do that without wasting the resources or lives of the people they demand take action. If you take part in union organizing, you learn that you have to make all of your attempts count, otherwise you're blowing your chances and making it harder in the future by alerting the bosses. Yes, you have to impact their money, but just like "vote with your wallet" is an empty phrase if there's no mass movement around a specific product/company, to actually deal with the structural issues that billionaires and the companies they represent present, individuals have to band together to create structures that can contend with them. Otherwise, it's just proposing individual actions to address structural problems, and that plays enough into the hands of these tyrants that they'll say that's the "right" way to deal with the problems they cause.

Why are you ranking genders? Did you spend time under the impression that men were the better gender? Can you even see how fucked it is to relegate an entire gender as second class? If you bought into the idea that women were somehow less than you by mere virtue of being women, can you not see how they might bear some justified disdain for you specifically?

No, I don't see men as a "lesser" gender, I don't see women as "lesser", either. They are simply different ways of experiencing the world, and the near coin flip odds of what the doctor will say when they check your genitals for the first time isn't gonna be the way that I determine who are worthwhile people.

There's more to masculinity and manhood than fitting the awful mold that the hegemonic powers have set out for us. If you stop trying to "win at gender", or whathaveyou, maybe you can become the sort of man that doesn't take gender as a zero-sum game

My Democratic Representative talking about being "proud to attend the inauguration" and "[standing] at the ready, willing to work with this administration" seems to be. I'm sure it's fine and not at all a concern and that the Democratic Party will definitely stand up for what matters, whenever they decide that is.

I think you're vastly underestimating the scale, and underestimating how much damage will be suffered in the short term. It's honestly not all that surprising that you would come to that answer, though, because it's the same mindset that's leading Trump and his oligarch cronies to what they're doing. But both COVID and 08 were backstopped by the US economy. We're looking at the situation where those happen, but the US is unable to be that backstop. Might the Eurozone become that backstop? Potentially, but the severe economic impacts that the US weathered as a result would be borne completely by Euro, which only holds up a fraction of the the world markets that the US. Might the Euro, might Finland, might even you specifically come out on top? Maybe! But it wouldn't be on top of this economy, but one that has undergone a severe change because a simply massive portion of the global economy that exists at this moment would simply no longer be there.

What I expect is all the "the FDA doesn't want you to know this" grifters are really excited to have their snake oil supported by the government so they can sell their stuff better. No further thought that "we could make a lot of money doing this" and of the similar myopic thinking that cares about next quarter's warnings call more than being in business next year

Calling AI measurable is somewhat unfounded. Between not having a coherent, agreed-upon definition of what does and does not constitute an AI (we are, after all, discussing LLMs as though they were AGI), and the difficulty that exists in discussing the qualifications of human intelligence, saying that a given metric covers how well a thing is an AI isn't really founded on anything but preference. We could, for example, say that mathematical ability is indicative of intelligence, but claiming FLOPS is a proxy for intelligence falls rather flat. We can measure things about the various algorithms, but that's an awful long ways off from talking about AI itself (unless we've bought into the marketing hype).

It's like supporting those companies, voting for politicians who support them then deny your responsability for that.

It really isn't, particularly for those of us who have been getting yelled at for doing exactly not that, and being told that not having full-throated support for Harris when we were specifically told that the campaign didn't need our support and locked out of speaking up. For those who have been told that our lack of support is why Trump got elected and Palestinians are being killed. Collapsing the entirety of electoral politics into "we voted for this" is harmfully reductive. We cannot keep telling ourselves that no matter what we do while working together, since the overall result was this it is our fault. It's literally ignoring the actions of political opponents to blame ourselves no matter the outcome.

Placing a blanket blame on voters for this is still just electoralism. Voting should be one political expression of many; reducing everything down to the outcome of an election--even if you're blaming just those who voted--doesn't build political movements.

Because there's a extra system of measurement change hiding in the middle. The Inches, Feet and Yards system (with the familiar 12:1 and 3:1 ratios we know and love), and Rods, Chains, Furlongs and Miles system. Their conversation rates are generally "nice", with ratios of 4 rods : 1 chain, 10 chains : 1 furlong, and 8 furlongs : 1 mile.

So where do we get 5,280 with prime factors of 2^5, 3, 5 and 11? Because a chain is 22 yards long. Why? Because somewhere along the line, inches, feet and yards went to a smaller standard, and the nice round 5 yards per rods became 5 and 1/2 yards per rod. Instead of a mile containing 4,800 feet (with quarters, twelfths and hundredths of miles all being nice round numbers of feet), it contained an extra 480 feet that were 1/11th smaller than the old feet.

So you would rather get no Starcraft games than get a Starcraft game that is not an RTS?

This is such a wild take. We are absolutely drowning in bland games built on IPs that the new devs had no care for and were simply cashing in on. In what world are you thinking we need more blatant cashgrabs with a coat of StarCraft-tinted paint? And that we're hoping for good things from Microsoft at this point? Nah, I'm good, thanks.