The issue is deeper than just the skill of the artist. It's that "good" music is that which stirs strong emotions in ourselves.. But feeling emotions at the workplace is cringe and unprofessional and no one wants that. So the music has to be bad since it must be "professional".

He was trying to reproduce the dynamic of the OK hand sign.

What happened then is that neonazis online thought it would be hilarious to use the innocent sign as an in-joke. Leftists caught on quickly since they are obsessed with fascism coming back and the whole thing was quite public. Then the OK sign spread gradually from online self-professed neo-nazis to real life hard right politicians. Finally, when leftists said "this is a neo-nazi symbol", they got laughed at in the media by these rightist politicians along with the apolitical neutral commentators.

This had two effects : first, it paints the left as a bunch of crazies and the hard right as relaxed funny types by comparison; second, it acted as a shibboleth. What I mean by that is that if became possible to know people's politics by simply showing them the sign and asking "what is this?" — you'd get either a puzzled look, a denunciation of far right politics, or a knowing chuckle and wink.

Musk tried doing the same thing with his nazi salute : build some plausible deniability with the "I give my heart to you" comment, and then immediately afterward tweeting stuff like "the Nazi attack is sooo tired". The hard right base recognized the drill and started using it as a shibboleth too.

But it was too much too fast, the whole of MAGA wasn't ready to commit to literally Nazi salutes, so it was written off as Musk being a weirdo.

You can tell it wasnt a simple mistake because then Musk would have produced some kind of blabd corporate apology afterward, not immediately made nazi puns on social media

Most European languages are some almagation and standardization of a patchwork of dialects. English destroyed scots, Tours french destroyed occitan, hochdeutsch largely displaced bavarian, etc. The reason is the dramatic increase in state power in the 19th century (therefore giving importance to the language of administration), combined with policies of "cultural unification" and nation building. So there in fact very much is artificiality in language that is predictable.

The reason Esperanto wasn't adopted by states when it was invented is because internationalism was seen as either an utopia or a threat by states. The reason it isn't adopted by the UE now is because it would be a highly visible and unpopular move that would take decades to bear fruit and therefore politicians will never support it. The entire UE therefore learns english, massively increasing the influence of people who brand themselves its enemies.

🙂‍↔️✋ born to die

🙂‍↔️✋ born to live

😎👉 born to increase GDP

“This is a stark contrast to the U.S., where AI growth is increasingly tied to debates over data center power consumption and grid limitations”

Won't anyone rid us off this troublesome democracy, so that tech companies may grow in peace ?

Biden won the highest turnout election in more than a century, and Al Gore's win was stolen by the Bush clique. This is gross reframing or even reimagining of events to suit your narrative.

In 1700s Europe the people in power were the nobility (the descendants of feudal aristocrats) and the clergy (the church). Their claim to power (legitimacy) was that God willed it, and also they had the biggest army ("ultima ratio regum").

Liberalism arose from "enlightenment thought" and basically said that all humans are equal, therefore state legitimacy comes from the consent of the people, and therefore there should be a set of laws that guarantees everyone's rights and gives everyone a say in how society should be run. Some subjects (such as religion) belong to a "private sphere" that the state has no say in and is therefore beyond politics. State power should be minimal and tightly regulated through mechanisms such as the bill of rights or the separation of powers. This ideology was the foundation of the US independence and the French revolution. The political thinkers most emblematic of it are John Locke and Montesquieu.

The people who gained most from erasing the special place in society of the nobility and the clergy ("abolishing the privileges") were people who were rich but not part of these organisations, that is to say merchants and industrialists. Leftism was born out of the "social question" : everyone having the same rights is cool but the richer in society clearly benefit more while the poorer are unable to make use of these "rights" (for instance having the right to a trial does you no good if you can't afford a lawyer ; or being allowed vacation days is pointless if you can't afford to stop working). It is somewhat at odds with liberalism, because solving the social question might require to break some rules of liberalism (most notably state non-intervention, private property, and separation of powers). The most emblematic political thinker here is Karl Marx.

Some leftists theorized the state should be violently overthrown in order to install themselves as dictators and therefore solve the social question by directly redistributing wealth to the poorest. The most important of these is Lenin, who took over the government of Russia in 1917, turning it into the Soviet Union. However he soon died and passed power to Stalin, who cemented his dictatorship and took over a number of countries through military force. When some of these countries (most notably Hungary in 1956) tried to rebel, the Soviet government sent in their army. Thus "tankie" is an insult ― it means one who excuses the brutality of the Soviet government, or more generally the usage of force by a leftist power. It mostly means the same as "stalinist".

Meanwhile, in the US people were divided on how much state power was acceptable to use. The democratic party used state power to fix the economy during the great depression (Roosevelt), then fight racism during the civil rights era (Johnson) ; today a part of society aligned with the democratic party wishes to use state power to fight sexism and other social issues, therefore being closer to the leftist view. The word "liberal" in US parlance came to mean those people, who today call themselves progressives, and the "liberals" I referred to earlier are sometimes referred to as "classical liberals" in order to avoid confusion.

I hope this clears things up

If it's a honor system that you don't obey, are we to conclude you are without honor? ^^

Yes, this is a long established left-anarchist position. A foundational text is Proudhon's 1840 What is Property? if you're curious.

Current property regimes were established illegitimately by violence: manifest destiny in the US, the Norman conquest in Britain, the Frankish conquest in France, etc. Even back then they were to the detriment of the many and the benefit of a few, and since property tends to accumulate (through inheritance and moral persons) this only amplified over time. Today this regime is backed by the state's monopoly on violence. So effectively most of us are born in a world where violent gangs stole all the land for themselves hundred of years ago and any attempt to overturn this is met by violence from their legal descendants.

Note this doesn't apply to personal property (legitimized by usage: your home, clothing, toothbrush, etc), but only to the state-backed legal regime of property such as owning land or companies.

I don’t have any statistic, but I would guess that the proportion of people wanting a Jack is significantly higher in the group of people interested in buying Fairphone that on the general population.

Fairphone literally does have that statistic. They spent effort to gather that info in order to inform their business decisions. And they report:

We also looked into the consumer data and Fairphone 4’s weight and thickness were more of an issue than the lack of a minijack

According to MK, he was written to be gay, but higher-ups had him make his relationship with Huna ambiguous.

First, what makes you think we can? It's a strong claim to put forth without evidence.

Second, I won't be there in the future, so I'd like things not get too bad in the meantime.

This meme implies this is only an issue of personal responsibility ; but in truth to actually lower car deaths we need a systemic approach.

Think of cigarette companies laying blame at "addictive personalities". They knew making people personally responsible would not threaten their business, whereas public policies against tobacco did.

This post is doing the same thing : when an accident happens we should not just ask "who is to blame?" but also "how do we prevent it in the future?", which in this case means redesigning streets to be friendlier to pedestrians and developing other modes of transportation.

This is [...] a strange marketing strategy by AI companies. Instead of selling products based on helpful features and letting users decide, executives often deploy scare tactics that essentially warn people they will become obsolete if they don't get on the AI bandwagon.

Very insightful for me to read this. If AI in its present state was as useful as it is advertised, it wouldn't need such apocalyptic language.

War isn't inevitable. Back in the cold war it was averted multiple times, and the USSR had a much more closed economy than China's. China going to war with NATO would lose them all their largest trading partners.

Bash has an option for that you can put in your .bashrc:

bind "set completion-ignore-case on"

Other interesting options exist

It's interesting how you seem to believe your stance is based on science and facts yet you conducted no research to find out what vegans actually eat. Else you'd have found out vegans do typically eat a lot of protein and generally have healthier diets than the general public. The reason being vegans by definition spend time thinking about what to eat and looking stuff up, whereas many people just eat whatever.

The game also supports NVIDIA Reflex technology, but Unlike Anti-Lag+ which works on a driver level, Reflex is incorporated into the game itself.

This shows how Nvidia's size and money allow it to improve its market position without necessarily having better tech. They may sign deals with game developers to implement Nvidia-exclusive features rather than have to tamper with DLLs and such.

In their world, resisting surveillance will be probable cause for arrest, because you must have something to hide and need to be investigated.

Just curious, do you get 10¢ for every metaphor you write or something?