this makes me wonder how much longer a towel could be used if it were promptly dried after use, rather than put up on a hook where some of it dries sorta and the rest of it clumps.

even when you are clean from showering, you are still covered in delicious skin, refreshing moisture, and things that thrive in the presence of both.

How many times in U.S. History have the 3rd or 4th options been elected to the office of President? When the answer is zero, how do you count them as options?

You are literally more likely to win the lottery than you are to elect a third party to U.S. President.

plausible: check

testable: TBD

falsifiable: TBD

still, 1 out of 3. not bad!

prices will be raised regardless. record profits? raise prices. record growth? raise prices. cost of production goes down? raise prices.

if you won’t deny a thing to someone it’s pretty hard to sell it to anyone

Relay or decrentralize it maybe.

The thing I read about this earlier said Signal is super against decentralization iirc. Or at least against federation? Are they different?

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Hey, I’m fully on board with your defense of social media, but I think in this case the commenter is just saying “i miss the social media we had before they started calling it ‘social media’”. Even 2004 facebook fits this description, and I’m inclined to agree. I miss social media when it felt more like IRC and craigslist, when facebook was a glorified personal guestbook, etc.

This is really a both-sides situation.

Hamas isn’t Palestine. Israeli gov isn’t Israel.

When you make simple distinctions like this, things get less complicated.

vote for people that will help build the middle class up again

The point of the middle class is to split the working class in terms of income and wealth, so they spend their time antagonizing each other and mostly ignoring how the upper class is stealing everything.

We don’t need a middle class; we need a strong working class.

You want a class that’s got more education? Educate the working class. You want a class that’s got more wealth? Enrich the working class. You want a class that’s got the time and inclination to make informed political decisions? Deliver workday/workweek reform for the working class.

We need to be more efficient with what we make

We need to make stuff with the goal of not having to make any more of it at some point. Currently we have an economy that gives no shits about what is made so long as it sells more this quarter than last.

Either we need a magical wave of enlightenment to change the priorities of those who control the means of production, or we need to change the structure of our economy and its incentives to make “build to last” a winning strategy.

If the Republican party ever becomes irrelevant, Democrats will be stuck waiting to find out what their new opposition party will be. If it winds up being an actual progressive party, I don’t really see what options Democrats would be left with. Either they try to gain support from people leaving the Republican party, or they try to be “progressive enough” without losing corporate support?

If Democrats share that uncertainty about a post-Republican future, and if they think the way most status quo actors seem to, then I imagine they’d prefer the Republican party to hang on as long as possible.

What I think that strategy would look like: Democrats going as fiscally conservative as they can while still remaining left of Republicans. Democrats lamenting their inability to make progressive changes, all the while not investing much more than lip service towards advancing said progressive changes.

So tl;dr he/his team did two things:

1. argue the way AI uses content to train is legal
2. provide artists a tool to prevent their content being used to train AI without their permission

On the surface it sounds all good, but I can’t help but notice a future conflict of interest for Zhao should Glaze ever become monetized. If it were to be ruled illegal to train AI on content without permission, tools like Glaze would be essentially anti-theft devices, but while it remains legal to train AI this way, tools like Glaze stand to perhaps become necessary for artists to maintain the pre-AI status quo w/r/t how their work can be used and monetized.

this is a grievance i’ve needed validated for a long time. tysm

it’s such a wild example of feature creep, and yet it’s not quite the wildest example of Star Citizen’s feature creep. When Roberts’ funding exceeded his wildest dreams, he should’ve changed nothing from his original pitch and simply delivered that. For reference:

Original funding goal: $2 million US

Funding by end of Kickstarter campaign: well over $6 million US

If they finished the project with a $4 million surplus, great! They’d have ample budget for post-launch support, and maybe even for some free post-launch content updates to improve goodwill. If that’d gone as planned, the dude’d be sitting on a whole new generation of goodwill.

Oh, and we’d have a game like this:

Pick up jobs as a smuggler, pirate, merchant, bounty hunter, or enlist as a pilot, protecting the borders from outside threats.

A huge universe to explore, trade and adventure in

Wing Commander style single player mode, playable OFFLINE if you want

Actions of the players impact the universe and become part of its history and lore

Fully dynamic economy driven by player actions

If caught alone in an online ambush, send a distress broadcast to your friends and if they’re nearby they can jump in-system to save your bacon.

You wanted proper Newtonian mechanics. You got it! Spaceships adjust their trajectory and orientation just like the real thing.

10X the detail of current AAA games (as measured in polygons)

Range of scale never seen before in a game - ships from 27m to 1km scale, all at same level of detail

Support for Joystick, Gamepad, Mouse, Keyboard, as well as HOTAS, flight chair, rudder petals, and VR

the cardinal rule regarding “in-game purchases” is: Players who spend money purchasing in-game credits will have no advantage over players who spend time!

Instead they immediately pivoted to a pay-for-ships funding model and let the scope grow to seemingly every one of Roberts’ wildest whims

The tech demo is cool. Realization of no-loading-screen transitions from surface -> atmosphere -> orbit -> microgravity -> docking with another ship is wild. Being able to watch your pilot and gunner do a space battle from out the window, while you go walking about the ship is wild. But having it be only a tech demo for this long is so disappointing, and having the focus pivot from singleplayer-with-online to online-with-singleplayer are significant disappointments.

funding timeline: https://starcitizen.fandom.com/wiki/Crowdfunding_campaign

original pitch/campaign: https://web.archive.org/web/20121015042706/http://robertsspaceindustries.com/star-citizen/

corporations can’t seem to ever accept a limit for themselves.

This is the result of competition. When success is measured relative to others, it’s forever a moving target. Under this definition of success, self improvement is equally effective as sabotaging another. And as we can see, it’s not just businesses sabotaging one another. If a business can get away with sabotaging its own consumers, as it can in the case of a monopoly, a cartel, or regulatory capture, it will.

Also coming here from all. I had no idea any of the things you said were features of flashlights. Maybe a useful question for me to ask could be: what got you into flashlights as a ‘thing’? Also, do you feel you have a sense of what trades and hobbies mostly comprise this flashlight community?

Lastly, in your estimation is there a reason for an average flashlight user to make the jump from $10 flashlights that are bright enough for them to find their dog’s poo in the dark, to a $50 flashlight like those in this post?

This is coming from a slightly incredulous place, but I’m also trying to mentally pivot from incredulity to curiosity. I hope my tone hasn’t been abrasive.

It’s just that, living in that moment, it appears that these companies are so unbelievably large and powerful that they could never be unseated

It’s also that the U.S. has shown repeatedly that it’ll prop up companies with ongoing subsidies, or even bail them out as in the 2008 crisis.

strictly speaking it’s

here’s a gift card so you can give us that money back again we can keep your money but give you something for free later.