We feel similarly about this topic. You might look into donating to one of their unions. I donated to SAG for a long time in lieu of paying for Netflix et al. The money doesn’t go directly to artists but it does help keep their posture strong in negotiations and strikes. Of course I’m piss broke now, but it felt nice to contribute materially while it lasted.

almost uploaded this to the lemonade stand listing before I realized it could probably be construed as an actionable threat. that was close lol

I can hold the phone next to the pizza if you want to talk to it

get out of my head get out of my head get out of my head get out of my head

Because most people do not follow the news very closely. They learn enough to form an opinion, often against their will, and then try their hardest to pay attention to things that don’t torpedo their mental health.

I don’t have a source to point at but I think the first trump admin, followed by covid, broke people. There is no good news and no clear action to take to make the bad news stop. So people tune out. Some news slips through with their FYP or whatever but even then what they get is predigested and filtered so that the emotion hits hard and goes away fast. The most popular form of media is designed not to inform, so people are not informed.

Turns out Rosie worked for the NSA the entire time

I tend to be fairly sensitive, and I haven’t been very successful in quieting my own kneejerk defensiveness when “yes all men” and “male tears” come out. A lot of feminists are justifiably angry but I don’t have to stay in a room where I don’t feel welcome.

So I tend not to label myself a feminist even though I agree with feminists on most things. I vote for feminist candidates, I’ll defend feminism when people tell lies about it, but I can’t be a feminist myself because I can’t participate in it.

Have a kid at 25 -> kid has kid at 25

I do not see the problem. You could bump both of those down to 20 and she’d have a 10y/o grandkid. Multiple grandkids even.

E: Aside from all that, teen pregnancy happens, and while it’s not ideal it also doesn’t make the mother some kind of untouchable pariah.

Tbh many people don’t use PCs at all, and the advent of cheap generative ai for image manipulation makes this kind of creative task more accessible to those people. I hate it. I would like to put the touch screen genie back in the bottle. But it is too late.

you are having an entirely different conversation than the one you are in. The point of all these little things is that kids teach them to other kids. I assume theres still kid-lore, its just about… idk, how to unlock the Freddy fazbear skin in fortnite or whatever

“We thought having the ai voiced by ai would be cute” would have been acceptable, had they paid a voice actor to train the model. It doesn’t say in the article but I’m assuming they used some off-the-shelf model, which is tantamount to theft unless the company selling it in turn paid for use of everything in their corpus.

The “take that, liberal snowflakes” framing is beyond crazy.

The CEO of Ford drives a Xaomi. He could have any car he wanted, and he chooses a Chinese car. It’s ostensibly for market research but he’s said he really doesn’t want to give it up. So yeah they’re cheap, and also I think China might just genuinely make better cars at this point. While China has been investing into manufacturing and consumer tech the big three have been dragging their heels and kicking and screaming because they see engineers as cost centers and that is biting them in the ass as well.

Company’s that own a patent can release spores causing cross contamination, then sue a farmer at harvest for their crop containing copyrighted genes.

No they cannot. This little bit of common knowledge is bullshit on several levels.

1. nitpicky, but plants reproduce by pollen and seeds, not by spores. okay, since i’m being nitpicky potatoes and sugarcane don’t reproduce with seeds. potatoes are tubers and sugarcane uses cuttings. some plants reproduce with rhizomes but we usually don’t eat those. point is spores are for mushrooms and ferns and whatnot.
2. the big seed producers pledge not to sue for trace contamination
3. monsanto was preemptively sued by farmers in 2013 because the farmers were afraid of the windblown lawsuits and wanted to get monsanto’s patents on genetics struck down. court said no, because Monsanto could not be sued over a threat that did not exist. That is, Monsanto had never actually sued anyone for windblown genetics. But given the above point the court also said monsanto is legally not allowed to sue for windblown genetics. because they promised not to.
4. copyright and patent law are two different things. seeds and their genetics are covered under patents. that’s either better, worse, or sideways depending on your perspective but it is different.

big ag is evil and they fuck farmers over constantly but you don’t have to bullshit to make them look bad

no wait this page is still usable on ADSL, you need MOAR CDNS. MOAR HIGH RES IMAGES. MOAR VIDEOS! MOAR TRACKING PIXELS AND SCRIPTS MOAR MOAR MOAR

Well how are you going to get rid of the ghosts if you don’t consume them? You pour it drain and now the drain is haunted and you have to hire a plumber who’s also a practicing priest. Its a very rare job description and I’ve only ever heard of one. He doesn’t come cheap. You’d think it’s a scam if it weren’t for the water ghosts.

I wanted to make a cheap joke about getting the ghosts out by boiling the hell out of it but I wound up in a rabbithole about supercritical water. It turns out you can boil the hell into water. With a lot of heat and pressure water can dissolve rock, oil and gas dissolve into the water easily, and if you put organic waste into really angry water that shit will burn. Underwater! It even destroys PFAS and prions!

I am in my mid thirties. Someday age will catch up to me on this front, but it doesn’t seem to have noticed me yet. I can still out drink most 25 year olds (which does not make me cool). Some of us are just Built Different, and by that I mean that through a combination of genetics, tolerance, and being, ahem, “big boned,” my body is fantastic at absorbing, buffering, and metabolizing ethanol. A blessing and a curse in equal parts. Other people will stop at two drinks because their body tells them to and they have the willpower to listen to that signal. My body never sends the signal. Unless I’m in a situation where I have to drive home, my internal “probably shouldn’t do that” doesn’t overcome the disinhibition. So on a Friday night at home with nothing to do I can easily knock back enough to still be drunk the next day and still not get hung over. Sounds awesome, except that the ability to process alcohol efficiently doesn’t protect me from alcohol being a carcinogen or neurotoxic.

The simple antidote to all this, of course, is to not have the first drink. Which pains me, because alcohol rules.

Oddly when I ask people like this too many questions they find it difficult to explain their beliefs with any specificity. Questions like “what is energy,” or “how exactly does the tetractys connect to quantum physics,” or “how can we apply any of this knowledge in a falsifiable way?”

“Everybody pees too but if you’re doing it 50 times a day something is probably wrong”