My uncle was a small-herd fairy farmer my entire life. Never had more than a couple dozen cows at a time, always knew all of them by name. He kept on getting squeezed out by larger and larger operations. He eventually went grass-fed organic to try and stay competitive. Then he told me that the large operations have organic mini-farms that they operate. The cows there are kept organic… but only so long as they remain in perfect health. The instant one gets sick, she gets moved over to the bigger factory operation and is pumped full of all the antibiotics that all the rest are kept on.

So, while my uncle is keeping a small herd and who has both financial and moral reasons for wanting to maintain his cows that way, a large factory farm can maintain a nominal organic operation, undercutting small fries like my uncle, but actually only keeping their cows organic for exactly as long as it’s convenient, and not a moment longer.

My uncle is retired now, but it hurt me to hear him tell that story. We ought to care about small family farms, but we keep letting capitalist “efficiency” turn every aspect of life on Earth into a market-optimized hellscape.

I’m pretty sure they just had us brute-force memorize all of the single digit additions and multiplications in grade school. Seemed to work out okay for me.

“Mr. Franklin, of what use is this hot air balloon contraption?”

“You can take ladies up in it with a bottle of wine and a blanket and you know, they can’t refuse, because of the implication. Think about it. She’s floating up in the middle of the sky with some dude she barely knows. You know, she looks around, and what does she see? Nothing but open air. 'Ahhhh! There’s nowhere for me to run. What am I gonna do, say ‘no?’”

What’s going on down in Columbus County, North Carolina?

The spacing on the lights up top is super weird. AI seems to have a real problem recreating consistent repeated patterns.

You’re not exactly wrong, but it’s even more fundamental than that. If leftists were a more reliable voting bloc, then Democrats couldn’t exist as they do today. They would be primaried by more leftist candidates. And then, if hard left policies were more popular with the general electorate, they would win.

The nightmare we’re all living in right now is proof. I don’t believe for an instant that The Powers That Be wanted Donald Trump to be president. Even by fascist standards he’s kind of a disaster. They wanted fucking Jeb! But Trump’s implicit message of “I’m going to fuck shit up and the establishment doesn’t want me” resonated with a lot of people. It just got the extra boost from being tied with fucked up racism, sexism, and ignorance, all of which are tied to pretty solid groups of voters.

They made a new She-Ra show on Netflix back in 2018 and it’s fuckin’ awesome.

It seems to me like there’s a lot of talk in the vein of “AI will never be able to meaningfully replace humans at [Task X],” and not enough talk about what we should do to prepare for the possibility of AI replacing humans at those tasks.

Like, right now, AI can create shitty art and write shitty code, but are we prepared for what happens if and when it can do those things well? We’ve got to acknowledge that human lives have inherent value, and not just because they can do things that machines can’t.

I had this in a “math for the English and theatre majors” class called Modern Math. It never used anything much more complicated than basic “solve for X” algebra, but it had useful lessons like fair ways to divide up an estate, or how to plan a more efficient route across multiple destinations.

They also taught us why, mathematically, first past the post is just about the worst possible version of democracy, and why any of the several other options are objectively better.

Be the Punisher.

Want to make cool skull logo out of burning cars.

Can’t really see the parking lot from above.

Just sort of pace out the outlines with gasoline, hope you get the proportions right.

Comes out like this:

If it’s going to have some kind of inventory system… figure out a way to prevent players from hoarding high-value items until the end of the game, at which point they are either meaningless because you’re so leveled up, or else you can trivially defeat the final boss by spamming all the holy hand grenades you’ve been socking away.

Starship Troopers isn’t a smart movie pretending to be a dumb movie, it’s a moderately intelligent movie with pretensions of being a smart movie pretending to be a dumb movie.

Robocop, on the other hand, is a masterpiece.

George Lucas is one of a handful of people on the planet where you can accurately say “They ruined my childhood.”

Like, if you’re a massive fan of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles but hate the most recent incarnation, you can still go back and watch the original. Lucas has gone out of his way to make that more difficult for Star Wars fans. It’s an impressive level of aggression and back-stabbery for the people who made him wealthy to begin with.

B̷̧͕͈͆e̷̬͖͙̅ ̶̤̞̝̦̀ṇ̵̅̓̇͘o̸̪̺̺̳̿̓̂t̶͚̺̜̦̔͐̿ ̸̦̫̂̀å̸͕̤͌f̵̡͖̲̌͛ṙ̶̗̩̈́a̶̦̒̐̋͠i̶̜̐͝ḋ̶̢̰̪̻̂̅̾.̵͓̺̠̖̊͌̈́͆

In any given year, more than half of all gun deaths are suicides, so really it should read…

Go back inside

Shoot self

Also keep an eye out for people complaining about “globalists” and “coastal elites” because you’ll find that the majority of the time, that means Jews.

The page Philosophy loops back to itself via the twelve-article chain of Existence, Reality, Universe, Space, Three-dimensional space, Geometry, Mathematics, Theory, Reason, Consciousness, Awareness, Philosophy.

Looks like he’s trying to avoid the Helvetica Scenario.