On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog … until you tell them.

Do you remember the beginning of Trump’s previous term? His very first priority was to harm Muslims.

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If someone doesn’t understand the difference between swearing at and swearing around, that’s a shitty environment.

In one of my better workplaces, the expression was “you can cuss the hardware, you can cuss the software, but don’t cuss your teammate.”

Everybody get up, it’s time to slam now

And yet a dump rump is still worse.

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I know folks with autism-related sensory sensitivities who really can’t stand celery and have trouble with a lot of canned soups and broths because of it.

Gotta admit, I originally wrote “old farts” and “young shits”, and decided that was too rude.

Federated platforms don’t die to corporate-type enshittification. They die to spam or elitism.

If operators fail to collaborate on keeping spam down, the platform becomes unusable or greatly-diminished due to spam. See Usenet for example — yes, it’s still around, but it’s greatly diminished from the 1990s. New projects and organizations don’t tell participants to subscribe to a Usenet newsgroup for discussion. (Curiously, email mailing-lists have outlived Usenet in this way, at least for technical projects. While email is federated, any given mailing-list is centralized.)

If the technology isn’t developed with an eye to new users’ needs and new use cases, because it’s “good enough” for the existing established users, the platform becomes dated and gets replaced by something trendy and corporate. This is IRC vs. Discord and Slack. IRC has a higher barrier to entry and infamously doesn’t work well on mobile — but it’s good enough for the old farts who care about it, while the young farts move to Discord instead.

New York is all the Asgardians’ fault. If Thor hadn’t gotten himself exiled, Loki wouldn’t have come to Earth and found the Tesseract, so no invasion.

Sokovia, though, is all Tony’s fault. He built and released an unaligned superhuman AI agent. (Don’t do that, folks; it predictably breaks the planet.)

Previously, it was a shithole.
Now, it’s a Nazi shithole.

The 1984 Gibson novel Neuromancer begins with the line, “The sky above the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel.”

At the time, this unambiguously meant the speckled gray of analog TV static: radio noise amplified and played out through a CRT’s scanning electron gun. However, before too many years had passed, new TVs started displaying a solid blue screen when tuned to a dead channel.

And in 1996, Neil Gaiman riffed on Gibson’s line, in Neverwhere: “The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel.”

The first-past-the-post voting system sucks; the resulting two-party system sucks; but right now we have to operate within it. The mathematics of that system entail the simple fact that if you discourage people from keeping Trump out, you are helping get Trump in. That makes you a Trump supporter.

You’re currently a Trump supporter. If you don’t want to be one, you can stop.

Elphaba

Yep. What’s more, this effect is even seen in countries that had less lead poisoning to begin with, like Sweden. Average blood lead levels in Sweden were below the level that the US government even considered concerning at the time — but they still got a ~5% decrease in crime by phasing out leaded gasoline.

Lead makes people stupid & impulsive; and stupid & impulsive people do more crime.

https://www.su.se/polopoly_fs/1.207429.1413788630!/menu/standard/file/WP14no9.pdf

Huh?

Gas stations for selling those crack pipes which facilitate drug use.

Hey, those paper roses make really cute gifts for your crackhead sweetie.

I sure wouldn’t want to be in the rope business.