wikitopian

California can't support as many people as you wish it could and replacing its SFH suburbs with cramped mixed income efficiency apartments would be an aesthetic, ecological, and socioeconomic disaster.

I hope the feds hunt down and arrest everybody who used multiple slurp juices on a single ape.

There's XMR, some interesting little projects like DERO, and a vast sea of tokenomic pyramid scheme garbage that governments can and should stop.

JavaScript Creek

We might have lost the ability to solve problems and create solutions with approachable yet powerful programming environments. But think about all the abstractions, frameworks, platforms, paradigms, and design patterns we now get to learn!

I remember back when cryptokitties came out KNOWING that useful real world blockchain applications were right around the corner.

Simpler, happier times.

But why is the pop music industry stagnant, though?

There are fewer producers, executives, and financial/logistical obstacles to creatively expressing ourselves with music than ever.

Has everything been expressed? Are we as a people becoming less inspired? Is this part of an inevitable process with any medium of expression? If so, has our collective muse moved somewhere other than music? Will technological progress be found somewhere other than digital hardware?

We've got to learn that this is an inevitable consequence of our appetite for automation and scale.

If your business is important enough that it can't risk falling into the endless hellpit of automated, anonymous, hyperscaled infrastructure, then don't build your business on automated, anonymous, hyperscaled infrastructure.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/old-music-...

If anything, it's the middle aged who refuse to believe that technology and music can just sort of stop progressing, while the young are downloading old music and shrugging about all the the tech hype surrounding corporate stock market bubbles.

It's always the elephant in the room with invisible illness.

I believe that the diagnostic methods for testing chronic inflammation can and must be improved, and that chronic inflammation deserves far more R&D investment than it currently receives.

Long Covid is merely a small part of a broader story of chronic inflammation and how millions and millions of people are suffering from invisible autoimmune consequences of lyme disease, STDs, and long forgotten colds and flus that triggered lifelong inflammatory reactions.

It's the hidden cause of most cancer, a major driver of the obesity epidemic, and is surely subtracting more years of life from more people than the covid pandemic ever did. I'm optimistic that we'll have the diagnostic criteria and awareness in the medical field in the future where we will be able to diagnose, measure, and treat chronic autoimmune inflammation rather than debating whether or not everybody's faking it.

Disclaimer: Some people are definitely faking it. I know it. You know it. Everybody knows it. I'm not disputing that. If we can start understanding it as chronic autoimmune inflammation, for which there can be solid diagnostic criteria, rather than as "long covid" or "chronic lyme disease" or whatever, we can separate the legitimately ill from the disability scammers.

Unless you're saying that coercion is only justified on individuals if the benefit to society are well known, probable, and sizable enough to some "threshold".

This point seems too obvious to me to even warrant defending. Obviously, there must be an especially high bar to be met before we chase people down, hold them down, and inject chemicals into them.

You do not have the right to impose your optimistic opinion about vaccines on others.

And I'll do my part to see to it that you don't have the power.

Importantly, threatening coercion increases resistance to vaccination, causing people to throw out the well tested with the optional and experimental.

Your argument could perhaps hold water if it were centered on the Johnson & Johnson formulation.

There is no precedent for a relatively novel technology being injected into everybody in a blind panic before a great deal of testing has been performed.

It was a huge gamble. It could have gone much worse than it did.

This period is best understood as a brutal hangover from several years of market subsidized growth. We had cheap Ubers, cheap meal delivery, and free web services all paid for by a speculative bubble which is in the process of popping.

Meta can't just admit that they don't have a viable business model or their stocks will truly crash, so they have no choice but to cannibalize their remaining customers, like how phone and cable companies screw the remaining people with landline phone service and traditional cable packages.

I'm middle aged and obese.

It appears that it was indeed suboptimal for people younger and healthier than myself to take it.

It's a complex question that involved a lot of rumsfeldian known unknowns and unknown unknowns at the time and even now.

What I do know is that the certainty was not at the threshold which justified mandatory vaccination.

I chose to get vaccinated and I continue to believe it was the right decision. More data may prove me wrong. We'll see, I suppose.

But research like this underscores the point that we should not be forcing or coercing vaccination. We also should not have subjected children to years of isolating and alienating lockdowns.

For most of the American soldiers who were deployed, the Vietnamese were a barbarous and exotic other that were trying to kill them.

It would do a disservice to all of the sides of the conflict to insist that each of the films exploring it deliver a full representative survey of the perspectives.

Maybe we should bring back buggy whip craftsmen too, so we can truly turbo-charge this economy with people who are busy doing jobby looking stuff.

I think coding on my enclosed porch in a cozy country farmhouse surrounded by nature is a beautiful thing. In comfy pajamas, all day long.

Will you subsidize my aesthetic preference or does it only work one way?

A vast subset of our economy depends on parasitically feeding off of people commuting to work.

If you think they and the government institutions and their politicians who rely on their tax revenues are going to politely shut up, you're mistaken.

I'm going to go with the happiness I can remember how to spell.

Climate Change should be approached as an engineering problem that threatens everybody and not packaged as a "social justice" problem against the affluent.

One could as easily frame climate change as a problem caused by the global south industrializing and achieving higher living standards, leaving larger carbon footprints.

I'm not a republican. I'm a proponent of science, technology, and climate journalism that focuses on education instead of polarization.

Some anonymous trolls gaslighting you online do not grant you a license to hate, dehumanize, and harm everybody who disagrees with your politics.

The unsettling thing about people who insist that humanity is irrelevant because it's small relative to others things is that they must necessarily believe larger people are intrinsically more relevant than shorter and thinner people.

There is, actually.

The rich can be led to believe that reducing consumption is an elite status symbol, and an opportunity for posturing among their rich friends.

Though rich people will always consume more energy than poor people, there have been promising shifts, such as the rich competing to own the latest efficient electric car instead of competing to own the most fuel inefficient sports car.

Dehumanizing and othering the opponent as beyond reason and justice in wartime is deeply immoral.

Doing it over peacetime class and partisan differences is deeply immoral and really stupid.

I'll see your realism and raise you one.

The belief that science, technology, and environmental policy can transcend partisan politics is necessary for western society to function.

If you step over that in your eagerness to apply postmodern analysis, you'll introduce even greater challenges than the ones we're already barely capable of addressing.

My point still stands that beginning a conversation about science, technology, or policy with your finger squarely aimed at people you don't like will only serve to start an argument with the people you don't like.