nobody is going to waste marijuana like that

I’m old enough to remember parents back in the 80s handing out cigarettes and beers to the other parents in the neighborhood as we went around Trick or Treating.

Marijuana just isn’t that expensive. Very easy for me to believe a house would be handing out joints to consenting adults as a joke or even an advertising stunt.

Counterpoint: they didn’t need to clear all the trees

You’re not laying plumbing and electric through an old growth forest. The roots of those trees won’t allow it. You’ve got to clear the whole lot and then replant.

they could have replaced them with more native trees

That would require a local nursery specializing in the cultivation of native plants at the scale the developer requires. At the industrial level, its easier to just ship in some stock variants, whether they work locally or not.

From an ecological level, it is easier to simply not break things than it is to fix them afterwards. Stripping the soil and resodding it, tearing up all the old plants and replanting, and kicking out the native wildlife for years at a time isn’t in any way conducive to ecological preservation.

We can’t live in an apartment because it will always have bad insulation. We should all live in single unit housing with… checks the quality of insulation in your average 1970s ranch house oh shit, oh fuck.

Also, gotta say, love to live in a street level neighborhood Cul-de-sac with that one guy revving his motorbike at 3am. Single pane glass, noisy neighbors, and god help you during July 4th or Jan 1st when someone gets ahold of fireworks.

But for some reason, we completely forget about this shit when we talk about apartments. Like the suburbs - particularly the corners near intersections or school yards or big churches or highway on-ramps - aren’t routinely noisy af.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_gardening

Very common in and around the old Soviet style Eastern European blocs. The style of construction was known as “Towers in the Park” and was often paired with rail stops and local commercial centers for the convenience of pedestrians.

You need to pretend you live in a democracy or the administrators will take away the illusion.

He will be exempt. The areas that he lives in and the things that he does will not be tagged as “criminal” on the data system that he has the contract to administer.

That’s always how these systems work. You don’t worry about getting dragged into the Saudi Consulate and bonesawed to death by intelligence officers when you’re MBS, because you’re the boss and the guy getting bonesawed is your employee.

For the same reason, you don’t worry about getting spied on when you’re the one who owns and operates the big surveillance infrastructure because it exists for your benefit.

That’ll fade by election day. Trump’s strength comes from the deluge of right-wing media that bombards people. These debates are going to blotted from their brains - if not completely subverted by talk show re-edits and talk-overs - in another month.

There’s this bizarre assumption that debates shape public opinion rather than sharpen prior biases.

Liberals watched the debate and concluded Harris was normal and therefore won.

Conservatives watched and concluded only Trump is willing to speak The Truth to a hostile media and therefore won.

Undecideds don’t like either one of them for a variety of reasons. But nothing these two said on Tuesday really turned heads. It was classic Trump and classic Kamala.

I’m not sure what people think AI was ever going to be…

The heavy investment in AI is coming under the assumption that these advanced processes will replace huge portions of the human workforce.

So we don’t need lawyers, because we just put prompts into a Law AI and it gives us a verdict. We don’t need doctors, because we just put symptoms into a Medical AI and it gives us a diagnosis and treatment plan. We don’t need salespeople, because we just put the product into a Marketing AI and it spits out a bunch of comvincing ad copy.

the concept of what a brain is will probably be questioned as well.

We already connect our brains to our computers. We just use screens and keyboards as our interface.

I suppose you could argue that a guy with a calculator or a camera or a chat app is mentally different than one without it. But I think the goal with AI is supplementing human minds, not complementing then.

So much of the drift has just been marketing. Rebranding a Markov Chain stapled onto a particularly large graph as Master Computer from Tron.

One of the nicest things about the Houston Reliant Center is that there are two different rail stops along its edge.

If the city wasn’t run by people who viscerally hate mass transit, I could see a city in which the stadium complex housed a full sized Union Square style mass transit hub. But the fact that we built rail to our 120,000 seat stadium complex at all is something of a miracle. One of only two rail lines in the entire city, and its the third most heavily used transit corridor in the country.

To expand: Robert Owen ran semi-Socialist company towns with large expansions in protections, lower working hours, and high rates of profit. When he took his model to the other bourgeoisie, he was cast out of high society and publicly humiliated.

Owens built a practical model for socialist economics, which reverberates into the modern day. He was living proof that these policies could create prosperous surplus over time, and his methods did get adopted in subsequent socialist governments.

But it’s true. Simply proving out the mathematics of socialist economics isn’t enough, because the practice still overly democratized political influence. For authoritarian capitalists, this wasn’t seen as beneficial. Better to Rule in Hell than Serve in Heaven.

Engels writes about this in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

This feels like a big nut of it

But the perfecting of machinery is making human labor superfluous. If the introduction and increase of machinery means the displacement of millions of manual by a few machine-workers, improvement in machinery means the displacement of more and more of the machine-workers themselves. It means, in the last instance, the production of a number of available wage workers in excess of the average needs of capital, the formation of a complete industrial reserve army, as I called it in 1845, available at the times when industry is working at high pressure, to be cast out upon the street when the inevitable crash comes, a constant dead weight upon the limbs of the working-class in its struggle for existence with capital, a regulator for keeping of wages down to the low level that suits the interests of capital.

Not enough to be efficient. You need to be the guy doing the firing when the downturn comes, rather than the guy who is getting fired.

That struggle for power is what Capitalists cling to.

I’ve yet to see a small government conservative shrink the volume of government spending or the size of it’s workforce.

They mostly just replace teachers and safety inspectors and public sector engineers with cops and consultants and cronies.

The problem, as I see it, is that the majority of men in this position are voluntarily “unfuckable”.

The original incel was a college aged woman who felt she was being rejected by all her male peers.

There isn’t a shortage of incel women. They just don’t get the five alarm five media coverage and right wing political pandering that men do.

Men are taught to fight one another for “prized” women, while women are taught that failing some commercial beauty standard means you doing get to have a love life.

So you end up with these PUA communities on the guy side - insufferable horndogs constantly chasing tail - while women become hermits out of shame.

Plenty of people in both pools are “fuckable”. But they’re poisoned into believing they can’t have mature relationships with one another by a mass media full of toxic tropes and derogatory standards.

Oops. Looks like that shut you up.

https://www.qiaocollective.com/education/xinjiang#unsubstantiated

Photos and videos fallaciously used to prove, show, or insinuate either concentration camps or slave labor of Xinjiang people include:

An April 14, 2017 de-radicalization public talk at Luopu County Reform & Correction Centre (explanatory Twitter thread).

An August 12, 2017 arrest of pyramid fraudsters in Bijie, Guizhou (explanatory Twitter thread)

A video uploaded on September 17, 2019 appearing to show a routine prisoner transfer in what looks to be Bayingolin Mongol Autonomous Prefecture, with vests printed “Kashgar Detention House (喀什看守所).” (see Global Times, 2020-7-22, in response to the re-emergence of the video in summer 2020 and BBC’s confrontation of Chinese Ambassador to the United Kingdom Liu Xiaoming using the video on 2020-7-19) Detention Houses are otherwise normal infrastructure in today’s China. (see this Zhihu answer for one person’s experience staying 37 days in a Detention House, and this post about the work of a police personnel tasked to a Detention House) [Chinese language]

A December 21, 2019 transportation of suspected fraud criminals from Shanghai to Taiyuan by Taiyuan police (explanatory Twitter thread).

A stock photo of a Chilean shoe factory from 2010 (Reddit post)

Satellite imagery of assorted buildings in China, some of which are normal prisons and at least one of which is a 5-star apartment complex.

In some extreme cases, videos from other countries entirely (video was from Indonesia - part of what is being said is “ampun, pak, gak lagi” - have mercy, I won’t do it again), videos from a Taiwanese BDSM club, or edited and pixelated photos to try to push the narrative. 

now you’ve moved on from internet troll to delusional

Americans are the most propagandized people on earth.

You believed the Vietnamese attacked you at the Gulf of Tonkin. You believed Saddam did 9/11. You believed vaccines cause autism and illegal immigrants gave your country COVID.

You’re getting an eyeful of genocide in Gaza as we speak and yet you still think you need to defend the people perpetuating it, because Time Magazine says you should.

Now you’re gearing up to throw away a generation of young men on some Pacific Island so that you can wage war on the folks who build your iPhones.

Enjoy yourself.

Combine that with the fact that she didn’t just hoax her patients, she also hoaxed investors.

That was the comedy angle. The tragedy angle is that the patients never able to sue, because it was impossible for them to determine if they’d been part of the faulty test group.

Investors got their pound of flesh while folks who were actually harmed were left without recourse.

He was celebrated as a whistleblower for releasing it long after the news was worth more than court gossip.

The man is the poster child for why American major news media is absolute dog shit. We see the same pattern with Bush Iraq War fuck ups sat on through to 2005. And all the banking scandals squelched during the thick of the OWS protests. And the Theranos woman misdiagnosing hundreds of patients with her hoax machine while parading around as a business celebrity. And the Bitcoin scams hushed up until the biggest players had exited the market.

Whether it’s Bob Woodward or Micheal Lewis or Judith Miller, there’s a cast of these characters who exist to hoodwink people into thinking they have a free press.

Reagan had already lost a big midterm in '86 and should have been easy to impeach by the incoming Dem majority. With 55 seats, they could even talk about conviction.

They choose to roll the dice on electoralism instead, and gave the White House to Reagan’s (heavily complicit) VP.