Erik Haugen @ech@qoto.org

@NoctisEqui @SrRochardBunson Political rhetoric these days is so disappointing.

My friends on the right are convinced the CA legislature is secretly trying to legalize infanticide. (Look up the poorly-written AB 2223 from last year. Seriously, I keep hearing about this a year later. They're *convinced*.)

Then on the left we have this equally bizarre notion that the right is trying to get kids out of school and back into the coal mines. Or <whatever the nonsense outrage is today>.

The inane misspelling of the other party is a sure sign we found the bottom of the barrel.

People: we have actual disagreements in the actual Overton window that matter. Please let's focus on those, yes?

@kjhealy are you talking about the tenure thing?

@pecet@101010.pl @Moosader You don't in the US; each country has different requirements. (This has led to financial ruin for some who owned a medallion in NYC.)

And of course Uber's lawyers know what they're doing, so they aren't doing anything illegal, obviously. (for some definition of "illegal", at least?)

I think the implication here is someone is annoyed with Uber for... something: bad pay? congestion? crime? Or do people actually like the weird rent-seeking medallion thing?

@LRRRonEarth @Moosader Interesting claim!

I'm skeptical, though; I'd guess driving to blockbuster is way worse than (data center carbon/sec) ÷ (views per second)

But that's a wild guess. Have you seen a rigorous analysis of this?

I suspect the old model where they mail you DVDs might have been the best of all :) I miss those days.

@stokes I love how it throws in perl with fortran as obsolete languages.

@pebonilla I don't think Heritage has ever been hard-core libertarian.

@toriver @jacket @sjvn me too, I've never used NFTs. (But, I didn't say buying video games.)

Fair point about 2nd life. I meant VR more generally, I could have worded that better, pardon me.

@Pineywoozle @jacket @sjvn wow 😂

"nobodies saying they are remotely similar" Except they're saying each item is "just flavor of the fervid month", and addressing that was the only point I made.

If I pay a lot of money for an NFT for some art you made, I'm supporting you? The thing you said is the one part of owning original works that actually applies to NFTs in exactly the same way. You realize that, right?

LLMs poses a lot of problems, for sure! I never said otherwise?

@freemo @Geoffberner ranking cause of death like that is fuzzy, of course, but I think even so it is hard to do it in a way where covid is 3rd. It's probably at the rate of like 100k/year right now in the US? So not just behind the big 2 (cancer, CVD) but also behind accidents, alzheimers, stroke, etc.

@freemo @gpowerf Important to note that comparing it to the Flu does *not* mean you are minimizing its impact: the flu is very serious.

@jacket @sjvn Yeah, it's a funny post but I think these 3 things aren't really comparable.

NFTs seem useful for a certain range of applications, one of which – and I don't think this is what you meant – is specifying who owns what in things like video games. The monkey picture thing seemed pretty stupid indeed, but here's an interesting thought experiment: if you think nft monkeys are stupid, would you want to spend extra for an original painting if you could get a to-the-naked-eye just as good copy to hang on your wall instead?

Metaverse-type technology is obviously potentially super useful for a wide range of things. However, all attempts so far have been extremely underwhelming, and I don't think anyone serious thought that was going to be any different in the near future just because Zuckerberg is into it.

ChatGPT and future iterations seem poised to e.g. make every knowledge worker many times more efficient at large parts of their jobs. This is just not like those other things.

@pieist Expansionist Russia is far scarier than <whatever example where the west isn't intervening>.

@Nonbiner@mastodon.nl @Savvyhomestead Oh maybe it is, and it is just too small to tell.

@Nonbiner@mastodon.nl @Savvyhomestead I think it's in there with that big orange "lower respiratory diseases" stripe. (It would probably be a bit fatter in 2020 and 2021, if we could see this over time.)

@TimWardCam @Savvyhomestead guns will be counted under things like suicide. That's the problem with charts like this: it might not have to breakdown you want.

@Pineywoozle @JorgeStolfi @cosettepaneque @randahl

You might be right about Jorge, but to the broader point can you link to a speech where she shined in this way? Something inspiring and charismatic? Something that gets people riled up, like the way Trump was getting everyone fired up with his outlandish nonsense?

I mean just read the abstract here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/psq.12490 – this makes the point that as a leader of the then-current regime she was constrained, but still I think a better politician (Palin, Michelle or Barak Obama, Bill, etc) could have overcome that hurdle much better, all else being equal.

FWIW I think Trump lost in 2020 for a somewhat similar reason: during covid he lacked the sort of inspiring, uniting, calming leadership that is helpful during a crisis. (Contrast with Bush after 9/11, who absolutely nailed it.)

(I can't imagine a stupider level of discourse than cheap puns where you corrupt the name of something to tear it down, like writing "DemocRAT" or "REPUGlicans" or whatever. Gah. It's like the trash comment threads on yahoo news from 2003 or something.)

@JorgeStolfi @Pineywoozle @cosettepaneque @randahl ok, if you don't like the DNA thing, then you *really* aren't going to like Trump, so that doesn't really explain why she lost. Like, his whole brand is about throwing out norms that get in the way of results.

And the "it" here is charm/political skill/charisma, not accomplishments.

@pyperkub sure, human nature to blame the other team. (Just look around mastodon.social etc and see all the blaming of "fascists" or whatever going on here.) And I think you're right, it's maybe a bit going out of your way to be unflattering, but blaming others is sort of what populism is all about, whether it's sanders/warren or trump/tucker.

Yeah, stoking fear is a great way for governments to consolidate power. Both parties play into that, for sure.

"build a wall rather than pass immigration legislation" – I'm not quite sure what you mean here. Both parties built the wall, both parties whine about our collective inability to pass "meaningful comprehensive immigration reform", whatever that means. You see a direct line from those things to authoritarianism?