Rune @skalden@qoto.org
Writer. Interested in principles of storytelling, theater and a lot of random stuff.
Joined Sep 2023
@tayfonay Ticket, money, passport?
Rune
boosted
Cars just keep coming. Evenly spaced.
I see a gap. Yes! Move quickly to walk through. The car about to pass sees; slows. Doesn’t stop. LOL Nooooo not that! just slows enough to destroy the gap.
I bet they feel so considerate!😡
Another gap. Huge gap! This time I *don’t* move. Don’t wanna spook ‘em. Soon as this car passes I can go! But they see me *looking* & slow! Desperately I wave for them to go. Confuses them more: they *crawl* rubbernecking at my misery. But don’t stop. Gap is gone.😖
Quotation works on this instance, I think.
Rune
boosted
The best argument for free education I have seen in my lifetime is this:
In the US where education is not free, and fewer get well educated, the country is now facing the very serious problem, that a large segment of voters do not understand why democracy is important. Instead, they follow a presidential candidate, who pitches dictatorship as an interesting new idea, and they do not possess the knowledge to instantly identify this as the worst possible idea ever suggested in American politics.
Rune
boosted
“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
~William Shakespeare
@sz_duras Norway. I think you find it in the other Nordic countries, like Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, as well. I would agree that Britain probably has not had it since Thatcher.
@sz_duras Social democracy has been reasonably successful in addressing problems like extreme poverty. Capitalism has also been able to address issues of production and distribution of goods in a way that the centralized economy of Soviet communism did not. A problem today is that we choose instant gratification over what is good for us, and capitalism encourages the exploitation of this. This causes problems on many levels, from personal to an inability to face global challenges like climate change. Also, as you point out, the game tends to increase inequality. The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. Wars are a separate issue. Apart from the conflicts of interest, men like Putin have convinced me that there really is evil in the world.
@sz_duras I live in a social democracy. It is not perfect, but I think it works reasonably well compared to the alternatives. Communism has faced some challenges. In Russia, they had trouble feeding the population, and in China, it has evolved into some sort of autocratic capitalism. I do agree that the current system, the capitalistic game if you like, is not rigged to solve the problems humanity is facing today. How do we fix it, though?
@sz_duras I will not make excuses for everything the west does. But I believe democracy is worth fighting for. I wish Russians were able to protest against the invasion of Ukraine the way we protest against the war crimes being committed in the Near East
@sz_duras Is it a shocking admission to say that it is in the interest of the west to support democracies against an autocratic predator?
@sezduck @tayfonay I was actually able to find and restore the page of young me from the waybackmachine: https://geocities.rmy.no/ 😂
@RustyBertrand The Victorian Death Chic is a good phrase. It is hard to fully suppress the instinctual aesthetic response to female beauty, though. I like the hourglass figure. Is it wrong?
@tayfonay I was so disappointed when I realized that my page there was not for eternity
Rune
boosted
Got tired of having this conversation over and over again so I just spent way too long making this:
Rune
boosted
How many books and libraries has Israel destroyed? How much history and knowledge?
Rune
boosted
“Your periodic reminder that less ice at the Arctic is consistent with a weaker jet stream that allows cold air to drift down into the Great Plains.
The frigid temps you're experiencing happen BECAUSE of a warming planet, not in spite of it.” Via Dr Steve Campbell from the other place
https://twitter.com/historian_steve/status/1745920780624711886?s=46&t=4TnCHrl_NkgPDLmdROH8hA
Rune
boosted
𝓖𝓵𝓸𝓼𝓼𝓪𝓻𝔂
Blockchain: a slow database
Crypto: an expensive slow database
NFT: an expensive slow database to store URLs
AI: a way to write slow and inefficient algorithms
LLM: a database that stores text in a slow and inefficient way
Chat GPT: an expensive imprecise query language for slow and inefficient text databases that often returns wrong results
Writer. Interested in principles of storytelling, theater and a lot of random stuff.
Joined Sep 2023
