Obama also ran a sham campaign in '08, presenting himeself as far more progressive than he really was.

And it worked. So why has the DNC abandoned that strategy? Why can’t they countenance even so much as a falsely held progressive stance?

The air of something interesting in place of actually having something interesting to say. That’s just how Abrams writes. It’s not like just a mistake he makes kinda frequently, it’s deliberate. He has a whole TED talk about it.

Watch on the Apple Vision Pro at peak quality

was this filmed with VR in mind? is that why it’s so wide?

I kinda just forgot Spock, Torres, and Troy were half human

Remember when red blood was all the rage?

Oh man, that fad takes me back

I know this is a joke, but why should the machines for doing sums also just happen to reproduce the same phenomenon that happens in a living growing meat brain?

Goes further up the pike than that. The phrase is “in a gold rush, sell picks and shovels”. The real shovel seller is NVIDIA, with their graphics chips.

Really, this is just an extension of the graphics chip boom crypto started. A lot of “mining” server farms transitioned smoothly into renting server time for AI training. It’s always been the same bubble: overproduction of graphics cards.

Drop Bear sweap

The english speaking world may be largely secular, but its a Protestant secularity. The same pattern of behaviors and underlying assumptions just transfers over to politics.

Every instance of Christendom leftism is actually untrue and wrong and doomed to failure except for the personal beliefs of me and maybe a few people in my local church discord group.

And the emphasis is always on personal beliefs, rather than actual actions. It’s how you get the Lockheed Martin engineer who “hates capitalism”. Doesn’t matter that they’re contributing to the globe-spanning death machine, because they personally believe the right things in their head.

In another generation or two they will probably be the ones to spearhead the effort [improve conditions in the United States]

this was said of the hippie generation (ie boomers) as well

In the 1821, John Quincy Addams (at the time secretary of state) was told to give congress a report on the new metric system. He presented them a very detailed document, making comparisons between the two, but ultimately recommending the metric system.

…so detailed, in fact, that none of them bothered to read it and no decision was made. The treasury ended up taking the initiative on their own, and went with what everyone was already using.

This was barley 30 years after the constitution was ratified, and the report was made by a guy who’s dad helped to draft the damn thing. We don’t get to blame the Brits for this one. Our stubborn anachronistic measurements are entirely a Yankee phenomenon.

In practice, I’ve heard of companies using AI to “replace” large groups of people, then higher back a few of them with expanded responsibilities and worse pay.

So, they are using it to replace workers, just not in the neat sci-fi sense.

There’s a clear continuity of ICE policy between Obama, Biden, and Trump. Today’s ICE and its severe fascist escalations would not have been possible if Democratic administrations had not poured so much resources into it.

But I guess bothering to remember anything that happened more than one presidential cycle ago makes one a “low information voter”.

Now that i’ve seen and read both, I don’t think they dumbed it down all that much. Most of the changes were kind of just good choices for going to a visual medium from a textual one.

also,

lets not kid ourselves about how “hard” this sci-fi is. Astrophage is given multiple borderline magical properties just so they actually have the ability to go to another star system and find a solution.

Rupert Murdoch is australian

Meanwhile, you get lucky if your representative’s staffers read the bills before a vote.

I think its supposed to be someone about to take a shit into a cup, but I’m really not certain

Afghanistan used to be a major heroin producer. So much so that in the 90s, the Taliban gained a lot of local goodwill and support by driving out the poppy plantations and replacing them with wheat. When the US invaded, a lot of those former drug lords became officials in the occupational government, and heroin production skyrocketed again.

The reductive take was that we invaded for oil. But we didn’t, it was so we could move crazy amounts of narcotics through Fort Bragg.

If you want an example of church and state merging, look at Utah.

Trump and his ilk are the yankee predilection for frauds and hucksters. It’s always been a mainstay of US life and politics, they’re just not always in the driver’s seat. Andrew Jackson springs to mind.

There’s absolutely a strain of liberal discourse that has decided actually Bush wasn’t that bad, and chose to ignore that much of what Bush did was lay the legal and structural groundwork for what Trump is now running rampant with.