Bring knowledge of CFCs to a time when we’re able to make them but not able to detect the ozone problems they cause.

Hey Vegeta, what does the battery say about its Ah level?

IT’S!!!… nine thousand.

Curtis Yarvin “joked” that we should turn poor people into biofuel, so…

A very reassuring technology to have!

But my worry was more about them changing their business model once they get big enough.

Only payable in British currency, not colonial paper money.

Some editor ran this piece through a shredder. The main content is good, but the headline and intro are terrible.

Here are the highlights:

One reason this administration is so disorienting is that U.S. foreign policy has been guided for decades by the opposite of realism. The key fights in Washington, especially in recent decades, were between neocons who wanted to spread democracy through war and liberals who wanted to spread democracy through soft power like U.S.A.I.D. contracts to bolster civil society.

…

While Mr. Trump embraces some elements of realism — giving in to the strong and sacrificing the weak — his tariff wars and threats against peaceful neighbors could end up being as costly as the military adventurism of the previous liberal order. Rajan Menon, a professor emeritus at the City College of New York, told me that people who expect the Trump administration “to follow the playbook of realism” by showing restraint “are going to get very disappointed.”

…

To Mr. Trump, America is a great power that Russia wouldn’t dare attack, and Ukraine is a pawn that can be sacrificed. But here’s the thing about great powers: They all decline eventually. Neanderthal realism doesn’t save them. After Athens sacked Melos, word of its brutality spread. Its allies turned against it. Athens lost the war. Noble ideas, it turns out, do matter.

Legit, first time I heard a Brit say his name I thought it was a Japanese dude: Kiastama

I finally read his name some months later and realized.

I’ve been using Kagi for about a month now, and I think I’m gonna stick with it. Paying with dollars instead of data/attention feels more healthy for everyone involved.

(Fully realizing, of course, that there’s nothing stopping them from doing both, and that’s why we need better laws. Voting with your wallet will never be a complete solution… but it is something I can do right now.)

The dichotomy of “freedom to” and “freedom from” is pretty well-worn territory in philosophy, although there are many different formulations of it (including options beyond just these two), but the simplest model is this:

“Freedom to”: The protected right to do something, like fire a gun in the air.

“Freedom from”: The enforced guarantee that you will not be impacted by the actions of others, like your neighbor’s falling bullets.

An egalitarian society can’t grant “freedom to” all actions to all people while also guaranteeing them “freedom from” the consequences of all others’ actions.

If I have the freedom to drive a monster truck on any public motorway, I necessarily lose the freedom to walk those streets without worrying about monster trucks.

The only way around it is to have a privileged class that has extra “freedom to” do things when the consequences mainly impact the underclass, and extra “freedom from” the actions of the underclass.

Like, most states allow you the “freedom to” openly carry a firearm, but also employ police to protect your “freedom from” people being an immediate threat to your life.

In theory, you can’t have both. So in practice, this means that only white people get to openly carry guns. Black people get disarmed or shot.

—

That said, I’d disagree that labor freedom reduces economic security in general, but if you got more specific I’m sure there are some instances where that’s true.

Just specifically don’t take an employer’s word when they say “if you unionize we can’t protect you anymore”.

We’re doing it to our infosphere with AI at the same time!

I wonder what other aspects of civilization we can obstruct with debris from irreversible deployment of immature tech.

That feel when my phone only rendered “geneva_convenience@le…” but I still knew it was .ml before checking

Bags of dirt: The fourth little pig

Something that has always bothered me about this joke: Don’t news stands generally have the front page visible, to entice people? So like, you’d know well before you bought one.

Edit: I’m illiterate. I’ve heard this joke before as “guy buys a paper, looks at the front page, throws it away”. But this version actually makes sense.

That’s wild, cuz that case is still ongoing. SC just declined to hear an appeal on the stay. So they don’t actually know that the courts have their back here yet.

I know the bar is several miles beneath the floor at this point, but at least some senators are willing to walk across it in this one specific very limited instance.

Edit: It is truly a dark timeline when the best reassurance you can find is that the dismantling of democracy may yet be done through procedurally valid means.

Do it. Demand zero subsidies for Elon.

Found the Randall Wray enjoyer. :)

You’re not wrong. Burning is what they used to literally do in earlier times, and the conceptual model today is exactly the same even if there’s no literal burning.

People don’t like hearing it though. Idk why.

No one.

Remember, the government is the issuer of the currency. They don’t need to collect dollars in order to spend them.

Imagine a referee removing a point from a participant.

The point doesn’t go anywhere, waiting to be reused, it just gets deleted. The next point to get added isn’t the “same point” in any sense, even though the point total is the same and maybe even some physical point token got reused.

Conceptually, sovereign currency is always on a one-way trip from being spent into existence to being taxed into annihilation.

No one:

Everyone: adds a pointless “No one:” above perfectly valid memes

Starting at $939…

It’s not deep state, it’s a coup.

In essence, a coup is a 1) rapid seizure of state power by unelected actors, who acquire that power by 2) seizing critical government infrastructure and 3) weaponizing it to neutralize legitimate government actors’ efforts to stop them. The unelected actors then use this power to 4) remake the rules of the political game in a way that cannot easily be checked or undone through democratic processes.