zifnab25

zifnab25 , 2 months ago

It's a shame we never invented a Space-Time machine

zifnab25 , 2 months ago

History started on October 7th

Israel firing sniper rounds and launching drone strikes into Gaza City isn't terrorism, it's Smart Data Driven Policing

zifnab25 , 2 months ago

Dwayne Johnson has been showing back up in WWE events, and I do get the sense that he's tapped out on the Disney end of the money funnel. With all that Saudi cash flowing into combat sports and with Vince McMahon getting dragged out back like the rabid dog he is, I wouldn't be surprised to see Johnson springboards from Vince's old position to a political campaign, with his eyes on the White House.

Gotta distance himself from the wildly unpopular current liberal President if you're even going to begin that transition.

zifnab25 , 3 months ago

Behold, the unlimited power of a fully nationalized war time economy.

zifnab25 , 3 months ago

AOC who's an op

lea-tired

zifnab25 , 3 months ago

In Georgia, demand for industrial power is surging to record highs, with the projection of electricity use for the next decade now 17 times what it was only recently.

The first new nuclear plants since Three Mile Island just came online in Georgia last year. Vogtle 3 and 4 will produce a combined 1.2 GWe at peak capacity.

These reactors took 16 years and multiple bailouts and bankruptcies to complete, costing an estimated $34B to finish.

Hopefully, future power construction will move a little smoother.

As a comparison, the Taishan Nuclear Power Plant took ten years to complete at the cost of around $7.5B and it has a peak generation of 3.3 GWe

zifnab25 , 3 months ago

There's definitely truth in this. But also...

https://www.authenticcomms.co.uk/blog/the-1944-cia-guide-to-sabotaging-meetings

• Make “speeches” – Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your ‘points’ by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences.

• Slow it down – advocate caution, avoid haste

• Where possible refer all matters to committees (never fewer than five) for “consideration”

• Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.

• Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.

• Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.

zifnab25 , 4 months ago

That would require some kind of machine capable of learning, a model of language so incredibly large that it can comprehend these linguistic nuances, or an intelligent form of artificial device.

Wonder if we'll ever have something like that in the future.

zifnab25 , 4 months ago

There's a Sci-fi horror book I enjoyed, called "John Dies At The End", that posits an alternative history in which computers were created from the brains of pigs.

As a consequence, the civilization is heavily invested in harvesting organs in the same way that we're invested in drilling for oil.

zifnab25 , 4 months ago

Panicking every time the clock strikes "4:20" because I know what that means.

zifnab25 , 4 months ago

Its called a bumblebee because its got three left feet.

zifnab25 , 4 months ago

Imagine spending $13B on state of the art software and this is the only realistic use case.

zifnab25 , 4 months ago

You need to start from the premise that leftists are being hysterical and genocide isn't really happening.

Then you need to double down and insist you are right to be hysterical about the hypothetical genocide Trump might do.

Finally, they want to be able to indict you as fake Leftists who never really cared about Palestine when Joe Biden loses and Trump doesn't fix Biden's mess

"Leftists who didn't back Joe Biden caused the deaths of a billion people in the Middle East" will be added to the Black Book of Communism, in the end.

zifnab25 , 5 months ago

they might have been more hands-off than Hasbro went it comes to mucking with the business model,

Hasbro was extremely hands off for a long while. But then their toy lines fell apart and their board game revenue just became "How many times can we sell you the same box of Monopoly pieces?"

Suddenly WotC was their revenue stream, and the head managers decided they needed to apply their magic touch to the franchise.

I don't really care, because D&D is more a style of playing than a product for sale. Sucks to see Faerun or Eberon cannibalized by these ghouls, but there's just so much fucking material out there that's never going away.

It's just not a game you can ruin (and 4e fucking tried, let me tell you). Too much of it is bound up in what you and your friends bring to the table.

zifnab25 , 5 months ago

I am just personally uninterested in the direction the game is going with the OneD&D, and I think the source of this muddling path is do to the failure of the original business maneuver with the OGL revision.

I absolutely agree. Although, I think the consequences of that decision has been something of a "Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom!" D&D-knock-off renaissance. And I'm pretty happy with that, given how a lot of my old favorites from Palladium and Rollmaster and GURPS seem to have found some new life.

I don't really see things getting better under Hasbro, so any major shakeup might be a good thing overall.

I would love to see the Onyx Path (ie, old White Wolf) folks find their legs again. Miss myself some old school Vampire: The Masquerade.

zifnab25 , 5 months ago

Waving my cowboy hat, clutching a bomb between my thighs, and screaming "You're all about to find out why we can't afford health care!" as I plummet towards the earth.

zifnab25 , 5 months ago

But arresting people as a form of harassment is the burger. Having a cop roll up on a guy sitting on the curb and throwing him in the back of a squad car is the service Americans want.

If anything, the low conviction rate is a problem only in so far as a court proceeding exists at all. Leave them all in jail forever, Gitmo style, and Burger Folk won't complain.

zifnab25 , 5 months ago

And maybe when you're a bit older, you'll even be able to take on Infinite Jest.

zifnab25 , 5 months ago

Oh man, what do Boeing and Astrobotics have in common?

Can't seem to keep all their lids shut.

zifnab25 , 5 months ago

Its curious to see the Chinese government called out for being insufficiently dedicated to anti-corruption measures while doggedly insisting that the myriad prosecutions of corrupt officials within both the Chinese public and private sector are these horrible infringements on civil rights. We've got Chinese ex-pats who fled to the US and went right back to committing crimes as soon as they arrived. Billions of dollars defrauded from Americans because the US was intent on protecting known malicious actors that the Chinese government had planned to prosecute.

Like, Russia? Fine, sure. Whatever. That place has been a dumpster fire since at least Yeltsin. But at some point, western media isn't denouncing fraud. It is implicitly covering for these crooks under the "China Bad" banner head.

zifnab25 , 6 months ago

The best paying jobs are increasingly removed from any real form of value creation. Western Markets value deception, financialization, and asset inflation far more than actual labor, accurate accounting, and efficient administration. The professional test-writer makes more than the teacher. The real estate agent makes more than the construction worker. The insurance actuary makes more than the physician. The salesman makes more than the factory worker.

Follow this business logic to its ultimate conclusion and everything becomes an MLM.

zifnab25 , 7 months ago

that's literally what we're doing

Hey fuck it, in all seriousness. If you see someone outside in the cold freezing, bring them in. If you're cold, they're cold.

At the same time, its infuriating to see some smugface on Twitter tell randos that they've somehow made a personal decision to shuttle billions to the Bezos Klan and murder a few thousand lumpen proletariat on the back end. We might be indoors, but we are as much under the gun of capitalism as everyone else.

The TrueAnon Crew did a great interview with a couple of homelessness activists in the Sacramento Area. And they'll give you an earful about how city leadership and police goons make villainizing and harassing anyone bold enough help too many people at once. In my hometown of Houston, I've seen first hand the amazing folks at Food Not Bombs eat tens of thousands of dollars in citations for daring to feed hungry people on my city streets.

We aren't participants in this holocaust. We are simply prisoners in marginally better cells. The existential horror of homelessness is that it is a weapon directed at each and every one of us. Our commitment to our unhoused neighbors should come as much out of a sense of self-preservation as charity or guilt. It cannot be seen as a consumer choice, but a revolutionary act. In the end, we stay warm together or we all freeze separately.

zifnab25 , 7 months ago

Today, it is to everyone’s advantage to form some kind of ethnic collective. The people who share your viewpoint or from whose philosophy those catchphrases come, are the ones who are institutionalizing racism today. What about the quotas in employment? The quotas in education? And I hope to God—so I am not religious, but just to express my feeling—that the Supreme Court will rule against those quotas. But if you can understand the vicious contradiction and injustice of a state establishing racism by law. Whether it’s in favor of a minority or a majority doesn’t matter. It’s more offensive when it’s in the name of a minority because it can only be done in order to disarm and destroy the majority and the whole country. It can only create more racist divisions, and backlashes, and racist feelings.

If you are opposed to racism, you should support individualism. You cannot oppose racism on one hand and want collectivism on the other.

But now, as to the Indians, I don’t even care to discuss that kind of alleged complaints that they have against this country. I do believe with serious, scientific reasons the worst kind of movie that you have probably seen—worst from the Indian viewpoint—as to what they did to the white man.

I do not think that they have any right to live in a country merely because they were born here and acted and lived like savages. Americans didn’t conquer; Americans did not conquer that country.

Whoever is making sounds there, I think is hissing, he is right, but please be consistent: you are a racist if you object to that [laughter and applause]. You are that because you believe that anything can be given to Man by his biological birth or for biological reasons.

If you are born in a magnificent country which you don’t know what to do with, you believe that it is a property right; it is not. And, since the Indians did not have any property rights—they didn’t have the concept of property; they didn’t even have a settled, society, they were predominantly nomadic tribes; they were a primitive tribal culture, if you want to call it that—if so, they didn’t have any rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using.

It would be wrong to attack any country which does respect—or try, for that matter, to respect—individual rights, because if they do, you are an aggressor and you are morally wrong to attack them. But if a country does not protect rights—if a given tribe is the slave of its own tribal chief—why should you respect the rights they do not have?

Or any country which has a dictatorship. Government—the citizens still have individual rights—but the country does not have any rights. Anyone has the right to invade it, because rights are not recognized in this country and neither you nor a country nor anyone can have your cake and eat it too.

...

I am, incidentally, in favor of Israel against the Arabs for the very same reason. There you have the same issue in reverse. Israel is not a good country politically; it’s a mixed economy, leaning strongly to socialism. But why do the Arabs resent it? Because it is a wedge of civilization—an industrial wedge—in part of a continent which is totally primitive and nomadic.

Israel is being attacked for being civilized, and being specifically a technological society. It’s for that very reason that they should be supported—that they are morally right because they represent the progress of Man’s mind, just as the white settlers of America represented the progress of the mind, not centuries of brute stagnation and superstition. They represented the banner of the mind and they were in the right.

[thunderous applause]

~ Ayn Rand, to the West Point graduating class of 1974

zifnab25 , 8 months ago

Trying to figure out if the people doing the revolution are justified in their violence...

us-foreign-policy

Alright, I think I've got it.