most of America

One American in five.

I wish more MCU Democrats and Punisher Skull Republicans would read this.

Oh yeah, we’re absolutely getting a fucking measles epidemic before the end of his term.

At some point he needs to be able to physically enact proposals. Like, it’s one thing to say “Build a wall” and it’s another to get the land rights, hire the contractors, do the work, maintain it on competition, etc, etc.

You can go down to the border now and you’ll find this rink a dink bullshit that’s falling over in a light breeze. Then you’ve got spools full of razor wire tossed into the steadily shallower Rip Grande. People got paid tens of millions to put that garbage in the ground. And that was under an ostensibly competent administration.

I agree we’re going to get a ton of shit policy. Police violence under Trump is going to skyrocket. Vigilantee violence is going to jump. Border guard violence is going through the roof. But, like, is he going to build anything that can last? Or is he going to get the Americanized version of Neom? A bunch of scammers delivering invisible clothes to prance around in.

I guess we’ll find out.

Between 2017 and 2021, things got pretty bad. Riots, wars, a plague, economic crash, and it ended with a mob breaking into the nation’s capital and trashing the place.

Can’t imagine a repeat will be better.

Change the number of stripes, too. Add blue stripes, turn the red stripes pink, and ditch the Bald Eagle for a shark.

Only then will America truly be Woke.

Israelis don’t believe it is their land. That’s the rub

Joe Biden confirmed it by repeating it over and over again. Why would I need more evidence than that?

Disney isn’t above making R-rated cinema

https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Category:R-rated_films

Both Deadpool & Wolverine and Alien: Romulus were Disney flix.

Might have something to do with movies catering more heavily to “Family” audiences (the functional death of the R-rate film in theaters) while TV shows cater more heavily to childless adults.

We’ve literally coined the term “sexpository” to justify injecting gratuitous naked time into our 8-12 hour prestige TV shows. We’ve also made these sex scenes a lot gayer, which rubs the Family Friendly crowd the wrong way but plays great with the 20-30 somethings who are all on board with it.

Finding the right Discord can be hard. But when you’re in a community where people are pinning things to channels and wiki-ing / linking them out, its a fantastic source for info.

They’re an idea that big forums are actually awful and you’re better off in smaller communities.

Mostly, it’s a pain because it can be hard to find some escoteric bit of knowledge or expertise when you don’t have a Reddit sized forum to troll through.

But that’s where spaces like Discord excel. Nice, tight communities of hobbyists and specialists who are routinely online and regularly churning out useful content.

The bloody managers are the biggest problem. Most don’t understand code much less the process of making a software product.

So, I’ve had my eye on management and started doing some management training. The job of management really isn’t to do the work itself (or even to understand the work). That’s the job of specialists and technical leads. The job of management is to oversee the workforce (hiring, organizing teams, dictating process, allocating project time, planning mid and long term department goals, etc) not to actually get your hands into the work itself.

It’s certainly helpful to understand coding broadly speaking. But I’m in an office where we’re supporting dozens of apps written and interfaced with at least as many languages. Nevermind all the schemas within those languages. There’s no way a manager could actually do my job without months (if not years) of experience in the project itself.

At the same time, the managers should understand the process of coding, particularly if they’re at the lower tier and overseeing an actual release cycle. What causes me to pull my hair out is managers who think hand-deploying .dlls and fixing user errors with SQL scripts is normal developer behavior and not desperate shit you do when your normal workflows have failed.

Being in a perpetual state of damage control and thinking that this is normal because you inherited from the last manager is the nightmare.

But at least the bozos at the top get to make the decisions and the cheddar for being ignorant and not listening.

Identifying and integrating new technologies is normal and good managerial behavior.

Getting fleeced by another round of over-hyped fly-by-night con artists time after time after time is not as much.

But AI seems to thread the needle. Its sophisticated and helpful enough to seem useful on superficial analysis. You only really start realizing you’ve been hoodwinked after you try and integrate it.

Setting aside the absurd executive level pay (every fucking corporate enterprise is just an MLM that’s managed to stay cash positive) it does feel like the problem with AI is that each business is forced to learn the lesson the hard way because no business journal or news channel wants to admit that its all shit.

As a tool for forming communities, Lemmy’s mechanics work just fine.

But the process of federation - combined with the prickly nature of certain administrators - means you can have a lively and robust community in (hypothetically) the far-left transgender tankie community that pioneered the application. But then that gets abruptly cut off and squelched in a more popular forum by some late adopters who hate their politics more than they enjoy their technical savvy.

Lemmy.world has a bunch of memes and political screeching because that’s the kind of user its admins choose to encourage. Other communities have more practical interests. But they don’t draw the same kind of crowd, so you won’t see them on the front page of this site, particularly if you only browse Local.

Really looking forward to this shit showing up in AI-edited Wikipedia citations in the near future.

I’m not a fan of dark matter

When you consider how many astrological phenomenon have been discovered in the last century, or even the last decade, its not hard to believe there’s a large lump of matter we simply haven’t identified yet.

I’m more prone to believe the mechanics of physics are solved and certain volumes of mass are occluded than that physics is wrong and all mass is accounted for.

it’s hard to tell who’s right

At a superficial level, sure. But that’s in large part because of the nature of the problem. Dark Matter is the quintessential Unknown Unknown. It comes from the argument that we have a universe that is accelerating in its rate of expansion in a way that doesn’t follow the understood shape of the universe.

Dark Matter / Energy solves the problem by positing a large invisible mass that’s been compressed, like a spring, and is still being released following the Big Bang, propelling SpaceTime out in front of it.

But because all our measurements are occurring in a relatively small timeframe (relative to the history of the universe) and because we’re working from a very limited perspective (not like we can pop over to the other side of the universe and confirm our findings), we have to make a lot of estimates and assumptions. Introducing/Dismissing some of these assumptions can “solve” certain problems very easily. But on closer inspection, they raise a bunch of new questions that can just as easily be debated.

Even the Nobel prize committee said fuck it

That’s more because AI is “hot” right now and astrophysics isn’t paying anyone’s bills.

I don’t think Iran will need to wait that long. This looks like the US/Israel are planning a joint operation counterattack on Iranian facilities. Which will trigger a retaliation in turn as Iran escalates in kind. Etc, etc.

The big difference now is that the US military will officially be getting its hands dirty in the region, much like we did in Desert Shield / Storm and in Libya. Very possible that the ghost of John McCain finally gets its long-sought-after bomb bomb Iran.

Look to my home country Denmark and see how many left leaning parties exists. None of them are Communists btw

Western bloc countries purged their governments of explicitly communist parties back in the 50s and 60s, during the hottest years of the Cold War. The parties that formed in their wake had many of the same ideological inclinations operating under different monikers. So you’ve got Red–Green Alliance and more left-leaning voices in the Social Democrats talking about public housing and land reform and a worker-lead democracy, just like explicit Communists in Cuba and Vietnam and South Africa and Korea and India were seventy years ago.

Similarly, “conservative” parties organized under UKIP, National Front, FDL, or the AfD espousing all the same racist, ultra-nationalist, imperial expansionist views common to 1930s European fascists. None of this shit is new in the material sense. It’s just fresh paint on the old frame.