moved over to sh.itjust.works

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  • 194 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Wikipedia functionally ended the market for encyclopedias. When I was a kid I would go to the library and read an encyclopedia just to see what random knowledge was in there. Traveling salesman would sell encyclopedias door to door and they were hugely expensive. Then Encarta came along and it was mind blowing you could have all that information on some CDs. Then Wikipedia killed all of them and did it for free.

    When computers began to take hold in middle class homes, one of the biggest gold rushes was to be the encyclopedia of choice on the computer, since consumers saw encyclopedia software as an obvious (and maybe best!) use case for a computer.





  • Imagine being so divorced from your community that you think only the actual act of being killed in their school affects children and not the practicing for active shooters, dealing with the fact that people walk into schools and murder children in your society, etc and not understanding the possible consequences of that on small children.

    Very good statistical argument. You may have missed a very small issue though, the part where it’s children and being murdered and them having to deal with that. Other than that, well done.










  • In the mind of the pro-nuclear advocate, they imagine oil and coal plants being decommissioned and beautiful, brand new super perfect never failing nuclear plants taking their place. In these dreams these nuclear plants are never made by the lowest bidder, are never under staffed or inadequately maintained, are never involved in war, are never targeted by terrorists, and are never struck by acts of God. These plants have perfect supply chains whose materials are exactly as durable as described and never less. They are run by people that will, quarter after quarter, year after year, never take shortcuts for profit or make decisions that will negatively affect the plant or the people working there. You see, even the capitalists are perfect little angels in this perfect plan that makes perfect sense.

    Because what they’re selling is a perfect version of a perfect nuclear plant. All inputs and outputs are perfect with the very small exception of the nuclear waste of course, which they have a perfect answer for as well. You see, we will perfectly store and perfectly wait for a perfect answer to our perfectly nightmarish waste product from our perfect energy source.

    hey bro its cleaner than oil hey bro we could get rid of coal hey bro it’s super safe that’s why my plan calls for it to be built in South Dakota

    No thanks. We don’t need to jump out of the frying pan and into the fire to prove our environmentalism. Renewables are here. Let’s make the great leap forward of this generation be the deployment of renewables on an unimaginable scale.

    Even the baseline assumption that oil producing countries and corporations would just sit there and let it happen is so patently absurd that it’s hard to take the conversation seriously at all. Sure buddy, Exxon and Saudi Arabia aren’t going to deploy their armies of lobbyists and use their cartel to undermine the wholesale transition away from their product.

    Sure buddy. Environmentalists against nuclear are binary thinkers but our idea of using nuclear isn’t just naive magical thinking. Sure.






  • Back in the before times, bills would come to a vote and bills that had virtually total support would go thru with unanimous consent. Now, bills are blocked from being voted on so that Senators aren’t on the record being shitbags. As you quoted Vance saying, ““it’s idiotic for us to take the bait” in regards to Democrats using the bill to force Republicans to publicly declare whether or not they support IVF.”

    Think about that statement from a Senator, then marvel at how fundamentally different he sees the job of a Senator from say, you or me or regular humans.

    Duckworth is putting a face to whoever opposes a wildly popular issue, IVF treatment. It causes people to think about the issue, because legislators are in fact advocators (you know, in complete contrast to Vance trying to hide what he advocates for). There’s nothing performative about it.

    in my opinion, it is the standard democrat cynicism. it is simply something that in the future can be used as a bullet point for her future candidacy. without context, one could write ‘honestly’ she “fought” for IVF.

    For Duckworth and for many people, IVF is a opportunity that is basically magic. It changes their lives and it gives them the opportunity to have children. There are few things more powerful than that, and it’s tone deaf to an extreme degree to think that something is performative just because it isn’t targeted at you.

    I mean, usually I’d say you’re being a petulant childish asshole, but I’m trying to be better too.

    It’s ok if everything isn’t important to you, champ. It can be important to others and we can support that. There will be Republican supporters of IVF that wanna know too.