I don’t think the people who organized a takeover of power in the richest and most powerful nation on Earth are thoughtless.

Who taught you to believe that they are?

The article says Trump is backing a united Ireland. Is that just catering to Irish-USAmerican voters? Because I don’t immediately see how it would benefit technofascists.

“Algorithm” is a term from computer science

That is an example application of Algorithm’s work, but far from the only one. Algorithm doesn’t inherently have to do with information theory or programming languages.

Linguistic drift comes for us all. “Eventually everyone who hates this thing is going to be dead, and the ones that use it are going to be in control”.

I couldn’t disagree more. Roddenberry is just some guy, Star Trek has always been so much larger than him. And as The Orville demonstrates, there is no justification for a 2020s star trek to be grittier than a star trek that aired between the Korean and Vietnam war, with the second red scare with the existential threat of nuclear warfare.

Its utopian vision of the future has a backstory of humans fighting each other to near extinction in the Eugenics War and WW3, because that seemed where things were headed. The present has always been gritty, but Star Trek used to be about zooming out past the horrors of the present day to imagine a brighter future.

The franchise has simply switched hands from being propaganda by a bunch of left-leaning weirdos to being propaganda for huge corporations and the state they wear as a trench coat.

It is entirely possible to write Star Trek today that is as left-wing (relative to its time) and utopian as it used to be. The owners of the IP simply will not permit that.

Algorithm means Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. His name was transliterated into Latin as Algoritmi and from there into English as Algorithm.

Using ‘algorithm’ to refer to anything other than the person is linguistic drift and therefore utterly unacceptable. Even if you’re “pulling an Algorithm” by relying on his mathematical work, then you’re pulling an Algorithm every time you use the number zero. Using “(pulling an) Algorithm” to refer only to a structured set of mathematically precise instructions is just so ignorant.

Anyway, what were you saying about people being dumb for using “algorithm” in a different sense than how it was used previously?

Abolishing crime reduces it even more

(not being facetious)

I’ve seen people live their lives in Scotland. I have met no true Scotsman yet.

That’s Tommy Tallarico. Two L’s in the last name, different first name. Not related.

That’s an insult to good and honest terrorists.

tl;dr: all the percentages in the article are bullshit.

The US government was providing 31-69%¹ of all global funding to LGBTQ organizations? That’s a lot more than I expected.

So much more that I doubt whether this New York-based advocacy group running a survey about recipients of US funding has properly accounted for selection bias.

Did they search for advocacy groups with an English-language website or something? Or take a survey from groups they work with?

edit: I looked at the methodology section of the report. As I feared they spread the survey “through their network”, though they did distribute it in several different languages.

They pay lip service to the existence of response bias, but they completely ignore selection bias, and they ignore both when loudly presenting the percentages from among respondents as if they are in any way representative.

So as usual the headline is utter trash, but for once it’s the fault of the survey organization doing bad statistics rather than the media misrepresenting them.

It is of course awful that queer organizations are losing funding with which they can help people, but this is a qualitative observation. Most of the numbers in the article and the report are bullshit.

¹: (lower bound: ½•½+¼•¼+0 = 5/16, upper bound: 1•½+½•¼+¼•¼ = 11/16)

But at that point why have hydrogen-based or ammonia-based energy infrastructure? Why not use the excess electricity to make fertilizer and use that to grow crops?

Are the factories that make hydrogen so much cheaper than the factories that make fertilizer that when you build enough factories to make use of all the excess electricity (meaning they’re idle 80% of the time), the cost of having those factories make fertilizer instead of hydrogen is greater than the cost of building and maintaining the entire infrastructure for using hydrogen or ammonia as energy storage/fuel?

For same-handed scissors, your thumb goes in the handle for the blade that is further from your palm, while for opposite-handed scissors your thumb goes in the handle for the blade that is closer to your palm.

The ergonomic assumption is that you’ll use your fingers to lock one blade in place, then use the ball of your thumb to apply a pressure away from your palm to the handle of the other blade. Because of the hinge in the middle of the scissors, this pushes the thumb’s blade towards your palm as you close the scissors.

Thus for same-handed scissors the blades are pushed together, while for opposite-handed scissors they are pushed apart. Being pushed apart can form a gap that paper can fold into, or can combine with the resistance of the paper to make a gap that the paper folds into as you start cutting.

To use opposite-handed scissors, push the blades together. For example by closing the thumb blade using pressure from the pad of the thumb instead of the ball while keeping the finger blade fixed. Or, my favorite, using my thumb to keep the thumb blade fixed while closing my fingers and applying pressure away from my palm with them.

Like with cookies, they will undoubtedly find the most unusable and malicious form of “no algorithm” allowed under the law.

It’s not a warning, it’s a threat that they plan to follow through on.

Indoctrinatie is een stuk makkelijker omdat beleid hen isoleert van hun medemens, hen arm houdt, hen plezier ontneemt, hen te weinig woonruimte geeft, hen de vijand maakt van collegas en van minderheden en migranten met andere arbeidsvoorwaarden, hun mededogen bestraft, en hen bezig houdt met zinloos werk dat hen van de samenleving vervreemdt.

Elke westerse staat is na het opkomen van het communisme druk aan het werk gegaan met zo hard mogelijk te voorkomen dat mensen solidair kunnen zijn met elkaar. Het resultaat is dat mensen weinig solidair zijn met elkaar.

Goed beleid zou betekenen dat het staatsgeweld dat mensen uit elkaar houdt afneemt, waardoor mensen meer samen kunnen werken, waardoor de propaganda minder effectief wordt, de populariteit van fascisme afneemt en de populariteit van het communisme toeneemt.

Of dat betekent dat ze niet meer verkeerd stemmen is tussen jou en je propagandabron.

Well, the important thing is we’ve found a way to touch less grass than either them.

Well, you can do the right thing once.

If you want to do the right thing multiple times, then it’s useful not to get caught.

leaving the starship under the command of a lieutenant

Yeah, what are they, some kind of placeholder?

Profits don’t matter. The broliarchy can just let the US government print money for them and call it a “strategically essential sector”.

If you’re giving them your money, that’s one thing, but the AI slop industry will continue until the US government breaks with tech bros or the US economy collapses trying to keep it going.

Because it’s easier to destroy (social-liberal) democracy with like-minded allies. Europe would have been a much tougher nut to crack without Russia to stoke their existential terror.

The average person lives at 30 degrees latitude, not 45 degrees. Going wider reduces distortion for most people while increasing it for a small minority: