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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • How about: Popularizing the idea of the wall in the first place, going mask-off calling illegal immigrants “murderers and rapists”, the “Muslim Ban” on air travel, moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, employing white nationalists as staffers, packing the supreme court with extreme conservative justices, giving permanent tax cuts to the rich, expanding the presence of immigrant concentration camps, cozying up to foreign dictators, stating he wanted generals like Adolf Hitler’s behind closed doors when his own generals refused to nuke North Korea and blame it on someone else, egging on a far-right insurrection attempt, directly pursuing strikes and assassination attempts against middle-Eastern military generals and diplomats, ending the Iran nuclear deal, calling climate change a Chinese hoax, calling Covid the “China virus”, spreading vaccine disinformation until one was developed before the end of his term, trying to start a trade war with China, discrediting his chief medical advisor on factual statements about Covid, saying Black Lives Matter protestors were “burning down cities”, wanting to designate Antifa as a terrorist organization, declaring “far left radical lunatics” part of his “enemy from within”, being an avowed friend of Epstein, sexually assaulting over a dozen women and underage girls, being a generally abusive sleazebag, also funding a genocide (Israel has always been ethnically displacing Palestinians), also building the wall, also not implementing healthcare reform (and being against what we have), also not protecting abortion rights (+ setting up the conditions that led to their erosion; see supreme court point above), and also denigrating anti-genocide protestors (but not as harshly since he wasn’t the one in charge when it happened).

    I guess he’s not a cop though, so there’s that.

    (minor edits made for grammar/spelling)






  • Advertising is like the Kudzu vine: neat and potentially useful if maintained responsibly, but beyond capable of growing out of control and strangling the very landscape if you don’t constantly keep it in check. I think, for instance, that a podcast or over-the-air show running an ad-read with an affiliate link is fine for the most part, as long as it’s relatively unobtrusive and doesn’t put limitations on what the content would otherwise go over.

    The problem is that there needs to be a reset of advertiser expectations. Right now, they expect the return on investment that comes from hyper-specific and invasive data, and I don’t think you can get that same level of effectiveness without it. The current advertising model is entrenched, and the parasitic roots have eroded the foundation. Those roots will always be parasitic because that’s the nature of advertising, and the profit motive in general when unchecked.







  • Anything within a sealed loop such as blood or brain fluid shouldn’t be boiling. Your body is pretty good at keeping that stuff inside as long as you don’t have any major cuts or something. That said, I don’t think even a minor cut suffered in the vacuum could clot or scab without oxygen.

    All of the air in any of your orifices would rapidly get sucked out (including from one’s butt), and pretty much any liquids exposed to the resulting vacuum would boil. Negative pressure within the body means more room-temp boiling liquids, which then creates more air to get sucked out! It’s a feedback loop!

    A space-exposed corpse would likely end up quite dehydrated for the above reason.


  • I’d also consider myself pretty tech-savvy, but that came from plenty of mistakes growing up including putting malware on the family computer at least twice (mostly ads for these “Pokemon MMOs” back in the mid aughts that were too enticing for my kid brain to refuse 😅).

    It’s very easy for me to forget how much of an outlier my tech experience is among most folks around my age. I had an acquaintance in the first year of college I helped by giving essay advice, and was very surprised to see that the only thing they really knew how to do was basic use of apps on their iPhone. They got a laptop for school, but no computer experience, no keyboard typing experience, and even just the iPhone Settings app was a scary place to be avoided for the most part. To this person, Microsoft Word was a new thing they had to learn on top of everything else. In college. It was also in the South so I don’t know if I should be that surprised unfortunately.

    Regardless, it was pretty wild to me, but a very real reminder that not everyone has access to the same resources education, and/or experience to draw on.



  • Driving is more fun when there are more viable alternatives. I don’t like driving, but it’s my only real choice where I live so I do it begrudgingly, and you have to share the road with me. Think of all the people who don’t want to drive (on account of it being dangerous, costly and/or mentally taxing) suddenly not being in cars, and how much traffic that would free up for you to zip around instead!

    Also, calling a public service “bankrupt” is really weird to me. How many tax dollars are we spending on public highways and freeways again? Do suburbs, which are designed to be car-dependent, provide a net gain or net cost in tax revenue to cities?





  • tl;dr the signal appears to have been from a cold hydrogen cloud “resonating” off of radiation bursts; namely, those emitted by neutron stars. The stronger the burst through the cloud, the louder the signal on equipment. The WOW! signal appears to have been the result of a particularly powerful event, but by observing the same/similar (?) gas cloud(s), they’ve been able to spot signals with the same signature, albeit weaker due to being hit by less rare (and less powerful) phenomena.

    Some clarification might be needed on whether it’s a specific cloud that produces this signal, or if any cold hydrogen clouds are capable of it. I couldn’t seem to find any in the article itself. Maybe there’s something in the published research paper that provides further information.