• 0 Posts
  • 32 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 18th, 2023

help-circle





  • Now he’s driving their investment into to the ground so the banks will end up writing off most of the debt rather than asking for repayment. So far, it seems to be working.

    Maybe I’m financially illiterate, but I don’t understand how that works. Like… if I take out a loan to buy a house and then deliberately burn down the house, that doesn’t get me off the hook. If anything, I’ll probably end up going to prison to boot. Why exactly would the banks just write off Musk’s debt instead of going after him and his other assets in court?


  • It’s unfortunate that the headline and much of the article is needlessly sensationalized. The article makes it seems as if our previous understanding had been completely wrong and was now completely overturned, and that’s simply not the case. The new finding is that aggression can be the result of self-control, but it’s pretty clear from the words of the researcher and the abstract of the paper that aggression resulting from a lack of self-control also exists (“We often fail to inhibit our worst, most aggressive impulses. But that is only one side of the story.” and “balanced perspective, which allows aggression to arise from successful and unsuccessful self-control”).

    Research indicates that the brain’s prefrontal cortex, a center of self-control, shows increased activity during aggression, further debunking the association between poor self-control and aggression.

    That doesn’t debunk shit. It’s obvious why the prefrontal cortex would be active in the case of premeditated aggression, but this finding makes perfect sense even in cases of spontaneous, uncontrolled aggression. In that case, the prefrontal cortex is trying to exert self-control, it’s just failing at it. But that activity would still show up.

    Very interesting findings, but the reporting is pretty poor.




  • The article doesn’t really seem to make any moral argument (probably because it’s unfinished - maybe don’t post it until it is?). Yeah, Discord is financially unsustainable, but that’s just because it’s still in phase one of the enshittification cycle. At this stage, venture capitalists are basically subsidizing the service for everyone. Maybe I’m just myopic, but I don’t really see anything morally wrong with enjoying a service paid for by a greedy billionaire. And once the enshittification ramps up, well, there are always alternatives.



  • It’s not our war. It’s not our fight. It has nothing to do with us.

    That’s where you’re wrong. America has a global empire, and Russia is one of the other powers trying to undermine and dismantle it. If America wants to keep its empire and the many benefits it brings, it has no choice but to defend it. Be thankful you’re only having to spend money while someone else is spending lives.





  • a plausible argument could be made on humanitarian grounds that a negotiated settlement as quickly as possible is the best of the bad options

    Absolutely not, that idea is based on a total lack of historical memory and amounts to nothing more than kicking the can down the road. Russia will not accept anything less than keeping the territories it currently occupies, and that’s not an option. This invasion happened because Russia had been getting away with this kind of stuff for two decades. It’s not Putin’s first land grab. It was Chechnya in 2000, Georgia in 2008, Crimea in 2014, the rest of Ukraine in 2022. They took a small bite at first, and when they got away with it, they took a bigger bite next. And again, and again. Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Allowing Russia to get away with this and keep the territories it took guarantees another repetition of the same pattern less than a decade later with yet more devastating results. If we had nipped this in the bud, the war could’ve been avoided entirely. The second best time is now.



  • Eh… I figure if CMs weren’t effective, they wouldn’t be using them. There’s a good reason the military heavyweights refuse to join the international treaty that bans them.

    Also, the whole discussion is basically moot, since apparently Ukraine has been using old Soviet CMs all along anyway. Getting more modern American ones with a much lower percentage of duds will be nothing but an improvement.



  • Generations of having a chance to blow up children. vs maybe a short term push of the front, maybe.

    The thing you’re forgetting is that the Russians are busy laying as many landmines as they can get their hands on all over eastern Ukraine. Using cluster munitions to drive the Russians out will result in less UXO than letting them continue doing that.

    With conventional weapons UA is already kicking ass.

    I guess we must be following different news outlets, then. All I’m hearing is that the Ukrainian counter-offensive is going a lot slower than planned. And if you can be sure of one thing in a war, it’s that things are always worse than the belligerents are willing to admit.