maarsen

2 hours ago, Heartofice said:

Man I wish that Industrialisation and Capitalism shit hadn't happened, I hate having medicine and not starving. It sucks.

When Britain entered the Great War in 1914, a huge number of men were called up and tried to enter the armed services. The problem was that at least half of them were so sickly and/ or malnourished that they were not even useful as cannon fodder. The Germans even noticed how small and stunted the British soldiers were compared to themselves.

7 hours ago, BigFatCoward said:

If i owned Tesla stock and the company were trying to pay Elon 50 billion, i'd be somewhat aggrieved. 

So would I as I would see it as a way for him trying to get back the money he was forced to spend on Twitter.

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

Serbia has dropped all plans to buy Russian fighter jets, citing the sanctions regime making it impossible. They had been urged by Moscow to "wait out" the sanctions but the Serbian government has decided they can't afford to wait. Instead, they have ordered twelve Rafale fighters from France.

Are citing sanctions an excuse to not say Russian armaments are not really that good?

9 hours ago, mcbigski said:

I don't think Fauci is an underpants gnome specifically.  But his MO seems to have been:

1.  Fund gain of function research to increase contagiousness.

2.  Set up royalties for mRNA vaccines.

3.  Release a far more contagious SARS variant.

4.  Sub out mRNA patents to the companies that give decent kick backs.

5.  Use the power of centralized health care to demonetize treatments that aren't currently under patent.

6.  Profit!!!

Missing the ??? step here somewhere.

Off your meds?

7 minutes ago, Tears of Lys said:

Doh.  Never made the connection.  I too think of Motown, Motor City, etc.  I still love me some Motown music.

How about Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels?

1 hour ago, Tears of Lys said:

My most vivid dreams are often those of flying.  But I have to flap my arms at first to escape gravity's pull, (I know) and then when I clear the treetops it's clear sailing.  I remember having to be very careful of power lines.  It is an absolutely wonderful feeling.  The other really cool dream is the one where I'm on cross-country skis and each step glides about 3-4 yards.  But no snow in sight.

But has anyone else experienced "exploding head syndrome"?   It's funny, I know, but it's an actual thing apparently.  It happens in that time when you're just falling asleep, and then "BANG!"  I've had it once in a while for as long as I can remember.  It's harmless, but when it first happens, it's quite disconcerting!   You look around to see what happened and did anyone else hear it.

I have had this on occasion. I have had it while wide awake too.

12 hours ago, Spockydog said:

Sabine is awesome. This is very brave.

 

I subscribe to her channel and yes she was very brave. It did need saying though. 

1 hour ago, Larry of the Lawn said:

I can't remember which one of these threads is the right one to bash Elon Musk in, apologies if this is off topic.  Twitter restored the original model of blue check marks this week and got rid of the Musk scheme where you just buy it instead:

 

https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/05/media/elon-musk-blue-checkmarks-x-reversal/index.html

 

Pretty amazing watching the purported genius get told his idea sucks, have him do it anyway, watch his decisions and management tank the platform, and then see him scramble to fix shit after it's too late.  Why couldn't you just leave it the fuck alone?  

True genius lies in leaving stuff the fuck alone. The fake genius  not so much.

2 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

More space means more opportunities for intelligent life to arrise.  The Fermi paradox asks why haven’t we hear them?  The question holds.  

I do think there is other life in the universe probably intelligent life… it’s simply interesting the we haven’t heard it yet.

Think of space as the oceans on our planet. We have basically sampled a glass of water from the seashore. I would hesitate to say no fish live in the ocean because we found none in our glass. I got this analogy from Neil Degrasse Tyson. Space is immensely big and distances are really really immense. The surprise would be if we did find life.

14 minutes ago, kissdbyfire said:

Should we look forward to an SEC investigation and subsequent charges? I may be wrong but I think he doesn’t have one of those yet? Is he trying to ace the criminal code like it’s a test or something? 

I think the target of the scam is Trump. The easiest scammed person is a scammer.

That was my exact thought last week.

4 minutes ago, Iskaral Pust said:

Generous take: it’s a MAGA meme stock and show of loyalty.

Cynical take: it’s a convenient channel for a shady transfer of wealth to Trump by undisclosed political interests in his moment of dire need, in exchange for future influence.  Trump can now pledge his suddenly valuable shares or borrow against them for the bond he owes to the court.

The transfer of wealth can only occur if Trump gets out before the inevitable collapse. Does anyone think Trump is foolish enough to not dump his stock before the plunge? I do. The transfer of wealth may be from Trump to those flogging the stock.

Well, over the years I have worked in many places and could go on for hours on the stupidity I have seen. All it takes for any corporation or even a small company to go off the rails is hiring one wrong person. One person who sincerely believes in the jargon or bafflegab they spout is enough to destroy anything. People are not machines in that if the proper input is used, out comes the proper output. People think, adapt,  and refuse to accept ideas for any number of reasons. Economic behaviour is human behaviour and we are not rational at all times. Corporate management is really more akin to religion than science.

1 minute ago, The Big Stink said:

Texas just banned some forms of speech.

Was double posting included?

7 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

It's a belief, and it's not science, and some people are even trying to organise it (like having atheism camps for kids), and it has its evangelists and fanatics writing books and giving sermons on the internet. It has a lot of the qualities of a duck, but maybe it's just a decoy, not a real duck.

According to David Wolpert, lack of an omnipotent being is science. As for me I have so little religious feeling I don’t even worry about atheism

1 hour ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Link… please… Kari Lake is the female version of Trump.  I want to soak in the schadenfreud…

I saw it on the YT channel Meidas Touch. 

Well Kari Lake has utterly capitulated in the defamation lawsuit against her. She admits it was all lies, every bit of it.

2 hours ago, Kalbear said:

It is a popular stock associated with one of the most powerful people on the planet. It is also something of a loyalty check.

One of the most powerful? I think wannabe powerful is a more apt description. Unless of course we are talking about his stench.

1 hour ago, Makk said:

Truth social has tiny revenue, high net losses, and prevailing biased content that is going to cap potential revenue by keeping away advertisers who don't want their brands associated with it. The combined share value of it and digital world is massively overvalued. But it is a transparently bad investment rather than a scam. It would be a scam if they reported false revenue or user counts to justify the valuation but they are not, these numbers are just publicly terrible.

The name for the scam is 'pump and dump'. You pump up the prospects of the company, in this case using the Trump name and 'reputation' as a good businessman and billionaire investor, and when the time comes you dump the shares before the price falls.

10 hours ago, Makk said:

I'm not sure its a scam precisely but it certainly looks like a terrible investment in the long term. I'm assuming the origins and current holders of Digital world funding has been thoroughly investigated for this merger to go ahead, but digital world is a publicly traded company. There seemed to originally be a lot of Chinese investment, I would hope the entire thing isn't a front to channel foreign money in illegally.

Truth social itself, which is the only "asset" involved after the merger as far as I am aware, has really badly performing numbers that don't in anyway come close to justifying the combined $10 billion dollar valuation. But people do seem to want to invest in dumb shit these days, it may be legit.

Twitter with many more subscribers barely made money which is why Musk refused to buy it after looking at the books. Even now after Musk was forced to buy it it has dropped in value by 1/2 at least. Truth Social is a scam.

1 hour ago, Zorral said:

China and Russia Learn Not Even Their Ships Are Safe in the Red Sea

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-03-25/supply-chain-latest-china-and-russia-shipping-in-the-red-sea?

When the news of the ISIS bombing in Russia hit, one wondered if it would affect that ceasefire thing. 

When you give people guns and rockets, everything starts to look like a target.

6 minutes ago, Werthead said:

There was an analysis a decade or so back which showed that historical Conservative economic performance was horrendous, and as a whole was largely outperformed by Labour economic policies (when equalised, given the Tories have been in power for twice as much as Labour in the last century).

However, the Tories have had several strokes of good luck which have delivered good economic performance on their watch, such as inheriting various low-hanging fruit situations they can exploit (Thatcher selling off council house stock built up over many decades, for example, or winning the Falklands War). Labour has also had awful luck in some of their timing, such as both the 1970s economic meltdown, partially caused by things like the Yom Kippur War and high oil prices, or the 2008 economic crash. Tory policies are usually ideologically-driven rather than practically-driven, though, basically falling into the category of, "We say this is a good idea so it inarguably is, even when we enact it and it torpedoes the economy." That makes it incredibly hard for them to about-face when things are going bad (having the foresight to boot out Truss rather than grin and bear the resounding chaos that would have followed is a notable moment of good sense from the modern Tory party).

The main problem modern Labour has encountered that, as politics lurch further rightwards, they have followed, putting them either more in the centre (under Blair) and the suspicion that Starmer could even be just right-of-centre, and thus mostly doomed to following Tory policies-lite. This might be better than under a Conservative government, but things might not get noticeably "better" overall, because that would require policies that Starmer does not seem to want to enact (despite embracing some of them just a few years ago).

Blair did have big ideas and talked a big game in 1997 and these helped him win, despite the economic rebound of the prior couple of years meaning that things we actually already improving under Major. In 2024 Starmer's ideas seem to boil down to, "We probably won't suck as much as leaving the Tories in charge."

For the Conservatives, opposition might be a good time to regroup. Something they probably need to tackle is that, manifestly, going further and further to the right on social issues doesn't actually seem to be nudging the dial with the country as a whole; Britain is not inherently a bastion of super-liberalness but I do think it has a deep-set attitude of "Meh, whatever, live and let live," which seems to be getting more and more annoyed with some Tories banging on about some of these issues, not to mention inherent Tory-voters amongst minorities getting alarmed at some of their rhetoric and decamping to milquetoast-Labour.

Other countries have had similar experiences with conservative policies and finding out that in the end that they really don't work. People as a whole seem to worry more that 'others' are getting ahead when times are good rather than when those 'others' fall back in times of economic stress even as people as a whole fall back. This is why conservatives keep coming back into power even as their record of economic management is abysmal.

1 hour ago, Zorral said:

There Is a Twisted Logic to Trump’s Obsession With Al Capone

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/25/opinion/trump-al-capone.html

 

Well then, we can only assume that Trump will end up in the same state as Capone; in prison and dying of brain rot due to syphilis. Good enough for me.

27 minutes ago, Week said:

*should be -- not intended as a prediction.

Early stage start-ups typically have more than $4M in revenue (IIRC, last year was $39M in expenses and $4M revenue) and a path for growth. This company has as much growth potential as a stone.

I would love to have that list of investors. So much moose pasture, so little time. 

9 hours ago, fionwe1987 said:

That's a nice piece. However, it's worth noting that while FEM may explain the reason for why consciousness first evolved, it doesn't explain how that evolution has proceeded since.

My brain may indeed be on autopilot while driving a familiar route. Yet it often is not on autopilot when I'm stationary in my even more familiar couch, and thinking about writing a story, or picturing the next watercolor I want to work on.

I'm surely engaging conscious processes in those moments, but nothing external has changed. My brain is not at the minimal energy consumption rest state, despite no sensory input that would disturb it.

I could meditate and take it there, but often, I don't. Nor is this failure goal directed, or optimal strategy, because whether spending time thinking up a story or water color is worth the energy consumed is not something we can predict well, especially if we are not published authors or famed watercolorists (or insert art/skill here that we spend time cogitating on).

Yet, this kind of cognition is critical for all the external facing success stories of human beings, at least. I definitely don't think this is unique to us, but we're somehow wired for this kind of hoped for future-state driven non-minimization of energy use in our brains, which must have had different evolutionary drivers than what first evolved consciousness, if FEM is true. 

It's the "useless" cogitating that we need to explain it we want to figure out consciousness. And AI today doesn't run unprompted. The servers for LLMs do not draw power when no prompts are entered. So whatever argument can be made for their consciousness, that consciousness does not exist when they're on but not given any external prompts. 

If brains like to be in  state of low energy consumption, the how do we explain gambling, drugs, following topics on a forum, reading books compulsively, and watching  sports or TV or movies? And the there is the appeal of horror in books, movies, and real life.