Having done something similar it really fucking sucks. Even if you find a way to discreetly kill time, you can’t shake the feeling that you’re burning precious hours of your life for no reason.

I would much rather work a solid 6-7hr block at home knowing I can sign off when I’m done than spend 1 + 7 hours in cubicle hell.

Weird to see a tankie throwing shade at Stalin like this. Just another log on the incoherent jenga tower of your ideology

Of course it’s not the same:

• One has staged elections for jackboots controlled by a party with a funky cross on their flag. Any political dissent gets you sent to a work camp.

• The other has staged elections for apparatchiks controlled by a party with work tools on their flag. Any political dissent gets you sent to a re-education farm.

Couldn’t be more different.

This makes me irrationally mad. I want to think the ratio is some subtle reference to a date or holds some symbolic meaning. But deep down we all know it’s just what some random flag maker from hundreds of years ago thought looked good and then was copied and bastardized without much thought.

Edit: looking into it, it’s even worse than that. The USA uses 10:19 only by executive order in certain contexts but otherwise uses a bunch of random ratios. Some countries tried to approximate the golden ratio but the measurement drifted and they never bothered to fix it.

If someone walked up to me and told me to label anything as the gravest, worst thing to happen in human history I would definitely abstain. It’s just not possible to say that [as a representative of millions of people] unless you’re OK with diluting the conversation around serious ongoing problems with hyperbole.

Sorry to the millions of people being genocided in Gaza, the real gravest tragedy is something else (or vice versa). There is no correct objective answer to such loaded propositions.

You don’t abstain from a resolution about slavery that include reparations to the victims because you think another crime against humanity is worse.

You shouldn’t frame honest attempts at reparations and progressive policy in black/white terms. The point of this resolution is the same as everything in the UN: toothless posturing that goes nowhere to the domestic political benefit of everyone involved.

The Nay votes can say they’re defending whatever tragedy plays best to their audience, the Yea can play off their moral superiority (either in opposition to Nays or for support of their tragedy) and the Abstainers get gold stars for their deft diplomatic balancing. And it didn’t cost anyone anything but ink!

Us peons are supposed to slurp up the drama and pump our echo chamber full of our chosen narrative (see: this post). But there’s another secret option: stop engaging with rage porn content, it’s better for your health.

For sure, for sure. 15 million humans forcibly relocated and an estimated 30-60 million deaths over 400 years is certainly among the gravest human tragedies.

On the other hand could you imagine if tragedies like the holocaust or holodomor or the Chinese three years famine were extended to even a fraction of those 400 years? Or if a handful more cities had been nuked? Or if we let the 50 million people living in modern slavery die in bondage? What about the billions of people that have died from preventable diseases over centuries of neglect?

…Why are you even bothering to argue about this? There’s no objectivity in these conversations, and yet you insist that everyone but you is wrong.

Sounds like someone has never had to beat traffic to get to a second job… or a doctor’s appointment because your boss kept you late… or pick the kids up from school on time because you can’t afford childcare/after school activities… or get home to let a spouse drive the car because you can’t afford two cars or…

Being poor is expensive, time consuming and dangerous.

USA is so dystopian that not having a car can very easily fuck your life up. Tbh the big brother solution is still a better idea than cutting off a person (or even a household) from transportation to jobs/groceries/healthcare.

Because most places in the USA have atrocious worker protection laws. Even if you’re in a name brand, corporate job with thousands of people on board with unionizing, they can close your office or fire everyone with no repercussions.

Just look at Blizzard, Google, Starbucks, etc… They take a chainsaw to any union talk and have never been bothered with consequences. If you’re employed by a tiny, family owned business you have even less leverage. Your personal relationship to the owner is much more important to achieving your goals than paperwork solidarity with the 2 other employees.

There has also been a huge, prolonged campaign of union busting specifically to weaken their power in these political scenarios

I view it as a philosophical difference more than anything. Only an absolute lunatic would actually push the button without an extreme amount of pressure; it’s just not a rational action of self preservation. A Solomon plan, as in the parable, is a choice that will kill you. Say what you will about the people pulling Israel’s strings but they have enough sanity and power lust to not throw it all away.

All nuclear players are handling loaded guns. Any bluster or rhetoric is hot air because you don’t know what they’re made of until they pull the trigger. And that is the most unique decision in human history in the hands of a tiny group of people. Nobody should ever have been given the personal power to vaporize entire cities, you can’t generalize that failing to a state policy level.

Complicated dead man switches don’t solve the problem or absolve the decision maker, it’s just a layer of abstraction. You still have to choose to enable it and accept the consequences of killing millions of people. Telling the world it’s enabled is just indicating your current line in the sand (a nuclear event). That’s no different than setting a line in the sand for a conventional threat to your capital city. Either may be an understandable and high pressure threat to the individual decision makers: both are reactions to the other belligerent, both end with the button pusher dead.

And both sides always have the option to renege on their promise and launch first before that line. Even if they hold to their promise, saying “I warned you” doesn’t make a mass revenge holocaust or suicidal holocaust more ethical than the other. The only humane choice is total disarmament and deterrence with an empty gun, which will never happen of course.

Yes it would be damn near impossible because basically all communication would be dead as fast as it happens and any belligerents wouldn’t be in any shape to give convincing evidence (assuming they survive and it doesn’t trigger a worldwide exchange).

If two countries are at the brink anything can happen: a radar blip, a failed first launch, fog of war, equipment malfunction, etc… Nobody’s official policy is “we’ll nuke anyone for any reason”, they always claim self preservation/retaliation. If a conventional war with Iran goes poorly it would be a rapid flurry of Israel maybe launches or threatens to launch => China (or whoever) retaliates => USA (or whoever) counters => comms are disrupted or locked down => troops are mobilized etc…

The same events could be true of a purported dead man switch system: can anyone prove that the switch was improperly triggered? Does it matter now that most people involved are ashes?

It would be over in about an hour or two and would take decades to properly reconstruct, if ever. Every state would jump at the chance to frame the tragedy in their favorite light and you personally will never ever know the truth.

In that light it doesn’t make any sense to worry about speculation or opinion pieces or rumors. There never will be a way to prove or disprove theoretical apocalyptic policies. There are a billion reasons to criticize Israel and hate Zionists but this isn’t much better than a puff piece.

They’re two sides of the same coin and not functionally much different. In a world with nuclear weapons everyone must have a “last resort” strategy like this: the perception of the destruction of the state triggers nuclear annihilation (against anyone/everyone; you plan for all options). The only other theorized response is to voluntarily roll over and die so humanity can live, and nobody with nukes is going to admit to that.

In a real scenario you could never verify if the first launch was from a credible threat retaliation or not. Even if you could, first strike vs retaliatory is cold comfort when everyone is starving in a nuclear winter. It’s not worth getting upset over a wikipedia article with a bunch of journalist quotes and opinion pieces. We’ve known about MAD since 1962.

Receiver of Wrecks is a pretty metal title tho. If he’s telling me to do something I might listen

Astroturfing new bot accounts I guess

This looks like when you see a weird, unflattering picture of a celebrity. Earth just woke up and hasn’t put its makeup on and you put it on blast like this

I wonder how chicory (and optional caffeine pill?) emissions stack up against the coffee equivalent. It’s close enough to coffee for me 🤷

It’s not uncommon for a donor to support both candidates because whoever wins will have a debt. Like you said this is peanuts to them.

The other factor is non-monetary support. A $1 billion check to a candidate’s campaign fund has a lot of red tape. It isn’t as effecient as a $100 million donation and $900 million spent blasting propaganda across your personal media empire.

This is bad because it means if you want to run for office, your campaign is mostly floated by this tiny group of people. $5.5 billion sounds small until you realize that breaks out into millions of dollars for any individual campaign. Unless you’re rich enough to ante up (and repeat that every election cycle), you’ll never play the game.

More isn’t spent because it doesn’t need to be, not because it isn’t effective. The policy goals of the 0.01% are basically in lock step, why would they bid against each other? Regardless of the raw number, the average politician has to equally weigh their representation between the needs of the 0.01% and the 99.99%.

The theory behind DEI policies is to formally challenge personal bias (both explicit and subconscious) in hiring and participation. There’s nothing inherently tied to unfairly favoring minority groups other than the fact that they are usually the target of negative bias.

It’s a pretty basic and logical idea that acknowledges human fallibility. I hate that it was rapidly co-opted on all sides as a shorthand for racism and opposition to cis-white-male dominance.