If you can afford the tax, you could have afforded to pay your employees more and yet you don't. Because there's no law compelling you. This is the point of taxation, is to compel community reinvestment, because people won't, unless they are compelled to.

Bullying is basically always the wrong intensity. Either you should be trying to portray yourself as sympathetic, have good optics, organize allies, build awareness and influence. Or you're dealing with power so entrenched and evil you're gonna need a lot *worse* than bullying.

This is the wrong takeaway and feeds directly into the kind of behavior we see here so often. Boycotts work. Protests work. These are not the same as "bullying."

If you don’t like your life, it absolutely isn’t your fault. None of us asked to be born. But we’re here. If you want things to be different, you have to get power.

You can repeat whatever you want about how if you’re underprivileged you have less to work with, that it’s unfair to have to get power instead of having it handed to you That’s all true But nobody’s going to hand anything to you, unless you have rich family to inherit from.

There is no reward at the end of the rainbow for counterculture. There is nothing but the social bonds you make, and if all the social bonds you make are with people who’ve opted out of the bonds of society, then you’ve done nothing but sealed yourself in an underclass.

I’ve said this before and I’ll probably say it again: We could have had smarter fascists. No fascists with power would’ve been better. But since that ship has sailed, at least the fascists we got are undermining their own attempts at consolidating power.

we must invent sethrogen, a hormone that turns you into a goofy stoner

and people say AI isn't useful

people liken elon to lowtax but man, while lowtax's parents were enablers who spoiled him rotten, even he never sockpuppeted them

I have a suspicion that the people most trying to 'slow their life down' by reducing the number of things they do are counteractively not experiencing enough novelty to be making those new memories in the first place if you want time to feel longer you need to do more / different / new things

same energy (I mean this as a huge compliment, two of my favorite fictional couples ever)

One of my biggest pet peeves is when people say they were dead the whole time in Lost. They have a character VERY bluntly spoonfeed you that that is NOT the case in the finale. The show is flawed, but a lot of the discourse around it is just stupid.

This video of @hankgreen.bsky.social's is very good and is basically what Dostoevsky meant by "beauty will save the world." It's not some shallow statement about aesthetics. It's about how we're uplifted and inspired to do good by seeing good. www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVu2...

My position is pretty simple: if someone’s way of engaging online is through harassment and pile-ons, Bluesky is not the right fit for you. The network is open and decentralized, and people are free to build or participate in communities that align with how they want to engage online.

I was recently reading “Morally Motivated Networked Harassment as Normative Reinforcement” by @alicetiara.bsky.social. A person is accused of violating a community norm, which triggers collective outrage and harassment that also serves as a way for others to reinforce their own group membership.

My impression is that, more than anything, the Bluesky staff wants to see AT Protocol thrive and replace the walled-garden web2 social media platforms. In order for that to happen, though, they need to ensure the experience here isn't deeply toxic. Harassment brigading works against that.

He needs to go. Every single Democrat who isn't willing to play hardball needs to go immediately. Stop fucking around. This is real. How many more people have to die.

a lot of people clearly think that the united states should have a "hukou" style system of controlled migration

I'm trans but have never had anything but positive interactions with Bluesky staff, many of whom follow me. I've never gotten even a temporary ban, despite being very active here. I'm not saying my experiences are necessarily universal, but I have a very hard time believing this.

I feel absurdly lucky that I went for a lit minor in college, because *whew* my love of writing has definitely aided my LLM work.

It would be very funny if AI use makes liberal arts majors the new hotness. "Highest paid degrees? Philosophy and creative writing."

I was a child prodigy coder, and I do enjoy it, but I've always enjoyed writing far, far more. I became a professional software engineer because it's easier to get an upper-middle class income that way. So suddenly being able to do a lot of my job via writing feels like a godsend.

You need to get *some* programming experience still, but it needs to be much more conceptual and much less about mechanically churning out reasonably reliable code. The big-picture architecture (and smaller picture architecture, too) is still going to be vital, and you need to understand it.

Me being a philosophy major / creative writing minor did far more to help me be a savvy AI user than my decades of programming experience

A lot of it is just classism/racism. People think they're better than riding the train with a lot of working class black people. MARTA is fine, it just needs funding for serious expansion. There are lots of important places the trains don't go.

Nah, there's a reason it's framed as life expectancy *at birth* Age outpaces gains in life expectancy, but the longer you live, the more life expectancy in total you have.

forced millennialization. you WILL say pupper. you WILL be quirk chungus. you WILL talk about "adulting." you WILL structure your personality around fandom as consumption. you WILL sing semi charmed life in full, unprompted, unasked for.

My alma mater 🫡 People are freaking out about this, but this is the same hospital that successfully handled the American ebola cases during that scare in 2014.

Every year, we'd go visit my grandparents for a week in Denver. I grew up lower-middle class, but my grandparents were pretty well-off in retirement, and would splurge on us when there. That time felt so special. And even at age 7 I vividly remember being sad about how fast it would go by.

I hate the whole "perception of time speeds up because it's a smaller and smaller fraction of your life" Time slowed way down the year or two after I came out as trans, because everything felt so new again It's all about your brain not being able to label periods of time as "more of the same"

If you believe this then you are stupid

I was singing along a lot to Shania's "Man, I Feel Like a Woman" constantly at age 12 In a sane world, that should've been enough to fast track me onto puberty blockers

this came on when I was grocery shopping earlier, and I had no choice but to sing along

Welp, can't say I didn't see it coming, they cut down everyone's salaries about a month ago due to limited runway, but the company I was working for laid me off. Need full time TypeScript and/or Solidity work ASAP

Surely they've suffered enough?

it's been so weird how reactionary many leftists are getting, even in anarchist camps that had been more immune than authcoms. so much antisemitism, scapegoating of intellectuals, a lot of 'retvrn' style rhetoric, and conspiracy theories all over social media, that open the door to people like her.

"Pokémon Bluesky and Reddit"

I'm not confident many of my fellow leftists/progressives can think sanely enough about AI regulation so as to ensure we don't inadverantly erode or destroy vital civil liberties. Many are capable of seeing these dangers around Section 230 + age verification while missing it entirely around AI.

Looks like a pretty damning failure on OpenAI's part, and I hope they suffer consequences. Regulating consumer AI technology will be incredibly challenging though and ripe for a dangerous fascist pendulum swing similar to "age verification", section 230 repeal, backdoors, and encryption bans.

credit goes to @somewhere.systems for this incredibly correct chart

🫪

Fun fact: the whole "10k steps" thing didn't even have a scientific basis, it was from a Japanese marketing campaign for a pedometer based off of the kanji for 10,000 (万) looking like a guy walking. The counter could only go up to 9,999 as well, so it would reset then.

"We need to invite Marjorie Taylor Greene into the tent but a campaign stop with Liz Cheney is a bridge too far" is real "I'm going to become the Joker" stuff for me.

Proliferation of this exact dynamic is the single biggest reason the social justice movement of the Trump I & early Biden era was decisively defeated

These people use “transphobe” to mean “cis person who disagreed with me once”

I tried to warn people about red-brownism like 8 years ago and now we have "leftists" cozying up to MTG

every so often I hear someone talk about how we have to resist automation and self driving cars because it’ll put people out of jobs & on the one hand I get what they think they’re saying, but also, they’re saying they want cheap human servants

on a similar note, i was on a student exchange to germany at one point; i love germans and it's a great place, but definitely the lesson i came home with was that ww2-era nationalism was bad and had horrific consequences.