just some guy (the bad kind)
@viscousboredom.bsky.social
Still just some guy, now available across all platforms
I keep saying it's the boomers that are the most out of control with their phones, but everybody wants to be all "kids these days" and ignore grandpa glued to the dumbest mobile games imaginable
Stephen Bush@stephenkb.bsky.social · 2w agoSaw two men - RP accents, early 60s - come close to blows in the cinema last night because one of them told the other to turn their phone off. Something bad and strange is happening in society.
Being asked to explain What's Wrong, Specifically, With Ken Paxton
Inigo Montoya: Let Me Explain
Alt: Inigo Montoya: Let Me Explain... No, there is too much, let me sum up
static.klipy.com
ellie lockhart (she/they)@eleanor.lockhart.contact · 2w agoso Paxton is at a double disadvantage, because he's an adulterer with criminal scandals and all sorts of other just tremendously embarassing stuff; he's tied to Trump, so "traditional MAGA" will want to turn out for him and probably don't care, but some of these people also hate Trump now
it is an incredible testament to the power of midcentury Soviet propaganda that the dumbest leftists in the world are still confusing the expansionist reactionary petrostate which grew out of its corpse for the thing itself
Separate from this discussion, Feygin's book is pretty good and highly readable, 100% worth your time if you haven't gotten to it yet
Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li@sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com · 2w agoMe, at the gym looking in the mirror: why am I soft in the middle now, the rest of my life is so hard? Me, at home looking at the half-eaten pint of Häagen-Daz: oh yeah, that's why
Speaking of Claudish language, does anyone know which model(s) are the ones obsessed with the phrase "sit with that for minute" that all the YouTube AI slop channels seem to use?
post malone ergo propter malone@proptermalone.bsky.social · 3w agoand like, it's pretty clear that if you go to a news aggregator-- the for-you Google tab or whatever that serves stuff it thinks you'll be into-- those links are now mostly slop. clear Claudish language and so forth. that sucks. but you can also do some sick things with the tools
Western Michigan got absolutely screwed, they legitimately won that game
Look, if we're doing technically correct then a jury didn't, exactly, find that he wasn't an abuser, they simply found that alluding to his abuse in public while being female is defamatory
GOLIKEHELLMACHINE@golikehellmachine.com · 4w agothis christmas, see johnny depp — who was technically not found to be an abuser in US courts — in a new look at an old favorite. EBENEEZER: TECHNICALLY CORRECT
People say wild stuff about these data, and I wonder if they aren't doing some sort of % of disposable income in their heads, because my boring, normal apartment complex verifies income and won't rent to you if you're above 33% of gross
Matt Darling@besttrousers.bsky.social · 4w agoYou might be pulling from a younger/more urban/poorer sample? Full population has that around 20%. share.google/IHCeOVFBoAqb...
Older centrists think we want dignified statesmen who will stand above the fray. Nope. Most Democratic voters basically want petty, vindictive people who are going to make the bullies pay for their crimes and cry hard as they do it. They're begging for it.
A bunch of people are, perhaps unwittingly, admitting that they would not then check and read those sources and I don't think they realize they're telling on themselves
rev. howard arson@theophite.bsky.social · 2mo agowhat everyone is objecting to is natural language semantic search. the fact that it has a front-end on it which makes tool calls is completely irrelevant to the fact that what is coming out the other end of the tool call is your pile of sources.
Insane amounts of mental and emotional labor has gone into figuring out which table you sit at in the cafeteria during grade school and now no one is willing to say it was all pretty silly
Stephen Bush@stephenkb.bsky.social · 2mo agoThe Sorting Hat continues to exert its visibly sub-optimal practice of sorting into Heroes, Bookworms, Misc, and Evil because you can’t turn around to the book’s real audience (a kid who read the first one a year ago) and go “you shouldn’t feel excited by the Houses”!
Machiavelli nodding along to Luthen Rael's monologue, taking notes: "I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago from which there’s only one conclusion: I’m damned for what I do."
just some guy (the bad kind)@viscousboredom.bsky.social · 2mo agoI interpreted much of The Prince as saying "even if you're good you still have to be good at your job" or more accurately that competent governance is orthogonal to morality
It's well-understood that rich people stay rich because they can afford to buy Rolexes in bulk, thereby getting a discount on a more durable mechanical watch compared to its budget-friendly competition
The Fig Economy@figgityfigs.bsky.social · 2mo agoRight! Like there’s a lot that’s tangled up in there, like causative claims (this is *why* rich people are rich, when it’s a lot more convincing in the converse, this is (part of) why poor people stay poor).
It's wild looking at the replies go nuts about bulk buying toilet paper; I promise the owner of your local car dealership does not plan tp purchases, buying household goods is entirely convenience driven for them One of the perks of being rich is buying what you want, whenever you feel like it
The Fig Economy@figgityfigs.bsky.social · 2mo agoIt simply does not follow that because the cost per unit good is cheaper if you buy in bulk, the cost of a cheap version of a good times how often you have to replace it is greater than the cost of the expensive version of the same. These are two different things.
@jamellebouie.net's take here aligns really well with my view that musk is still not fully comfortable with being known as a whiny racist and he's still desperate to be seen as cool & Important
Is Elon Musk the world's biggest billionaire piss baby?
YouTube video by Takes™ by Jamelle Bouie
youtu.be
This whole thing has made me much more nervous about a conflict with China, where Xi is much more likely now to think that they just have to survive for three weeks and then we'll be out of ammo
GOLIKEHELLMACHINE@golikehellmachine.com · 2mo agojames you just don’t understand how important firing twenty million dollar missiles into sand dunes is to kinetic lethality warfighting
As an academic myself, I fully support telling all of us to stfu, every single person holding any form of doctorate needs to hear that at minimum once a week
Revan@revan.eurosky.social · 2mo agoI think @turtlebee.bsky.social is saying this conversation is more interesting and useful than the ones just attacking her because she’s an academic
"decommodify" is one of those phrases that causes me psychic pain every time i see it
ellie lockhart (she/they)@eleanor.lockhart.contact · 2mo agoAgain, “decommodify” means “remove all easily legible signs of supply and demand and create a government monopoly” which basically means that there would be no reliable way to avoid undersupply. I get that people have a rebuttal to this; but the rebuttal is “nuh uh”
anyway now i am going back to never thinking about maine
On the one hand, I totally agree and this is just facts. On the other hand, I'm having trouble passing up an opportunity to point and laugh at the Pod bros and everyone else that lined up to promote him
The Fig Economy@figgityfigs.bsky.social · 3mo agoThe thing about “maybe they shouldn’t have nominated” is that yeah, sure, also it’s in the past and there’s nothing to do about it now. It’s done.
Wait, Michael Tracey is an idiot and a rube? You're just now telling me this. I'm hearing this for the first time.
If the bad thing we're looking at *also* existed in decidedly pre-capitalist societies in antiquity or the middle ages, it's going to be pretty hard to argue that it is capitalism's fault. Many of society's ills are things capitalism inherited, rather than things it caused.
Quoting this mostly to get this out of Nick's mentions. A fact that can help demystify FICO scores for some people is that credit reporting agencies (Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax) cannot *directly* see your income or your assets, just your debts, and therefore FICO can't either
Cam@drcampatterson.bsky.social · 3mo agoYes you are crazy. The risk of an open credit card account is far greater than its impact on your credit score. Especially since your credit score is most influenced by accumulating debt and then paying it off, which a dormant credit card never does.
A huge part of what PMC firms like blackwater did/do is just hire soldiers with in-demand training/specialities and actually pay them what they're worth, then turn around and charge the government double that for them. taxpayer paying a middleman so people trained at public expense can work for govt
This sort of vagueness is downstream of "everyone who disagrees with me is evil and disingenuous" My policy proposals are all simple and complete, there's nothing of substance to debate, therefore you oppose me because you're Bad
Nied [5'7"]@nied.bsky.social · 3mo agoOK so what is Graham Platner's implementation plan for Medicare for All? Would his plan involve expanding the existing Medicare program or scrapping it & replacing it like Sanders' plan? What does the interim look like? When does it kick in? What does the interim plan look like?
This *does* have me rethinking universal suffrage, just not in the way op wants me to
Sharon 🪳🌹@sharonk.bsky.social · 3mo agosay what you will about pre-Musk X but i don't recall female suffrage being a point of contention
ngl, the space x IPO being largely successful immediately after elon musk spent a week fomenting racist pogroms in northern ireland is one of the more blackpilling events of the year for me
You deserve REI. You deserve to go and smell the scent of various clean rubber products and then have things explained to you by an outdoorsy they/them with a nose ring. You deserve REI.