Have you thought of lipstick and nail polish?

Hah

Google is so useless these days. It’s very common that my searches get actually zero results now. Like, what the fuck happened? Google used to identify its quality by how many hundreds of pages of (admittedly mostly useless) results it could return for each search. Now, when I do get results, it’s about a 3 to 4 ratio of useless ads to actual content.

I have the Google rewards app that occasionally asks me questions about where I’ve been / what I’ve bought for which it will pay me a few nickels each. The other day it asked me questions about my use of ChatGPT and the relative trust I had for the answers given by the language model to my trust of the results from a Google search. The last question was an essay question asking me why I thought ChatGPT was better for the specific application I was using it for. Google paid me a whole goddamn dollar for telling it, in many colorful words, that I understood the tool I needed for my question wasn’t an ad generator so obviously I didn’t use Google.

It’s pretty fantastic. In 2020 (only just beginning my journey of recovery from a conservative upbringing), I decided I should understand what fascism actually was. I found that dictionary definitions were terribly imprecise but eventually found Eco’s essay. I understand there are other methods–of similar scholarly integrity–used to define fascism, but I have not spent the effort to find and compare these other works. It is my (uninterrogated assumption) vague understanding that Eco’s definition isn’t regarded as opinionated.

There’s also the point that a life sentence is wayy cheaper than a death sentence (according to some random guy who once mentioned it)

Hey look, feature 8 of Umberto Eco’s Ur Fascism!

… Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. …

Eco does make a point of clarifying that the presence of absence of any single trait he has identified does not prove a thing is or isn’t fascist.

But in spite of this fuzziness, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.

(The full text of the feature I quoted above)

8. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.

Oh fantastic! I am proud to have observed this exhibit of librarian “humor”, thank you and your children.

My friend is having some trouble too, could someone help me explain it to them?

Since turning 30 I’ve been thinking about the half-your-age-plus-seven rule a lot more. It would feel creepy as fuck to date a 22 year old. Is this all in my head? It feels predatory to swipe right on anyone younger than 25

Thumbtack? For random odd jobs around the house, I don’t know if that one counts as similar. I’m not certain it’s an exploitative con

I have been trying to decide between an aeropress or pourover. Maybe I’m ignorant of something, how is the pourover a larger hassle?

I get the same math… Seems fucky but… This is assuming the sum of centripetal acceleration and gravity at the peak of the loop is zero. It may be physically possible for a cat to learn to manage a loop with such velocity but I imagine a cat wouldn’t be able to maintain a stride through a zero-g portion of the loop the first time it tried it.

So, instead let’s throw an assumption that the cat must maintain at minimum sum of -1g at the maxima of the loop. That may be badly phrased, assuming the cat must have at minimum a net force of at least one g between it’s paws and the surface of the loop it was currently using to accelerate…

3.5 meters = 11.5 feet

Radius, so still a freaking 7 meter diameter loop feels incredible…

Thank you for this recommendation!

Part of what creates in me so much faith in communism is my profession vs my interests.

I am an engineer. If I didn’t need to sell my labor I would be an engineer who solves problems and creates progress. Since I live in America, I don’t.

I suffered a traumatic brain injury as a pedestrian who didn’t look both ways. My answer isn’t very fun but I technically qualify as I had to be resuscitated on scene.

I was in a coma for a few days and then–despite being conscious and over time regaining awareness, then vocalization, then even conversational speech–I wasn’t writing any new long term memories for a couple of months. My experience of that dark period, to the extent that it isn’t nothing, is pretty vague. The memories of months preceding injury are pretty blurry until the injury which I don’t remember and then the next I remember is being tied to a hospital bed and chewing on the Posey mitts. I remember some hallucinating in that period, one instance is an ordinary piece of a day interacting with nurses and therapists but perceiving everything as if drawn in the Family Guy cartoon. I post-hoc interpret that memory as a vague basically dream state that got mashed in with a Family Guy memory.

So no, no afterlife experience or memories of the other side.

Podcasts / audiobooks

• Behind the Insurrections
• Behind the Police

being my first two recommendations