I'm gonna be honest. I would simply not bet against Elon Musk. It's fine not to like him! He can be unlikable. But I don't think there's an interpretation of base reality that's like.

'Elon Musk is bad at getting things done, accomplishing his goals, etc. The guy's a loser.'

It makes you look really stupid when you say things like this. On account of how obviously wrong you are.

I got so annoyed at Mike Duncan's jab at Elon in the new Mars Revolution podcast season where (spoilers for early in the first episode I guess)

That's true, but on the other hand he set himself the goal of buying Twitter, and then he set himself the goal of not buying Twitter. So he's only doing 50% there.

in which i take on the argument that windowless bedrooms will somehow solve the housing crisis (lol)

i tend to agree with the basic objections here: pointing the blame at basic building standards for the housing shortage is just factually unsupported, there’s a laundry list of regulations we can and should address before we get to things like “bedrooms having windows”; that even as an architectural issue requiring windows in apartments is not actually a major design constraint; but also, that we’re just asking for new and funkier types of mental illness to develop if we start building lots of living spaces without any natural light whatsoever.

Definitely agree, this is too much Kafka to stomach as it were - 'useless' regulations are not the source of the housing crisis, the politics of power and competing interests. We can quite easily build lots of housing for everyone with windows, its a really minor constraint, we just aren't, for reasons very unrelated to window regulation. If you solve the politics problem you can just build a bunch of good apartment buildings.

There is some merit in the idea of coming up with 'solutions for our reality', if you can't solve the power politics issue maybe you can at least reform the building code to allow what buildings we are building to be more efficient. Windows I don't think rise very high on that list though - allowing more Single Room Occupancy buildings (aka dorms) would be a way higher impact reform, for example, as would allowing single-stair apartments buildings like virtually every other country on earth does so the double stairs don't eat up a third of your floor space on tall, thin lots. Outside of insanely large or very weird construction projects, its just trivial to move the floor space for a unit around so that it has window access, there isnt much to gain there.

Of course the aesthetic of endless underground hacker dens lit only by the glow of CRT monitors hits so hard, so it should be alowed for that reason alone.

I’m totally for a “cool cyberpunk shit” exception to all building codes.

Yeah, this is one of those policies that would be great if it accompanied a massive increase in housing construction as well. Basically, allow conversions of offices to apartments to handle to time before the new apartments can be built.

I don't understand why people put windows in bedrooms. If a bedroom has a window, you have to buy and install a blackout curtain to make it suitable for sleeping in. It'll still leak some light out the sides, but if you do a really good job installing it you can make your room almost as nice as one that didn't have a window in the first place.

Well, you see, most people do not have to do this, because most people don't require pitch blackness in order to sleep. The only time I ever wanted blackout curtains is when I worked nights. And as you say, they still leak light around the edges, so that's not an ideal solution.

So what does work, if you would really rather have an effectively windowless room, is aluminum foil. It's cheap, opaque, and can be formed into whatever shape you need and will stay in that shape. Just tape pieces of it directly to the glass with enough margin that you can wrap it around the windowsill and molding. This provides a much more effective barrier to light. The only disadvantage compared to curtains is that curtains can easily be opened and closed, but it sounds like you don't ever want open anyway.

Or, if think foil in your windows would look tacky and you don't mind the cost, roller shutters.

imagine how much more fucked up the history of the world would be if eating someone's brains reliably conferred on you their memory and knowledge

hey wow this is just like in The Book of the New Sun

This bill would allow the government to strip organizations of their nonprofit status by declaring them supporters of terrorism -- without having to provide any evidence at all.

You might as well call it the "end civil society act". Narrowly, this was prompted by protests about the Middle East, but it would be extremely naive to think the Trump administration wouldn't use this to kneecap any liberal organization that was engaged in activism or lawsuits against the government.

Flat space theory (there’s only 2 dimensions)

hey wow this is just like in Flatland

thinking about how there's still a non-zero chance of kamala harris becoming the 47th US president

ideal punchline to this whole saga is joe biden passing away quietly on christmas morning and giving harris a tenure clocking in well below william henry harrison's

The Year of Five Presidents won't be for another decade (-ish).

Trump and the rest of the MAGA grifters will have already printed merch with "47", and I would like to watch them have to start over.

Honestly there’s a non zero chance of this happening and we absolutely can get four presidents in a year still.

The 47 merch being outdated would be funny at least.

Trump would just declare that Harris doesn't count and he's the actual 47th president anyway.

I learned the other day that “upstate” is a specific region of New York State and not just “all of New York State that isn’t the city” but I think that’s lame and am gonna force the term definition change. If it’s not the city it’s upstate

the enemy's state is up

Honestly whoever told you that is stretching the truth, and maybe is just wrong. In practice anyone in NYC will refer to any part of NYC that isn't NYC or Long Island as upstate. "Oh you are from New York? NYC or upstate?" I don't think people debating "does Yonkers count as NYC?" really changes that.

Every state has an upstate. New Yorkers are just being obnoxious by pretending theirs is the only one. When someone says they're from "upstate," unspecified, you should say "so like Orlando? Tallahassee?"

Absolutely nothing has been accomplished this weekend. Very very disappointing.

I also got nothing done this whole weekend but now I'm roasting garlic.

Oh shit I just realized I can post the "Gaussian Blur Wizard That Gaussian Blurs You" here

his friend "Motion Blur Mage That Motion Blurs You"

Their long suffering associate, the "Sharpen Cleric that Sharpens you (badly)"

Nooo!!! What have you all unleashed upon us!?!

dont forget the chromatic abberation warlock that chromatically abberates you

may I add Mystic Mosiac who turns your quality waaaaaaay down

What did he do to deserve this

punished by the council

It's not a punishment. It's a test. Now you must Undo five times in a row to be judged worthy.

this is not a question that can possibly have a context-independent answer

We can fix that.

thinking about how there's still a non-zero chance of kamala harris becoming the 47th US president

ideal punchline to this whole saga is joe biden passing away quietly on christmas morning and giving harris a tenure clocking in well below william henry harrison's

> Trump dies after choking on a turkey bone during Thanksgiving dinner > Vance is like ok it's me then > but as usual he's really cringey and weird about it > electors are like mmm i dunno man > 50 of them defect and vote for Kamala > she wins

(Putting this in a new conversation because to do otherwise would be the most blatant kind of derailing.)

@jadagul:

Leaving everything else aside - this is obviously insane, right?

...not that it's wrong. Empirically speaking, in a FPTP system, it's an accurate description of how things go. But it also seems like a grand sweeping indictment of democracy as a system, at the most fundamental level.

If there is literally no way to govern well enough that the voting masses will keep you in power so that you can keep on governing well - if the fickleness of the electorate will just always result in the Two Main Choices sharing power over time, such that you have to work outside the electoral system in order to keep those Two Main Choices reasonable and healthy - then what actual value is the voting providing, here? How can we possibly square this with the idea that the will of the people is producing some kind of wise guidance? How does the entire thing fail to be just a cruel farce?

(If we're on board with the idea that it's just about perceived legitimacy and quelling-of-violent-power-struggles, that's fine, but it also suggests a very different kind of rhetoric than what you normally get.)

I don't think that's it. It's just that political parties tend to overreach when they are in power, because governing well enough is really difficult. It's hard to know what people really want, because polling isn't that good, and it's hard to know what the outcomes of your policies will be because the world is unpredictable.

So the party in power will go off the rails sooner or later, either because they misread what people want or they understood what people want and failed at execution. And so they lose power and the other guys come in.

First they came for the trans people and immigrants, and I spoke out immediately, because we already know how the poem ends.

I added this line to my work e-mail signature on Wednesday. This will put a target on my back in January; I do not care. I will not be cowed by fascists.

So was no one gonna tell me that “Tainted Love” was originally recorded in 1964 or was I just supposed to stumble backwards into that fact like a total asshole?

holy SHIT

*listening to this in 1981* what if it had more… DUN-DUN

“I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll,” Joan Jett’s signiature song, was originally recorded in 1975 by a completely forgettable band called The Arrows.

and brutally sampled in 1998 by a completely forgettable band called Five

Since we're already ruining pop hits of 1981, "Bette Davis Eyes" was originally recorded by Jackie DeShannon in 1974.