deleting my account

When the 25lb bag is mostly weavels?

90% of Spotify is trash. Much like Audible, it’s just choking on AI generated content and similar worthless vanity projects

That’s apparently apocryphal. The rate of pullover tracks with the most common car color (currently white). Driver behavior (speeding, illegal turning, etc) and other outstanding features (lapsed registration, broken tail light) are the most common proximate causes for a pull over.

Real “Unpopular Opinion” hours, but a lot of the Google AI results are honestly helpful and significantly less annoying to navigate than the links they reference.

No annoying or intrusive ads or DONATE PLEASE pop-ups or demands that I give them permission to add cookies. No miles of irrelevant fluff text. No captchas or other weird security features.

This feels like a patch on a patch on a patch, given that so much of these annoyances are a consequence of aggressive AI data harvesting and Google Adsense incentives and decades of privatization championed by Silicon Valley libertarians.

But here we are, regardless. AI answers filter a lot of that crap out

I think what the antivaxers are incapable of understanding and expressing is that they are not actually questioning the science, they are questioning the health care industry and the systems meant to keep them honest.

A lot of the opposition to vaccination reads like fad diets and self-help trends from 20 or 30 years ago. You can prevent autism by fumbles around playing Motzart to your baby in utero? Meditating during Yoga? Eating chocolate? Pick your Oprah-sponsored poison.

But, like, why are we seeing a fixation on a proven medical treatment and not some generic “don’t let your kids eat jelly beans” or “do headstands to get the blood flowing to the brain” hookum?

I think that’s where you get to people really running afoul of an increasingly dysfunctional health media ecosystem. One whose reputation is bloated with empty promises about The Perfect Cancer / Alzheimer’s Cure or Living Forever With Blood Transfusions. And then it’s colliding with an actual system that just seems to throw enormous bills at you for pain killers and palliative care.

On the one end, there’s supposed to be a recipe for perfect health if you have enough money. On the other, I can get a flu shot and still get the flu? How unfair.

I’ve found the best way to deal with a fear of needles is to scream slurs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study#Public_trust

There’s been a systematic undermining of public trust in health and safety instructions going on for decades.

Some of this distrust is earned as with Tuskegee, the bungled Anthrax vaccine, the Reagan Era response to the AIDS epidemic, scandals with weight loss drugs like Fen-phen and Redux, Oxycodone, etc.

Some of it is purely manufactured, with the CIA-sponsored agitation against the Chinese COVID vaccine being a major font of modern day anti-vax Truther Lore.

But to no-sell skepticism as just “you’re a little baby who is scared of needles” really under plays the shift in attitude nationally. We used to be a country that whole heartedly embraced a preventative for small pox, polio, and influenza. Now we’re more terrified of kids getting the shot that gives you bad grades in school than getting measels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_reactor

As often as not they were chasing Americans’ empty promises (and occasionally achieving the impossible as a result).

The hydrogen bomb, the probe into Venus, the Mirr Space Station… all launched in response to American campaigns.

But the USSR of the 60s/70s was a wildly different place from post collapse Nationalist Russia. They scraped much of their R&D infrastructure for parts under Yeltsin.

Russia’s got more of a space program than the US at this point. And they’ve continued to build and modernize their nuclear infrastructure, with the youngest plant coming online as recently as 2020 and seven in the pipe.

They’re two industries the country has keep in relative working order while the rest of the economy was scrapped for parts back in the '90s/'00s.

Insane to think they are in a position to colonize the moon when they’re quagmired in Ukraine and slaughtering hundreds of thousands of young men to keep at it. But they have the kit to try in a way no other county - except maybe China or India - could hope to.

Market saturation reduces incentive to import, which leads to a decay in quality

That’s just crack.

Falling price of cocaine more often than not means you’re getting it stepped on a lot more. You’re not getting high quality for cheap.

Enshitification came for the narcotics industry ages ago.

You joke, but nothing screams “bad days ahead for the American finance/real estate/tech sectors” like a sharp contraction in demand for nose candy

Requires a fully funded and staffed public postal service in a county that’s dismantling, privatizing, and outsourcing core components of public sector package shipping

Lab rat quality of life has never been higher

Free The Tree!

Free The Tree!

Going to gouge all the midstream businesses in the long run. Hardware retailers, PC assemblers, all those little companies selling custom cases and overclock kits and fancy cooling appliances.

The lack of cheap but crucial components will have some ugly coat tails for the rest of the industry.

You mean West Canada?