Well obviously a thermonuclear war is not good for business. However do not make the grievous mistake of thinking that Trump is a mere pawn in the oligarch’s game who can be relied on to act rationally in their self-interest. He’s done their bidding aplenty, but he’s also doing a lot of stuff that weakens him, his buddies, and his country, just because he’s so fucking dumb and vain. Like invading Greenland, a country he already had full access to for military purposes and that US companies were always welcome to exploit for minerals. His generals are literally using every trick in the book to try to redirect his attention away from Greenland because the US has literally no interest – military, financial, or geopolitical – in it. Literally the only explanation for this fixation of his is that Greenland looks big on a Mercator projection and that makes his tiny dick hard.

M.A.D. only works when all actors:

1. Have reliable information (certainly not always true, see Stanislav Petrov)
2. Can be assumed to be acting in their own self-interest

Number 1 is in doubt with Trump because he and his cult spend a lot of time in a made-up reality. I can totally see some war hawks explaining to him that the UK and France don’t have the nuclear capacity to glass the entire continental US outright, and Trump interpreting it as “we’re untouchable” because he’s not into concepts such as “nuance”. To a degree the same is true of a dictator like Putin or Xi Xinping who are also surrounded by yes men who purposefully feed an enabling narrative (see also: Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine because he thought he could get away with it).

Number 2 is simply completely incorrect. Trump is so unpredictable even his own administration can’t guess his next move – they’re constantly acting on his latest rant and doing a poor job of pretending it was part of the plan all along. I’d love to believe that he can be deterred by the thread of M.A.D, but I’m unfortunately too acutely aware of the news to lie to myself like that. That’s the main difference between him and Putin – I can actually believe that Putin will only act in what he believes to be his self-interest, and he knows a nuclear exchange ain’t it.

As someone who lives relatively near a “strategic target” that would be targeted by one to several ICBMs should Trump happen to have a particularly bad (but certainly not unthinkable) outburst one of these days, please know that I am saying this with as much restraint as I can muster:

I do not care what happens to MAGA, they must must stopped at any cost.

None of this shit is about looking good in the history books anymore. Trump is diving head first down a path that leads to WWIII. This is not a joke, this is not hyberbole. He’s literally doing everything that Hitler did but with thousands of nukes at his absolute unchecked disposal. This is about the survival of human civilization, and any action that helps bring about the downfall of the Trump regime is a legitimate one. Unfortunately no-one is willing to admit it until billions die in a nuclear winter because a demented turd couldn’t handle someone telling him no for once in his fucking life.

Here is my favorite video essay of 2025: Fantasies of Nuremberg.

A bit of a heads-up: do not watch this video if you want to retain any hint of a fantasy that such a reckoning even did happen in the first place. Do watch if you want a fantastically well written essay about one of the most mythologized and relevant events in history.

A weak dollar will work great for you when you bring back all those manufacturing jobs from overseas and start exporting the surplus production. Any day know. Any day.

He’s a child of apartheid and, according to his own daughter, was always an awful person in private.

There’s lots of precedent for white supremacists keeping a low(-ish) profile when it suits them. Just look at famous card-holding Nazi and prolific mass-murderer Werner Von Braun and his public perception in the US. If he could cultivate the image of America’s Dearest Scientist, literally anyone could.

Love the technosolutionist mindset, but the parties trying to made that happen lost BIG TIME in the 2024 elections and neither you nor I are in charge of the energy policy. Feel free to found a startup to explore all your big ideas but our problem is neither a lack of ways to decarbonize our energy nor a lack of reasons to go off of fossil fuels.

What I’m not hearing is a solution to the problem that the European far-right is now directly funded and supported by Putin, Musk, Thiel, Zuck, that the parties currently in power have no interest in curbing this obvious foreign interference, and all that is all but guaranteeing that the far right will take full control of the region within the next few years in exchange for a few favors like – among other things – handing out to the oil barrons a blank check. That’s not a technical issue to be engineered out, that’s a political landmine the size of a continent that we’re barreling towards. Well, if we don’t get dragged into WW3 before that, at any rate.

I agree fossil fuels are bad and renewables are good, but electric heat pumps aren’t going to be deployed in every house over the summer no matter how violent the price shock. To go green we need industrial capacity, lots of it, and a ton of political will that the far-right simply does not possess because they’d rather buy Russian gas in exchange for campaign financing.

No-one “needs” anyone but economics aren’t a zero-sum game and both the EU and the US benefited enormously from our economic and military ties, and cutting those ties will be painful and the faster it happens the more painful it will be.

If we employ the economic nukes against the US right now, we will lose most digital payment systems for a few weeks as countries and bunks rush to implement Wero and the digital Euro, and we will face strong gas shortages as we currently rely on the US to make up for Russia’s. Europe and NA would immediately enter into a deep recession.

The payment systems are a hugely understated threat but are being worked on actively. The fossil fuels aren’t understated but we also lack short-term solutions as electrification takes time (but also we aren’t doing nearly enough).

However it is true that the EU is profoundly neoliberal and that ideology is very ill-equipped to deal with a fragmented world order in which free trade is no longer the default. Those assumptions are being challenged, however the far-right seems primed to bring about the populist “solution” of turning Europe into a bunch of mini-Russias.

The game has more breadth than I thought it would, and the systems it does have (exploration, fighting, construction, farming) have wayyy more depth than Minecraft’s it does not feel fair to compare. There’s definitely enjoyment to be had for a while playing if the occasional random lag spike or disconnect is not a deal breaker for you.

But it’s not yet a Minecraft killer. Minecraft still has a much higher gameplay variation. In a couple years though I don’t think there will be much reason to play vanilla Minecraft except nostalgia.

Are we already forgetting that trump invaded Venezuela for oil, then the oil companies said “excuse me but we can’t profitably exploit their notoriously shitty oil”?

Part of being a literal Nazi is that the o.g. Nazis got themselves stuck in an increasing number of military quagmires not because they had to but because they refused to do consider the obvious peaceful solutions for their problems. The war machine had to be fed even at the cost of their own self-destruction.

Except this time they have a nuclear arsenal capable of wiping all civilization and somehow people aren’t freaking out nearly enough about that.

No, blame the streaming companies. Dynamic range is a known standard. All they need is:

• a “louder dialogue” toggle switch to amplify the center channel in the downmixing settings (Kodi, many TVs, and all dedicated receivers can already do this FYI for this exact reason)
• a “night mode” toggle switch that turns on an audio compressor (my 20 year-old receiver has that feature – it’s hardly rocket science; I believe YouTube calls it “stabilized audio”).

Upsides:

• preserves high dynamic range mix for audiophiles
• works with already released movies (!!!)
• improves the life of people with tinny speakers, strict loudness requirements, or hearing impairments

Downsides:

• Can’t feel superior to audio engineers who are doing their jobs, I guess?
• Streaming companies need to reinvest a few thousand dollars out of the billions they are making to add those two buttons

Drawings are one conversation I won’t get into.

GenAI is vastly different though. Those are known to sometimes regurgitate people or things from their dataset, (mostly) unaltered. Like how you can get Copilot to spit out valid secrets that people accidentally committed by typing NPM_KEY=. You can’t have any guarantee that if you ask it to generate a picture of a person, that person does not actually exist.

I mean, Nestlé killed hundreds of thousands in impoverished countries. I think the Oracle service APIs can’t be that bad, though I’m sure they would be if it made Larry Ellison $50.

Your description of the sound just got me making a bunch of seal sounds by myself. Congrats!

Also Trump literally illegally kidnapped a head of state to the U.S. And we’re supposed to pretend the first thing they did was not simply… Move the murderer somewhere out of state where they couldn’t reach him even if they tried (which they won’t because no blue state has the balls to meaningfully stand up to Trump)?

I mean, realistically that guy could twerk in front of the Minnesota Capitol with some ICE buddies to back him up and giant sign saying “I did it” and Minnesota still wouldn’t do shit.

“State’s rights” are exactly like the “2A rights”. They only serve conservatives, whom the law protects but does not bind.

This is not just me being salty BTW. I am trying to get across the point to anyone reading this that if your plan to bring back U.S. Democracy relies on the Constitution playing in your favor, you’ve already lost.

No-one is immune from propaganda. And those awful books promote quite a few bad messages. Well firstly they promote criminally bad writing. But besides that, they work very hard to make a lot of oppressive power structures sound cool, whimsical, and aspiring to the uncritical reader. From the police institution to the prison complex to the famously abusive English boarding school system to the literal ethnostate to slavery somehow, and I haven’t gone over the half of it.

It truly feels like every other bit worldbuilding that Rowling put in sounds whimsical on the surface but makes you go “wait, the implications are truly terrible!” when you think about it for more than two seconds. Except she clearly did not think most of it through; she literally just thought “race of jewish caricatures who want nothing out of life besides being bankers” is good and whimsical worldbuilding… And somehow got away with it.

It’s impossible to quantify or prove but these books have had the most cultural impact out of any modern book franchise, and I don’t see how the systemic normalization of so many awful things to uncritical children and teenagers can balance out the joy and whimsy that people got out of them (especially when there is so much better written teen/YA fiction out there).

Shifting the Overton Window in the way that those books did is some insidious type shit that actually does matter quite a bit more than most people realize. New hot take: I think the bigots are correct to get big mad at Queer representation in media because it moves the Overton Window the other way and that actually impacts bigots long-term. In a very real sense a trans actor in a movie is a concrete and real step towards the de-legitimization of bigoted views. And HP is very much doing the opposite of that every time it touches on any kind of social subject.

The work itself is definitely a fascist pre-cursor. The whole “Wizarding society” thing is the mythical ethnostate from which everyone else must be excluded to avoid violence. That fact is so central to Rowling’s beliefs that it’s barely a theme in the books, just straight up a fundamental fact about the world barely worth commenting on. And even though HP is pretty sanitized wannabe liberal slop, she still manage to slip in some very racist stuff (slavery allegory about slaves being happy, “Cho Chang”, the Irish boy who constantly blows shit up, etc.).

I do believe that Rowling herself is not a very intelligent person (the quality of her writing is proof enough) and has incredible amounts of cognitive dissonance from trying to fit in with the liberals who made her successful, while holding some incredibly backwards view on many social topics. You’re right that she’s not a fascist per se, because she doesn’t have fascism’s consistent belief in self-ideology. At the same time much of her political activism has been so enabling to open fascists that it begs the question: does the label matter? Is the sheep who opens the gate to the wolf not, in its own way, a wolf in sheep’s clothing? Are U.S. Republicans not fascists just because they are more concerned about their own self-interest than any alliance to ideology?

What pisses me off is that you’re 100 % correct but most of it is unintentional on Rowling’s part. She’s a fascist reactionary and she just, for the most part, enthusiastically described her perfect little ideal society.

Everyone is in their place, the good guys work very hard to maintain the existing social order, and the people at the bottom are there because that is in their very nature and really they just like it that way and attempting to elevate them is futile. Textbook fascism and all of it is presented completely deadpan because this is Rowling’s genuine beliefs.

Hot take: HP’s popularity is responsible for more societal ills than pretty much any other book in print. Almost no-one engages with it critically even amongst the crowd that outwardly disagrees with Rowling’s more recent political activism. Fuuuuck that license.

“Just another action movie” but the guy up the comment chain is literally dozing off. Part one actually has very little action in it, most of it is packed landscape shots, politics, and lore dumping. Which is very accurate to the source material. If you dislike Villeneuve’s adaptation, I can only assume you did not love the Herbert books because he was incredibly faithful to the tone, especially for material that was thought to be impossible to adapt to the big screen.

Lynch’s stuff is simply not comparable because he said “fuck the source material” and just kinda did whatever came to him in some acid trip or other. Fine if that’s your thing but that’s not what Dune is - especially not the first few books.

Love my old precision, but my new latitude uses this Intel ipu6 bullshit with god-awful kernel support on Linux. No effort made from Intel or Dell on upstreaming. Onboard audio support only halfway works, webcam straight up doesn’t work in-tree, and power management is hilariously bad. Shit’s already awful on Windows, but on Linux I’m delighted if I get 90 minutes of runtime, and even when sleeping I only get maybe 8 hours before the battery empties.

Also don’t get me started on DisplayLink. The real thunderbolt docking stations work great though, love mine.

But I would never buy a Dell product I haven’t used before at work. My experience is literally 50/50 between “great, no notes” and “I would rather use anything else”.