We will never forget this

My brother, we will barely report on it long enough to be remembered.

This bill is getting rammed through with zero debate in the twilight hours with almost zero media coverage. After decades of hearing how Congress is incapable of getting anything done, it is dizzying to watch how quickly a simple GOP majority is shoving nearly a trillion dollars a year of reforms down the country’s throat.

Compare this to the nine months spent negotiating Obamacare. Or the way climate change and immigration reform got repeatedly dragged to death. Hell, even Bush’s stab at Social Security privatization didn’t enjoy this level of expediency. It’s almost as though oppositional party politics no longer exists under Trump.

🎵 In the LAAAAAND of the FREEEE 🎶

🎶 And the HOME. OF. THE. BRAAAAAAVE. 🎵

I mean, dealing with the Problem of Evil (or Suffering or however you want to describe it) isn’t unique to Christianity. It certainly isn’t one that’s gone unanswered. Hell, a cornerstone of the orthodoxy is that the Original Sin of defiance of God’s Will is at the root of all evil.

I think there’s a superficial knee-jerk response to these beliefs that boil down to “No, that sounds like some made up bullshit”. But you can dig deeper and talk about the fundamental impulses toward pride and gluttony and conclude there’s a kernel of truth over the religious pastiche.

God is, at the end of the day, an unproveable/unrefutable hypothesis. But the immediate causes of human suffering are knowable, tangible, and preventable. Whether you’re blaming a god or snubbing one, if you’re doing so on the grounds that nobody stopped one human from abusing or neglecting another it would seem like your accusation is misplaced.

I think women are raised to be adults by 18, whereas boys are raised to be overgrown tweens by 18

I’ve noticed poor kids are expected to behave as adults much earlier than their richer peers. You’re expected to act independently of your parents sooner. You’re expected to become financially independent sooner. You’re expected to take on more physical and economic risk sooner.

Meanwhile, aggression is typically encouraged in boys and discouraged in girls. This leads to grown men with shorter tempers and more bravado, which may be interpreted as “acting like adults” among other similarly-aged men but “acting like children” for everyone else. Machismo becomes a career path, particularly via law enforcement and the military, for men. Also, as part of the sales, marketing, and advertising industries. So it is rewarded by socially and economically.

By contrast, sexuality - particularly submissive sexuality - is encouraged among girls. And - implicitly or explicitly - sexuality is offered as a pathway to economic independence for women. So women are expected to hit young adulthood earlier and then remain there until the jump to “motherhood”, at which point the definition of “adulthood” is limited to child care and house cleaning services. Women aren’t expected to be financially literate in the same way men are. They certainly aren’t encouraged to be entrepreneurial in the same way.

Richer young adults are allowed to bask in their childishness longer and afforded more opportunities to screw up financially and socially. Poorer young adults are expected to rush into their prime earning years as quickly as possible, and to assume the behavioral affectations to match.

Aluminium is found on Earth primarily in rocks in the crust, where it is the third-most abundant element, after oxygen and silicon, rather than in the mantle, and virtually never as the free metal. It is obtained industrially by mining bauxite, a sedimentary rock rich in aluminium minerals.

But these guys are getting it from anorthosite, which is an interesting variation of industrial trends.

AI is a great tool for developers, not a replacement

AI isn’t a great tool for developers. It’s a great tool for mitigating the knowledge gap between an individual’s academic understanding of a development project and the syntax involved in the language they are attempting to deploy.

As the number of programming languages has proliferated faster than the volume of developers versed in each language, and the older languages have lost much of their professional base to retirement and layoffs, we’ve needed increasingly elaborate tools to fill in the skills gaps.

But AI doesn’t fix the underlying problem of an increasingly large backlog of code desperately in need of refactor or replacement. It just papers over the problem with a cheat-sheet of simple conversions that junior developers can leverage to liter the next iteration of the codebase with bandaids.

A proper solution to our coding backlog would be educational first and foremost. We need more rigorously enforced orthodox approaches to coding. We need more backwards compatibility between systems. We need to refine the number of languages in active use and narrow the size and scope of their libraries. We need a more universalist approach to building and maintaining database schemas, digital communications, and business practices. We need a publicly funded open source community of developers to build the backbone of software into the 21st century.

What we’re producing is the opposite of that. Less rigor. Fewer recognizable standards. Less training. Poorer code hygiene and weaker enforcement of best practices. More bugs. So many more bugs. And enormous volumes of legacy code that nobody will be able to maintain - or even understand - in another twenty years.

Computers are machines designed to quickly, precisely, and consistently make mistakes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anorthosite

The primary economic value of anorthosite bodies is the titanium-bearing oxide ilmenite. However, some Proterozoic anorthosite bodies have large amounts of labradorite, which is quarried for its value as both a gemstone and a building material. Archean anorthosites, because they are aluminium-rich, have large amounts of aluminium substituting for silicon; a few of these bodies are mined as ores of aluminium

Isn’t Greenland just part of Denmark? Why would Europeans doing mineral exploration in Europe hurt America?

I mean, would Alaska’s governor opening up more of the wildlife refugee for US industrial exploitation be a “blow to Olaf Schultz”?

This is, entirely unironically, the central tenant of the Catholic teaching on the subject.

It really does just boil down to “You can’t adjudicate the morality of the Divine.” And, for the most part, its a line of reasoning that hierarchical social structures condition us to accept. God is just the CEO of the Universe. If you accept that your boss at the toxic waste and murder machines factory is Beyond Good and Evil, believing it about God is downright trivial.

God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs.

Or Top Gun.

I’ve yet to meet a woman who wasn’t into a good foot-rub. It’s my go-to opening move for the Netflix-and-Chill date and rarely fails to end in us at least making out. I never really got “foot-fetish” as a guy thing. It struck me more as a girl thing, with women using “rub my feet” as an excuse to initiate intimacy. And some guys just decided if a woman was showing any amount of feet, she must be coming on to him.

I mean that’s basically the idea behind any societal view which dictates that women should cover any particular part of their body, it’s not that muslim people inherently find hair sexy, it’s the societal norms which attached an intimate meaning to hair.

I think the issue isn’t the presentation of hair, but of femininity. And the more extreme interpretations of this (hardly unique to Islam - Puritanical Christians, orthodox Jews, and other more fanatical patriarchal faiths also demand women hide themselves) are about disguising any aspect of a person that might lead to a man being aroused. Eventually, you’re just shoving women into an entirely separate room, because the presumption is that men have zero self-control in any social setting.

I mean, I don’t really object to the premise of the character - Batman-like super genius who stacks the deck in his favor by building a bunch of cool gadgets to get him out of tight spots. But I agree, its far more fun to see a character like Tony run up against the limits of his gadgetry than to hand him the Super Science “I Win Button” and wait until the last five minutes of the show to press it.

If you cut out all of the fructose, glucose, and carbohydrates from your diet.

Problem is, these foodstuffs are cheap and easy to preserve and distribute. So a lot of what you’re suggesting boils down to “if you buy more fresh produce” which ultimately means “if you spend more money on groceries that spoil faster”.

Even that doesn’t address the relative health hazards of chronic high consumption of red meat when compared to white meat. But, again, we’re talking about an enormously subsidized beef industry even compared to fish and chicken (where it seems we’re intent on raising prices through ecological destruction/abysmal hygiene). The game still boils down to having this avalanche of surplus ground beef that’s practically being given away next to healthier options that are far more expensive.

A few nights ago, I watched a classic film called “The Battle for Algiers”. The movie explored the French occupation of Algeria during the independence movement of the late 50s/early 60s.

And let me tell you, “civilized” France was doing some curiously unciviled shit by the end.

Everything in the Marvel Universe is just wizards. Nobody is coding. Nobody is engineering. Nobody is doing anything more technical than “Hit him with a bigger rock”.

Tony is just a wizard doing wizard shit in stylized techno-pastiche.