Unfortunately, the people pushing AI are the same ones selling recreational flamethrowers

It’s great for getting off the ground in a language you’re unfamiliar with. But a recipe for technical debt when used long term. You’re inviting spaghetti code with some real hair pulling bugs.

subscription based self driving taxis

Can’t wait until the Lime Scooter can travel 80 mph

Would there be enough land for the crops once everyone went crop eater

Yes. Even despite absurd levels of agricultural waste (40% of our crops go in the trash, in large part due to poor refrigeration infrastructure, dismal labor conditions, and market price fluctuations killing a harvest season) we end up with enormous vegetable surplus.

Fish, shellfish, and other sea life are still a highly efficient source of protein and other nutrients. Crawfish, for instance, are basically an invasive species byproduct of sugar and rice harvests in the Gulf Coast. There’s little reason not to eat them, given you’re getting them whether you want them or not. Same with mussels and clams, as anyone who has had to clean the underside of a boat can tell you.

But the degree to which pollution and industrial fishing wreck coastal and deep sea habitats absolutely does make it unsustainable long term. We could live to see a future without tuna or swordfish or halibut purely due to our aggressive ecology-wrecking fishing practices. So it’s less a question of “Could we live without fish?” and more a question of “Will we live to see the extinction of fish?”

C is just a letter

It’s the successor to B, which was derived from BCPL (“Basic Combined Programming Language”)

Incidentally, C++ is a reference to how integer values are iterated in C. And then C# is a pithy take on C++ wherein you’ve stacked two rows of plus signs on top of each other.

There’s often some rhyme or reason to these names.

American Exceptionalism, Baby!

Maybe worked 4 hours over two years?

And you’ve got 450k cans in the back of your pickup?

Sure, dude.

He paid for a down payment with seven years of manual labor earning less than a living wage.

half a million cans over seven years

If the cans are only $.10/ea, then 450k only netted him $45k. It took him seven years to earn just enough to pay for the deposit, not even the house.

Real Boring Dystopia Shit

No no no. None of this should be acknowledged, because Whataboutism.

4 hour planning

I’ve seen projects where this was comically too high. But a lot more where it was horrifyingly agonizingly too low.

“Corrective Rape” as a trope within the American prison system is probably the darkest part of this cartoon.

Refer Madness is a fun video to watch and only gets funner after you’ve smoked a bowl.

Heavy Metal and Rap Music? They hurdled right over and landed on Any Amount of Dancing and Suffragettes.

If you’re a US citizen, resist.

Easier said than done. There’s no clear point of leverage for people to lean into. The cops are ruthless. The liberal opposition is toothless and lame. People don’t really trust one another. There’s a strong attitude of “I’m just going to keep my head down until it blows over”. But we’re not even really in a crisis per-say, just yet. Trump’s a fucking menace, but the economy is strong and we’re not currently at the peak of a pandemic and there’s no hurricane about to decimate a random corner of the Gulf/Atlantic Coast.

I suspect we’ll see more points of galvanized opposition when the winds change. But for now, looks like Americans are going to lay back and think of England.

Hard to get an unbiased answer on a question of subjective experience.

I’ve seen a new vim and vigor in my local Houston PD’s crusade to ruin the lives of homeless people. I have to assume folks in ethnic and religious minority neighborhoods, LGBTQ communities, and anyone easily designated as “Woke” are have it particularly hard right now.

But if you’re just some white-cheeked, white-collar, middle-class schlub, things haven’t meaningfully changed.

They should ask again when we’re in the grip of a Bird Flu epidemic or another Tech Sector crash. But for now, life drags on in America not all that much different than under the last regime.

Wrestle with a pig and you’ll both get muddy, but only the pig will enjoy it.

Christian Nationalists long ago mastered parsing out the bits and pieces of the Bible they agree with and butchering anyone who disagreed with them. This is a tradition going back millennia. You’re not going to beat anyone in the Westburo Baptist Church at a game where the rules boil down to “Fuck You Heretic, I win”.

Old enough to remember libertarians who were smugly asserting Social Security caused the Iraq War.

Now we’re stuck with the libertarians who smugly assert that the Department of Education causes transgender teenagers.

School to Prison Pipeline just got an exciting new twist.

After WWII, Japan became the first country in Asia to undergo an industrial revolution

After WW2? Industrialization during the 20s/30s was the whole reason they attempted to conqueror the Oceanic island states and the Chinese/Korean/Indochinese mainland.

They then suffered an economic collapse due to unchecked growth and speculative markets and decided to never again speculate on the future and just stick to tried and true methods.

The Japanese Economy was undone by The Plaza Accord and The Louvre Accord, which western nations used to devalue their currency and undermine Japanese export prices. The downturn, followed by a financialized corporate consolidation and expropriation of revenues through foreign investment, permanently crippled the Japanese economy in the aftermath of the 90s Asian recession.

What sets countries like Japan, Korea, and the Philippines apart from China is the domestic control of their industries. Their markets are dominated by private equity and fixated on steady profit margins rather than long term public investments. Consequently, the capital cities are flooded with cash and industrial development while the rural areas are devoid of commerce. There’s no shortage of speculation, but its rooted in the private equity markets and focused largely on fictitious capital - debt instruments and their derivatives - rather than real capital or technology.

Chinese investment in the periphery and its rising tide of middle class wage earners is what propels them into the 21st century. They’re the ones building out new transit lines, new public housing projects, new universities, and blue sky research. The Xi Government is openly hostile to speculative investment, doesn’t bother to bail out failing financial institutions, and focuses primarily on expansion of utilities, trade corridors, and mixed us developments.