I would take this guy more seriously if he had any amount of engagement.

We need a higher quality of critic. Is there any chance we can convince one of the Krassensteins to complain about this place?

Its an elite invite-only boarding school, so you’re unlikely to know anybody when you arrive. But also, it tends to clump people together by family cough bloodline cough and common interests, so the theory is you’ll make friends more quickly when you’re coughWEAZEcough segregated into like-minded groups gaspGAGchoke fuck me its really bad the more I think about it, isn’t it?

A bit more seriously, its not crazy unusual for schools and unis to organize people into fraternities and clubs and houses and other social units early on in your college career. Then you tend to just end up with these people as your friends by virtue of proximity. By applying a certain degree of blind randomness, or by sorting via interest and passion rather than letting people congeal based on their own historical biases, you get a better mix of students than you would if everyone just clumped by who they knew or thought they’d like.

The system doesn’t have to be modern phrenology.

Imagine a fucking Westoid complaining about Kim Jung Il’s love of cinema. All you mayo do is watch movie, pay rent, eat hot chip, and lie.

It does, but I’m reading it as an outcropping of the fractured state of the returning committee membership.

I can’t speak to what the International Committee facilitated, but I can say I’ve seen some off-shot of the delegation’s visit via Noah Pasarán regarding the history of the embargo and its long term and most recent economic consequences. This is some of the most real and informative coverage of the Cuban Embargo I’ve had the opportunity to access, and I would consider this kind of outreach invaluable when attempting to shift views on our foreign policy.

To dismiss the efforts of the DSA participants as a whole seems shortsighted, as it appears more radicalized members of the delegation such as Noah continued to advocate for and send support to the country.

The article also seems to completely neglect that the DSA delegation brought 500 lbs of medical supplies to the island. Which seems like a bigger thing to crow about than two naysayers with shitty attitudes.

I mean, singling these losers out is cool, but it seems weird to call out all of DSA for the ugly behavior of these two bad actors. After all, this is a statement coming from within DSA. Its not coming from the Cubans themselves. The fucking President took time to meet with them, which would seem to suggest Cuban organizers are largely supportive of these outreach efforts.

Giving these two tickets was a mistake. But organizing the trip, getting Americans to visit the island, and putting them face-to-face with a bonafide AES state leader should be a huge mark in DSA’s favor.

$89k and rising. My water bill jumped 9% this year, because the pipes have been bursting at record rates thanks years of heat waves. My electricity bill can get north of $600/mo during the worst of the summer. My grocery bills have been steadily climbing while shrinkflation eats into the size of what I’m bringing home. My car is getting towards its last legs and everything on the market appears to be a few grand over MSRP, because every dealership insists “Sorry, we only have a few left in stock!” Can’t get out of a vet visit for less than $500.

Seems like everything I buy that I think is an upgrade ends up falling apart faster than what its replacing, too.

Walls really feel like they’re closing in everywhere.

Its a highly effective form of propaganda.

Take some guys who have had their bells rung time after time after time. Sit them down in a room with some bespeckled nerd and have the nerd tell them that all the secrets of economics are in six simple rules that even you can understand. If the guy says he agrees with you, start sponsoring his fights. Do this with enough guys and one of them is going to come out talking like this after the title fight.

The Saudis have been aggressively investing in MMA for similar reasons. These fight club events are great venues for attracting young people with chips on their shoulders. And when they’re old enough to think twice about what they’re being told, who cares? They’re too old to be used in the coming Water Wars as cannon fodder anyway.

Its usually very easy to clean stainless steel. The crusty stuff falls right off with a good sponge or brush. Cast iron pans take a bit more work, but they’re study enough to stand up to a tough bristle-brush without scraping.

Its those cheapo “no-stick” pans that break down as you use them and make everything impossible to get off.

I’m mostly just laughing at the notion of “being obligated by the government to show up on time to dinner” as some death knell to American freedom to leave other people waiting.

Flipping through my history book on Egypt and looking at the chapters after 1956. Gotta say, I hope it ends better than this.

The Suez Crisis signaled the decline of British/French hegemony, but it ushered in a new era of American hegemony. I would not call it a “humbling episode for the West” nearly so much as a changing of the guard.

I genuinely dread what arises from the wrecked state of Ukraine in subsequent decades. A rapidly rearmed Western Europe would not be what I would describe as a move towards the “Good Timeline”, particularly given how modern German Greens and their AfD rivals echo the sentiments of a certain prior national socialist political movement.

Liberals were insisting that the Wagner Group was doing a straight up Nazi Cosplay as they Blitzkregged towards Poland. But then also Ukraine’s Ghost of Kiev had single-handedly shot down half the Russian air force.

Azov were freedom fighters rescuing all the beautiful blonde-haired blue eyed babies. Russia was in the midst of a pogrom against the Uber-volk. Half the Russian population had just been killed in an ill-conceived human wave attack against stout Ukrainian defenses. Then we got an earful about how the Spring Offensive would end in Moscow.

I think the craziest part of the war was when Prigozhin tried his coup and the Ukrainian front lines did not move. Like, if there was ever a fucking moment for western forces to reclaim territory, it was when Moscow was being evaluated and half of Wagner Group was racing towards the capital. But they just sat on their thumbs in confused shock, waiting for the next shoe to drop. This was the full extent of what Germany, France, the UK, and the US could bring to bare against Russia. Stunned silence as half of Putin’s active duty military turn coat.

What a fucking clown parade.

I like how we’ve invented a vast incomprehensible machine that can’t do words good. A large language model that cannot model letters.

Literally any Markov Chain could output better than this by scanning a telephone directory, but ten million of the finest servers Microsoft can assemble have to slurp up the entire Jordan Aquifer to put out this dogshit.

Pulling Biden off the ballot of states he’ll lose by 20 points and then letting Dems blame the residents there for not voting hard enough.

Saying What Can’t Be Said: Israel Has Been Defeated – a Total Defeat

The war’s aims won’t be achieved, the hostages won’t be returned through military pressure, security won’t be restored and Israel’s international ostracism won’t end

I want to believe this is a 1980s South Africa moment. But for all the “wha! wha! Our international reputation!” I simply won’t hold my breath waiting for the 30,000 dead Palestinians and 1.4M refugees to enjoy any kind of retribution.

The killing hasn’t even stopped yet. The famine drags on. All the Israelis seem to care about is their next-quarter GDP figures. But for Gaza it is so much fucking worse.

Americans in the impossible position of choosing between

• Kill more brown people

• Make money shipping another cargo container full of novelty sex asses

something like the sophisticated stuff known from sci-fi

More science fantasy than fiction. That’s part of the joke in it all. Not enough deaf people to make real bionic ears profitable. You’ll see them in Cuba or Vietnam long before they reach stateside.

The correct angle should be forcing all generative AI and its products to be public domain

None of these parties want to expand public domain, though. So that’s not on the table.

This is purely a tug of war between “disruptor” tech industry piracy that’s supposed to be Too Big To Fail and legacy media that would drag us back to flip books and cave paintings if they thought it would benefit the bottom line.

It isn’t, though.

I’m an incredibly small bean, policing data at this scale is borderline impossible, and we already demonstrated (via RIAA/MPAA wack-a-mole enforcement efforts) that this isn’t profitable in any meaningful sense.

The only people who really benefit from this kind of legislation are Mega-Corps who want to compel one another at some macro level.

The real end goal here is to force OpenAI to purge it’s model of images captured from Marvel or Disney or some WB property. Nobody is coming for your home rolled desktop image generator.

History started on October 7th

Israel firing sniper rounds and launching drone strikes into Gaza City isn’t terrorism, it’s Smart Data Driven Policing

Hey, listen. If you’ve got nothing to hide, I don’t see why you’re afraid of getting caught.