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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 21st, 2023

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  • Ttereal tellers is ttattElonkows nothing about AI. Anyone involved in the field knows all of the big names because we read their papers, listen to their lectures, and talk about their models. He then goes on to be dismissive of work he’s not even close to understanding. It’s blatant ignorance, and Elon is used to just being able to power through his ignorance by either BSing his way past people who know no more than him or firing anyone who is actually qualified and as a result disagrees with him.


  • Slay and serve are part of the drag/queer community lexicon that were made popular (iirc) in the NY ballroom scene. No one cares when 6th graders use them or if they stop.

    If you watch queer media or hang out with The Gays, you’ll hear them all the time. They’re a bit campy, but not cringe.


  • At some point, sound mixing just went to shit. My partner was in the industry working in post-production and agrees with me. The sfx are loud and the dialogue is not - thus all of the smart tvs and settop devices supporting features like “Dialogue Boost.”

    I used to notice it a lot with poorly managed concerts - the singer’s mic would get drowned out by the instruments. I guess all the people who were responsible for that moved to LA.

    But now I have a soundbar and two HomePods as speakers, and still turn on subs. And that might have something to do with the number of concerts.



  • It’s not an unpopular opinion but it might be a tankie shitpost. I just really fucking wish people would explain their reasoning rather than just blatting out a stupid idea. This one isn’t stupid, per se, but if you want actual feedback you should say why you hold this opinion so people can tell you where they agree and disagree and it’s not just a downvote fest.

    Having said that, this is the least stupid of a series of incredibly vapid posts, so I’m writing a response.

    Yes, there is a supply/demand relationship. Let’s say you make 50 widgets a year and sell them for a dollar. Then a new use comes out for them, and people are willing to pay two dollars (this is actually the story behind the kong dog toy coming from a VW part). So now you can increase production, but eventually you’ll run out of customers, so you can reduce the price to $1.50, and so on. You can see this happening in real time in commodities markets, where oil producers will cut output to drive up prices, or increase it to drive them down (eg if they want to reduce oil production in other countries).

    Where you’re not wrong is that it’s a highly idealized model, like a lot of basic economics. It works best with commodities, but we’ve seen it with video cards, hard drives, cars, and so on. However, the more complex the market, the more factors beyond supply and demand are involved. There are things like sticky prices, information disparity (look up a paper called “A Market for Lemons”), and biases like those that won experimental psychologist Daniel Kahneman the Nobel prize in economics.


  • Because they make more money than they’re paying in fines. They also may be making more money violating laws than they’re paying in fines, but that’s how they’ll have to determine how they conduct business.

    Basically - and this is mostly for tech but I suspect it applies to other markets - the US is the single largest market. “Europe” is second, depending on how you want to define it, but even just the EU is a very big market. China is big and growing, and most companies are trying their best to keep growth there. Asia collectively could be huge, but the attempts to collectivize Asia have not worked out well, historically speaking.

    But the takeaway is that a company will exit s market if it’s losing money, generally speaking. No one is sacrificing earnings to make sure Belgians have access to the latest phones out of the goodness of their hearts.


  • I’m going to assume that OP and most people posting here know the difference between trans and drag. Some drag queens are trans, most are LGBT, some are straight. But trans women are women.

    Trans persons - at least many of them - mostly want to pass and have their identity accepted. This goes for trans men and trans women. And most people would like to be seen as attractive.

    The truth is though that you might just be into trans women. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but the community is generally aware of and quite wary of “chasers.” Those are people that fetishize trans persons.

    The difference between being attracted to trans women and being a chaser is whether you see the person as an individual or as a class. Think about white guys who are really into Asian women or black men. On the one hand, it’s fine to have different tastes and perceptions of beauty. The fetishization occurs when the individuality of the person becomes less important than the fetishized quality.







  • Can you do a text search and find the word “conviction” in the amendment?

    Here’s the text:

    No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

    And, again, this has all gone through Congress. Trump did it. Everyone knows it. Even the Trumpists know it.


  • I want to be clear. I do not blame Ghana’s people for these laws. I do not blame Africans for the many nations that have enacted similar laws.

    Christian church organizations, acting under the rubric of evangelical outreach or even more offensively charitable giving have backed religious and political leaders with LGBT-phobic agendas up to and including execution for being gay. Of course they’re going to do it - they get power and money for doing so.

    The US needs to extend the Logan Act to apply to these situations and make the crime a felony that can lead to the arrest of the people involved and the legal dissolution of the organizations.



  • The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol outlined 17 specific findings on Monday in the executive summary of its final report. Here are the findings, with additional context.

    1. Beginning election night and continuing through Jan. 6 and thereafter, Donald Trump purposely disseminated false allegations of fraud related to the 2020 presidential election in order to aid his effort to overturn the election and for purposes of soliciting contributions. These false claims provoked his supporters to violence on Jan. 6.

    Annotation: This reflects the committee’s finding that Mr. Trump’s repeated false claims that the election was rigged had both a political and financial motive. During its second hearing, the panel introduced evidence that Trump supporters donated nearly $100 million to Mr. Trump’s so-called Election Defense Fund but that the money flowed instead into a super PAC the president had created. It was not just “the big lie,” the committee said. It was also “the big rip-off.”

    1. Knowing that he and his supporters had lost dozens of election lawsuits, and despite his own senior advisers refuting his election fraud claims and urging him to concede his election loss, Donald Trump refused to accept the lawful result of the 2020 election. Rather than honor his constitutional obligation to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” President Trump instead plotted to overturn the election outcome.

    Annotation: Mr. Trump and his allies filed more than 60 lawsuits challenging the results of the election and lost all but one of them. Many of the suits, the committee determined, were brought even after some of Mr. Trump’s closest aides — including his campaign manager, Bill Stepien, and his attorney general, William P. Barr — told him that there was no fraud that could have changed the outcome of the race.

    1. Despite knowing that such an action would be illegal, and that no state had or would submit an altered electoral slate, Donald Trump corruptly pressured Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to count electoral votes during Congress’s joint session on Jan. 6.

  • Fascism. It’s fascism.

    Economic and social collapse dislocates a lot of people. It dislocates people who think they shouldn’t be dislocated, because they played by the rules. They go to church, they had a job, they’re patriotic to their best understanding of the word.

    Then, in their minds, something must have changed. It might be the immigrants, or the Jews, or the gays, or weirdly drag queens for some reason this time around. Then someone comes along who validates them as victims and promises a return to their historical glory days.

    The last paroxysm is the election or ascendency of a far right populist who elevates that narrative. They promise to restore national pride and return to traditional values, and to return the nation to its roots which had made it strong and put them on top.

    It’s happened multiple times around the world, and there are a lot of books and articles on how and why it happens.