What Jeff Bezos says: I like meetings to be ‘messy’ so I can be part of the process.

What his employees hear: Always get at least one small thing obviously wrong in your proposals, so that Jeff Bezos can “persuade” you that he has a better idea and feel like he’s being useful.

I can’t agree that cutting back on exports should’ve been the first priority. It would’ve done less good at a higher cost than eliminating domestic fossil fuel consumption, which is how Canada could’ve had a real impact on on global scale by showing everyone how it’s done. I write in the past tense because with the Liberal government having failed to get it done, the political chance to accomplish anything useful in time to prevent the disaster seems to be rapidly approaching zero.

Its removal is as useful in preventing fingerprinting as its presence was in protecting privacy.

Wow, a truth.social link. Don’t think I’ve ever seen one before. Normally, meaningless idiotic tweets from DJ Trump only turn up on the TV news, not in my Internet news feed.

That’s not ignorance, it’s malice. Elon has made it clear that he’d like nothing better than to require everyone to show their official ID for “age verification” purposes before being allowed to use social media. I’m not sure exactly why. Easier to file lawsuits against anyone who uses it to make fun of him, or perhaps it’s just one small step in some kind of grand totalitarian vision of the future. But he can’t hope to get away with imposing it on Twitter unless competitors are required to do the same.

In recent decades some 7.6% of global lands were pushed across aridity thresholds (i.e. from non-drylands to drylands, or from less arid dryland classes to more arid classes).

That’s one hell of a statistic.

While that article does look as if its author has bought into some propaganda originating in Russia, that’s really only revealed in the final paragraph, not the part you quoted. You seem to be reacting more to the “fossil fuels power everything” and “this latest rise in the price of oil and gas means that the final collapse of global industrial civilization is now underway” attitudes, both of which which are fine American traditions.

Someone said jokingly that the tiktok algorithm is so good that it can tell when you’re a researcher looking for evidence that tiktok pushes people towards political extremes, and show you exactly what you’re looking for. I thought it was funny, but it also seems like it might be sort of close to what happened here. Normal people would not just passively watch all that shit without reacting in some way.

Disappointingly, Tiktok could not figure out my desires at all when I tried it. I liked one exceptionally good dance video and then it just kept showing me superficially similar dance videos that weren’t so good no matter what I tried to get it to stop.

Okay I guess I had enough of this “playing some other games” phase. There’s that new vicn mod too. Back to Skyrim it is.

Apparently I have fewer problems with it than some. It’s snap. Maybe I could come up with some other minor complaints, but nothing big really. It’s mostly just snap. That is what prevents me using or recommending Ubuntu any more.

Yeah China sure is scary. Centralized social media owned by American billionaires on the other hand can totally be trusted never to interfere in elections.

I think realistic graphics in 3D games got to be good enough that further improvement doesn’t really matter any more in 2011 (Skyrim) but I can see an argument for putting it as late as to 2016 (Witcher 3).

Seems to me the main rationale for building a pipeline was that it would enable exports of crude and bitumen to get to markets where they’d sell for a higher price, meaning it would be more expensive for domestic refineries too. There have been quite a few news stories in the past year suggesting it’s had some success in doing that. I don’t know whether that effect has lived up to expectations, but it’s an odd thing to not mention at all in an article discussing the effect of the pipeline on gasoline prices.

okay I fixed it

    if ( test == false )
        x = 1
    else
        assert( x != 1 )

If they banned guns based on specific well-defined criteria, presumably nobody would need to wait for a list to know which ones were affected? It’s sort of amazing to think that this government could fail to do so for a second time after the way it went down last time.

    if ( test == false )   
        x = 1
    else
        x != 1

Things like “it doesn’t provide a rebuttal” are often said, and I don’t find it convincing. There are ways to show the lies for what they are without directly arguing about it. Is the movie effective in doing that? It seems to depend on the viewer.

I haven’t yet had the chance to see the movie, but based on what many reviewers have said I think there’s a pretty good chance it isn’t the pernicious Russian propaganda it’s been made out to be. The synopsis from wikipedia seems representative of what is said to be its approach:

The soldiers depicted are often volunteers who say they went to the front for various personal reasons: vague patriotism, avenging fallen friends, protecting loved ones, preventing their children from going to war in the future, or, more commonly, for money. Soldiers are shown drinking heavily, and sometimes note the pointlessness “of it all”. One notes that they return back only dead

It’s easy to imagine some viewers missing the point and mistaking things the Russian soldiers in the film say for things the film is saying. Of course it’s also easy to imagine that it really does align with Russian government propaganda. I feel like it’s necessary to actually see it to find out which is the case.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/roughshod

I’m not often one for whataboutism but this is focused on Russia to a degree that seems absurd. Sure, their propaganda is dangerous and pervasive, but why should it be so exclusively singled out? What about all the rest of the stuff we’re subjected to from around the world? Despite its recent political problems the USA is still for now much more politically respectable than Russia, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t bombarded with propaganda originating there. Not to mention the Business Council of Canada, the Fraser Institute, the Century Initiative, Pathways Alliance, or the National Post. There are many hazards in this information environment, and we need to be better prepared to handle all of them.

The problem is much larger than Russia. No effort to address it will get far without recognizing that.