America is not a monolith. Signal’s developers are very much aware of the risks of operating there and probably already have several escape plans given recent developments. I also think five-eyes probably has access but getting it might be computationally expensive.

If we decide to ban smartphones from schools we should ban them from work too. I’m supposed to be writing an article right now and instead I’m here. Then we should ban them from streets so that people have to pay attention to where they are going and the things going on around them. At that point we’d have something like functioning human beings again instead of mindless zombies. We could still have terminals for plugging into the Machine but our time with it should be regulated (like it already is with research clusters) so that we don’t waste energy. There, the whole problem is solved and all it takes is a global butlerian jihad.

Was it the poet who lives on the beach? That was the only one I’d have been threatened by

Thanks, I had to research to even notice anything was wrong.

As your annoying communist I’ll also point out that if you’re a scientist developing novel methods to detect endotoxins your grant funding is currently being eviscerated by the US federal government and you’re likely to find a much more lucrative career path working for a pharmaceutical company that lacks your research ethics. And if you make it up to the admin level you can go lobby the government too!

So now we’ll have a whole plethora of social networks for everyone to isolate into their own bubbles essentially because our global leadership is comprised of children who can’t play nicely with each other. Sounds good, sign me up for TurkmeniNet.

I’m trying to figure out whether it’s an LLM or not. I’m always interested to see how far they’ve advanced.

I’ll bite. What do we as liberals get out of this genocide? Are you gonna say our stock in Lockheed will go up? Because not all of us liberals have stock in Lockheed.

Look, you can do the same thing with any religious document. See for instance Jeremy England’s Every Life is on Fire in which he equates passages in the Torah about Moses to the thermodynamical necessity of the emergence of life as an autocatalytic process. The metaphor is tortured and the whole enterprise comes off as awkward and unnecessary. Scientific principles are entirely nihilistic; it’s our interpretations of them that make them magical. And those interpretations aren’t captured by any holy document.

Real quick the appendix might have an evolutionary function. When you have a gut infection and your intestine flushes out everything (good and bad bacteria), the appendix might be a cache for good bacteria that avoids both the infection and flushing. The good bacteria then repopulate your gut from your appendix.

But please put your plastic in the bin marked plastic.

Science: Please stop using the word believe, it’s making me nervous.

I think this is true of US presidents too.

Does it though? Did they really do XCT on enough brains in areas with different F in their water to show this over time? And correct for the fact that it calcifies with age anyway? And probably does so variably across individuals and populations (2023 meta-analysis says old white men are the most likely to have calcified pineal glands).

There’s something called an environmental Kuznets curve that suggests that a population will sacrifice environmental health to industrial degradation in favor of per capita income up to a point, after which they are affluent enough to care, and after this environmental health improves. China seems to be at the inflection point.

I didn’t mean you specifically but I’m so glad that happened! I’ve recently left the US but while there I was active with DSA, labor organizing, and a local urbanist collective. My biggest gripe with the American left was always their insistence on throwing their weight behind this or that Democrat. Maybe now it will finally be clear that mass mobilization is the only way forward. We did this in the 1930s and we can do it again today.

Please actually do this. Not on the internet. Join a local activist chapter. Go to the meetings. Use your speaking voice. Contrary to what politicians and corporations tell you, it is possible to organize society in a way that does not result in oligarchy.

I bought one from Aventon. It was easy to repair and didn’t require anything special.

What I find interesting about this article is that it critiques heavily about the first 200 pages, says almost nothing about the next 600, and then says the conclusion is unsatisfactory because it didn’t quote the book the author wrote in 1991. It’s transparently personal.

Academics write books. Get over it.