Notices by ambivalence aficionado (coolerpseudonym@wandering.shop)

I didn’t even know there was a global magazine of culture called “aramcoworld” and that it really is published by Saudi Aramco

Dreamed last night I got a spider underneath my shirt and it bit me several times before I got it out. Also we were both journalists and the spider was my editor

@futurebird The democrats are th weakest major opposition party in the western world

@futurebird Which is pretty weird when you realize that a strong majority favors their policies. They are utterly in the wilderness

Conan Doyle was good at micro fiction. These little stories he drops into Holmes stories as asides:

❝A third case worthy of note is that of Isadora Persano, the well-known journalist and duellist, who was found stark staring mad with a match box in front of him which contained a remarkable worm said to be unknown to science.❞

Anyone remember how, before the year 2000, the U.S. party identifications of the colors red and blue were switched every four years by the TV networks’ electoral maps? The two colors only got locked in to their parties during the Bush / Gore endlessness, when people started talking about “red states” and “red America”, and so on

So if you wondered why the fascist party got socialist/revolutionary red, and the liberal-centrist party got Tory/royalist blue, that’s why. Pure historical accident

I would argue that an LLM can’t be AGI, by definition. That’s my intuition

I call on republicans to realize that Trump speaking now sounds like he has a brain injury - it’s word salad

Seriously the case for Trump having an organic brain disease is much more convincing than the case for Biden having one.

Nobody seemed to give a shit about the Leagues Cup this year.

Maybe we can retire it.

#MastodonFC #FediFC #Soccer

@reesecommabill @olympicschat including a queer threesome in the Bibliothèque nationale de France

@CedarTea People like libraries

Absolutely. Do not use, do not support BetterHelp.

They took patients’ intake questionnaires and sold them to Facebook.

BetterHelp itself is not a ‘covered provider’ under HIPAA. But they heavily implied any data you gave them was HIPAA covered, and would not be shared.

They have been slapped with an $8 million fine by the FTC.

(I think they should be a HIPAA-covered provider, and they should be prosecuted.)

BetterHelp *cannot be trusted*. Stay away!

https://weirder.earth/@dessertgeek/111854230732895093

This take seems to confuse the top 1% of income globally—more than seventy million people—with the top 1% in the richest countries. If you’re above the US median, you’re probably in the global 1%.

If the “everybody else” we must live like is something like the global income average, that’s way below poverty in the US. What we think of as an ordinary dignified working class lifestyle (in the developed West) would be ruled out by this particular limit. https://todon.eu/@ramonita/111442142613775266

We can’t get out of the climate crisis by expropriating the rich, or what we think of in the developed west as the rich, because the “sustainability” threshold is way, way down the wealth and income ladder. Eliminate the personal carbon emissions of everyone making more than a million a year and I doubt you’d be able to detect the dip.

The scale of demand destruction that will have to happen to keep the planet habitable will ruin the way of life of most people, if it doesn’t just kill them.

Is it possible to upload a sound file here?

I want to play for you the sound of the local birds

#AskFedi

@zorinlynx It’s considered “blocking the box” here. The concern is you’ll get stuck, I guess.

@zorinlynx I’d been doing it for years and never got a ticket, even though it was always illegal, as I have discovered.

Nashville cops are not big on traffic enforcement. They’re understaffed and mad at the city, so I think they quit writing traffic tickets almost entirely a few years ago. That’s the story, anyway. Turns out the world kept going just fine.

In chapter eight of Wodehouse’s “the Code of the Woosters”, when Stiffie Byng sets up a meeting for twelve ‘pip emma’, it’s clear she means midnight—it should have been twelve ‘ack emma’.

Unless in England, or in England of the past, midnight is twelve p.m.

This has long puzzled me

#Wodehouse #JeevesAndWooster #CodeOfTheWoosters