Notices by Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝ (richpuchalsky@mastodon.social)

@abolisyonista

back then people generally understood what you had to do to make progress on anything

@violetmadder

"I'm not sure what's going on" isn't theory, though, it's part of being a responsible adult. Theory is supposed to serve practice and lead to changes in our situation.

@abolisyonista

@bruces

I'm sure that he could crash-land something on the Moon, hail it as the physical start of a new city, and extend the grift for another few years.

@abolisyonista

This does bring up the question of why critical theory really needs to exist. Is revealing and describing ambiguity really at all valuable or useful? It seems like ambiguity is always fairly plentiful and descriptions of it are themselves ambiguous.

#Texas is becoming a world center for the largest polluters and for concentration camps where children are imprisoned and die.

But don't criticize the people of Texas! It's not their fault that they live under a democracy and can elect the leaders that presumably represent their values. They are victims.

https://www.texasobserver.org/developer-gw-ranch-pecos-county-largest-power-project-us/

@abolisyonista

"Can people actually do it or not" is far down the chain of questions about why this might not be good. Another one is "do factories even matter in this society, are they actually more than a marginal source of power for the ruling class".

@abolisyonista

Every contemporary protest in my society interrupts circulation / commerce, not production. Is everyone wrong? Possible but not that likely.

@revoluciana

It's so annoying that a large % of journalists and academics moved there. I still have to read it for climate stuff.

A video of uncertain provenance showing an elderly Hmong man being arrested by ICE in sub-zero weather, wearing very little.

The Hmong in Minnesota are there because they were US allies in Vietnam. People should remember: never be a US ally. The US will not remember.

@abolisyonista

Social democrats are still trying, with projects like Norway's oil fields. Since these projects take something that everyone agrees is evil when capital does it and claims that it's not when "the people" do it, I think that they are not good in themselves. The left is supposed to provide an alternative to capitalism not a justification for it.

@inthehands

"violence is instigated by cops and/or provocateurs" is not a good idea. When the police station burned down that was not a bad thing.

@adamr

I have a Masters (in astrophysics), have been tangentially involved in academia throughout a working life, and I am here to tell kids that what they are being taught has no value to adults other than to keep them in line and is forced on them by the system.

@futurebird

@futurebird

i think that there should be a social expectation that young people should learn, and that adults should not be able to prevent children from learning. But as an anarchist of course I think that the state should end, as well as a state mandated system of education.

@adamr

@futurebird

Quite possible! (Anarchists are not really big on the church either.) But communities can build schools and staff them without a church organization, or young people can learn through one-on-one teaching from adults.

When looking at bad possible alternatives we have to compare them with what actually exists, not the ideal of what is supposed to exist.

It's possible for a number of things to be true at once:

1) we're likely to avoid 4 degrees and end up at 2.5 on our current path. That's very good! 4 degrees would be extremely bad.

2) 2.5 degrees is very bad

3) We're not doomed to 2.5 degrees. It's possible, pretty much at any time soon, for us to politically decide that we should be under 1.5 degrees.

4) The COP process has pretty much done as much damage as it has helped.

Saw another article that mildly annoyed me about vibe self-regulation. You see, when you're concerned about anything (#climate in this case) you have to have good vibes. Otherwise you may get discouraged and discourage other people. It's impossible for an adult to have a nuanced appreciation of how difficult something is and do it anyways. So above all you must monitor your own vibes in order to propagandize yourself and others.

I increasingly hate all of these vibe articles.

1/n

@inthehands @CelloMomOnCars

I read downthread until someone posted what I was going to post, which is that throughout the history of plastics recycling most of the 95% not recovered has been dumped in a poor country somewhere. And they were answered "where would you landfill that waste"!

I guess dumping it in an open dump in a poor country is supposed to be better than an expensive landfill in a wealthy country?

They called the teddy bear "Kumma", what did parents expect

https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/19/tech/folotoy-kumma-ai-bear-scli-intl

There are certain basic presuppositions about texts: that they are written by humans who have some kind of basic concern with truth or aesthetics or both. A liar who writes falsehoods is still concerned with truth: someone who writes with a bad aesthetic is still concerned with aesthetics. A human being writing Oulipo poetry according to an automatic procedure is obviously concerned with aesthetics.

LLM produced texts are fundamentally not concerned with any of these things.

2/n

There has been a lot written about how so-called "#AI" #LLM s have had bad effects for artists, writers, programmers, and people who do not want governmental agencies or corporations to make racist decisions. I will take all of that as having been written better by other people and write about how AI is bad for #librarians.

1/n