Wildly better list. One of the failings of liberal/left minded people in recent decades has been to become list makers. “We will stand up for the rights of women [pause for applause], blacks [pause for applause], the elderly [pause for applause], etc…” sounds real nice until someone listening says “what about me?” It’s a losing political strategy in a world where the words “All Americans” and “everyone” exist. At the absolute least, tag those words on the end.

To be clear since this keeps coming up from people who like to put words in other people’s mouths then tell them those words are wrong, I am not saying laws can’t protect/benefit marginalized groups. This is about communication.

Often times two.

A big part of legally protecting a company is being proactive about things that will get you sued. The lawyers were correctly operating in our bad criminal Justice system.

Sauce: https://www.jstor.org/stable/48812575

This study builds on decades of work that makes less and less sense every minute of the digital age. Each year we’re further from a semi-homogenous group listening to Casey Kasem’s Top 40 (or whatever). Most people have a fairly clear, shared concept of 60s/70s/80s/90s music, but ask ten people about the 10s/20s and you’ll probably get eleven different answers.

In addition to changing mass listening habits, the digital age untethers us from time and wildly diversifies “new” music. You can hop on Youtube/Spotify/etc and listen to the Glenn Miller Orchesta as easily as the newest Drake singles, which with radio/MTV/etc was historically not the case. Those platforms also have allowed a world of music diversity and access that completely changes the paradigm. For example, some of the best “80s Music” in existence was released in the past few years.

I like that if you start at “Sanctity of marriage”, something the radical right clearly does not actually value, and work counterclockwise the terms get increasingly vague and meaningless until they completely phone it in with “Etc”. What values.

“If robosexual marriage becomes legal, imagine the horrible things that will happen to our children, then imagine we said those things, since we couldn’t think of any. As a mother, those things worry me.” -Futurama

Yeah, humans would never destroy natural resources in favor of some tech fix or just kinda assume that the planet would fix itself… /s

My headcannon on the human battery thing is that the machines have core programming to make reasonable efforts to preserve human life. Designing power reactors (look how thick the cores are on the towers) with humans slapped to the side technically aligns with the core programming while allowing them to stick it to us apes. It’s also why the attack on Zion was one tentacle abductor machine for each human instead of dumping super plague down the hole and calling it a day.

Our rapidly depleting aquifers being used to produce those resources would suggest there are too many people.

“Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions” -Thomas Jefferson. Don’t get mad, and also don’t come right at them with the ridicule as they expect that and are prepared. Simply start agreeing with them and see how far you can take it.

Good stuff. One small note: I’m not sure how useful the distinction of “Chinese state-sponsored companies” is in recent history when comparing to the US, let alone now. The US has retooled much of federal research engine toward promoting US AI. Even fired the NSB (among many other long standing, expert driven advisory boards) to replace it with a bunch of tech baron stooges. States are offering unprecedented payouts to data centers. The AI hyperscalers already have a bailout all but guaranteed when the bubble pops. It’s all state-sponsored, just with extra steps.

Can someone ELI5? Is this extremely token gesture an appreciative nod or strings (visible or not) attached trojan horse?

I’m not a big Avatar fan, but you make a compelling case. Extra points for a B5 reference.

The morally-gray stories CAN be good, but not in the hands of most modern movie/streaming writers who somehow all seem to have gone to the school of “Trust me bro, I’m somehow better than the internationally acclaimed author who wrote the IP I’ve been handed” with a major in “mystery boxes” and minor in “identity IS character”.

There’s this cool new thing where you can search for stuff on the Internet. You should check it out. To answer your question, yes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Button,_Button_(The_Twilight_Zone)

I just want to apologize, as this is largely my fault. There was a blowout clearance on Easter Candy and I went in all. Having gained 924 metric tons over the past few weeks, I’m throwing the averages way off.

Why is the butt plug room so small? Are we even serious about fighting fascism?

Brutal self own for Lemmy

I had a similar thought about Bill Clinton’s dick back when we learned that Trump sucked him off. I know Bubba was POTUS, but people seemed to be lining up to blow him. His penis must be immaculate, whatever that means.

We’re already well on the way to having supercritical CO2 generators. Sure, it’s still a steam engine, but supercritical CO2 makes it sound so much sciencier.