Any time there’s a ready meal from the supermarket and for some reason the adhesive is way stronger than the plastic film. You end up with loads of bits of film just sort of stuck to the rim of it. Super annoying.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham suggested at the Munich Security Conference over the weekend that Trump’s demand was a clever ploy to bolster declining popular support for the Ukrainian cause. “He can go to the American people and say, ‘Ukraine is not a burden, it is a benefit,’” he said.

I continue to be amazed by how frequently the entire spectrum from mainstream liberal regular conservative to Trumpist conservative fascist fall back on a line which is tantamount to “they’re not tricking you, they’re tricking someone else! Totally trustworthy!”

We’re just smelly sacks of biology like a rat or a lizard who happen to have developed higher reasoning capacity for whatever reason.

As an exercise, try to be conscious about your thought process, write stuff down. When your thought process leads to an action with a consequence or verifiable prediction, consider: did it pan out? Was that because of your thought process or a fluke? If something went wrong then what about your thought process didn’t help you?

This can help you to narrow down stuff like: did a possibility not arise to you, were you biased/overly dogmatic in some way, did you just not know some relevant information or a particular technique that could have helped you? Have you gotten out of practice with something? Was the situation even in your control?

And like wise if it’s good, what can you repeat? Did you apply some good critical thinking rule or something you learned? Are there situations where this wouldn’t have happened this way?

I find it’s impractical to do this for everything but worthwhile doing every so often and sometimes this can call out patterns in your cognitive processes.

Another one on mental clarity: do the apple test. Try to visualise an apple. At some point I struggled with this and got mediocre results but I was able to improve it by doing some visualisation based “meditation”/exercises and employing some techniques like verbally saying or thinking the word “apple” or a description of one and/or focusing on parts of it before attempting to call the whole apple into view. This had some carry over benefits like being able to visualise things in blender in my head better.

It’s still March… 2020

Too real. Not just holidays, weeks and months go by and it’s like “shit when did it get to 2025??”

I no longer feel a sense of unrealised potential for myself I guess. That’s it, I’ve got what I’ve got.

Without knowing the finer details, my assumption would be that it’s some kind of risk/reward tradeoff.

Ok the nuclear risk is higher, but causing chaos in nuclear security could create opportunities like giving Trump or Musk more direct access to the nukes or removing people who might have prevented them from using them, thereby granting them more personal leverage. This would be in keeping with the Project 2025 aligned executive orders and such.

There might even be commercial opportunities for Musk: “oh well the state management of nuclear security was super inefficient, ApocalypseX will do it”

Remember disaster capitalism is a thing.

I think Hanlon’s razor is a false dichotomy here. Neither stupidity nor malice are required to explain self-interest, which is the far more likely explanation given the people involved and their actions up to this point.

If going from scratch, trying to get support from an acquiring bank to verify authorisation and settlement integration as a community project would be “interesting”. Things like PCI compliance, 3DS accreditation etc. also. Pretty much need to piggyback off an existing solution.

Yeah definitely. I’m sure some people in co-tech in the UK were working on something like this in a more generalised way a while back. They were running sessions for people on this for a while. Working with experienced orgs on this would be key.

Ideally each country would have a system which generates all the basic legal paperwork and a sound (if basic and intended for extension) constitution which encodes essential compliance requirements. Getting such a system verified may be easier said than done, however, especially depending on how co-op friendly the local regulatory environment happens to be.

I’d say if anything it’s hard to stop people from doing so. It’d be trivial to set up an ad-hoc exchange (e.g. I’ll PayPal you money for tokens) for instance or simply resell items purchased with the tokens in a fiat market.

Thinking more strategically, I think the aim would ultimately to get things like this provided through our co-opy marketplace.

The question then becomes when does exchange into national fiat currencies become an issue: legally of course there’s money laundering concerns. I’m hoping that the continual regular and cheap issuing of the tokens would generate a somewhat inflationary environment (which is compensated merely through dealing with everything instantly and electronically with an exchange mechanism) which would head off speculation at least.

Then maybe there is some idea that there should be an exchange to fiat currencies which is also organised as a co-op, which could allow some governance to be put in place around it and then defederate from instances which allow ad-hoc fiat exchange (again to put in a speed bump for money laundering and criminal liability).

Ok here’s the pitch: instances generate currency for each of their users on a time registered basis or some other easily verifiable metric. Each instance’s currency is different and they automatically generate exchange rates with each other instance’s currency. People buy and sell items through it using only currencies generated by the federated platform.

Also all instances have to be co-ops or they get de-federated. Maybe the license even specifies this.

???

Socialism

Died eating sea urchins… Yeah that kind of tracks actually.

Not a hamster but when I had gerbils, one had eaten half of the other. Not long afterwards the cannibal developed a severe middle ear infection which killed her even during treatment.

If there’s one foreign influence we don’t need, it’s Elon Musk’s apartheid nostalgic nonsense. The sooner he blows himself up the better.

An opinion brought to you by somebody who’s never done a real day’s work in her life.

the guy who thinks detonating masses of nuclear warheads on a planet is likely to make it more habitable rather than less

Yeah I used to use Ubuntu as a Linux desktop a few years ago. I just came back to install Fedora on my desktop and the whole process was super easy. Even for gaming, Nvidia drivers, Steam with proton, etc. all set up with zero command line interaction, troubleshooting or even looking up guides or anything. It was intuitive and works.

Literally the hardest part was I couldn’t find my USB stick and ended up improvising with an old SD card as installation media.

The compatibility for gaming on Linux today is generally really good. The whole experience is really polished.

Yep, it makes sense when you consider the real nature of management and why it actually exists.

A rich man starts a company. He hires 12 people under him. He’s working a bit harder than he’d hoped, he’s constantly fielding questions and such but all is well. He needs to hire two more people. This is too many for him to manage directly, so he appoints two people to manage the other twelve as two teams of 6. All is well again.

They expand up to 30 people and suddenly they find the two managers are too stretched again! So another manager has to be introduced. When the company is over about 150 people, we even need multiple layers of management to keep this whole thing afloat as suddenly there are too many managers reporting to the founder or to the managers.

Yet at no point does the person who owns the company agree to give up any real control. If someone sets a budget he doesn’t like, he gives that control of the budget to someone else. Everyone in that hierarchy is acting on behalf of the owners under this arrangement.

The managers are just sat there with the mandate to make employees do more work under ever-increasing resource constraints, in the name of profit maximisation.

The management hierarchy functions as little more than a way of getting the owner’s instructions down to the employees by people who can interpret them as such, and to feed issues back to whatever level has the ability to deal with them (or declare them not an issue, as is often the case).