I feel like wearing FL-41 amber tinted glasses in the evening has helped my sleep. Orange tinted ones like Blublockers would do the same.

I voted for Harris, but I feel like it’s pretty obvious why someone would vote third party instead.

One need only reject the premise that voting should be a strategic act of harm reduction. Mind you, I’m not saying “is” here. I’m saying “should be”.

We may not take their approach, but you have to admit that there’s value to it. They are embracing the world as it ought to be, whereas we are trying to work with the reality of the situation as we perceive it.

And we could be perceiving incorrectly. For all we know, Trump could loose-cannon his way into making Netanyahu’s whole party lose their next election. It may not be likely, but nothing in this world is certain.

For all we know, the Heritage Foundation could destroy so much of the government and economy so rapidly that it weakens all of the property rights and FBI operations aimed against self-sufficient mutual aid, and communes start springing up all over the place. It’s not likely without massive turmoil, starvation, and bloodshed. But however unlikely, we cannot predict the future!

Cyncism is costly in terms of mental health and well-being. In order to choose pragmatism over principles, we must accept a reality where no good choices exist. But that’s not something we can do everywhere. We can’t repeatedly choose the “least miserable option” and still be able to hold ourselves together and function. It’s just not possible.

Humans need hope to survive. They need a hill they can hang onto. They need to be able to say, “on this ground, I fight for what should be rather than what is.”

Some people’s hill is their ballot.

Hmm… so an approach that would have gotten Rodeo’s point across better might have been to say,

“so anarchy is just another name for the purest form of democracy.”

Because democracy is such a broad word that it is occasionally applied to the United States, despite the CIA’s history of coups and the FBI’s history of extrajudicial assassinations of citizens.

btw, I’m stealing this and turning it into a writing prompt over on Literature Cafe.

The post is here

The game is hampered by a lack of any retry-mission/save/load feature. Right now, players are stuck indefinitely with the negative consequences of their mistakes.

Thanks for the well-written explanation, stranger.

Who knew a company with an unhealthy obsession with harvesting every screen tap of data from every person using their services… would chicken out from connecting their servers to a bunch of clients they couldn’t monitor.

… That said, I actually didn’t see this coming. It baffles me that I didn’t, but I didn’t.

I like Joplin’s cross platform sync. I hop between phone and PC constantly with it.

Plus “math skills” is one of those areas where stereotypes and self-fulfilling prophesies have incredibly influential power.

Math is difficult for everyone, and emotional factors like, “having the confidence of yourself and your peers” are important in making it through difficulty.

An algorithm is the meat of a function. It’s the “how.”

And if you’re using someone else’s function, you won’t touch the “how” because you’ll be interacting with the “what.” (You use a function for what it does.)

You will be creating your own algorithm by writing code, however. Because an algorithm is just a sequence of steps that, taken together, constitute an attempt at achieving an objective.

Haus is saying all the little steps that go into approximating sine occur directly on the hardware.

Even the babies have evil in their hearts.

*in Dread Pirate Roberts voice*

You have a dizzying intellect.

I can take a guess at what it tells us.

We’re lonely. We get no physical contact. No touch. No warmth. And it’s not really socially acceptable for us to seek those things, because men are scolded for emotions and vulnerability. We are scolded for anything that would enable intimacy.

And it’s to such an extent that most men are so repressed they don’t even realize they crave intimacy. They don’t even have the vocabulary to describe their need for intimacy.

Now introduce, to such a man, a “sister.”

Heavy emphasis on the quotes.

The “story” of the porn, using their family ties as a shortcut, quickly establishes that she lives with him. She bonds with him. It’s socially acceptable for him to hug her, to wrestle with her, maybe even to cuddle her. And she will always be there, because her connection to him runs deeper than most “romantic” relationships can (we’re still assuming this man can’t articulate his own need for intimacy), so he doesn’t need to worry about her abandoning him.

Naturally, this emotionally repressed man is going to look at this fictional family member, this figment of his suspension of disbelief, and say, “well I want to 🦆 her!” (I always find my keyboard’s lack of profanity amusing. I refuse to teach such an innocent piece of software how to cuss.)

What he really means is that he appreciates that intimacy. And cannot really get turned on in its absence. But he can’t say that. He can’t admit that or even know that. Because this man is not only starved of all of the above: he can’t even articulate this starvation.

Daughters? Sisters? Mothers? They all serve the same purpose as a shortcut – “here’s a person who is intimate and trusting with you by default.” The familial bond is a fast, easy way to establish prebuilt trust and affection without spending 20-30 minutes on storytelling or 20-30 hours of therapy trying to convince a repressed audience that it’s okay to have a deep, intimate, trusting connection with this consenting woman.

In other words, what it tells us about society isn’t good.

But I do believe GDP includes government spending.

It sounds like you were distressed and left because you didn’t know what to do or how to help.

That’s empathy. Feeling uncomfortable when you see people in pain is empathy. And it’s normal. It’s normal for you to feel distressed around her as you hear her account. It’s normal to want to leave. It’s normal to feel guilty about leaving. It’s normal to wonder if you could have done more to help catch the bastard.

This is awful. What you just saw is awful. What you just experienced is legitimately uncomfortable.

And it’s hard for people to wrap their heads around, because how could your pain be valid when it’s a response to seeing someone in “real” pain? How could your pain be important when it’s nothing more than the faint echo of the pain you’re witnessing someone else go through?

But it hurts. As selfish as it feels to hurt at a time like this, it still hurts.

Damn. That’s my entire personality.

Wow. That’s Linus Torvalds levels of screaming, “ARE YOU FUCKING STUPID?!”

People got really worked up back in 2008.

Yeah, but Fain is the first democratically elected UAW leader (prior leadership was chosen by delegations and was fraught with racketeering and embezzlement) and it shows.

That’s horrifying

Are we doing an Aktion T4 now?

On that note, why – when most of modern conservatism has so many direct parallels in the Third Reich – do they call our side the fascists?