As I understand it, the “matter” part is a hold over from physicists trying to fix their faulty calculations.

Looking for “matter” that only interacts with gravity is a bit like looking for the perfectly smooth frictionless plane. I mean, somethings gotta account for the sums being off, but the real world explanation is anybody’s guess.

Alright alright. Twenty dollar tech demos that last 45min. Please don’t sue me for using rhetoric to emphasize a point.

it will never not be funny to me that Valve released VR’s killer app, and the killer app killed VR.

Nobody else has the time or budget to make something like Alyx, and strapping a monitor to your face is obnoxious in ideal situations, let alone to for a library broadly of $40 tech demos that last 15min.

If you pitched this as a scene in a satirical movie, you’d be told to tone it down a bit.

How do you account for growth in the real economy, then? Spain invaded and obliterated the cultures of a whole continent in part because they didn’t have enough silver to match their accounting books.

I get that we have a problem with venture capital and defense contractors having access to the federal money spigot, but putting an arbitrary cap on the monetary supply will just impose a new set of problems.

The religious fanatics self-segregated and sent themselves, for the most part.

…born just in time to be on television.

Come on, now, if you really think his ideal is “warlord”, you’ve been paying more attention to what conservatives fantasize than who he actually is. Trump is a theater kid. An Andrew Lloyd Webber stan. He has the soundtrack to Cats on hand at all times. His favorite part of the presidency is that he gets to be on TV whenever he so chooses.

Democrats could instantly and easily sidestep a lot of transphobic fear mongering by simply saying, “you don’t have to like or even understand it, but its these people’s right as free Americans.”

I don’t think they’re interested in doing that, though.

Obama also ran a sham campaign in '08, presenting himeself as far more progressive than he really was.

And it worked. So why has the DNC abandoned that strategy? Why can’t they countenance even so much as a falsely held progressive stance?

The air of something interesting in place of actually having something interesting to say. That’s just how Abrams writes. It’s not like just a mistake he makes kinda frequently, it’s deliberate. He has a whole TED talk about it.

Watch on the Apple Vision Pro at peak quality

was this filmed with VR in mind? is that why it’s so wide?

I kinda just forgot Spock, Torres, and Troy were half human

Remember when red blood was all the rage?

Oh man, that fad takes me back

I know this is a joke, but why should the machines for doing sums also just happen to reproduce the same phenomenon that happens in a living growing meat brain?

Goes further up the pike than that. The phrase is “in a gold rush, sell picks and shovels”. The real shovel seller is NVIDIA, with their graphics chips.

Really, this is just an extension of the graphics chip boom crypto started. A lot of “mining” server farms transitioned smoothly into renting server time for AI training. It’s always been the same bubble: overproduction of graphics cards.

Drop Bear sweap

The english speaking world may be largely secular, but its a Protestant secularity. The same pattern of behaviors and underlying assumptions just transfers over to politics.

Every instance of Christendom leftism is actually untrue and wrong and doomed to failure except for the personal beliefs of me and maybe a few people in my local church discord group.

And the emphasis is always on personal beliefs, rather than actual actions. It’s how you get the Lockheed Martin engineer who “hates capitalism”. Doesn’t matter that they’re contributing to the globe-spanning death machine, because they personally believe the right things in their head.

In another generation or two they will probably be the ones to spearhead the effort [improve conditions in the United States]

this was said of the hippie generation (ie boomers) as well

In the 1821, John Quincy Addams (at the time secretary of state) was told to give congress a report on the new metric system. He presented them a very detailed document, making comparisons between the two, but ultimately recommending the metric system.

…so detailed, in fact, that none of them bothered to read it and no decision was made. The treasury ended up taking the initiative on their own, and went with what everyone was already using.

This was barley 30 years after the constitution was ratified, and the report was made by a guy who’s dad helped to draft the damn thing. We don’t get to blame the Brits for this one. Our stubborn anachronistic measurements are entirely a Yankee phenomenon.

It is astounding. If I were in charge of the DNC, I’d absolutely hound him on this the moment they’re able. Turn it into a massive spectacle, everyone involved, televised court hearings, the works. The Reality Television President goes out with a reality television bang. I’m a dumbass yet I know he’s violated the commerce clause a few dozen times over. In the process, try and get crypto properly regulated as the securities trading boondoggle that it is.

I’m not, though, and I severely doubt any of this is gonna happen.