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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: March 3rd, 2024

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  • When they say “two corporations” they’re talking about the federal and state governments they referenced earlier.

    It’s part of a conspiracy theory that the US government is actually a corporation (and I guess state governments now, too?). The original theory I heard was that they never actually got the 16th amendment to the constitution ratified, so in order to levy income taxes on US citizens they secretly converted the federal government to a corporation and by having a birth certificate you are an employee of the government, rather than a citizen of the country. That’s of course all made up and doesn’t make any sense when held to 2 seconds of scrutiny, but I’ve met more than one person who believed it completely.



  • I’m not the person you’re replying to, but I think their point is that the bars don’t scale linearly. The red bar (2014 price) for the McChicken is supposed to represent $1 and the yellow bar (2024 price) ~$3, but the yellow bar is not 3 times the length of the red bar. This means the relative differences between the bar lengths doesn’t match the percent increase number printed above then. This is most egregious comparing relative differences between the McChicken and the Quarter Pounder with Cheese meal: why does a 122% increase look so much worse than the 199% increase?

    I suspect the cause of problem is that the small bars were stretched a bit to fit printing the dollar value within then, but if it throws off the visual accuracy of the bars, what’s the point of using bars at all?


  • Robin Williams as the Bicentennial Man. The movie was okay; his performance was amazing. I’ve struggled with mortality for a while, like I expect a lot of people do, and to see him as a character who started their existence immortal, and to choose mortality. His death in the movie hit me much, much harder than I expected. I haven’t watched the movie again since my first viewing because I’m honestly afraid of going through that again.







  • Mirror proteins behave much like their natural counterparts, with one important difference: They take much longer to break down. That’s because the natural enzymes that normally degrade proteins have shapes that are adapted for attacking left-handed proteins. They cannot grip mirror proteins and cut them into fragments.

    The virtual non-existence of enzymes that can break down right-handed proteins is almost assuredly because their use is vanishingly rare in life on Earth right now. If mirror life did escape the lab and find some way to thrive, normal life would suffer until some normal bacteria happened to mutate and create enzymes that could break it down.

    I expect it to be like the Carboniferous period. Trees evolved, and nothing was around that could break down lignin, so they thrived for millions of years and caused devastation to ecosystems of the time. But dead trees represented a lot of untapped raw materials, so eventually other life evolved to break them down.

    I would expect the same with mirror life. All else being equal, a few million years of devastation until life evolved ways to fight back. Or humans could dramatically speed that up by genetically engineering normal life (bacteria) with the tools to break down mirror proteins and thus attack mirror cells. It would still be devastating and would completely reshape life on the planet, but it may let humanity squeak through and continue existing.





  • It said the Israeli leader was covered by immunity rules that apply to states which are not a party to the ICC. Israel is not an ICC member.

    “A state cannot be held to act in a way that is incompatible with its obligations in terms of international law with regards to immunities granted to states which are not party to the ICC,” the French statement said.

    While this technicality may be true, it still seems like there should be a mechanism to hold people accountable for genocide that they don’t have to agree to beforehand. Saying “oh we can’t arrest him for crimes against humanity because he didn’t already agree to be arrested for them should he ever commit them” is a diplomatic copout and a moral failure of the international framework.


  • Geoengineering is cheaper and easier than rapid emissions reduction

    I don’t know if your whole comment is sarcasm, but every part of this statement is wrong. We are in the very, very early stages of developing the technologies needed for the level of geoengineering required to mitigate what we have already done to the environment. To roll it out to the levels needed would be far more difficult and expensive that converting our entire way of life to renewables, which should really say how hard and expensive it would be given how utterly daunting of a task full conversion to renewables is.

    Now, putting in token investment and paying lip service to geoengineering, that’s cheaper and easier than switching to renewables. But that’s not even treating the symptoms. That’s just your standard con game against the broader population to try to manipulate the conversation.


  • Not OP, but in my circles the simplest, strongest point I’ve found is that no cryptocurrency has a built-in mechanism for handling mistakes. People are using these systems, and people make mistakes. Without built in accommodations, you’re either

    1. Creating real risk for anyone using the system, because each mistake is irrecoverable financial loss, and that’s pretty much the definition of financial risk, or
    2. Encouraging users to subvert the system in its core functionality in order to accommodate mistakes, which undermines the entire system and again creates risk because you don’t really know how anything is going to work with these ad hoc side systems

    Either way, crypto is just more costly to use than traditional systems when you properly factor those risks. So the only people left using it are those who expect greater rewards to offset all that additional risk, which are just speculators and grifters.