Hegar

Go running.

You know when you build something up in your head to be really awful, then you try it and it’s exactly that awful?

You know that feeling you get when you look into your dog’s eyes? The same parts of your dog’s brain became active, so they’re probably feeling similar emotions at that moment.

Yep. Pence is the one with lady blinders, like a horse, to protect him from seeing things that might scare and confuse him.

Yep! In my experience it’s awful and it stays awful for ever.

But just like with going to work, over time you come to accept that existence is suffering.

Threaded messages seems fine to me, as you said that usage is more well understood than threadiverse which risks conceptually-centering a billionaire controlled platform.

The existence of threads makes threadiverse an inappropriate name for fediverse content aggregators, is the point I was being overly sarcastic about.

Defederating from threads seems like the best way to make it nice. That way there’s less influence from psychopathic billionaires who happily stoke genocide for clicks.

Where in the Midwest did you grow up?

TBH, I just don’t think something better is possible - I suspect that there are no valid shortcuts to trust.

Unless something is just obviously bullshit, it will always take some time to develop a sense of how the different sources are treating a new story. Even a trusted source can prove unreliable on a particular topic.

It’s uncomfortable living with that uncertainty until you’ve seen a story from enough angles that you can judge for yourself. But either the story is important enough to me to spend that time, or I just accept that I can’t really know.

I downvoted then blocked it because:

• I don’t trust its specific analysis of sites. Others detail some examples.

• I don’t think whole-site analysis is very useful in combatting misinformation. The reliability and fullness of facts presented by any single site varies a lot depending on the topic or type of story.

• Other than identifying blatant disinformation sites I don’t see what useful information it provides. But even that’s rare here and rarely needs a bot to spot.

• Why is an open-source, de-centralized platform giving free space to a private company?

• Giving permission for a private trust-assesing company to be operating in an open public forum makes it look as if these assessments reflect a neutral reality that most or all readers would agree on or want to be aware of. It’s a service that people can seek out of they decide they trust it.

Presenting this company’s assessment on each or most articles gives them undue authority that is especially inappropriate on the fediverse.

More like hurricane Charlie.

those of us who are not sub-Saharn African

Do you have a source I could scope on that?

I know there’s genetic backflow from neanderthals to many african populations. I found a snippet from a paid article that seemed to be saying that (some?) neanderthal-related ancestry found in sub-saharan populations is early sapiens genes that went into neanderthals, but I couldn’t find a solid yes/no on neanderthal alleles in sub-saharan pops. I’d guess there’d be at least a little gene flow from nearby populations that do have small neanderthal ancestry, but that’s just my uneducated guess.

Denisovans too for some of us.

And I think at least 1 ghost population of different humans that we’ve not found remains of!

This is a story of one bootlicking employee who was in desperate need of fucking off and minding his own business:

However, just as the movie started, an employee told them to put their snack bags away, the report said. They agreed but the employee apparently insisted on sitting next to them to monitor the snack situation.

A few minutes later, one of the children popped a Skittle he was already holding into his mouth, and quite frankly, all hell broke loose, the women said. The employee started shouting at them, and said that the police would be called unless they left. This is when the children started crying.

“My niece asked nicely: ‘If you’re calling the police, are they going to kill my mum?’” one of the women told the newspaper. “And he laughed at that stage. He looks directly in her face and he said: ‘Yeah, maybe we’ll find out.’

Right to disconnect laws were first introduced in France in 2017… One critic at the time said: " the French may quickly discover that their most productive workers are routine “lawbreakers” who stay connected during off-hours." … A 2023 Australia Institute study estimated Australian workers on average were doing an extra 5.4 hours of unpaid work per week. … equates to an extra 281 hours’ unpaid work per year. This is estimated to be costing workers an average of AU$11,055 annually.

For employers, productive is just a polite synonym for exploited.

Public protest and unrest is a symptom, your society telling you something is wrong

This is something that the Chinese government actually pays very close attention to. Specific issues - food safety and pollution for example - they allow some protest so they can gauge how strong public sentiment is on the matter. Even when they arrest protest leaders, they’ll often make policy changes in the relevant areas. I’ve heard china scholars talk about how interested the chinese government is in public opinion and the roundabout ways they assess it in a system where it can’t be regularly expressed in open elections.

the appearance of a peaceful society without conflict is not the same thing as a peaceful society without conflict

For sure. I feel like as far as an authoritarian government is concerned though, they are functionally the same. Until suddenly they are not, of course. But again, the resilience of the CCP is due in part to working out what is up for public comment and what is most definitely not.

public unrest is a feature

Again, super agree. But I don’t think of public unrest as political chaos, at least not in the US context. The inability of the government to perform it’s most basic functions without brutally pointless culture wars, the myriad ways to gum up the works and prevent action, the increasing politicization of the public service, the willingness of so many to act contrary to the government’s own interests - that’s the sort of stuff I think of as All American political chaos.

I could definitely believe that some weibo users are very interested in Biden’s stepping down. Xi’s decision to stay on passed the original term limit was quite controversial even among some of his supporters. Stepping aside when the moment requires it is the hallmark of that paragon of Confucian virtue, the Duke of Zhou.

But no one in the world “envies” our political chaos. We’ve done real damage to the global reputation of democracy and given example after example for the world’s autocrats to point to when they argue that democracy is self defeating.

Not on normal courtyard/community exercise

That’s almost certainly a backronym. There aren’t enough records of its use to say for certain, but nonce probably shares an etymology with “nancy” as in nancy boy, or possibly with “ponce” as in perfumed ponce.