The real stickler is that just from pure lucky timing, data centers will likely be the direct beneficiaries of the third reactor coming online at the Vogle plant here in Georgia. So taxpayers foot and will foot the bill, and meanwhile our governor and mayor are tripping over themselves giving tax breaks to data centers.
I think you’re mistaking slight natural adaption for domestication, and taking domestication for granted. Go into nature and try and train a wild wolf. Good luck! You can’t.
Domestication, in the way that we see having happened with dogs (and cattle, and chickens) takes a really long time.
We consider cats “domesticated” and yet demonstrably they are not. If they were much bigger, they’d eat us, and if set into wild, nearly all household cats immediately revert to feral.
I owned five ferrets once. Loved them so much, but came to the realization that there are animals that should be pets and animals that maybe shouldn’t (yet). I think we have many, many more generations before raccoons are at the same level as dogs.
Ironic choice: ferrets are a wholly domesticated species of weasel, bred for rat hunting. They are domesticated, by any reasonable standard I'm aware of, as are cats.
I'm sorry your experience with cats hasn't been as pleasant, but I assure you they are much more domesticated than chickens - which you seem to have little experience with. Screw eating us - they'll eat each other.
You’re wrong on several things. There’s a big difference in the kind of domestication of dogs - which we generally think of when we think of domestication - and animals who serve extracurricular domestication, ie ferrets.
I also have 2 cats, having had 2 prior. They’re great. But it’s just science that they are not fully domesticated.
I also lived on a farm as a kid.
So let’s not make assumptions to prove an incorrect point.
The United States is the wealthiest nation on the planet according to Forbes, richer than the subsequent three nations combined.
It’s a tragedy that our own citizens are not the direct be beneficiaries of that wealth.
I think a lot about the scene in Star Trek IV when McCoy is in a hospital and says “what is this the dark ages?”
Gofundme is like a kafkaesque tragic absurdity that - hopefully - will be looked at as an indictment of the inequitable K shaped economy we’ve built, and hopefully fixed in the future.
> The United States is the wealthiest nation on the planet according to Forbes, richer than the subsequent three nations combined.
This framing by Forbes (any many others really) is insidious because it doesn't take into account the population number and how unevenly wealth is spread.
For instance, Switzerland is not a huge economy - around the 20th in the world, but its citizens enjoy an extremely high quality of life because both income inequality and incomes overall are significantly better that in the US.
Population size is usually included in those calculations. It’s typically GDP per capita.
But I couldn’t agree more that the inequality and social safety net (or lack thereof) make the numbers deeply disconnected from QoL. Which I believe is the whole point.
> As for whether this represents a "kafkaesque tragic absurdity" we would need intimate knowledge of a lifetime of financial decisions. Maybe she was really bad with money, and frittered it away in casinos. Maybe she was amazing with money, and donated to others more than will ever be donated to her.
As someone in a nation with socialised healthcare, no you don't. It's a Kafkaesque tragic absurdity, and this sentiment of "maybe she was bad with money" sounds a bit like "maybe she was holding the live hand grenade wrong".
The US is maybe the only developed nation where this happens, insurance exists because massively unlikely, massively expensive events are very hard to budget for. It's not the person's fault if they didn't manage that.
The UK has socialized healthcare, and that's not going so well. Societies excel at stuff they prioritize. Pretty much all societies don't prioritize other people's tragedies.
It's definitely going better than the US, where you basically need to beg people for treatment money. I'm not sure what "not going so well" means, in that regard, since virtually every other developed country is doing better than the US on this.
I’ve lived in both Canada and the US. My grandma in Canada had to wait 9 months for a hip replacement. Even though the government provided help with paid aids, it was not a great situation.
My mom here in the states needs a hip replacement and she can’t afford it because she’s maxed Medicare.
You mentioned ambulance. My wife called an ambulance for our kid who tripped on something at a park and a rather hysterical person told her she needed to call an ambulance right away. Pressured, she did so; our kid was fine. But we then owed $3,500 for the ambulance. Though we were paying on a payment plan and never missed a payment, the bill got turned over to collections for some unknown reason. We got it sorted it out but it took about 15 hours of work to resolve and fix our credit.
I’ve found that my Canadian relatives complain often about the system but very few seem to truly understand what is good about that system.
Pick your poison. Like many things here in the US, healthcare in the US is great if you have money, bad if you don’t.
It's not that great even if you have money. Unless you're talking about the type of money needed to pay for all of your treatments out of pocket, and give you access to special private care most people don't even know exists.
My experience has been: if you have an immediate health issue with an obvious solution, you can get pretty good care. Say if you have a broken arm, gun shot wound, heart attack, stroke, etc. Anything uncommon, or that requires ongoing care, is a life sucking nightmare.
I'll give some examples from my own life. I live outside a major metropolitan area. A relative was visiting me and had a stroke in my living room. I called 911, and an ambulance appeared 5 minutes later, in 25 minutes they were in a hospital with a telemedicine link to a stroke expert. The expert said they needed to be brought to a downtown hospital so they were sent there by helicopter. One of the two best neurosurgeons in the city performed an endoscopic removal of the clot and saved their life.
Contrast this with a different relation who struggles with chronic pain and spine problems and has spent the last 20 years bouncing around various doctors, battling insurance companies, pharmacies, waiting to be seen, waiting endlessly for specialists, tests, and having to keep track of all of their information themselves because the system is fragmented and every office wants a complete restatement to their medical history.
Yeah, exactly, I don't know much about the NHS but I wouldn't be surprised if the recent issues are because it's getting defunded so it can be sold off to private owners.
> this sentiment of "maybe she was bad with money" sounds a bit like "maybe she was holding the live hand grenade wrong".
Yes, it does sound like that when taken as an isolated sentence fragment. I'm not sure what your point is though, since no reasonable system of economics could possibly solve for people holding the metaphorical live hand grenade wrong.
I think the sentiment is not that generosity to those in need is bad, but that something bad must be causing so many to be in such desperate need.
It may be relevant that the US has higher health-care costs than every other country in the world except for Switzerland, but not because it's providing better care. Many countries have better outcomes.
The fact that you need intimate knowledge is evidence of the Kafkaesque nature. It describes a world where virtue doesn't exist except for the case of financial planning (which often equates quite well to luck).
Based on my understanding of Kafka, to fit the definition, funerals would be essential goods whose costs should be socially guaranteed. In reality, a funeral is a discretionary event about the deceased and for the living. Crowdfunding for the benefit of the crowd is not an inversion of responsibility, it's simply voluntary collective spending.
You could say it's an inversion of societal norms, but that's not Kafkaesque.
My apologies, I misread the original article and I was left with the impression that the GoFundMe was only for end-of-life and funeral costs. I must have missed the standfirst, which is where it was described as a "cancer fundraiser".
The Churchill line is about democracy, but the adapted version is a common variation. It works as a standalone maxim without need of attribution to some famous person.
I don't know if you've noticed, but internet discussions collectively can't seem to avoid "no true Scotsman"-ing what counts as capitalism, likewise its alternatives.
I've seen some people on HN criticise the "socialist" healthcare of the nordic countries on the basis of what Stalin was like, and others saying that China as is today is each of communist and capitalist depending on the point the poster wants to make.
I also clicked through ten pages of Google search results for "capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all the others", each of which showed the literal quotes in the preview excerpts, at which point I became too bored to continue.
I mean, how is "healthcare" from 500 years ago the bar here?
And isn't single-payer state-funded healthcare the scaled version of a small town passing the plate around anyway?
As I think about it, gofundme is even more kafkaesque in that it gatekeeps fundraising to those who have online social networks strong enough to fundraise. We don't hear about those who aren't able to because in the Jia Tolentino definition of "silence," they are not able to express that need online.
> Maybe she was really bad with money
I guess I fundamentally disagree that a kind of Dave Ramsey level of financial saving is a prequisite for healthcare. Indeed, I'd argue that casinos are a symptom, not a problem, of a system in which the only "viable" way out is gambling - again another tentpole in a complicated kafkaesque system.
I agree that single-payer baseline healthcare is the obviously correct answer. The experiment has been run countless times globally, and there's enough evidence to put this beyond debate. Rebecca's circumstance isn't Kafkaesque, it's merely adding to that mountain of evidence.
> how is "healthcare" from 500 years ago the bar
I agree completely, but it's not Kafkaesque for a person to ask one's own community for voluntarily contributions in their time of need, just because that community happens to be online.
> gofundme is even more kafkaesque in that it gatekeeps fundraising to those who have [strong] online social networks
There's nothing Kafkaesque about a popular person having more opportunities than an unpopular person. And there's nothing inherently capitalist about it either. This is human nature, nothing more. I would be far more concerned about an economic system that sought to "guarantee equality" in a way that reduces the individual's incentive to be kind to others.
Man, seeing the visualizations here reminded me of how great it was to load up some music in Winamp (downloaded via soulseek), turn on the geiss visualizer, and get stoned.
If you look at [1] you can see some derivations from Milkdrop/Project M.
There were a lot of other, good visual plugins and software. VJ software, specifically, but also Libvisual just abstracts input and output, therefore allowing you to use all of these (supported) visualization plugins on any supported media player. It isn't much developed anymore these days, but this is the correct way forward.
Looking at the actors in Livisual [3] G-Force is decent but also a couple may be missing from earlier Libvisual releases. You may also like Lemuria [4]. Winamp's AVS is also FOSS [5].
Agreed. I would love Plex (or PlexAmp and then cast) to have some built in visualizations. And I have no idea why some of those streaming EDM channels on YouTube aren't doing music visualizations rather than ten second loops of video.
There are some visualizers in the Mac App Store. I'm using Ferromagnetic right now and like it well enough. There are still visualizers in Apple Music left over from the iTunes days but they're kind of lame.
I stumbled onto one years ago by accident, maybe an Easter egg or something. I came back to my computer (Mac) after several hours of iTunes playback to see a hitherto unknown visualization running, with fairly primitive-looking graphics by today's standards. It was not any of the visualizations available in iTunes at the time.
I filed a bug on it with Apple and they got back to me asking how the hell I had invoked this, because they'd never seen it before. Never did get to the bottom of it.
>Man, seeing the visualizations here reminded me of how great it was to load up some music in Winamp (downloaded via soulseek), turn on the geiss visualizer, and get stoned.
You can still do that. Winamp runs just fine on Windows 10/11.
This feels like someone in a marathon deciding to quit because they just ran really well for the last 10 minutes, with the assumption that since they were running really fast there’s no reason to think they won’t keep running fast. It’s deeply flawed logic.
The other issue is that while he might be right, the worst and biggest consequences of being wrong will not affect Bill. Or, frankly, anyone reading this comment.
It’s such a complicated problem for us humans because we often struggle to conceptualize beyond our own tribes, let alone humans who won’t exist for decades.
But the problem is that IF climate scientists are right - and other than a few cheery cherry picked stats, Bill has no evidence saying otherwise - then the longer we do nothing the bigger the impact.
Will humanity die? Probably not. But will it drastically affect QoL for nearly all humans on the planet save the 1%? Probably.
Right, but he knows this and he's drawing up his knowledge and solutions. You can point this out, but what solutions do you offer? And I'm sure you can paste some articles with solutions, but I mean actual solutions that people would be willing to change for, not hypotheticals.
If you happen to use Firefox, check out "Reader View" (it's a button that appears at the end of the address bar). It works brilliantly to strip away everything except the main text of the article; and present it in a font, at a point size, and with margins, of your choosing.
I think the gamification is at the core of why Duolingo has persisted even though it doesn’t work.
At any point in real learning, or in acquiring any kind of skill in anything, one hits a plateau and the thing becomes boring or dull or hard. Internal drive to learn the thing must overcome the drudgery of repetition until you exceed that plateau. And then eventually there’s another one down the road.
What’s more is that the more we learn the more we get rewarded for confronting and pushing through the boring or hard. It’s a real reward that dopamine is evolutionarily designed to encourage. In a way, learning is already as “gamified” as it needs to be.
Gamification on the other hand convinces us that we’re making progress but it’s completely artificial. It manipulates dopamine in ways that don’t encourage actual and more learning. Instead gamification rewards gamification.
We need less gamification in our world and more internalification.
He did not say that the kid was MAGA, or at least not exactly. Here’s all he said about it:
> We hit some new lows over the weekend, with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.
> In between the finger pointing there was grieving. On Friday, the White House flew the flags at half-staff, which got some criticism, but on a human level you can see how hard the President is taking this.
He then played a clip where a reporter asked Trump how he was doing. Trump said good and immediately started talking about his new ballroom.
What about any of that is misinformation? Given how they were certain the shooter was trans because he used arrows on the bullet - which were helldiver 2 codes - it did seem like people were trying to make it seem like the kid wasn’t MAGA.
Turns out the kid is neither, or both, and was just terminally online, which none of us want to admit is the real problem because we’re all also terminally online.
> with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them
Anyone hearing this would take away that Tyler was maga, would they not? It heavily implies that he is maga, and that’s why the maga gang is trying to deflect.
A lot of conclusions were jumped to early on by everyone. Things are more clear now, but still not 100%. From what I’ve seen so far he was a Trump supporter in his early teens, but did a full 180 in recent years, due to the influence on the internet, as you mentioned, and who knows what else.
If the ultimate joke was to laugh at Trump talking about his ballroom, I don’t see what his maga comments added to that. He stepped into a hornets nest and added nothing to the joke in the process.
Why would someone have to "desperately try to characterize" someone as something that they clearly are? To me, that language is clearly indicating that it is somehow difficult to do. At that time, it was fairly apparent that he was not MAGA, at least not in any remotely common sense of the word.
> At that time, it was fairly apparent that he was not MAGA
The criticism of the "MAGA gang" was _not_ about their actions at the time of the Kimmel broadcast, it was very much about their immediate behavior as soon as the shooting hit the news .. the time when nothing was known, the time when the FBI head was making statements about suspects that were untrue, the time when the US head of state was declaring war on the left .. you know, the time when nothing was known about the political allegiance of the shooter .. or the lack thereof.
I'm an outside observer, from here it's clear that the US has fallen deep into an Us v Them K-hole and that the current administration is all too happy to turn up the heat on the divisions that render the nation asunder .. the chaos makes the heist all the easier.
I could imagine interpreting the statement that way if he had said either before or after that it turned out the shooter was not MAGA. But stating it on its own, the effect in my mind was pretty clear: to communicate that the shooter was MAGA, and that the MAGA gang was doing their best to deny it.
The current president and vice president of the United States said on multiple media channels that an entire racial demographic of people in a city were eating cats and dogs, and those same people are concerned about the minutia of a late night comedian’s informational and semantic accuracy (who they also claim no one watches, which is probably itself mostly true).
Your god-president lies every single time he opens his mouth. Huge lies. The biggest lies. He also ridicules everyone he dislikes. With hurtful language. All the time.
He has never apologized for jack shit.
> Anyone hearing this would take away that Tyler was maga, would they not? It heavily implies that he is maga, and that’s why the maga gang is trying to deflect.
No one is tuning into Jimmy Kimmell for "news", though I am quite sure that his show is more truthful on a daily basis than your Fox News & Newsmax liars.
> If the ultimate joke was to laugh at Trump talking about his ballroom, I don’t see what his maga comments added to that. He stepped into a hornets nest and added nothing to the joke in the process.
The joke is that Trump probably does not give a flying fuck about Kirk. He cares about himself. That's it. He pivoted right to bragging about his dumb fucking ballroom.
You’re making a lot of assumptions here. Nowhere do I claim any party affiliation. Someone asked a question about why what Jimmy said was controversial, and I did my best to answer why a person might be upset. Other people who may have said similar things aren’t really relevant and it just gets into a game of whataboutism.
It was a political assassination done by someone who vehemently disagreed with certain viewpoints. The details about the shooter clearly indicate which end of the political spectrum he was on. Kimmel's comments were grossly inaccurate and wildly irresponsible.
> The details about the shooter clearly indicate which end of the political spectrum he was on.
The only thing clear about the shooter's political positions, is that it'll be presented as whatever will be most convenient to the speaker. He held views that individually map across the spectrum, allowing anyone to point to something and assign him at an arbitrary location.
> Kimmel's comments were grossly inaccurate and wildly irresponsible.
Kimmel’s comments are about the behavior of the MAGA world, and they were true: the MAGA world was trying very hard to push the idea that the shooter was not one of them.
> The details about the shooter clearly indicate which end of the political spectrum he was on.
I'm sorry, which details? Why does his opinion about a handful of topics mean that we can infer his entire worldview? Why do we have to assume that his views mapped neatly onto one end of the US political spectrum or the other?
I think the problem no one on either side wants to admit is that these shooters rarely fall into either side. They’re mentally unstable people who are attracted to fringe crazy ideas, regardless of the political stripes.
Their behavior indicts all of us Americans.
But of course admitting that and doing something about it means working together, which is a much harder solution than pointing fingers at the other side and doing little else.
To each their own I guess but I think this is a beautiful home. My home was built at the same time (1965) and seems to share a lot of characteristics to David’s home, although my house is much smaller.
You’d be surprised how hard it is find houses like this. Many of them have been gutted and rehabbed into “open” floor plans, with a lot of white paint and white barn doors.
This is unfortunate because house builders back then really knew how to create distinctive spaces.
This home has a lot of beautiful light, feels very airy and open, and yet feels very distinctive and characteristic.
Probably the biggest drawback and challenge will be, as other commenters have pointed out, that Lynch smoked packs a day and getting that out will be tough.
Otherwise there absolutely buyers who would love this home.
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