Netflix doing a little house on the prairie remake is going to be so fascinating like how are they going to try to make that storyline woke. Just how…. ( i have an idea of how and i think it will involve laura ingalls befriending an indigenous girl her age or something in the style of anne with an e but it really won’t be able to reckon with the author of the book referring to “savages” all the time)

I guessed it

you people aren't CASTING

I wonder to what extent cryptocurrency has contributed to the current inflation crisis. Like. We have this whole secondary economy where every day millions of extremely-low-confidence dollars are being converted into a deceptively-high-confidence commodity currency which is either hoarded without being spent or gets converted into more commodity currency. That's a nightmare scenario. That does really bad stuff to economies.

No, if I understand those studies correctly, the ones that indicate that crypto can't be used as a hedge against inflation simply find that when money is put into crypto as an investment, it does not generate a significant return on that investment above decrease in value due to inflation. This doesn't lead deductively to the conclusion that crypto doesn't play some causal role in inflation, I guess, but I was thinking that if we could blame crypto in some regard for the inflation crisis, some justifying evidence for that might be found in some correlation between the value of crypto holdings and the value of the dollar. But if they both change value at roughly the same rate, in roughly the same direction, with inflation, then that reduces my confidence in the claim that crypto is exerting an effect on inflation any more than the existence of the US dollar is, relative to the US economy. Of course, crypto could still affect rates of inflation somehow. As natalieironside suggests, economic actors might be evaluating crypto as a good investment and then investing and reinvesting into cryptocurrencies (to keep their value out of government-backed currencies) at a scale that spirals into the value of that (or those) government currency falling. But that still seems unlikely to be the case to me if cryptocurrencies that non-insiders would want to invest in (i.e. the ones that are more stable) are affected by inflation just like traditional currency. Especially since some of those more stable cryptos do, iirc, maintain that stability through some mechanism that responds to the value of the dollar? Again, though, I'm not a crypto or economic expert. I'm just curious about the possibilities of economic damage caused by crypto.

I was thinking more in terms of good money in competition with bad money. My suspicion is that dumping your assets into crypto has a similar economic effect to exchanging all your dollar bills for gold coins and burying them.

“but what if you abort the baby who’ll cure cancer?!” sir the baby who will cure cancer is an organic chemistry major who works at a Home Depot because you use AI to go through your resumes

"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." - Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History

I think people who worship the past are among the least equipped to actually study it academically. Like you can say, "Ooh, I think Shakespeare was the greatest writer who ever lived!" and it's just like, okay, well, cool, but you can't really formulate any interesting research questions on that basis.

There's an entire cadre of people who bang on about "Enlightenment Values" and another (somewhat overlapping) cadre of people who have Grecian bust userpics, and they're united in being, by nature, the suckiest philosophers in the world and having never actually read any philosophy. It's a brand identity for them.

I don't understand how this is even a defence in the age of drone warfare.

Or even like... Cannon warfare.

Yeah, the Ottomans could have taken this in the fourteenth century.

shipping containers are also not that strong and also only cheap/relatively accessible to use if you live somewhere where shipping containers just end up

Fun fact about shipping container houses is that because so many shipping containers are used to transport hazardous materials and are unsuitable to live in for contamination reasons, it's often easier to make them out of entirely new, unused shipping containers than to source appropriate second hand ones. Which destroys the entire purpose of shipping container houses. Because we already know how to make rooms that are cheaper, better insulated, and more spacious and easy to acquire and transport than brand new shipping containers.

I remember a guy on one job talking about having one for storage on his property from ages back and the council was on his ass to remove it, costing him thousands. When the craze hit he had people come out of the wood work offering *him* 1000’s of dollars to buy it off him. He sold it for like 5k and his buy paid for all transport. Near overnight inversion of value for the things. Literally the best covert marketing campaign of lying which preyed on apocalypse anxiety (i am including solarpunk-esque people in this alongside preppers). Concrete is either too woke or not progressive enough for the average joe.

Can we talk about how stupid and annoying grocery deliveries must be to that "compound"? Like yeah, just walk 300 feet or something with each pair of bags, nbd, hope your four trucks are just compensating for something and not because you have more than one person's worth of food to carry around.

i wish people were more capable of articulating critiques about exploitative conveniences like doordash without implying that the exploitation and the convenience are both equally objectionable.

i kinda think it is because u cant rlly have one without the other

well see now i don't think that's true. its entirely possible to adequately compensate people to do stuff like "pick up and deliver food or other objects to someone's house," or any other kind of situation where you're paying someone else to do a task for you. it's the desire for third party entities to extract as much money as possible out of these interactions that causes the exploitation. like, having a neightborhood mailmain isn't exploitative just because there's a world where people could pick up their own mail at the post office because the mailman gets stuff like health insurance and paid leave and overtime.

im swimming at the lake and accidentally kicked a fish. this has never happened in my many years of swimming. sorry man

there's two people fishing at the swim beach for some reason, as if that could possibly be good fishing. go try somewhere else guys, i kicked the only one nearby

@copperbadge

"You'll be left behind if you don't get onboard with AI!" okay let's assume for a second that AI is The Future or whatever. Let's assume that it will be the cornerstone of all future work. Let's assume that, like the investment guys floating on the surface of the bubble are desperate to have us believe, It Is Inevitable. Frankly I still don't think I'd lose much by ignoring it until that day comes. Like I simply do not believe that prompt engineering could take all that long to learn. Call me naive but I think that if AI became critical for my life tomorrow, somebody telling me how to access chatGPT (I imagine they've got a website or an app or something?) and being like "Remember how you used to use google when it still actually worked? Start there" would be enough. I think I could figure it out in like an hour, tops, by fucking around with the site and maybe looking up some tips on reddit. So like. Even if "AI is the future" did somehow magically turn out to be true, I don't see how that affects me at all right now or why anybody bothers saying so. "AI is the future, if you were smart you'd be using it!" no I wouldn't. It still wouldn't be a skill that's worth my time to learn yet. Pointless addition to the discussion. Maybe I'm dunning-krugered or something but I simply do not think that it would be difficult enough that I would need to start practicing right now or I'm missing out on something.

"You'll need AI in a decade so you should get familiar with it now!" I think if you start getting familiar with it now, and I start getting familiar with it in a decade, we're going to end up at the same proficiency pretty quickly. Doesn't seem like the kind of skill where "X years of experience" is relevant. I don't think that's a skill gap that would be hard to close.

You cannot simultaneously have a "it's easy for everyone to learn! Impossible to fuck up!" pitch and a "you MUST learn how to use it RIGHT NOW" pitch for the same product and expect to get taken seriously

idk if this is an usamerican thing or not but it always blows my mind as a small european country resident that yall have many names and types of apples???? what do you mean its not just red yellow or green??? why is it so complicated??? who is granny smith????

'whats your favorite apple' 'red' 'no i mean like what type' '??????' actual conversatiom i've had with a mutual from usa

the world is so big and beautiful

Yeah. There are a couple dozen rarer varieties that were not included there… all the heirloom apples.

everyone eat more vegetables NOW!!! and mention the last vegetable you ate in the tags so we're all on the buddy system. I'll start: bok choy