I think the distinction your looking for isn’t currency vs. barter, it’s the real economy vs. Stock/Bond/Derivatives markets where money is accumulated by gambling without producing anything useful.

As someone from the E coast, Olympic is like someone took a forest and turned it up to 11. I understand the technical term is temperate rain forest, but nothing prepares you for the shear density of life.

Groups of trees in a line are common, like in the 2nd pic. That’s because they grew on a fallen log that has since rotted away. If you leave anything there for a week, shit will be growing out of that too.

Did the kid in your school have access to experimental kit?

The kid in my school had a special prototype that displayed the Nintendo on the windshield for the passenger of a car. I’ve been waiting 35 years for that product to hit the shelves.

These kids are better equipped than the orks at the front.

If we ban space advertising, then only criminals will be able to advertise in space.

What we need to fight bad advertisers in space is good advertisers in space.

This could be solved if we only allowed astronauts to conceal-carry ad-copy.

(I like to use gun arguments out of context, because it emphasizes how dumb they are.)

I can’t spell anything without a dictionary or, these days a spell check. I usually know where the vowels go, so I cycle through them until the word “looks” right, or the red squiggle goes away.

I don’t like grammerly bc I know how to write, it’s just the spelling that vexes me.

The terminally online debate-me-bro brand of atheism.

It’s always been curious to me that you can define yourself by something that your not. I’m also vexed why an atheist would proselytize. They’re not saving souls or capturing 10%. What’s the motivation? And please don’t say it’s because atheists are better people. Because all the famous “new” atheists were regular cast members on Epstein Island and the whole movement had deep ties to the alt-right and Gamergate.

I’m not saying they’re wrong, I’m saying they’re obnoxious, belligerent, and annoying. To be clear, I’m atheist. That’s half the problem. These MFers are making me look bad.

You can’t solve systems by focusing on individuals.

None of us a free moral agents. We’re surrounded by systems of family, culture, and law that compel and coerce us. And all of that is built in to the signifiers “employment” and “labor”. It’s incoherent to slice off a traunch of all these interconnected systems, strip it of all context, and pretend it’s a free moral choice.

Changing systems requires collective action. Individuals are weak and the Western obsession with individualism is no coincidence.

Snyder made the same soft-core porn twice. “SuckerPunch” for straight guys and “300” for gay men.

I liked “The Watchmen”, but yea, everything else he did is low quality.

I hate “Man of Steel”. He made Superman a cop, and the climax is eleven nine-elevens in Metropolis.

I got called for the penalty phase of a capital murder. (death penalty).

The parties settled before anyone was selected. It took 2 days. I found out later that the convict was already on death row, but had gotten a re-trial because of a recent SCOTUS ruling. I was in no danger of being impaneled.

I don’t deal in absolutes, but one move I watched recently that I really enjoyed was Predator: Badlands (2025).

Like a Verhoeven move from the 80s, Predator sneaks in genuine and interesting themes into an ostensibly crappy sci-fi movie. The Thia character is good feminism that reminds me of Lewis in Robocop (1987). That is to say she’s powerful without being coded masculine. And her relationship with Dax is as a partner and eventually a mirror. Dax’s character arc can be summed up as overcoming toxic masculinity. Just delightful, I watched it twice in two days.

There was a time when the POTUS could have pressured Ukraine against attacking oil infrastructure during the Iran crisis. But you can’t leverage aid when your not sending any.

There are 10,000 plausible explanations for this, but I’m going to guess she was drunk. Maybe she hit her head when she fell in? If the people who recovered and examined her body say it’s not suspicious, maybe they know something you don’t?

In the US for example, many newspapers won’t list suicide as a cause of death unless that detail is newsworthy.

When the authorities say a death isn’t suspicious, but are vague about the cause, it might mean they’re trying to save the family some embarrassment.

Complaining about bitching. Wow! Is that ironic or meta?

The newspaper noted, however, that in a 2019 interview, Ahmadinejad praised President Trump and argued for a rapprochement between Iran and the US.

Everyone who goes on TV is automatically interviewing for a position in the Trump regime.

I just look at vanilla lemmy.world on a browser. I’m not really sure what an “instance” is, other than .mil sucks.

Fred Hampton. I don’t mean to pass over other civil rights martyrs, but the Black Panthers were something special. Real revolutionary politics, organised, and taking direct action; the high-water mark of leftest politics in modern America.

AI slop is content geared toward metrics in an algorithm. AI is helpless and must produce content averaged out by the metrics of whatever company designed the thing. But humans are perfectly capable of producing slop.

For example, a director working for Apple wanted to nerd out on the opening sequence to pay tribute to an obscure movie he liked. Apple said no. Their data showed that audiences needed to be captivated in the first 30seconds or they’d switch off. So how about a drone-shot over a European city with a song that cost a fortune to licence, and with a voice over explaining everything? All the slop, none of the AI.