I feel a little anxious as soon as I read Trigger Warning

I feel a lot more anxious when a show dumps graphic violence or ear piercing screams on me with no warning.

Warnings tend to at least let me adjust my TV volume in advance. Much better than those YouTube clips or TikTok videos that try to blow out my speakers in the first five seconds

New Zealand will go where its billionaire expat refugee community tells it to go.

Why don’t presidents fight the war? Why do they always send the poor?

Gooning

there’s a reason i coalition build best with religious anarchists while myself being an agnostic.

Very hard to be an anarchist and then recoil at a neighbor with superficial differences in belief. If you need homogeneity of thought for anarchism to function, but you reject a hierarchy of institution to enforce canonical doctrine, how is that even supposed to work?

there’s actually a ton of radical political thought in theology if you can get away from a hierarchically programmed preacher long enough to study it yourself

Sort of the secret sauce of the modern major religious movements. They are all, at their core, populist messages intended to appeal to wide audiences of working class people. The insular cults and sectarian country clubs do a great job of raising tons of money from a few gullible rubes. But they can’t stand the test of time without reforming back into popular theology.

I would say that any serious student of religion or history really needs a teacher (ideally more than one). “Just do your own research” is fine on its face, but inevitably you run into contradictions and conundrums that the texts alone don’t illuminate. A great deal of the Old Testament is written as part of a rabbinical dialogue, with different books and chapters and even verses intentionally challenging one another in order to spur meditation and debate. And plenty of Leftist texts follow a similar trajectory.

You don’t have to read Marx and Engels as somehow oppositional to Kropotkin, Bakunin, and Stirner. You don’t have to read Descartes as oppositional to Kant. All these philosophers can operate in dialogue with one another. Perhaps even in some kind of dialectic with one another.

But it does help to hold a certain set of common beliefs.

there’s a song i love titled Owed to a Hypocrite about how the politician and the preacher walk down the road hand in hand oppressing all us regular people

My favorite line from Game of Thrones is the Sellsword Riddle. The answer you give to the riddle says a great deal about what you think of political power and who ultimately wields it. And the deeper you muse on it, the harder it is to unravel.

This time shall be different

please don’t say gold is almost guaranteed to go up…

I mean, in so far as inflation is almost guaranteed to occur in a productive economy, gold is almost guaranteed to go up over the long term.

A better question might be “Is an investment in gold going to outperform another asset class?”

I looked into it as well but in the end went with a Gov Bond ETF instead.

That’s been the gambit with gold for a while. Point to a short term up-cycle in price and insist that’s a long term ROI you can count on.

But when you look at the actual price history

there are long periods when the price is either flat or negative. Risk of holding gold relative to, say, the S&P or even basic Treasuries can get pretty high, unless you’re very confident we’re in one of those rare '04-'11 sustained price rises.

Even as a hedge against short term downturns, it kinda sucks. If you look at the big historical recessions - '81, '90, '01, '08, '20 - the price of gold had typically already jumped ('01 being a notable exception) and subsequent years were fairly flat. Spikes in gold prices aren’t a bad prediction of future recessions, but they rarely make for good shelter on the eve of the crash.

Fungible, portable, valuable.

It isn’t fungible. Anyone who has tried to trade physical gold at anything close to the market rate can tell you that. And no retailer is taking a dribbling of yellow sand as payment.

It isn’t portable. You can’t produce a finite denomination of it easily or transfer it electronically or even carry it in a wallet economically.

It isn’t intrinsically valuable. It produces nothing consumable in the way an oil well or corn field or machine shop can. It’s a speculative asset with the potential to be turned into something more useful. But it has no practical use or purpose in a raw state.

Gold isn’t a scam, as far as the concept of wealth and hierarchy isn’t a scam.

The means by which commodified gold is packaged and sold to gullible investors is very often scammy. And the sales pitch promising future returns on investment are inevitably larded up with rosy predictions unsupported by current data.

The socialized mythology around gold (especially relative to peer commodities like copper or oil) radically inflates its sales price in bubble economies. But there’s no reason you’re going to see better investment performance than a purchase of real estate or commercial equity. And there’s certainly no reason you would want to buy and hold gold long term if you had an opportunity to build or invest in an actual value-accruing business.

At best, a long gold play is a hedge against deflation and economic decline. At worst, its a fad that cycles in popularity relative to cryptocurrency or beanie babies.

Did you mean IUDs?

… yes.

Insurance is about compensation for loss, and that’s it.

That’s certainly not true of medical insurance. Preventative care is part of the whole package. In fact, certain preventative care is encouraged. Health insurance companies are more than happy to pay for UTIs, for instance, because they’re so much cheaper than pregnancies.

Apple’s willingness to offload all of their production there and basically revolutionize their Tech industry

Taiwan’s FoxConn building assembly plants in Shenzhen in 2005 does not explain why Huawei is releasing cutting edge phones in 2025.

Besides, if you want to get historical, Apple cribbed all their technology from Microsoft’s trash bin back in the 90s. And Microsoft plundered IBM and the early tech companies of the 1980s before that.

Chinese firms didn’t cheat by licensing the same technology every American firm was outright stealing through reverse engineering.

I mean, ymmv. The historical flood of cheap memory has changed developer practices. We used to code around keeping the bulk of our data on the hard drive and only use RAM for active calculations. We even used to lean on “virtual memory” on the disk, caching calculations and scrubbing them over and over again, in order to simulate more memory than we had on stick. SSDs changed that math considerably. We got a bunch of very high efficiency disk space at a significant mark up. But we used the same technology in our RAM. So there was a point at which one might have nearly as much RAM as ROM (had a friend with 1 GB of RAM on the same device that only had a 2 GB hard drive). The incentives were totally flipped.

I would argue that the low-cost, high-efficiency RAM induced the system bloat, as applications could run very quickly even on a fraction of available system memory. Meanwhile, applications that were RAM hogs appeared to run very quickly compared to applications that needed to constantly read off the disk.

Internet applications added to the incentive to bloat RAM, as you could cram an entire application onto a website and just let it live in memory until the user closed the browser. Cloud storage played the same trick. Developers were increasingly inclined to ignore the disk entirely. Why bother? Everything was hosted on a remote server, lots of the data was pre-processed on the business side, and then you were just serving the results to an HTML/Javascript GUI on the browser.

Now it seems like tech companies are trying to get the entire computer interface to be a dumb terminal to the remote data center. Our migration to phones and pads and away from laptops and desktops illustrates as much. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone finally makes consumer facing dumb-terminals a thing again - something we haven’t really experienced since the dawn of personal computers in the 1980s.

But TL; DR; I’d be more inclined to blame “bloat” on internet web browsers and low cost memory post '00s than on AI written-code.

If heroin was fully legalized, zero restrictions, we’d be much better off than the current situation we have right now with the war on drugs, fentanyl analogs, and xylazine. Full stop.

If we hadn’t invaded Afghanistan and started importing heroin in bulk through Ahmed Wali Karzai’s mafia connections, we wouldn’t have tons of cheap heroin to hook people to begin with. Also, we did have fully legalized (functionally) zero restrictions opioids, back under Bush Jr.

That’s what Oxycotin was.

If you want to describe the US as a criminal nacro-state, you can start at the Florida pill-mills that flooded the country with hundreds of billions of dollars in highly addictive prescription drugs and made the Sackler Family some of the wealthiest people on the planet.

Based on this I’m not gonna read the rest of the article

Pretty sure all ram manufacturers are Korean?

Micron is American, headquartered in Boise, Idaho. Western Digital is based in San Jose, California. Kioxia (formerly a department of Toshiba) is Japanese.

Only Samsung and SK Hynix are Korean.

So, I don’t see anyone investing 10 years into the future to make ddr6 ram where their business plan relies on current trends.

Even if you’re not up to DDR6, there’s money to be made in lower-tier memory for lower quality devices. Also, when the market is in a pinch, you’ll have the ability to scale up with investment dollars faster if you’re already in the business.

Black, White, and Red All Over