futuristicstarfishcollection

[futuristicstarfishcollection]

Are not assuming that the things I'm saying are due to the fact that Iran is an Arabic country with a largely Muslim population and I am prejudiced against Arabs and Muslims? I'm saying that I hold no such prejudice, that I would hold these beliefs about any country in a similar situation to Iran irrespective of its majority ethnicity or religion.

I just want to assure my younger followers that, yes, the lead up to Iraq was virtually identical and just as transparent and stupid in its attempts to manufacture consent in the general public.

AND IT WORKED. BOTH TIMES.

[futuristicstarfishcollection]

the point of satire is signaling your views while signaling your sophistication- they're so stupid that if i sound like them you know ive got to be joking. like pretty much all communication more complicated than see spot run, the point is to lack clarity of purpose

[futuristicstarfishcollection]

The article is paywalled, and already familiar with the impact of CAFE standards on the American car market

The American consumer doesn’t actually want trucks and cars that are huge enough that you can’t see a six foot tall person over the hood. They make vehicles that big now to avoid environmental regulations related to engine efficiency

[futuristicstarfishcollection]

The cheapest car for sale in the US right now is a subcompact, the Nissan Versa, it is not cheaper to buy a larger vehicle. Yes people are in a vehicle size arms race, yes this is bad, no this is not an attempt by auto manufacturers to skirt around efficiency regulations. Chevrolet and Ford both sell smaller more efficient vehicles outside of the US. If the market existed for these cars and/or the fuel efficiency regulations were reasonable standards why do they not simply sell them in the US?

The American consumer doesn’t actually want trucks and cars that are huge enough that you can’t see a six foot tall person over the hood. They make vehicles that big now to avoid environmental regulations related to engine efficiency

[futuristicstarfishcollection]

As @argumate and others mentioned, Rowhammer was (and still is! it didn't go anywhere even though people mostly stopped talking about it; newer DRAM chips have some additional mitigations built in but it's unlikely to ever go away entirely) experienced as a shocking, innocence-upending betrayal by a lot of programmers, because it yanked them out of the world where bits are mathematical abstractions, and into the one where the security isolation "guarantees" provided by hardware are more like polite suggestions.

Stories like these two do make me wonder if the futurist dreams of energy and technology and AI, even if they come true, will crash against the same rocky shore of existing in the real world with lowest-bidder contractors, corner-cutting, and regulatory capture.

This isn't really a new observation. Normal Accidents made all these same points in the 80s (including the "reality gap" between the abstraction of the system and its instantiation in the physical world). Which could be encouraging— the world kept turning despite Perrow's book— or discouraging— we never actually figured out how to fix the problems he discussed.

[futuristicstarfishcollection]

Right but Americans do clearly have a preference for giant cars. You can buy a Honda Civic, or a prius, they are very much for sale, yet despite this the ford F-150 is the bestselling car in America.

The American consumer doesn’t actually want trucks and cars that are huge enough that you can’t see a six foot tall person over the hood. They make vehicles that big now to avoid environmental regulations related to engine efficiency

[futuristicstarfishcollection]

You are assuming my beliefs on this topic have anything to do with the fact that they are Muslim. They do not.

I just want to assure my younger followers that, yes, the lead up to Iraq was virtually identical and just as transparent and stupid in its attempts to manufacture consent in the general public.

AND IT WORKED. BOTH TIMES.

[futuristicstarfishcollection]

Can you explain why you think my beliefs are racist? I sincerely do not understand

I just want to assure my younger followers that, yes, the lead up to Iraq was virtually identical and just as transparent and stupid in its attempts to manufacture consent in the general public.

AND IT WORKED. BOTH TIMES.

[futuristicstarfishcollection]

It's obviously possessive? "A noun's" is rarely if ever plural

[futuristicstarfishcollection]

Yes, I am strongly against the ripping up of the JCPOA, that's the entire reason we're here. However that Iran has fortified uranium enrichment facilities is not up for debate. Believing that the primary purpose of those is civilian nuclear power is a little credulous. I don't think Iran is very close to a nuclear weapon, it is however fairly obvious that Iran has surpassed a number of the key bottlenecks associated with manufacturing nuclear weapons. Given this I do not feel strongly either way about targeted strikes on uranium enrichment facilities, even though diplomacy would obviously have been much better, starting with not tearing up the JCPOA.

I just think that "Country definitely has uranium enrichment facilities, historically had an official nuclear program, and strong reasons to want a nuclear weapon" is not actually comparable to Iraq. This does not mean I support bombing them, much less an invasion.

I just want to assure my younger followers that, yes, the lead up to Iraq was virtually identical and just as transparent and stupid in its attempts to manufacture consent in the general public.

AND IT WORKED. BOTH TIMES.

[futuristicstarfishcollection]

You just have borderline personality disorder it's not that deep

The Curse of Loving Like a Trans Lesbian.

I think the most beautiful and cruel part of being a trans girl—especially one overflowing with emotion—is just how affectionately, how deeply, we love.

There's no “casual” setting for us. No dimmer switch. We fall in love hard, like we end up staying up too late just to hear her breathe on the other end of the line.

Especially when it’s with her, you know the one—it feels like everything hits deeper. Every touch, every giggle, every sleepy cuddle while sharing a blanket that's too small.

We get attached so fast—not because we're weak, but because we feel everything. Because we see each other, hold space for one another in ways the world often never has.

And when the visit ends… when the door closes, or the screen goes dark, or the warmth beside you is suddenly gone—?

It feels like a heartache. Like your entire world has quietly unraveled and no one else even noticed.

You walk around suddenly feeling extremely touch-starved, or wearing her clothes because they still smell like her. We are suddenly aching for the weight of her arms, her voice, her little silly rituals she does that only you know about.

You can try to play it cool, but you know deep down, your whole soul is just screaming:

“Please come back. Please hold me again. I need to feel your touch.”

But the truth is… this is part of the magic too.

Because when two trans girls fall in love—

we really do fall in love.

It’s not just romance to us, it’s something more.

Because being a trans girl in love? Can be heartbreaking at times, sure.

But, it’s so worth it.

[futuristicstarfishcollection]

This is a direct result of Trump pulling out of the JCPOA, so no this is very much Trump's fault, and the defense industry has neither nearly as much influence as you think it does, nor does it need war anywhere close to as much as you think it does.

Leaving aside that any variation of "this is happening because leftists wouldn't pinch their nose and vote for the lesser evil™" about the bombing of Iran is just factually untrue (Harris made it repeatedly clear that she considered Iran a threat which she would make a priority to stop with military force, and Democrat presidents don't exactly have a track record of being more opposed to bombing middle-eastern countries than Republican presidents), it's just such a perfect demonstration of first-world ghoulishness how so many self-proclaimed progressive americans will see people in another country get bombed and their first though will be "I should use this to votescold other americans" before the bodies are even cold.

[futuristicstarfishcollection]

Abject nonsense. Among other things Iran very obviously has facilities for manufacturing nuclear weapons. They make no secret of it, there was an entire agreement about this in 2018. You can see the satellite images. Not even close to same situation

I just want to assure my younger followers that, yes, the lead up to Iraq was virtually identical and just as transparent and stupid in its attempts to manufacture consent in the general public.

AND IT WORKED. BOTH TIMES.

[futuristicstarfishcollection]

You can get pretty decent at writing following online writing advice. You'll probably end up writing some passable, economical prose by following rules about what verbs are good alternatives for what, to use adverbs but only very sparingly, and so on. But I really don't think you can become a great writer that way. Well you might if you're just naturally prodigiously talented. But I do think you just gotta read a lot in most cases. You have to read a lot of really good prose.

[futuristicstarfishcollection]

one issue the Big Short could have made more explicit is that the subprime mortgage boom was mostly demand driven, due to banks deliberately seeking out the shittiest loans they could find, and not supply driven, due to people with no income cunningly defrauding unsuspecting mortgage brokers.

why would a bank deliberately write shitty loans? because the failure of the market to accurately price complex securitisation products allowed them to resell the loans as if they were good ones, and they can charge higher interest on bad loans, so the worse the original loan is the more money they make.

this is suggested in the movie at various points, like the way the broker earns a bigger commission for getting loans for people with bad credit, but I don’t think it connects the dots to show how the banks were stoking the housing bubble by giving everyone and their dog (literally) a loan because they had a foolproof way of turning bad loans into huge bonus checks.

after that insight things get much more murky; the rating agencies were obviously full of shit (I like the way the movie makes them literally blind) but why did the buyers put so much faith in them? why didn’t they do their own due diligence?

and of course the GFC was sparked by the subprime collapse, but the actual cause of the crisis was the way the banks had shifted their sources of funding to short term money markets which dried up overnight once the risk pricing started reflecting reality, destroying the world financial system and requiring a massive bailout or armageddon (or in some cases, both).

explaining that is much more difficult, as while it’s relatively straightforward to wrap your head around CDO and CDS products explained by Margot Robbie in a bath it’s much more difficult to make sense of the role of “commercial paper” in the overnight interbank lending markets (again, read Crashed).

plenty of blame to go around, and the important thing is we learned very little from the crisis and it will undoubtedly happen again.

[futuristicstarfishcollection]

anybody on this website remember the jcpoa

[futuristicstarfishcollection]

I feel confused by the physics here. The bird isn't obviously doing anything to generate force on the wheel and yet it keeps rotating?