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a critique of our work was illustrated with gloomy shots of the unlovable 1960s Tavistock building, and of discarded toys in a derelict attic

lol

thanks for digging up, will rifle through these. though even with context, i feel that letter will still look annoying.

and that comic wasn't misdirection?

ai boom is driving up data center demand

Dilbert_X wrote:

Maybe when global warming has hit 10C and 90% of the planet is uninhabitable power will be ceded to the STEM guild much too late, who knows.

you probably have like 10 different kinds of tools in your workshop you could use to address that. or you could just wear a bracelet. everyone checks the time on their phones in 2025.

"fun watching it play out" is a bit of a nauseating take on sciences and services getting drawn and quartered by an ironman cosplayer with a custom hairline and no relevant qualifications. this "let it burn" stuff is the kind of attitude the internet (and angry old boomer men) sported when voting for trump in the first place. lul pepe or w/e.

sure, i'll read that.

still, seems like a startling letter to receive if you were in that position. "sorry, the medication you need for hormonal balance is in another castle."

others:
Houston family faces separation after ICE arrests Honduran mother despite documentation
https://www.fox26houston.com/news/houst … umentation
fox

‘It’s scary right now’: ICE holds detainees for days in bedless Baltimore cells
https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/poli … 4QUMEKDYM/

'This has been the new ‘normal'': Video shows ICE smashing windows to detain alleged gang members
https://www.spokanepublicradio.org/regi … ng-members

maga will just point at his approval rating and say he's doing something right, or dive into vagaries like "we can't just let these people come into the country willy-nilly."

tom homan is insulted by the term 'concentration camp':


1:58

social media, particularly youtube, is flooded with support for all this clandestine ice crap.

it's difficult to wrap your head around the sneering at cinco de mayo in america. "what even is cinco de mayo?" -self-proclaimed history buff. you'd figure at the very least, an excuse for more snacks discounts would be celebrated.

in the past, you'd think american conservatives would celebrate the throttling of monarchist tendencies. nowadays, i'm not so sure.

found on social media:


sounds like a health crisis.

"inconvenience." lol

uziq wrote:

the USAID cuts to HIV medicines are going to kill millions of people during this presidency.

maga counts this as winning.

Dilbert_X wrote:

uziq wrote:

i'm going to go out on a limb here and say that film critics do know what they're talking about, actually.

Then Trump and all the geniuses he employs must know what they're talking about too.

I'll concede that some strange paths have been gone down, I'm sure its all part of the genius plan which is guaranteed to deliver something sometime.

did you review trump-gaza yet? i know you expressed concern about palestinians in the past. what's your take?

Dilbert_X wrote:

OK, but there's a definite parallel, two groups of people who have very strong opinions about something they know nothing about.

i don't think it's the same at all. people have expressed a disinclination to watch cats in media-educated terms (and critics have elaborated).

while the trump administration is flagging federal pdfs for instances of the word "female," the magas can't really explain the whats or whys of 'woke' or how it bothers them, but for sure there's an undefined number of library books with titles they're not sure about that need to be addressed!

it's not a compelling argument to tell people they need to go see a fanfiction of a thing they're not that interested in just to prove they're not interested in it.

Dilbert_X wrote:

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

re: "we regret our trump vote but the woke stuff was just so annoying, you know."

i've yet to hear one of these people explain to me what woke stuff is or what about it annoyed them. it's a phantasm.

I'm guessing that the people who voted for Trump to defeat the wokeism that they'd never experienced and were never going to, and the people who write critiques of books they haven't read and films they haven't seen - Cats for example - are the same people.

has anyone here has argued to ban the cats musical? if mac wanted to hang a cats poster in his classroom, i'd give him the thumbs up.

but i don't feel the need to watch cats 2019. beheld enough to justify a solid 'thanks but no thanks.' i don't understand how even someone with a catgirl fetish like you could justify that cgi horror show. guessing the grinch does it for some people though. different strokes.

uziq wrote:

i dunno, man, somehow i think an anachronous anecdote about the saxophone isn't quite as bad as cheering on torpedoing your own medical research, national parks, and HIV humanitarianism.

absolutely not my intent to imply that. this was a yuge aside.

but it feels like the same thought process people use to internalize whatever they hear from the first place they hear it and belligerently defend it. it's the impression i have, anyway, from decades of talking with my fellow americans.

american liberals are not exempt from some of this kind of thinking. (e: while the following is not as egregious as maga):

unrelated to politics, one self-avowed liberal in my circles with a sagacious mien recited a quote from benjamin franklin about the saxophone, with zero indication of jest. this was obviously one of those -abraham lincoln moments. five seconds of google-fu for the specifics, and the inventor of the sax was born after franklin's death. the original quote was supposedly in the next century, in a local newspaper, and about the cornet.

this is an example of an easy fact-check a person person can do, on their own. this person likes fact checking when it's them doing it (preferably against conservatives), including for misattributed quotes. they present as "experts" on any subject that comes up and will spend an afternoon reading wikipedia about the bible or sumerian history or whatever just to infodrop along with the usual obnoxious spelling/grammar catches. so i get the knowing elbow nudge about v.p. vance not liking fact-checking, but this person loathes being on the receiving end of it. they get all angry or insular and withdrawn when it is done to them.

it wouldn't do anyone any favors here to point out that adolphe sax was well past when franklin could have made a joke about the instrument and gentlemen who don't play it. or that the quote is even later (and non-verbatim) to begin with. next to the other fake news that americans—including lefties—eagerly line up to mouthpiece for: fairly inconsequential. enough on my plate without needlessly generating cold shoulders at work.

-

i think a lot of americans don't like being corrected, and don't have the emotional maturity or were never taught how to take correction without internalizing it as a personal attack. or they usually receive correction in the manner or intent of an attack.* on the reverse, i also think a lot of americans don't do a very good job of correcting without coming off as unnecessarily, insufferably smug. if their intent is to inform, ineffectual. but exasperation, i understand. completely understandable, the urge to sign on and call a republican senator an absolute nincompoop for hopping up and down on a table flinging feces across the room.

*(e: this is one of the barriers i've encountered and have had to figure out ways to tiptoe around on an individual basis when walking people through math, or computing)

without jay here this is all preaching to the choir. a conservative trumper hears about stuff like foreign aid and one of the first things their brain can connect that to is the foreigners are taking their tax dollars and making it so that americans struggle. "why not us? we should take care of our own first, no?" then the conversation jumps to concern (faux or just misinformed) about the epidemic of homelessness, which they insist is also the fault of foreign aid programs. "we're flushing all these <arbitrary high figure> of dollars down the toilet!" and there's always a backup thing to blame when you debunk any of their causation claims. it's like the presidential line of succession, but for fake news.

they chill out a bit and huff noncommittally when you bring up the all the billionaire beaks. "well! that's not their real value, you know." it's actually quite easy to get them to eventually allow that the rich who use our infrastructure should help pay for it, but this is often not retained from one conversation to the next any more than they read my links when they ask for them, or than they send me links when I ask for them. when it comes to the thieving rich, suddenly they're not good at economy math and don't really have the time for this stuff.

"no matter what, trump/musk have a solid strategy." a trumper can't elaborate on what that is coherently. you just have to trust that it's a good one. "and if gas goes down, we'll be vindicated." this, from people who haven't trusted the government for decades, and supposedly still don't. cognition out-of-sync.

tyt i know, but...

sheesh

fold into 2016 thread

Trump signs executive order on developing artificial intelligence ‘free from ideological bias’
https://apnews.com/article/trump-ai-art … 17d547929c

Under Trump, AI Scientists Are Told to Remove ‘Ideological Bias’ From Powerful Models
A directive from the National Institute of Standards and Technology eliminates mention of “AI safety” and “AI fairness.”
https://www.wired.com/story/ai-safety-i … ica-first/

trumplation: no safeguards against being openly biased.

yet another executive order. if this were obama, i'd have "dictator" screamed in my ear every day. under trump? crickets.

i wonder if this will affect musk'd grok, or if there will be an exception. who am i kidding, of course they don't mean sympathetic models.

before even getting into the ridiculous claim that trump cares one iota about american innovation.

right, 'teaching' would be my first guess at his job based on that outfit alone. the sweater puts a 'guidance counsellor' spin on things. some black full-rim glasses and he's rocking the stanley tucci.

i put away cargo pants over 15 years ago. it's weird hearing they're back (i know it's been off and on, but still)? even for tourists. most of what i see here are jeans or slacks? even shorts seem like more of a rarity, summer months or no. cargo/polo would very much stand out at the local supermarket.

re: "we regret our trump vote but the woke stuff was just so annoying, you know."

i've yet to hear one of these people explain to me what woke stuff is or what about it annoyed them. it's a phantasm.

meanwhile other trumpers are actually celebrating the gutting of stem expertise and the enshittification of government jobs. to them, it's just deserts. for something.

Fear and resignation after ‘world’s most powerful company’ pays Trump a $100 billion ‘protection fee’
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/13/tech/tai … index.html

lol

tucked polos feel like a thing for 60yos and golfers with beer guts, or students at a christian private school.

i'm not strictly a fashion person, but have usually followed this setup: mostly tuck polos if wearing a belt. if slacks, have a belt. khakis (i don't have any rn) or jeans? untucked. need something more formal? wear a button-up. those and tees are a lot less ambiguous between smart-casual and business-casual. IMO

i remember you talking about how your classroom was kept at a high temperature, mac. i do not envy that. gross.

i think (check me on this, mac) that american history in public education here is usually favorable towards the united states. i could probably dig through my memories and recount the bullet points of some fairly dull-eyed lessons where (apart from "slavery is bad" in the most vague, responsibility-shirking sense) american history is thick layer of polish on a fresh turd still steaming-hot on the dew-covered morning grass. by the time high school gets around to hinting that maybe things were actually worse than that, it's already too late.

imo the trump regime stripping 'unfavorable' language and materials from libraries to federal documentation is the logical conclusion of this oft-disingenuous drive to make usa smell like a rose. talking about one of the firsts in military women or non-whites to do a thing so late in american history is probably an uncomfortable reminder for insecure bigots that Things Happened.

e: i've never had the displeasure of sitting in on a history class in the south, but i've heard stories of the confederate ball-fondling they get up to in the bible belt.

SuperJail Warden wrote:

"What about China?" is bad deflection from European history. But we also desperately should be looking at China with skepticism.

the point of all this:

dilbert wrote:

Had the tables been turned any other culture would have annihilated and enslaved us, probably the Chinese will yet, this won't be fun and I expect to see it.

who, exactly? the aztecs?

china, an example of a country that could have, but was in no great hurry to colonise and put the planet under its foot if the europeans didn't Do It First.

for all china didn't exactly have a pacifistic history, european powers were a much more virulent batch of mold when it comes to hearts of iron map painting.

it seems really dubious to me hearing that china would have conquered the planet if it hadn't been for europeans pillaging several continents. didn't seem like their thing at all.

a swarm of cops protect a cybertruck with their bodies like it was the potus himself.

‘How embarrassing’: NYPD shows up in full force to protect Cybertruck on Women’s March route
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/nypd-cyb … ens-march/

While no reports of damage have cropped up in the wake of the march, Musk’s armored vehicle of the future isn’t safe at joyous events, either.

Recently, a Cybertruck that showed up at Mardi Gras was pelted with beads.

lol




i thought these things were supposed to be 'invincible.' why do we need to pay cops to be meat shields.

a watch box. i'd keep that stuff in a safe.

chatgpt knows what a payphone is. it's over for humanity.

to massively overgeneralize, right-wingers are so close to being correct when they blame antagonistic government and the tax system for struggling middle and low classes. but they have a massive blind spot for the shenanigans of conservative policy and the trump administrations, and for the cherry-picked rich who they perceive as being on their side. very easily distracted by stuff like trans bathroom rights or how visible the gays are allowed to be, and how much a (republican) politician promised hinted they'd lower the prices of commodities by (regardless of failure to deliver).

super frustrating stuff. i hope some of the people turned away from medical school can find better abroad.

i've heard conservatives justify constant american war as we need to keep our soldiers in practice. aren't they worried about the bleeding away of medical expertise? no? oh, right. experts are bad and doctors caused covid or something.

literally looks like a grid of ai-gen slop result: "christmas house couple, red sweater, forest green sweater, looking at viewer." don't gotta specify white, that stuff's probably automatic.

bottom right: "we have jaime and cersei lannister at home"

side ask, is there like a special union for hallmark actors?

re: the people longing for the hallmark movie stuff, if you will direct your attention to the basic level of attention these characters evidentally put into their appearance: it would appear the reason more wasps don't have the hallmark wasp lifestyle is because they eat fast food too much and never exercise.

i think i have a basic grasp of what the usual plot of these are. woman leaves boyfriend for hometown heartthrob, right? aren't the male leads usually kind of empathetical and more fun for the female lead to be around than their high-maintenance and/or stereotypically inattentive city boyfriend? or is it all still just highly creepy stuff that the female lead is inexplicably drawn into.

prompt to chatgpt wrote:

"the pass is snowed in and you're not getting out of town even in a helicopter. why don't you stay at my place," Lunk McLank purred into her ear. "uh, thank you no, i'm fine where i'm staying, i'll just pay for some more nights," she said, highly creeped out. over the next few days, the entire, weirdly chrismassy town of smiling cultists spends the next week chipping away at her defenses and trying to herd her back to the local bachelor prince who smells of middle class cologne. when she finally escapes via snowmobile, she drops a tip to the FBI over payphone. years later, news breaks about a mass grave of white women in their 20s and 30s uncovered there. it's a town-wide conspiracy, and there are mass arrests. the camera pans to a convoy of busses showing up to transport

anyway,

(cis, straight white) men: time to look into maybe inheriting a christmas tree farm on the outskirts of a deeply red county town! nurse your nice guy schtick, and do plenty of sit-ups.
(cis, straight white) women: tradwife was the true path to happiness all along! stick it to your unhappy, liberal city friends. if you aren't blond or deeply brunette, there's always the bottle.

in reality though, i expect much of the audience are lonely people in unhappy relationships. among those, maybe the kind of old people who scowled at a black family movie at the dvd rental store when they caught a glimpse of it on a shelf in the 90s. "why does everything have to be about black people now?"

the average wasp probably isn't going to be given a cozy lodge by trump, anyway.

the prius was uncool! south park told everyone about it

this has been repeatedly making the rounds on social media. finally watched a bit of it.

my head.



elsewhere:

KQED wrote:

German Tourist Held For Weeks At CA Detention Center

German Tourist Held Indefinitely In San Diego-Area Immigrant Detention Facility
It was meant to be a perfect reunion. Amelia Lofving, a designer, had just moved to Los Angeles. Her friend Jessica Brösche, a tattoo artist from Germany, was spending the winter in Mexico. The two planned to meet up in Tijuana, cross the border, and head to LA. “We were going to have a month of just making art,” said the 37-year-old Lofving. “That was our plan.”

But Brösche, 26, never made it to LA. She’s been in federal immigration custody since Jan. 25 — the day they tried to cross into the United States through the San Ysidro Port of Entry. Brösche had her German passport, confirmation of her visa waiver to enter the country, along with a copy of her return ticket back to Berlin, Lofving said. A U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent pulled Brösche aside for a secondary inspection. CBP agents at the border accused Brösche of planning to violate the terms of the visa waiver program by intending to work as a tattoo artist during her trip to LA, Lofving said.

KPBS independently confirmed that Brösche is in federal custody. CBP declined to comment on the specifics of the case, citing privacy concerns.

After nearly a month, Lovfing was able to reunite with Brösche.  Lofving said Brösche told her about her time in custody — and a particularly difficult nine-day period in what amounted to solitary confinement in a CBP holding cell. “She says it was like a horror movie,” Lofving said. “There were people screaming from the rooms all around. They are feeding her through a little mailbox hole. She didn’t have a blanket, she didn’t have a pillow. It’s basically a yoga mat on the ground and a toilet on the corner.” Brösche is expected to be on a flight Tuesday afternoon, where she’ll be deported to Germany.

https://www.kqed.org/news/12030586/germ … ion-center

could have just sent her home. why do we have to pay taxes to torture tourists in some oinker oubliette?

"intending to work as a tattoo artist," even if true, being imprisoned like a stray dog shouldn't be the consequence.

did jay actually happen or was it all just a collective, lucid dream about deck building brought on by the ravages of covid-19.

i run into guys like that online sometimes and they sound even wackier over voip. makes work-conservatives sound like guests on all things considered.

it is poetic that musk has the president acting the part of shady car salesman. they're even threatening "illegal boycotters."

better go get a tesla to prove your loyalty! watch that stock climb! or else.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/11/business … index.html

from ongoing series of trump-tracking posted here - https://imgur.com/gallery/what-happened … 39-5LSfaqW

not enough time in the day.

looking forward to getting nuked because donald trump wanted a gaza hotel. /s

seems like yesterday that one guy got in trouble for calling trump "grifter in chief"

anyway, now the tesla protestors are "domestic terrorists."

*checks notes*

i tought maga was proud of domestic terrorism. they had it up on their readerboard and everything

adapted and regurgitated from established rhetoric (thanks rush limbaugh, et al).

the nice thing about non-reading voters and people who "aren't into politics" is you can take the american interchangeability and vagueness of stuff like 'socialism' and 'communism' that are already established trigger words, and apply it to whatever the communist, socialist, liberal Democrats are doing.

and it works. i occasionally get to hear about The Communists in power in liberal american cities. guess who these guys are voting for.

i watched a couple equalizer clips. the movie makes zero sense out of context. the guy's like a gotham rogue whose special thing is stop watches, only he kills bad guys? what is going on.

i may have watched these like 20 years ago. now i need a brain mint after seeing a corkscrew rammed into a guy's jaw. so much more disturbing than fantastical violence.

you can always bail on a long show.

am i supposed to feel empathy for elon musk being afraid of big bad assassins? i thought empathy was the weakness of the west. toughen up, slave mine nepo.

Dilbert_X wrote:

These days don't many schools have to suffer 'child-centred teaching'? Isn't that far more flexible than it used to be?
I know it means the teacher has to spend 90% of their time on the kid with ADHD but still.

look to mac on this. i'm very much commenting from a comfy armchair.

i very much like the idea of not leaving children behind if it can all be helped, and there should be systems and funding in place to make that happen while not disrupting other student's concentration. i've mentioned before, problems are on a more holistic scale than what schools could address even if they got more staff and funding and facilities and didn't have to min-max for filling classrooms to capacity. and for america, trump 2.0 is certainly not going to fix things.

Well, I had my interest in reading completely destroyed

well, what you can do (since you're setting yourself apart form the general population a lot) is overcome your learned aversion and get reading, even if just out of spite. are you going to let some schmucks who may even be dead by now rule you? you may come to enjoy a book when it isn't attached to a banal assignment. try a book club and expand your horizons beyond ww2 reprintia.

still doesn't mean kids should have phones in school.

that's probably going to be a losing battle. they couldn't even get calculators away from students decades ago, and those weren't (usually) a central part of a student's social life.

school takes up too much of a person's life. you get up while it's still dark, sleep through first period, leave way past noon, and then you're doing homework when the sky begins to darken. "it builds work ethic!" celebrated boomer parents who later lamented mobile phones bringing their work life home. lol.

when my elderly family got sick, they spent time recovering. when kids my age got sick, they got a pile of homework assignments to keep them company. get rid of homework.

musk literally tweets like navy seal copypasta. he's so painfully out of date.

e: i know this comment doesn't even touch on the perpetual problem of musk's international meddling and now his unilateral 'diplomacy' as DOGE's finest.

at some level kids just need to buckle down and learn the best they can, but imo the way some material is taught isn't very engaging. spending years of  having your interest in fascinating topics drummed out of you by some of the worst misanthropic orators imaginable doesn't really teach a love for reading and knowledge. this isn't the path to a population hooked on lifelong learning.

some responsibility probably rests on shoulders of parents for sitting idly while their toddlers are always plugged in to some distraction for short attention spans.

before even getting into social violence done to people on a broader scale through such as harmful policy and malicious or negligent city planning.

we could be defeating toxoplasmosis but donald trump has banned research on everything.

re: above - evoking memories of Freelancer

—

the "babble stations" as you put it, dilbs, are on an entirely different mental wavelength. it's the kind of background noise that evolved into buddy podcasts. can't speak for oz, but some of that stuff can actually quite funny if you're in the mood and listen to what they're actually saying. but I can't imagine any time is a good time for an introvert's proud introvert who gets chased out of a book store when a clerk tries to chat them up about the Heinlein book they're buying from said store.

here in washington, we've got soundtrack cinema. i tune in every now and then, sparks nostalgia.

online - https://www.space101fm.org/program/soundtrack-cinema/
https://www.space101fm.org/about/

kixi, great for driving through towns that have 'historic' (america, lol) districts: https://live.kixi.com/listen/



some of the expositional chatter can be fun, too.

It's tragic that so many sci-fi games utilize 3-minute, generic orchestral tracks destined for the mute button when they could have something like this in their spaceport and a player could go for hours before starting to hear it loop.

you'd think Death would be used to that sort of thing by now.

also, "pet parent" has to be one of the most obnoxious neologisms of the modern world. "this is my son," that, sir, is a dog. it may sound arbitrary, but i think people put an unhealthy amount of stock in their relationships with their pets. does it help justify all the costs of preventative vet care?

whatever the case, i'm going to expect a confused, unhealthily spoiled animal with bizarre habits when i hear that. "and this is fluffy's chair at the dining room table," what.

side note: cats have skull-cracking force in their bites. that animal can open up a rat head (which should be deterrent enough for letting cat teeth touch skin) like a walnut. imo, if you're bitten by a cat and your skin isn't damaged, it's not a real bite. who does that tiktok stuff anyway, playing injured or dead to see how a pet reacts. there's probably comics for that too.

the future is now old man

is that even allowed in 2025? sounds like lawsuit material. let the cafeteria and vending machines handle that stuff. imo, if i were a teacher, i'm not about to get blamed for making a kid sick.

i can't think of a single reason for a trump commissar to groom kids like that except as an in for their future votes. did she look constipated while handing out snacks? conservatives hate giving kids free stuff, don't they?

an adult giving candy to kids not their own (outside of holiday events like halloween) is creepy optics, man. if she has a sketchy economy van beater i'm gonna lose it.