It’s not going to collapse over night. Instead, things are going to get worse and worse gradually, with each step backward becoming the new normal.

Like the proverbial frog in boiling water, we’ll all just carry on until one day we’re like just chilling in our debris city, hoping we don’t have to sell any teeth for bottle caps in order to buy food today when some ghoul comes storming in and shoots up the place trying to murder a harmless old man with a dog, and then some naive vault dweller tries to intervene, but she only makes the problem worse and we’ll all wonder how the hell we got here.

Are you trying to say “Well the US sucks, so… don’t… don’t criticize Russia… man…”

Or are you trying to say “States gonna be states and do shitty state things.”

I have a kid, I spent 10 years working with kids professionally, and I agree with this dude.

In fact, lots of people, myself included, are drawn to leftist anarchism BECAUSE of lessons we learned about the failures of authoritarianism in school from parents and teachers. It’s always super annoying to see parents and teachers settling comfortably into an authoritarian role with their own kids, after hearing them wax emphatically about the effects of authoritarianism in adult society. I’m surrounded by hypocrites, and it’s not harmless. It’s like everybody either forget what it’s like to be kids, or think that the lessons of adulthood give them license to stop caring about those “little” problems, (and be fricken condescending in the process) when actually they just find it “easier” or it “feels safer” to them.

I have friends who we’re excellent teachers, but left the school system in absolute despair because they went in intending to be collaborative, entertaining teachers and passionate advocates for the kids in their care… Only to run up against all the bureaucratic walls the education system throws up to prevent exactly that and create as much conformity as possible… And then the icing on the cake is the vast majority of parents who just don’t get it, Don’t even try to get it, Don’t listen, know what they know, their opinions are their opinions and talking to them is just effing hopeless.

Whenever I’ve dealt with really difficult children, 9 times out of 10 you meet the parents and you’re like “Oh, this all makes sense!” (I can actually only think of three exceptions and two of those were clinical sociopaths). Or you go to work with a school (I’ve worked with and at dozens of schools) and you’re like “Oh, I understand why the kids from this school that I see in my program are always behaving in X, Y and Z dysfunctional ways. How is everyone this clueless and incompetent??” I have watched teachers utterly fail to teach or connect with the kids in their charge, and then watched those same teachers play politics and keep their positions while teachers who are doing a great job get let go (or forced out through social bs) because they want to ignore all that crap. I have had teachers come up to me when I’m running a program or event at their school and had them say “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I saw the kids in your program and those are all the most difficult children we have!” And I’m like “these kids are fine! You’re an authoritarian in an authoritarian environment, aren’t you??”

And I’m literally surrounded by adults who like think they know what they’re doing, and aren’t even trying to get it and MAN do they have opinions they want to share and it pisses me the fuck off.

My kid creates super good boundaries, he emphasizes kindness in communication in ways I was totally unable to do it his age, he advocates for himself (and other kids) like someone a decade older, and if he’s on his phone in class, it’s because the teacher is failing to engage the class. End of discussion. When I see that situation, I’m almost always like “I could teach this class and these kids would not be on their phones, and I have the experience under my belt to prove it.” (And I have seen shit like that).

I’m not arguing it wasn’t rape. I’m arguing

• It’s not equivilent to violent assault, or drugging or blackmail or something like that, but the word in the headline implies that it is. This is a criticism of “get clicks” journalism, not of protecting children or using appropriate language to describe things that are not OK.

• Young people are stupid and deserve understanding and forgiveness. If there HAD been violence or blackmail or something I would not feel the same way about this.

This does not make me some MRA bro being like “it’s fine man.” That’s not what I’m saying. What I am is someone who has worked with and mentored a lot of young people and the culture is NOT kind to them around issues of sexuality. It’s trying to get kinder, but we’re still WAY too confused and reactionary and don’t think about these situations on a case by case basis, we think about them like “Gross man!” And that creates tons of injustice. You don’t have to like it, you don’t have to be comfortable with it (you shouldn’t be comfortable with stuff like this), but that doesn’t mean your reactions can’t feed into a problematic zeitgeist. And the news is always going to be like “rape, rape, rape (click here to learn more)!” That’s not always fair, because that word can mean lots of different things (all bad, but not all equal) and our imaginations rush straight to the worst version.

That’s all I’m saying. I knew I would get comments like this when I did. To me that proves my point a little.

What outrages me is 19 year olds going to jail for having sex with 17 year old, or 15 year olds getting put on sex offender lists for filming themselves and sharing it on line. These things are an awful problem, that it’s hard for us to talk about and address. The Right ALWAYS wants to punish sex outside their excepted social boundaries (or any opportunity they get really) and the left is like “Protect and liberate children! (for good reason) but DON’T think too hard about the edge cases because OMG protect the children!!!”

You’re right, this isn’t an edge case. He violated a big boundary, took advantage of what was probably a huge power imbalance, he was definitely old enough that he should know better and he faced his consequences. And they WEREN’T that extreme because the cases aren’t all equal.

All I’m saying is maybe he doesn’t deserve to live the rest of his life as a social pariah because of a case of bad judgement at 21. You won’t change my mind about that. If that makes me gross to you… ok.

I understand why it’s important to call statutory rape rape, but it creates these headlines where it sounds like this dude violently assaulted a child. He didn’t. This is a case where a stupid young person went on an internet date with and ended up having sex with someone who was WAY too young (but was FULLY into what was happening and trying to help make it happen). He’s probably grown a lot in the ten years since the incident and is able to be like “yeah, I was young, stupid and horny and I got myself in a bunch of trouble with bad judgement. Never the fuck again.”

But news sites gotta get clicks and people gotta have things to be outraged about.

Hmm. Driving porn viewers who value their privacy underground couldn’t possibly have any negative consequences I can think of.

One of us!

Linux uh… Finds a way.

Crawl out through the fallout baby.

I don’t even see that. My brain must be broken.

I have it working on Debian, it wasn’t THAT hard, but I never got it to work with the GPU so it was SUPER slow. I’ve since found XTTS2 which set up super easy, comes with a web GUI and just supports my GPU out of the box.

I do remember some posts on r/sex back in the day that were absolutely kids (teens) and you could tell by how

• Freaked out they were about totally normal stuff.
• Excited they were about how great sex is.

I remember there was a funny day when there were two top upvoted posts on r/sex (probably in like 2017) where one was like

• It turns me on when my boyfriend masturbates to me, am I normal?

And the other one was like

• I (female bodied, they/them / nb) am a furry and my wife and I like to pretend that I’m a wolf and I’m hunting and eating her. What can we make that will look and feel like real organs I can “rip” out of her stomach and eat, and what could we use for fake blood that would be the easiest to clean up?

People kept linking the second one in the first one and reassuring this poor girl that she’s totally normal.

Honestly, sometimes when I can’t sleep, watching eSports helps (especially Starcraft II). IDK why, but put on a super chill caster like Wardii and I’m out in 20 minutes.

Having some loud, disruptive ad punch through my ad blocker and try to tell me about Liberty Mutual when I’ve almost dozed off is close to the most rage inducing experience imaginable. With Youtube now working to inject adds directly into video streams, I’m actually anxious about the future of my best sleep aid.

Here’s some ideas:

• Put limits on the amount of residential property that can be owned by investors in a given market. Something like “In order for an investor to purchase a residential property within this particular municipality, no more than 40% of existing residential housing can be owned by investors, excepting where A) The investor in question is an individual or family who intend to reside in the property and share it with one or more roommates or B) the investor in question is an individual or family who are moving out of a unit they already own intending to purchase another one and convert the original home into a rental property.” Alternatively "No more than 20% of the housing market in the municipality may be owned by entities who’s majority ownership A) resides outside of the municipality or B) who’s ownership possesses a combined net worth in excess of $10,000,000 (automatically adjusting for inflation over time), excepting newly constructed properties intended for sale.

• Reform property taxes to avoid squeezing out homeowners. I.E. Property taxes shall, in perpetuity, be assessed at the purchase price of the home when the current residents moved in. Meaning… If you’re a landlord, you don’t WANT your tenants to move out because then your property taxes will go up. Also “No insurance company may charge more for home owners or renters insurance than X percent of the current property tax rate.” And “No landlord shall charge more than X times the current property tax rate, where X is an adjustable number slightly higher than the current competitive market rate.”

• Pin a carbon tax on retail or office businesses in a given area to scale with whatever commute they require for workers who live far away. Make it high enough to strong arm business owners into paying (and charging enough) that they save money on higher pay rates for employees so they can afford to live locally in affluent areas and areas undergoing gentrification. I’m totally OK with employers being like “We prefer to hire local (or localish) because of this tax” to a perspective employee. I’m OK with it being high enough for business owners to feel it, and with business owners screaming about it as much as they want. Affluent residents want to fucking shop locally and they WILL, even if that means local retail has to raise their prices. If it puts you out of business, good. Someone else will show up to take your place and will treat their employees better.

Not that you would EVER see ANY of these ideas proposed in WSJ.

I grew up around the rich. They are short sighted idiots just like the rest of us, but with a whole lot more entitlement, self confidence and belief that things will work out fine (this matches their lived experience). They are just as prone to magical thinking and superstitious beliefs as anyone else, but NO ONE CAN TELL THEM THEY’RE WRONG. They lose touch with reality, because the human brain needs honest feedback from it’s community in order to calibrate it’s sense of reality and hardly anyone is honest with the rich to their faces.

The point is, there is no endgame. It would be better if there was. A BUNCH of the rich believe the End Times are nigh, a bunch more believe that capitalism and innovation will solve whatever environmental disasters industrial society is creating. I know of one multi billionaire (the mom of someone I went to high school with) who pays a Buddhist “holy man” a very generous salary to follow her around and be her full time spiritual advisor. IIRC, she thinks the enlightened will ascend to some higher plane of existence before the environmental apocalypse consumes the rest of us (she still funds various environmentalist causes). Meanwhile, Zuck and the other tech bros seriously think they’re playing Fallout IRL and Musk thinks we’re doomed unless we build a Mars colony.

It would better if there WERE a plan, or an end game or big conspiracy. We could maybe hold some actual people accountable for deliberately driving the planet into the ditch. But there’s not. Just a bunch of self serving, delusional idiots with wealth and power.

this.

Yes, but nothing real came of them. The US government has a long and well recorded history of spending money on pseudoscience, even well after it’s been debunked, as long as there are True Believers in the chain of command.

And the conspiracy theory community has a long and even more dramatic history of taking those mole hills and turning them into mountains (especially if grifters can sell books and / or T-shirts and / or weird copper sculptures that are supposed to “protect” you from it).

Look, I grew up with parents (and a wide community) who believed in psychic shit, crystal healing, telepathy, getting messages from the Akoshic record, what evs. It’s NOT real and also believing it is is NOT harmless. You’re gonna find PLENTY of misinformation about what people “believe” but if you look into any of it, you’re going to discover that somewhere along the line someone channeled something or someone like David Icke or Garahm Hancock is involved, or someone is selling tickets to their lecture or psychic seminar.

Honestly, only if this is a roleplay community. We’re getting into the realms of crackpots and conspiracy theories here.

That sounds like pseudoscience to me.

On the other hand, there have been rather dramatic advances in brain / computer interfaces and using machine learning to interpret electrical signals from the human brain. The good news there is that every brain is different, the machines need to learn each brain individually (a model trained to pull dream images out of my brain will pull just gibberish out of yours).

So far, the researchers would need your close cooperation in order to train a machine to understand even a little bit of what’s going on in your mind. This tech is nowhere near being used for interrogation.

TIL, Trump is just autocomplete.