Every REAL MAN knows that going to the bathroom is totally gay, it’s a place where men go and pull out their dicks and handle them, sometimes right in front of each other and they listen to each other’s body functions.

Real men will go pee in the parking lot to assert dominance, trust me, this is how you do it.

I am really about to throw my morality away and start grifting the FUCK out of these clowns.

5G defense necklaces, vaccine-removal potions, distilled masculinity in a bottle, magnets you shove up your nose to keep trans kids out of your bank account, whatever, you name it. Since we’re about to lose foreign production it’s time to fire up those 3D printers and Etsy accounts.

While I’m being cheeky, I’m also not. The world has changed, the old ways are dying because there is too much opposition to truth and reality. Of fucking COURSE a genetics company is going to produce complete fantasy creatures and call them “Dire Wolves” and you know what? I WOULD TOO, because this is how you survive now, this is the world we’ve become through no fault of our own.

Fun fact, global climate change is actually changing the temperature ranges that many fungus can exist in. Last of Us probably won’t come to pass because the cordyceps fungus evolved to zombify ants and other insects that it existed alongside with over millions of years, and we haven’t had any kind of constant contact with a similar fungus strain, so the chances of it being able to interact with our physiology is really, really remote.

But we can absolutely get really harsh strains of Valley Fever in areas where the infectious fungus doesn’t usually exist, and fungal infections are incredibly hard to treat.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11034633/

That’s still 2005, not “decades” ago, and it’s still a hype piece that’s been capitalized on by every other network because fear sells, excitement sells, disaster movies sell.

No serious geologist believes that there’s going to be a Yellowstone supervolcano, maybe ever because shit don’t necessarily work that way. The magma chamber is almost 80% solidified, and we’re talking 10,000 kilometers of rock. The worst case, we will see pressure vents forming and spewing ash, but likely not even THAT in our lifetime.

You have a fantastic moderation history, I’m legit honored to have someone like you tell me “goodbye” it means I’m doing something right.

Not even, there was a discovery channel documentary a number of years ago and it’s been constant hype and bullshit about a made-up crisis ever since. If you’re still taking TLC and discovery channel programming as science at this point, you’re unsavable.

Yellowstone is due to destroy itself any day now.

You are stupid.

It’s okay, I don’t mean that as an attack. I mean it as a challenge. Educate yourself and read actual science.

Would be a shame if the millions of people who cherish our national forests, such as outdoors-people, survivalists, veterans and preppers, just decided that they don’t want their woods chopped down.

Sure would be a shame if anything kept happening to that expensive logging equipment over and over.

I really hope to see him buried soon.

Under massive voter disapproval polls and impeachment proceedings.

I know exactly what you mean, I still frequent a lot of writing communities and that “cardboard” feeling is spreading. Most young people who have an interest in writing are basically sponges for absorbing how their peers write, so it’s tragic when their peers are machines designed to produce advertiser-friendly ad-copy.

I played around with ChatGTP to see if it could actually improve my writing. (I’ve been writing for decades.)

I was immediately impressed by how “personable” the things are and able to interpret your writing and it’s able to detect subtle things you are trying to convey, so that part was interesting. I also was impressed by how good it is at improving grammar and helping “join” passages, themes and plot-points, it has advantages that it can see the entire writing piece simultaneously and can make broad edits to the story-flow and that could potentially save a writers days or weeks of re-writing.

Now that the good is out of the way, I also tried to see how well it could just write. Using my prompts and writing style, scenes that I arranged for it to describe. And I can safely say that we have created the ultimate “Averaging Machine.”

By definition LLM’s are designed to always find the most probable answers to queries, so this makes sense. It has consumed and distilled vast sums of human knowledge and writing but doesn’t use that material to synthesize or find inspiration, or what humans do which is take existing ideas and build upon them. No, what it does is always finds the most average path. And as a result, the writing is supremely average. It’s so plain and unexciting to read it’s actually impressive.

All of this is fine, it’s still something new we didn’t have a few years ago, neat, right? Well my worry is that as more and more people use this, more and more people are going to be exposed to this “averaging” tool and it will influence their writing, and we are going to see a whole generation of writers who write the most cardboard, stilted, generic works we’ve ever seen.

And I am saying this from experience. I was there when people started first using the internet to roleplay, making characters and scenes and free-form writing as groups. It was wildly fun, but most of the people involved were not writers, but many discovered literation for the first time there, it’s what led to a sharp increase in book-reading and suddenly there were giant bookstores like Barns & Noble popping up on every corner. They were kids just doing their best, but that charming, terrible narration became a social standard. It’s why there are so many atrocious dialogue scenes in shows and movies lately, I can draw a straight line to where kids learned to write in the 90’s. And what’s coming next is going to harm human creativity and inspiration in ways I can’t even predict.

It’s part of the “nothing ever happens” generation desperate to have a narrative to follow. If they’re going to feel disengaged and disconnected from how complicated politics has become in an increasingly complicated world… WELL MIGHT AS WELL DUMB THIS SHIT BACK DOWN, OOHRAH WWE WRESTLEMANIA YEAH BROTHA ACTION

I too grew up in an age of movies like Star Wars fighting an overtly fascist empire, of Indiana Jones killing nazis, of countless kid’s shows and cartoons emphasizing values like being accepting and not judging people by appearances, of shows like Star Trek explaining the complexity of human societies and using aliens to relay messages of understanding and empathy with others, of science and educational shows like everything on PBS… I thought FOR SURE that these lessons being seen by everyone would lead to a brighter future of mutual compassion and understanding between people.

Holy shit was I wrong. People didn’t watch ANY of that shit, and if they did, they didn’t think about it, and certainly didn’t take any lessons from it. A vast majority of media-consumers don’t engage with their entertainment I’ve learned, they just experience it and move on without any attempt at making mental effort. Even the lightest mental effort is too much for most people. I’m literally shocked we have the society we do knowing now exactly how ignorant most people are.

He didn’t win by being consistent. Hypocrisy is WHY people voted for him. They thought he was the only one who would “do the hard things” by being cruel to the people who are hurting everyone. That’s the narrative at least, and while you can literally write libraries on the flaws, inconsistencies and logical discrepancies in Trump and the Republican narratives, the fact remains that most people are vulnerable to storylines.

Not moral flaws. Not character. Not record or experience. The only thing people largely, as a group, care about is JUST how someone makes them feel in that moment. And a lot of poorly educated, mentally unwell people saw and heard Trump lying to the people they believe were the cause of all our woes, and that’s why they voted for him.

If we ever want another democracy that works, we have to understand that our population is genetically and physically identical to the beings who were clubbing each other’s heads in during ten thousand years of ice age glaciers and primitive hardship. We survived those times by forming tight-knight groups and telling ourselves stories for how to survive. We’re doing the same things right now, but someone else is guiding those stories. Either we stop the storytellers or we make better stories that people will want to repeat. Those are our only options.

I bet he thought people who did things honest and built community were fools despite us often being happier than folks like him

I see you’ve met him (or his archetype) because yes, his favorite past-time was condemning the “sheep” for living their lives in suburbia, paycheck to paycheck, how useless education was, how worthless so many kinds of people are, how miserable life would be living like so, so many people in the world who are happy and loving with their families. He railed against the “spoils of babylon” while sipping champagne and brandy from his private restaurant booth.

He was crushingly miserable and blamed everyone and everything else for it and became physically violent at anyone who dared to challenge his assertions that he was the perpetual victim. He drank himself to death alone and broke because he had burned every bridge in his life and squandered a fortune.

I feel like this is the key reason why the worst people are the most successful. I cannot count the number of opportunities I’ve passed over in life that would have just required me to lie to someone, to inflate my worth, to take something that I haven’t earned, and so on. It’s so natural for me to think in terms of morality and equity behind my decision making that I don’t even consider alternatives.

And thus I’m over 40 and broke and will die working.

edit: just in retrospect, I figured I would mention my father. He was a man who was remarkably similar to our current president/king. Same hair and everything, the only difference was he drank like a fish. He had ZERO qualms about lying, he carried bizarre lies to his grave just to keep anyone the satisfaction of calling him out on even the smallest things. Lying came so easily to him that he built a multi-million dollar empire on lies, on borrowing money from one lender to pay another, of drug dealers and gangs and organized crime, of the very worst people in the world following him around like scavenger jackals hoping to catch a shred or crumb from the waste and excess my father surrounded himself with. I watched millions of dollars pass through his hands (and up his nose) and he never felt anything about it, he felt like it was never enough, that he deserved more and the people who suffered for it deserved their pain. I am telling this story because a lot of people think it’s not real, that there are not truly dishonest people in the world, and everything we’re all so contentious about is just misunderstandings and differences of perspective.

NO. There are lying liars who will look you in the face and tell complete falsehoods to you and smile as they do so, and they will delight in it. You are not aware of human darkness and you need to get it together. You NEED to understand how bad people can be, and how much people really LIE.

but since the pole still won’t fit it either punches holes in the barn or shatters.

Latest research is suggesting that the observer from the pole’s perspective sees the far door open before the near door, basically reversing the order of events. (Assuming the barn doors close briefly around to contain the pole, and then open again to let it through. The Barn sees the entire pole momentarily inside the barn with both doors closed, the pole sees itself enter the short barn, the far door closes briefly and then opens letting the front of the pole through, then the back door closes and opens as it passes through. IE: order of events can be recorded differently for each observer without breaking causality.)

The problem with this argument from the fundamental level is that 99% of religious zealots don’t give two shits about your science or facts. There is a whole segment of the human population that has no mind for factual information and just decides to believe whatever they feel.

There is no real arguing with these people, they don’t care about evidence or science, I am quite convinced they don’t even understand things the same way as other people and don’t have an internal mind-voice that works the same way as other people. It’s just a totally different conscious experience, and despite making full use of our science and technology, they don’t exist in a world where that matters.

The hard part about this understanding is you realize there’s no resolution. They can’t be changed because they’re not unsatisfied with their world. A smart person is never satisfied and will always ask questions and even ask questions about the questions. Not these people. They actively are annoyed by questions and even see learning things as a kind of sin or spiritual crime.

So lets save our collective energy and instead focus on making classrooms better funded and knowledge available and unavoidable for the younger children growing up in this world and still developing their minds. I was pulled out at an early age simply by finding a few science books, others can be too.

I cannot fucking stand the fact that we live in the year 2024 and we’re having raging debates about if science has value… ON THE FUCKING GODDAMN INTERNET.

This population deserves the hardships coming, and that’s a really, really terrible thing to say, because the coming hardships are going to be bad.

Do you think people become more conservative with age or is it society becoming more progressive and leaving them behind?

I am getting up there in years and seeing this play out over and over.

I think every generation wants to be more progressive than the last, but we tend to carry baggage of fear and insecurity through the generations. Or more specifically, older people tend to gain the political and monetary capital needed to affect policy and shape our societal outlook and attitude. They will always be more conservative than the younger generation who will want more freedoms and personal rights, inherently, and as the ruling class will clash with newer sensibilities, over and over.

What we’re asking here, is the conservatism reflected in our elders and leadership now broadly more harmful or helpful? Are we out of the touch or is it the kids who are wrong?

I think it’s a mix but mostly it’s not our real problem. Our real problem is that no matter what our age, we have greatly misunderstood how our own existence works. Most people have been taught that they have brains designed to exercise logic and reason and that brains are the best thing ever if you use them and make them smart.

No, our brains are not logical tools. We are not a rational species. There was no “age of enlightenment.” It’s all a hoax. Our brains are tools designed to write a story to explain how you feel. And that’s it. It doesn’t even have to make sense. When we all learn how our brains actually work we will collectively make better decisions, have more compassion for each other, and likely sink into even deeper despair as we all start to realize we have no free will.