paultimate14

I get that it's an infinite energy generator, not an infinite electrical generator. But you might as well finish the job and add the part where the energy heats water into steam for the turbines, just to be thorough.

Firewood banks are a fantastic tool for teaching rural people that socialism is actually fucking great.

Assuming that ALL rural people voted a singular way and have singular beliefs is incredibly prejudiced and dangerous. I live in a northeastern US city that has been solidly blue for my entire life, but I still see plenty of houses and cars with Trump merch. Heck, a lot of rural people have been disenfranchised by voter suppression tactics. A lot of these people are illiterate. They're victims.

And where do you draw the line? This inevitably leads to "purity testing" all of the "blue" folks to figure out just how "blue" they are, and that's kind of gross.

These people are my neighbors and fellow humans. Give them their fucking firewood, food stamps, libraries, healthcare, and all of the other material support any reasonable government should in 2025.

The real enemies are the wealthy elites. The fossil fuel magnates, the wealthy elites who own the land and control the lumber. They absolutely love that you're picking on a bunch of uneducated and powerless poor people and drawing attention away from the people with power who made the system this way.

I would not call PE a "bubble". It's not something people are just tossing money into because there are nebulous promises and the numbers are going up. PE is involved in EVERYTHING - restaurants, housing, tech, manufacturing, finance, marketing. It's not an industry, just a way of investing that bypasses pretty much all of the safeguards and regulations societies have put in place for public trading. And I don't expect it to "pop". Either it continues, and all of the wealth continues to be concentrated towards the top, or the populace manages to take enough power back to get legislation, regulation, and enforcement to add transparency and rules to private equity.

Something along the lines of "well I actually don't like anime!". And started talking about how people expect him to be an anime fan, and how he lived in Japan for a while and liked manga a lot but not so much anime.

It was a a party with a lot of "alternative" people, most of whom probably would just say "yeah I like anime". I think the guy was expecting me to say that so that he could that he could then subvert expectations, but my more neutral response kind of derailed things.

1. Bigotry and prejudice is always bad, even if it's not against a "protected class". Hating on white people, straight people, cis people, men, or anyone else for the way they were born, what their ancestors did makes the world a worse place. Heck, "white" itself is a nebulous concept that changes over time and is different depending on which racist you're talking to. Just because someone resembles your oppressor does not make them your enemy.

2. Kind of related, but I don't broadly judge categories of things. I was at a party recently and someone asked me if I liked anime, and I responded that I like some anime. Most of it I don't like, but that's not specific to anime. In my experience, roughly 80-90% of all media is somewhere between "garbage" and "mediocre", and it's the 10-20% at the top that I look for. A lot of my favorite bands happen to be metal, but I'm not going to like every band that uses distorted guitars.

Perhaps another way of phrasing it is that I usually find that the parameters which define genre are often separate from the parameters that determine my personal enjoyment.

My theory is that most people are more concerned with the social groups around media than the media itself.

I would expand that to body modification in general. Tattoos, piercings, hair loss/removal treatments, shoe lifts, fake nails. Heck, you could even expand it to clothing and fashion.

For me it comes down to cost-benefit analysis. For me personally I find it pretty easy to change my mind, so that's usually "cheaper" than trying to change my body. Or you could say that I don't see much "benefit" to such changes to my appearance. To let go of my desire to appear a certain way, to stop caring about how others see me. Some might call that cis privelege, but I would argue it's something most cis people (at least in the US) struggle with too.

With the people I hang out with, i'm usually the only one without piercings to tattoos. Often I'm the only person with naturally colored hair (I do hope I go grey before losing it because it would be pretty cool to look like an old wizard, but if I lose my hair first I'll just embrace it).

At the same time, you could extend the conversation the other way to things like prosthetics. I just saw a meme on Lemmy yesterday about a closeted trans person who had a car accident with a moose and needed extensive surgery afterwords. So rather than restoring how they used to look they took the opportunity to fully transition. From my perspective, the opportunity cost of transitioning was lowered in that case.

I want to see humanity continue to pursue technology to reduce these costs though. People have been writing fiction for centuries about gender-swapping, even just for a couple of days. If there really was some magical pill that could swap your gender for a day or two, or was easily reversible, or if you could just transfer your brain between artificial bodies, I could see that leading to a lot more empathy in the world.

Somehow I don't think Trent Reznor wrote "Closer" in an attempt to get laid lol.

I kind of like the idea of using the word "slop" solely for AI and finding other words to describe stuff that's just poorly made. Trying to ascribe "slop" to other things dilutes the word and will help AI companies to keep doing what they are doing.