What Do You Think Happens First: The Last Human Dies, Or The Last Machine Gives Out?

The perfect drink to wash down my ape biscuits

I have to admit, the Pacific garbage patch excites me a little. What freakish(endearing) microorganisms are breeding out there? The seeds of new life that will emerge when humans and our machines have collapsed into rust and dust

I'll need to read about this more, but I think there's something interesting about temples in the Roman imperial era and server farms today

What are the ethics of advocating violence against machines?

In 1971 Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard. Jimmy Carter assumed office during some of the economic and geopolitical turmoil that followed. Reagan took office, radically changed tax policy to benefit wealthy people, and ushered in a boom era in the economy. He handed off power to his vice president Bush, then Clinton took over during the Internet boom of the 1990s. Bush 2 started the Iraq War, ushering in an era of heavy US military involvement in the Middle East. All US administrations from Truman onward involved themselves in affairs of that part of the world. Obama inherited and continued that era, his main domestic accomplishment being a health insurance for all system that expanded and subsidized the private health insurance market.

Trump came to power and held it until the Covid-19 pandemic. His administration lowered taxes on rich people, disrupted US international agreements, and appointed a large number of judges. The murder by police of George Floyd sparked a wave of protests that occupied major cities for months leading up to the 2020 election. Joe Biden won with a tenuous legislative majority and governed the country during four years of adaptation and recovery from the pandemic and the nation's response to it. The democrats lost control of the House in the 2022 elections.

Donald Trump won the election of 2024 with a majority in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. He invited Elon Musk into the White House and cabinet meetings, and gave Musk unprecedented access to data systems across the federal government through the newly created DOGE. DOGE began directing the firings of masses of government workers, actions that were challenged in the court system.

Kinda feels like George Washington's main leadership traits were tall, charismatic, and handsome. That said, here are some other things he did (and didn't do):

He supported his lifestyle by enslaving dozens of people, claiming to own them and forcing them to work on his plantation.

He got a bunch of people inoculated against smallpox

He released all his slaves only on his and his wife's deaths

He kept together a defensive army for several years without wrecking the landscape or alienating the populace

He was given executive power and ceded it to a democratic(ish) process

He never figured out how to live without enslaving people

He never had a child

He raised up Alexander Hamilton and let him build a banking system

He led a militia force against US citizens in the whisky rebellion

He ordered a 3-year colonial war against native Americans in the Great Lakes region

Some time around World War I, maybe earlier, and definitely by World War II, humans stopped being the scariest thing in the world. For thousands of years, the most terrifying thing to see coming towards you was a group of men, always with metal, often with horses. With the advent of the machine gun, chemical warfare, heavy artillery, airplanes, a mass of people no longer seems so frightening. The scariest thing now is a machine. Victims of modern war often never see the operators, only the plane, the barrel of the tank, the drone that just dropped a grenade on them. Sometimes death takes them totally unawares.

'Military' itself means something different now. No longer a reference to mass human violence, now it means networks of mechanical violence.

the ship of theseus wikipedia article in 2003. 20 years later, after 1792 total edits, 0% of its original phrasing remains. (x)

doing the obligatory atla rewatch rn, and so far the main rewatch-value takeaway has been Uncle POV Unlocked 

tbh i think the funniest phenomena that's been happening in the last couple years is "youtuber, having gone too deep into the research hole, has been made an investigative journalist against their will"