Journalists too. Not too long ago it was quite taboo to kill journalists, especially foreign ones, but the taboo seems to be gone altogether there is no outrage.

The IP sleuthing deserves a gold star!

Philosophy is excellent food for thought, working through a MOOC course (MIT/Yale?) and doing the prescribed readings might strike your fancy. Happy to give more specific recs if you have some existing curiosity about a topic. Side note that it’s difficult to find people to talk to online about serious philosophical topics, the options I’ve seen (discord groups, facebook groups) usually aren’t very engaging but the reading and lectures and contemplation are engaging on your own imo.

Watch ancient history documentaries like the Fall of Civilizations or History with Cy channels on youtube (Fall of Civilizations is also/originally a podcast if you prefer). Whenever I am feeling empty of interesting thoughts this is my go to. When I watch frequently I constantly find my thoughts combining and recombining history with my current experience in a way that feels awfully close to intellectual stimulation. I also find it gives some mildly comforting perspective on current events.

Built to purpose gadgets. Getting into arduino or similar as a hobbyist can be intellectually engaging. The process of identifying something in your space you could enhance then drafting and executing a plan (including some basic programming) is kind of like a puzzle. Building things you don’t need like an LED based checklist for chores that resets every day, a pedestal that spins to give a house plant even sunlight, or a solar powered bird house might be a fun challenge.

Edit to add that if you live near a university professors will usually let you unofficially audit their class if you’re interested in a topic and have time during the week.

That’s wild!!

The chart is on a page discussing this:

My workplace is NSF funded and supports a number of activities designed to increase interest in the discipline among young kids or improve teaching techniques for k-12 teachers. Similarly, we run an REU (Research Experiences for Undergraduates) program to give undergraduate students exposure to hands on research (and hopefully encourage them to stay in the discipline for graduate school).

A majority of our funding still goes to PhDs doing fundamental research, but the pipeline that feeds academic research begins with children, and research funding priorities aren’t blind to that.

Find a nice waterfall and build a hut by it

We could probably recreate the sound without burning gas, the newer electric cars sound like alien ships which is definitely a different vibe

Zaia [president of the Veneto region] defended the wedding and criticized protesters, saying that the celebrations would bring revenue of up to €48 million to local businesses, via the 90 private jets set to carry guests to nearby airports.

Think about our mom and pop private jet businesses!

Widespread fire use by ancient hominids is estimated to have shown up between 400 thousand and 350 thousand years ago. I can’t access the whole article but from the abstract I suspect the research focuses on the increased scale of controlled fire use around 50,000 years ago and the fact that there was enough usage to impact the carbon cycle (consider how much lower a population they had than we do now, but their interactions with fire were already impacting the environment).

The research article is closed access, curious what they do to rule out an increase in naturally occurring fires

You wouldn’t download a car prompt an LLM to output copyrighted work

Flow charts or bullet lists as visual aid. The higher position your interlocutor is in the simpler you should try to keep your point. If you need their input on a project only bring them one A vs B decision at a time.

Regular coffee/espresso does nothing good to my body except make me poop immediately.

BUT my old school had a vending coffee machine that would sometimes break and only put out the coffee sludge with no water and THAT stuff made my hands shake

Agreed, the article is decent though! old reddit habits make me wary to editorialize headlines but I should probably start to do that in cases where it makes sense to

I forget the title but there’s a sci-fi story where there’s a galactic council between sentient creatures but they don’t invite newly discovered sentient species to the council until they survive the milestone where most sentient species nuke themselves out of existence

…it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far – not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world – that competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers.

My sister worked for the florida DOT doing environmental assessments and she said it was quite demoralizing because no matter what the assessment found (project would impact endangered species, waterways, etc) the dept would just write a justification and staple the report to it and do what they originally planned instead of re-routing, adjusting plans, etc.

I definitely agree we have an imagination problem, but I don’t think it’s limited to ‘the left.’ I actually think the issue lies squarely with (classical) liberalism and the values it instills. Any time someone with an optimistic vision starts to voice it people pile on with 500 reasons it’s impractical. People have a very “we can’t do better or we already would have” mindset. People also want there to be a general solution that works mechanically for everyone.

As mundane as it sounds I think the key really is fostering a sense of self-determination in our communities. Encouraging people to use their own resourcefulness to solve problems they see in their communities and in the world.

This isn’t limited to small or local problems, Instead of working for google tech bros could be building logistics programs to allow people to organize global food distribution through piecemeal contributions of food and transportation.

Things are the way they are because they were built that way under specific incentives and the people in power do not want to lose it. This is not inevitable or the best we can do. If we change our priorities and stop letting ‘the market’ act as a proxy for what we want to see, there is plenty of room for optimism about the future.

People are reasonable for not wanting to bring children into the world during a famine. Let’s plant some trees and pull eachother up and build communities people can imagine their kids thriving in first.

Worth noting that you’re going to have a lot more Zionists in Israel than in the general population.

At least 1/3 of the protesters that show up for Palestine in my woods are Jewish Voices for Peace folks.

Israel is an antisemitic project.

Keep hitting the streets London! Can’t help but think this is partly due to the absolutely massive protest near Starmer’s residence over the weekend.