TheVat

Yikes, I hope not! We have enough Damoclean swords mounted over our puny noggins (nukes, microbes, PFAS, nanoplastics, AI, bioweapons, etc) as it is. (I think you're being ironic, yes?) If we ever all agreed that probelm-solving comes from the barrel of a gun, that would set the Doomsday Clock in Chicago to ten seconds before midnight. Worth noting: Oliver doesn't linger on the lionization of Luigi (nor joins in), but only touches on it to show the crazy media reverberations of all the rage so many Americans feel towards the Big Healthcare behemoth. And Oliver, in full Angry Caffeinated Parrot mode, takes in some of that rage and channels it with eloquence. Good point. Our system of representative democracy is so broken. A majority have wanted SP healthcare for decades, even as billionaire donor run politicians keep trying to convince them it's a wicked commie conspiracy. Democrats gave up on real socialized medicine because they also were controlled by Big Money, and Big Money knows it would mean the rich paying their fair share and the Big Health behemoths know it would greatly reduce profits generally and including the profitable supplemental markets that might be left. In America, health is a commodity not a basic human right of access.

It's a curious mantra we keep hearing over here that the US has to somehow "beat China." With the data center boom there's this persistent question that no one is really answering: why do we need so many? This seems a standard theme of capitalism, an unquestioned ethos of "more is better," no matter what it's more of. IIRC Marx called it the "fetishization of commodities." @sethoflagos you're probably more up on your Marx than I am. But wasn't ol Karl kind of warning us about products of human labour taking over and running us? AI would be the apotheosis of this. Anyway, noone in power is going to answer the "why so many" questions beyond vague references of, "we need to beat China." Beat China to what? The PRC already has a horrifyingly advanced surveillance state and that is, erm, something that America, Land of the Free, should seek fecking primacy in?? Or is that we want to dominate in terms of sidelining our entire workforce with AI robotics? Underneath all the belligerent chest pounding talk of beating China seems to be autistic tech bros who haven't the foggiest notion of the societal implications of their work. Not the first time this trend is observed in Silicon Valley. This oligarchy-level of leverage, which has been spiking in the Orangeymandias admin is what people like Bernie Sanders have been trying to prevent with campaign finance and election law reforms, to rein in super PACs and corporate corruption and patronage. It's frustrating because so many information-poor voters, if you talk with them, actually want such reform if their attention is drawn to it.

Cumulus narwhal icosahedron pinky. Rhizome elocution wisp?

Thank you! I had just returned to post an accessible transcript, but yours seems more readable. Mine was still evolving from the fertile crescent in Mesopotamia. (Do I aim (A): to pose Mesopotamia? I do.) DK - no 'gram account. The full show is blocked in the UK, unless you have access to Sky Comedy. Or have a VPN - if the latter, you can just set it to some region like Bulgaria and the YT video will unblock. To which one replied "Socialism? You mean that broad ideological framework which has been implemented at all levels of government in the US since the 1870s, and which you know almost nothing about?" Or something like that? I guess people like healthcare to be profit centered when they get some of the profits and don't have to watch people suffer and die from medical neglect on a level most commonly seen in third world countries.

This is such a skillful evisceration of the largest company in US healthcare that I feel it's worth bending the forum rules and asking people to watch. However, to show a little deference to the discussion format here, here is a bit of transcript... ...and YT has in its wisdom chosen to block my copy/pasting of some introductory passages from the transcript they provide. Can I get a variance here? (At least until I can copy it elsewhere)

Swiss cheese has one of the lowest lactose levels of any cheese. This means the Swiss have better digestion, which causes them to be kinder and turn in wallets. PROVE ME WRONG!!!

Yep, I was going to suggest the part of epistemology which concerns itself with the limits of knowledge. The postulate that everything is amenable to some explanatory scheme lies within that branch. There's a scientific aspect, e.g. is a human brain limitation imposing limits on our knowledge, or is it the basic architecture of reality which forces blind spots, or a combination of those?

Yes. I've long thought it will be a soft power takeover. Wait for a good leverage point with the orange dotard, hint at a blockade, then offer Taiwan some softer alternative to invasion like a "treaty" where Chinese "consultants" are installed in key government offices. I suspect the Chinese CP learned some lessons about messy takeovers in Tibet, back in the fifties.

Palindrome season on the wane here. I noticed a couple words recently -"pollinators" and "aperitif" - and they seemed like 'drome material, but I had to stay with the meanings of the words that passed before me, striving to keep up with accelerating changes in the world. That said, it does sometimes feel like there's a magic in subverting our symbol systems, a kind of rough poetry or at least a whimsical experiment with meaning. Sometimes it's even charged with some teasing hint of a hidden order, like the voudon tossing of chicken bones or the scattering of 50 yarrow stalks of I Ching or reading the dregs of a tea cup. But I can settle for whimsy and the brief trip to a bubble universe where things make sense both forwards and backwards. (As opposed to our reality where people in power can spout jabberwocky in both directions). Cheers. And beware of women named Naomi.

No. Nothing but BS coming from the tech bros in their Patagonia vests. Who have started derisively calling anyone who questions their business model a "doomer." Or referring to AI agents who escape as "released into the wild," as if it's some earth-friendly thing in tune with nature. I wonder if they'd feel the same way about Gain of Function viruses escaping from a BSL-4 lab and appearing in their sandwich? Earth handed over to people with Asperger's.

If anyone wants to try a brew or other edible with gut comfort in mind, I've been having some good results from L. rhamnosus. I gather trad ginger beers tend to go with L hilgardii, but it looks like some other L. species will also serve as well. I was returning wheat to my diet a while back and trying to smooth the transition with some of the probiotics in non-dairy yoghurts which can help with grain digestion, especially those pesky gliadins. Tinkering with various blends, I tried adding some supplement rhamnosus at room temperature and giving it a day or two. Gut settled down rapidly after that. (A pitfall of trying no wheat for a while is enzymatic downregulation - basically, the gut colony scales back on the species that were handling wheat. So when you restart, the species remnants have to start reproducing quickly and that means gas. So if you can nutritionally inject some of those species in there, like L plantarum, L casei, B infantis, B breve, L rhamnosus, et al, it can help.) I had been eating some yoghurt brands that had some of those in the mix, but rhamnosus seemed to really hasten the flip back to normal. CAVEATS: This is anecdotal, so far as my experience goes, and gut biomes vary quite a bit, so I want to look into research some more on specific strains. Am also going to try L reuteri, another candidate. (Sorry, a little off the ginger beer rails.)

"It's not a god, it's a zip file." Amusing way to put it. Zip file + stochastic parrot + glorified autocomplete. And something about humanity's cognitive labours fed back to us for $20/month.

Precious and few are the moments We toucans share...

Hadn't known ginger beers used a SCOBY - a stunted knowledge due to commercial GBs here not really brewing anymore. So this is more like a kombucha, (the SCOBY I'm familiar with)? We also buy vinegar with "the mother" still in it - it's just little bits gathered at the bottom, not a pellicle. I had wondered if that mother could be used in kombucha brewing, but learned it was a little different in culture and insufficient in something (yeast?). If there's a nose numbing, you can sensitively test for H2S with lead acetate paper. Just hang it in the headspace. You can buy it almost anywhere (because people also buy it to test their water supply) fairly cheap. I had to test some well water some years ago and was able to just drive to a hobby store and buy some strips. Not saying it's that simple in Abuja (?) but seems possible if there are many people in the area on private water systems. (Also: please do not get kidnapped! New Yorker had an alarming article about massive kidnapping around your neck of the woods.)

Why would modeling ants be more useful than modeling high-functioning humans? Procedural logic is what unsentient machines do now.... it's just a step-by-step method of problem-solving or coding that tells a computer precisely how to accomplish a task through an ordered sequence of instructions. Been there, done that, going back to Ada Lovelace and Chuck Babbage.