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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Maybe it’s methane release. Maybe it’s gasses from the sea floor we knew nothing about. We have no fucking clue what climate change is going to look like. PR firms told scientists to put the lowest projections in press releases for the last decade. The real numbers are both grim and proving to be optimistic.

    As it turns out, the math was all wrong. Who knows why? Maybe all the Earth’s various systems are interrelated, and when one system collapses it causes dozens of other systems to collapse. Maybe Earth and the delicate balance that enabled life to grow on this planet is a little more sensitive to sudden, radical change than we thought.

    Maybe all the people who lied about climate change since the 1970s lied about more shit we’re going to find out about shortly now that we can’t stop it from happening. But they’ll still make their profits and get their taxpayer-funded subsidies, so capitalism is working as intended.







  • You see, with Effective Altruism, we’ll destroy the world around us to serve a small cadre of ubermensch tech bros, who will then somehow in the next few centuries go into space and put supercomputers on other planets that run simulations of people. You might actually be in one of those simulations right now, so be grateful.

    We are very smart and not just reckless, over-indulged douchebags who jerk off to the smell of our own farts.





  • Just a few weeks ago, Taiwan held historic elections without any major cross-Strait incident, in part because all sides — Washington, Beijing, and Taipei — worked to reduce miscommunication and misperception about their respective intentions. That is an outcome few may have foreseen in August of 2022, when most expected the cross-Strait situation to grow more tense, not less. But it’s no guarantee of future trends, and the risk remains real.

    This approach has been the hallmark of Biden’s foreign policy. They’re working behind the scenes subtly and competently, making progress in ways that doesn’t really track with the 24-hour news cycle and clickbait journalism. It’s good to see the efforts paying off, but they really, REALLY need to work on their messaging.


  • Firstly, the Houthi flag includes the words, “Death to America.” These are not rational actors. They are fanatic jihadis and all attempts to reason with them have failed. Acting like the Houthis are the same as a regular nation state is borderline intellectually dishonest.

    If they have a problem with Israel, keep firing at Israel. If they want a problem with the rest of the world, keep firing at our CIVILIAN ships. Firing at those ships is an act of war, and it was going to provoke a response.

    Biden waited a very long time to act, which emboldened Iran to take an oil tanker. That move virtually guaranteed a response, and it’s good that the response was limited to Yemen. Biden is playing the cards he’s been dealt, and he’s playing them reasonably.

    Also, it should be mentioned that the Houthis themselves said the casualties were ~5 dead and 6 wounded. Warming was given far in advance so they could evacuate and minimize casualties. If Biden had wanted to play dirtier, he could have. A deliberate decision was made to minimize civilian casualties. If the positions were reversed, the Houthis would nuke Tel Aviv, DC, and every other major city in both the US and Israel.