gonna find some merry men and get a band going!

4 billion even!

I too don’t know what this means. After much searching I believe this could be a reference to the whirling dervishes of Sufism. More likely than dowsing in my opinion.

Where were you in '91? You could have won Randi’s prize! wikipedia on Dowsing

Just criticises? Not “slams”, “destroys”, or eviscerates? Weak. No rage click from me.

It does smack of hypocrisy but I’ve been feeling more it’s a paradox of tolerance thing. Which itself a sort of hypocrisy now that I’m thinking about it. Huh.

If I don’t show you a video because I don’t think you’d enjoy it, that’s different from not showing it to you because I don’t want you to see it.

I wouldn’t disagree those are different reasons for not wanting to show a video but both are curations based on biases.

I guess I just have a more neutral connotation for bias than “biased against you for others’ own interests” and so I didn’t find bias to be a useful term here to distinguish the reasons behind curation choices.

Nothing really in disagreement here, just fiddling with common usage.

How is bias not inherent to curation? Preference for one thing over another is bias. Curation is literally showing you things it thinks you’re biased to like. These groups aren’t revealing their secret sauce for curation algorithms so we’d never know anyway.

nose hair trimmer attachment works well around the ears I’ve found (but it’s loud!)

cold cuts? Have you seen the price of a bag of chips? Ridiculous. I don’t need to spend 5 bucks to hate myself later after I’ve eaten too many.

$30 to buy an old mechanical pencil on ebay you remember having in highschool? No problemo.

does range come into play here?

your self driving car will just drive itself back to the lot when your payment is late

I don’t disagree with anything you say. I think it’s worth mentioning that the cost of enforcement directly informs the cost of a lease/rental situation. The cheaper they can enforce the contract, the less they can theoretically charge. If they had to get a court order to lock your phone or repo your car, they’d make it more expensive or be much more selective about who they lease/rent to. This maybe enables more people to have phones or get cars?

I swear I’m not rooting for team “aggressive manipulative business behavior widens opportunities for the less well off”. Gross. Kind of how I hear about globalization of manufacturing stuff - “they get paid pennies!” “yeah, but that’s more than before the factory came? look what they can buy now” I know that’s a overly broad generalization but you see those arguments.

What about the equivalent of foveated rendering? They’re only simulating the bits conscious observers can see, the rest is …not simulated to the same level? I guess you’re kind of going there with your model within a model thing. If we are the point of the simulation, there doesn’t seem to be much reason to simulate much beyond the planet besides what little astronomers can work with? Gonna crash this thing with enough players!

There’s a weird SF story that has blood cell sized intelligences and reality starts to break because there are so many observers on such a small scale that reality can’t change without being observed and then they all “poof” into another dimension or something and humans are left alone again. Anyway, the number of players crashing the simulation made me think of it. Blood Music by Greg Bear.

that’s a no on the cruciform for me, dawg. Yeesh. I’ll take everything else from there though, Poulsen, hawking drive, farcasters (maybe without the yoke of the AI techno core though), etc.

Can you link anything for lead getting into the water? I’d be interested. Everything I’ve read about it (with respect to the Stanleys) says it’s virtually impossible to be in contact with any lead containing bit unless you’ve purposely damaged the bottom and are basically licking it. One of the quoted experts was says depending on where you are in the US, your tap water is a much more likely vector of lead exposure.

Where are people getting HFCS drink mixes? Are you talking about the sodastream type bottles of mix? I only ever see people with the artificially sweetened tiny squirt bottles of flavoring. Which, healthy or not is up for debate but they’ve gotta be better than 150% of your sugar for the day in liquid form from HFCS/soda (in whatever container).