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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Downvoting to save words in your reply - nice. Have another upvote.

    Your most recent reply actually conveys meaning/makes a specific versus broad point. To that point, I don’t necessarily think they were making a eugenics based argument (though I would agree with you in dismissing an argument based on that) since they didn’t explicitly state the reason for mentioning the movie was because they believe in some idea of politics being genetic versus simply being most effectively passed down via social means from one’s parents while living with them through adolescence. Call me crazy, but I think most of the folks posting here should be given the benefit of not assuming they’re talking about eugenics until they are explicitly promoting it versus something more widely accepted, such as the aforementioned idea that it’s highly likely that parents pass down their politics through social means to their children. I could, of course, be wrong and maybe they were intending to make a eugenics based argument, but they weren’t specific enough to divine that. All of that said, I should edit the phrasing in a sarcastic comment I made elsewhere about removing oneself from the gene pool being a bad strategy since I probably wasn’t clear enough to get across that I was using the very real right-wing perspective where they favor their “good genes” over others’ “genes” for added effect.

    Your initial (decidedly vague) comment, as quoted, presents a false choice as if the person you were replying to was worrying about a future problem that is totally disconnected from the current topic of discussion, but they’re not and I don’t think the person you were replying to gave any reason for one to infer that they were ignoring the current issue in favor of some future issue. If they were talking about disconnected topics/problems then what you were saying would make more sense (or if you had been more specific, like in your followup, that would help too). It’s as if the person noticed a ceiling was leaking and exclaimed to someone suggesting to just put a bucket under it “Ignoring a leak is exactly how my neighbor ended up needing to replace their roof, I don’t think the bucket plan is a good plan in the long term!” and you were there to reply “Don’t tell them to worry about the roof, they need to fix the leak!” It’s not wrong, it just doesn’t really say anything or lead to further thought beyond the loop and comes across as a “calm down!”


  • Self-selective removal of oneself and those of probable left-leaning male partners from the gene pool* is certainly one strategy left-leaning women could try in the fight for a political environment where their rights are protected and progress further. Probably a terrible strategy, but certainly one that could be chosen.

    I respect any individual’s bodily autonomy and am not trying to make a statement in favor of men having a right to access or anything like that. It’s just an illogical movement if the goal is a society that has more individuals likely to support women’s rights - the gamble that thirsty men of the left will somehow save the day or that it would affect men on the right is kind of silly unless we’re assuming that there is a statistically meaningful amount of (secretly) left leaning women out there choosing right wing men as partners. (I wonder if anyone has tried to focus a campaign on seeing if the latter group exists in a sizable amount and can be convinced to be vote left - somebody should look into that and see how it works out. /s)

    It’s almost like 4B is something that the right wing would push to further their current advantage in household size in the US…

    *I am not seriously implying politics are a matter of genetics (though parents commonly pass down their politics to children in their household via social means), but plenty of people on the right do believe in their own “good genes” versus the “bad genes” of the left and I’m leaning on their perspective for sarcastic effect here.





  • This may be a stupid question, but: assuming an object (the bowling ball) is created from materials found on Earth and that it remains within the gravity well of Earth from material procurement stage to the point where it is dropped, wouldn’t the acceleration of the Earth towards the object be kind of a null considering the whole timeline of events? I mean, I get the distinction of higher mass objects technically causing the Earth to accelerate towards them faster if we’re talking a feather vs a bowling ball that both originated somewhere else before encountering Earth’s gravity well in a vacuum, it just seems kind of weird to consider Earth’s acceleration towards objects that are originating and staying within its gravity well?









  • The best part is if you have Google Home/Nest products throughout your house and initiate a voice request you now have your phone using Gemini to answer and have the nearest speaker or display using Assistant to answer and they frequently hear eachother and take that as further input (having a stupid “conversation” with eachother). With Assistant as the default on a phone, the system knows what individual device it should reply to via proximity detection and you get a sane outcome. This happened at a friend’s house while I was visiting and they were frustrated until I had them switch their phone’s default voice assistant back to Assistant and set up a home screen shortcut to the web app version of Gemini in lieu of using the native Gemini app (because the native app doesn’t work unless you agree to set Gemini as the default and disable Assistant).

    Missing features aside, the whole experience would feel way less schizophrenic if they only allowed you to enable Gemini on your phone if it also enabled it on each smart device in the household ecosystem via Home. Google (via what they tell journalists writing articles on the subject) acts like it’s a processing power issue with existing Home/Nest devices and the implication until very recently was that new hardware would need to roll out - that’s BS given that very little of Gemini’s functionality is being processed on device and that they’ve now said they’ll begin retroactively rolling out a beta of Gemini to older hardware in fall/winter. Google simply hasn’t felt like taking the time to write and push a code update to existing Home/Nest devices for a more cohesive experience.



  • Yup, I have friends all over the state and just the occasional glance over the years at what Republicans have pulled in the state has been horrifying.

    A side note not related to gerrymandering - I’ve seen it thrown around that Cooper can’t do it because a quirk of NC law says the Lt. Governor becomes Acting Governor anytime the sitting Governor is out of state and the current Lt. Governor is Mark “Some People Need Killing” Robinson, but I honestly think giving him a longer leash to let more people hear him bark nonsense and hate will hurt Robinson’s chances of becoming governor. Sunshine is the best medicine and all of that (to the extent that it’s not free media advertising as it was with Trump). It’s kind of a headscratcher that Robinson was elected as Lt. Governor to begin with, the dude is a walking meme/idiot and the voters really dropped the ball on that one.