What ever happened to fuscia? Wasn’t that supposed to be their long term OS for desktop?

Seemed potentially like a new kernel, rather than a new OS, and thus potentially a replacement for the Android kernel one day.

But that would mean all of the Android SDKs would need to be abstracted away from Linux, but it seems like they abandoned some of that effort and are mostly just emulating Android on Fuschia for now.

There is more than enough water available for everyone in the world. Israel gets 80% of its water from desalinated ocean water. They even have extra water to pump back into natural sources like the sea of Galilee and aquifers.

Western countries have more than enough resources to replicate Israel's approach. Water shortages are a choice, a failure of our bureaucracies.

Pretending that eating less cheese is going to somehow fix our dumb politicians' mismanagement and shortsightedness just seems silly. Water is extremely abundant on this planet, there is no reason why every person shouldn't be able to blast their shower for as long as they want and eat as much cheese as they like.

It would be currently impossible for desalination to meet the immense water demands of the midwest. Water is not the only variable we should consider, either. That land used to constitute an immense, rich ecosystem, and now it consumes water, emits more carbon than the entire transportation sector, and kills billions of animals in the most cruel ways imaginable. Cheese is cruel and wasteful and we kid ourselves if we put our vanity above the needs of our planet and its nonhuman inhabitants

>It would be currently impossible for desalination to meet the immense water demands of the midwest.

Any evidence for this?

First principles reasoning about the problem shows this to be eminently doable.

How much ocean water is available in the world? Virtually unlimited compared to human need.

How much energy can we produce to power desal plants? Well we can easily calculate the amount of fissile material we can produce. We have enough available material to power for all of humanity's energy needs (carbon free) just from nuclear alone for many hundreds of years.

There is nothing stopping us, with our vast wealth from desalinating ocean water. Israel has already demonstrated it's feasible on a large scale and can provide water for millions.

Also your choice of the midwest as an example is baffling. That is the one part of the US that will never have a real water shortage. The great lakes, tons of rainfall, and plentiful groundwater (the water table is like a few feet down isn't it?) mean that talking about the midwest makes absolutely no sense.

Places like California, Nevada, Arizona are the places that have real water problems. Yet they also happen to be right next to the ocean. California has so much vast wealth they could easily build enough desal capacity to provide water for the western states. It could be pumped to neighboring states via pipelines in the same way that oil is currently piped.

Israel has a massive desalination operation. It produces so much extra water that they can actually pump the extra water back into natural sources.

Any water shortage problem in the first world is simply one of mismanagement and a failure to plan.

Almost everything in this is still true with the latest models available today.

Great question, most Trump supporters are extremely unhappy he’s not doing the mass deportations he promised and instead just doing tiny stunts in Minnesota. Basically neither the right nor left are happy with this admin.

Considering the AG demanded the voter rolls for MN to remove ICE it becomes obvious what game is being played. It’s a shame the USA is a terrible place.

The US can be both a terrible place and yet also better than other places that are more terrible.

I would like to hold my country to higher standards than "Eh, it's better than oppressive regimes where people get murdered for political dissent."

Unfortunately, the events we're seeing in MN may show that we're in danger of even that standard being too high for us.

I think that's a bit reductive. There are plenty of economic, political, or familial reasons for not leaving.

Many people are trying to evade oppressive regimes where their prospects might literally mean death. The US can still be "terrible" while still not being quite as dangerous as that.

I mean, this kind of reads victim-blamey; hyperbolic example, when a person stays with an abusive partner for much longer than they should, does that imply that that relationship isn't terrible?

>Let Russia take most of eastern Europe in exchange for gas

Do people seriously think this is a possibility? Or is that hyperbole?

Russia can barely manage to hold the eastern half of Ukraine, I genuinely don’t see how they could take the eastern half of all of Europe..

I mean there's precedent in living memory...

> Russia can barely manage to hold the eastern half of Ukraine

Not even half, just a fifth.

Why does everyone seem to hate Autodesk?

I’m new to hardware stuff but have been putting in a lot of time in fusion 360. It seems to work well on Mac and Windows and it’s free for me just starting out.

I got a year subscription for $350, which was not a horrible price.

I will say it is very weird to me that there isn’t an open source program with all the features that Autodesk has.

There are companies that do cloud seeding:

https://www.rainmaker.com/

>Though cloud seeding has been in use around the world for 80 years, we recognize that people have valid questions about how the technology works.

Nothing tinfoil about it.

Thank you. Every time I talk about cloud seeding in CA people have a strongly negative response without any facts and I'm not really sure why

Well, where are your facts? Did you contact them to find out what they can and cannot do?

The conspiracy theories often imagine cloud seeding as some weather control superweapon that can create catastrophic floods or droughts. In reality, you're just giving water droplets or ice crystals something to condense around (usually silver iodide particles). You're working with what nature has already provided and you can't conjure storms from nothing or dramatically amplify them.

But hey, maybe it's better limit your knowledge about a subject to just its name. It enables you to be afraid of things you don't understand. Some people crave that feeling.

Language police are extremely uncool; going around telling people which words they are allowed to use mostly just hurts your own cause. It has the exact same effect that an old Christian woman scolding kids not to use swear words has. Eventually people realize that your magic words give them power and it becomes cool and useful to start using them in the exact opposite way you want them to.

The only way for you to achieve the goal of making sure nobody’s feelings are hurt by words is to take away the power of the words. You only give the words MORE power by reacting to them.

There are no "language police".

I think about this quote from Ricky Gervais a lot. He's had more than a few controversies, which you may or may not agree with but I think his take here is apt.

"Please stop saying 'You can't joke about anything anymore'. You can. You can joke about whatever the fuck you like. And some people won't like it and they will tell you they don't like it. And then it's up to you whether you give a fuck or not. And so on. It's a good system."

OP said:

>I became the "don't say gay kid" at school after that

Making a point of trying to control which words other kids are using counts as policing language in my opinion.

If you want to make fun of bartender who is strict their, a prude calling them a homosexual is just a non sequitur not an insult. Its not policing language its someone calling you out and saying your a fuckwit for being unable to inteligentlly insult someone or describe a sitution. That's way I don't like insulting people by calling them gay its just not saying what i want to convey maybe thats the "don't say gay kid" but i think its just indicitive that the people who say that didn't get the point of what was being said to begin with. Aka up your insult game there are ton of insults that are way weightier than calling someone a homosexual.

I’m sorry we’re not allowed to tell people they’re a stupid piece of shit or even that you disagree with their hateful rhetoric. Only the people saying the worst things should be protected and have free speech, we should limit our speech out of respect for theirs

Not that I really care, but I've got to ask the question:

Is telling people that they can't tell other people which words they use a form of language policing?

(In a thread concerning Plato, I thought this question needed to be asked.)

I'm not telling anyone they can't clutch their pearls and tell other people what to do. All I'm saying is that you will never win the cultural battle that way. Building a culture that does things like getting people fired from their jobs for using magic words, even if there is obviously no intentional malice in those words, is a great way to lose elections.

OP is not looking to get people fired for using particular words. OP doesn't appear to be fighting any sort of political battle. OP is telling people to be nice, and that's as much his right as it is yours to use the wrong words.

And I don't think elections or "the culture" should have anything to do with it. If that's how we made every decision, life would only improve for whoever exists in the overall majority. What if we each chose to have some integrity and do the right thing, even when there's nothing measuring it? It wouldn't kill us, I don't think.

That's only true of people who overreact or use offense as an excuse to let off some righteous anger. Most people don't react that way, even if that is what you'll most often see surfaced on social media because it's the most exciting and engaging sort of reaction. Most people will just tell you it's not a good thing to say and let you quietly reflect on it, or just exit the conversation.

tbh politely saying it bothers you is totally fine. That's not my argument.

All I'm saying is that making it your personal mission to make sure nobody uses the words in any context has lead us to where we are now, where we have a big backlash and young people are using gay and retarded more than they ever would have if we maybe just chilled out a little bit with the language policing.

We have taken this magic word mindset so far that we created a broad set of words that were so taboo you could get fired for using them in ANY context, even if you are talking about the word itself (like the case with the Papa Johns guy). And we had institutions like Stanford coming up with inane things like the "Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative" where they wanted to police words like "crazy" and "dumb".

Huge eyeroll.

Who said anything about scolding anyone lol. I responded very calmly.

I'm sorry, but you'll never win me over that the world be a better place if only we could bring back overtly prejudiced speech.

Actions have consequences. You can say whatever the hell you want, but doesn't mean you deserve respect, or not to be corrected, or not to face the consequences of saying overtly bigoted words.

The fact is... calling negative things gay implies being gay is bad, and therefore we should stop calling negative things gay if we want to support all the good people in the LGBTQ community.

OP’s words exactly:

>I became the "don't say gay kid" at school after that

Making a point of trying to shame other people for using words you don’t like is a losing game in the long run.

The “actions have consequences” argument is what lead us to where we are now where you can see an obvious backlash.

Heck the papa John’s pizza guy got fired for using a magic word in an obviously non-derogatory way, and it was the same “actions have consequences” mentality even though basically nobody would be genuinely offended by his usage of it.

If you continue to make a big deal out of every usage of gay and retarded those words will only grow in power and popularity because you are showing someone that they have the power to get you to freak out if they use them.

You can see the opposite effect with traditional swear words, which are so used in popular media that they have lost almost all of their power.

Do you think that racial slurs will lose their power if people stop objecting to their use?

Ah yes... sixth graders and human adults have so much in common.

In fact, the culture at the school changed, and people stopped saying gay so much. It was very cool.

You should try standing up for something you believe in sometime, maybe you'd like it.

Out of curiosity, what about calling someone a racist, a fascist, a Nazi, a bigot, etc.? Are those all fine too and better to just put out there so no one is, I guess, disempowered? Should we let everyone throw around racist and hateful slurs casually, and also label people using them with the traditional labels for those who engage in that kind of behavior?

Those words you listed are an example of exactly what I’m talking about. Words like Nazi, bigot, etc have lost most of their power now because they have been used so much. 5-10 years ago those labels could ruin your life and people in the US would trip over themselves to prove how those labels didn’t apply to them. Now a great number of young people don’t care at all about being labeled as those things, and being labeled as one of those things is much less likely to ruin one’s life/career.

That is some impressively convoluted doublethink. Good luck straightening your head out someday.

I’m just saying that words have the power they are given by people. If you don’t want to be offended by a special word you then just don’t give it the power to hurt you.

“Queer” is another example. It used to be a slur, gay people decided collectively that they were going to take the word back, and it worked. Go ahead and call someone queer as a slur in San Francisco, it doesn’t really work the same as if you had called someone queer in the Midwest in 1990.

It’s not doublethink, it’s a provable phenomenon.

Not a great example, as many gay people, including myself, still consider it to be a slur.

Many of the people who have supposedly took it back and use it to describe themselves aren't even gay.

I've only realized this somewhat recently, and it happens passively, but the way people use some of these magic words helps me to categorize the person who said it.

Sure, use whatever derogatory or offensive words you want, I don't really mind, but I am damn sure going to judge you based on it.

I don't tend to be the "don't use that word" type of person though. But I'm absolutely the "get the fuck out of this 'will make me dumber' conversation" type of person.

I tend to agree, the words someone chooses tell you about the kind of person they are. Context is usually obvious, you can tell if someone is trying to be edgy, if someone normally uses the word in their vocabulary with their friends, or if they are genuinely using it in a hateful way.

The genuine hateful usage is the actually bad thing that people want to stop, but many people mistakenly think they are fighting hatred by policing other people’s vocabulary.

Genuinely hateful usage is of course important to stop but let's not pretend that hearing negative things called something you are all day isn't damaging to people.

The idea that gay people walk around and hear "Oh that's gay as hell!" whenever someone stubs their toe, or loses in a game or whatever and don't have that affect them is silly and it clearly progresses into a culture where people don't feel comfortable being themselves.

It's a good thing that since I've grown up we don't say "oh you're not acting black enough", or "oh that's so Jewish", or any other variation of things that may not seem harmful at the time but end up perpetuating a "right" and a "wrong" whether intentional or not.

My X / Twitter account is 17 years old. I made it 2 years after the website was founded, and for a long time I thought Twitter was the most personally positive and professionally valuable social media website I participated in.

Often when I wanted to research a niche technical topic I would search for it on Twitter, or tweet about it and see who in my network knew more. Often I would see individuals with niche followings say incredibly insightful or valuable stuff years before other people were saying it. I also had a bunch of professional connections form on Twitter along with many job opportunities I could have pursued.

Now I view X as having destroyed nearly all of that. The system is so setup to reward rage-bait and slop that even if I try to curate my experience for it the meaningful individuals get drowned out. The algorithm and all the actions taken on the website seem more about creating a social manipulation machine for Musk than enriching its users, and as a result many of the most thoughtful and valuable people have scattered away from the platform.

I'm all for diversity of thought, but X under Musk is about non-transparent algorithmic manipulation of speech and manipulating emergent behavior to achieve political goals. It is one thing to unban people, but it's another thing to intentionally break all tools (like ban lists) that enable people to self moderate. Musk's X amplifies certain speech and then disempowers people who try to attain higher quality more productive discourse.

The watershed event that caused Musk to buy Twitter was when Twitter banned the Babylon Bee for making a joke about Katlyn Jenner.

Most left leaning people were blind to the increasingly censorious management of old Twitter. It had been ramping up pretty aggressively though up to that point.

Personally I haven’t noticed the algorithm disrupt my usage of X. I follow interesting makers and tech type people, and my feed is mostly stuff aligned with my interests. I didn't have the same network/professional usage you’re describing so maybe that’s the main difference for me.

As a way of staying informed and entertained it is better to me than old Twitter. But perhaps you are right as a way of networking or collaborating maybe it’s different now, idk because I never used it like that.

It was not a Jenner joke: "The Babylon Bee's Man of the Year Is Rachel Levine" was the tweet that got them banned. Cringey but not remotely ban-worthy imho.