DFHippie

For most of human history cultural change was extremely slow, so slow as to be imperceptible. I'm not sure the neanderthals experienced any less dynamic a culture than the modern humans living at the same time.

Perhaps expecting change makes change more likely. Also, when things are scarce and life is tenuous you are less likely to experiment. Why waste the resources? Why take the risk? When surplus calories became commonplace is when cultural change took off.

No, they burrowed a bunch of commissars into various agencies.

As you describe him Zuck sounds very much like the AI he's trying to sell.

And now they're all effectively dead, killed by illegal executive actions whose lawsuits have stalled out in the Supreme Court queue. But the employees are already fired and looking for new jobs, so even if the actions are rolled back when SCOTUS finally gets around to it (strategic delay -- they can move like lightning when it suits them), they'll be hollowed out and unable to perform their legislatively mandated duties.

> Donors hating these agencies means that no political party really fully supports them or funds them fully when they get power.

False equivalence benefits bad actors.

It looks like PFAS is a bigger problem in red states (Republican-voting states, for those outside the US). I suspect it's due to the prevalence of fossil fuel extraction and refining facilities and military bases in those states.

Vermont is in the clear.

The majority of what I see on Bluesky is people saying that political violence is unacceptable. There are a good number juxtaposing Kirk's saying mass school killings are an acceptable price to pay for the right to bear arms. They are not, however, saying that political violence is acceptable. I haven't seen anyone say that.

I have seen right-wing commenters say that the left was saying this. When I asked for examples I got nothing. I got responses, but the left-of-center commenters they pointed to were in the two categories I describe above: those saying the event is terrible and those saying it's ironic.

Now, I'm sure you can find people saying political violence is okay. I'm just saying I haven't seen it at all and therefore it isn't the central tendency in my feed.

They also grow coffee in Puerto Rico. Nevertheless, these few small islands have much less area available for coffee growing than Brazil. And coffee is grown in many other countries than Brazil, all of which are under Trump's trade assault. There is no way to substitute US-grown coffee for foreign-grown coffee.

When I was in Thailand, people honked at pedestrians to let them know they were passing them. Not angry honks, just toots. Different culture. It left a lot of confused tourists.

> You can't just put up a speed sign and hope people will magically abide by it.

Off topic, but one of the more maddening things I see here in the US is signs which say "End thus-and-such speed limit." I don't want to know what the speed limit was. I want to know what it is!

If this were the whole story you'd expect all of Trump and Elon's siblings to be equally terrible. Maybe they are and just haven't had the opportunity to demonstrate it? I have the impression, though, at least in Trump's case, he's in a different league.

It isn't Congress writ large, is the Republican caucus in Congress. And the Republican caucus in the SCOTUS.

Also, there is almost no deterrent effect. The people who authorized or perpetrated the abuse are not punished if you sue and win a settlement. They don't even have to hire and pay the lawyers. The payment comes out everyone's taxes, perhaps with interest if the government has to pay by issuing debt.

When the police abuse their power, it's the community that pays their salaries that feels the pain.

The point of the article is not to solve deep problems but to entertain. It did that. If it were one sentence long it would not be entertaining.

The US hasn't switched to calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. Partisans on the right do this to show their allegiance to Trump. Partisans on the left still call it the Gulf of Mexico to show their opposition to Trump. Big companies that can be targeted by Trump call it the Gulf of America to protect themselves. And most non-partisans still call it the Gulf of Mexico because they're not paying attention and have always called it that (if they have ever spoken of it or know that it exists). I suspect a lot of people call it the Gulf, already an established custom before this idiocy about renaming it, precisely to avoid entangling themselves in the partisan fight.

The US, like other countries, doesn't get redefined with every change of government, and Trump has not yet cowed the public into knuckling under to his every dictat.

Tantalum, iridium, and tellurium? How expensive is this stuff?

> I think Quaker has a branding problem. People think of quaker oats or amish.

The Quakers, like many minorities, face other people who know next to nothing about them claiming them as mascots. Quaker Oats are called that not because of a special Quaker fondness for oats or a cultural association between Quakers and oats but because General Mills thought the image would be good for their brand. If they were selling socks or buckets, they would have slapped that Mona Lisa-esque visage on those products. I have heard there was a particular Quaker mill owner whose likeness they used. I'm sure his quaint, 18th or 19th century attire, and the presence of Amish in Pennsylvania, are why people think there's some connection between the two religions. (Also, both are peace churches, but Baha'i and Jains are also pacifists and people don't confuse them with Quakers.)

In Pennsylvania there's a business of some sort called "Quaker Steak and Lube". The Quakers I know -- and I grew up among them in a large, well-connected Quaker family -- have no salient connection to either steak or lube. It's just that back in the mists of time Quakers founded the state which others now thoroughly control and some businessman in Pennsylvania thought it would be funny to slap their name, initially invented as a slur against them, onto his business.

So Quakers have two branding problems: people don't know their brand and they do know other peoples' brands that pretend to have some association to them.

About Quakers withering away, I do see a lot of agèd Quakers. The group that meets near my house is pretty old. But there are still Young Friends groups that are thriving, Quaker summer camps (full of non-Quakers), and such. Quakers probably are fading away, as most non-rightwing religions are, but I don't think they're a special case. At least they still believe in procreation, unlike the Shakers.

I was raised Quaker as well and still consider myself culturally Quaker, though I'm atheist and attend Meeting mostly only at weddings or funerals at this point.

What I value most about Quakerism is the emphasis on absolute honesty.

My father took time off college to protest the war -- which war, I'm not certain. He found himself questioning whether pacifism was truly his belief or something he was brought up with. So he enlisted to try out the other side. He didn't actually fight, but was trained as an artillery surveyor. When his superiors suggested he go to officer training school he asked for some time off to think about it, then came back three days later having decided he wanted to finish college and become a psychiatrist. He met my mom at his Quaker college, went back to Meeting, and some years later became a psychiatrist (and died shortly thereafter, not from the psychiatry). I've always thought it was cool that he tested his beliefs like that. His wider family was a bit uneasy with his choices but respected his process.

I think Kevin Drum (R.I.P.) covered this better than the author of this piece.

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposur...

https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-le...

And, addressing the meta-analysis the New Yorker author places so much weight on:

https://jabberwocking.com/yet-another-look-at-that-lead-crim...

The clincher is that competing hypotheses are almost exclusively concerned with phenomena in the U.S. and fall apart as explanations for the same cresting and subsidence of the crime wave in other countries, or even simply in other cities in the U.S. One city does broken-windows policing. Another doesn't. Both experience the same decline in the murder rate.

The article says R-process nucleosynthesis (it doesn't use this term) occurs when neutron stars combine but not when a black hole swallows a neutron star. Is this incorrect?

> "What this means is that a neutron star-black hole collision, while it might not erupt with material like a neutron star–neutron star collision, could power strong signals that telescopes can detect," Most says.

> And yet, they embrace incredibly unpopular parts of "extreme left". Being pro-illegal immigration is incredibly stupid and unpopular. DEI discrimination on the basis of race is also incredibly stupid and unpopular. I suppose i could also mention transitions for children. Need i mention free speech? It's a travesty that republicans have become the free speech party, but it's something the left has ceded.

You've swallowed a lot of right-wing propaganda about the Democratic Party. Do you really thing Democrats are "pro-illegal immigration"? The rest of these tendentious mischaracterizations take some tedious and likely fruitless effort to debunk, but just think about that phrase. Do you think any party is in favor of illegal immigration? How would that work anyway? Parties try to pass laws. The best you could find is that some party favors immigration policies you would prefer be illegal.

Democrats are against violating laws to deport people here legally or following the legal, prescribed process for adjudicating their status. Republicans are okay with breaking the law to chuck people out of the country. That produces a different result, but "illegal" is on the wrong side of the balance there for your argument.

You're not in a great position to tell Democrats what to say and do if you're clearly ignoring what they say and do and believing the lies other people feed you about them.

It's weird to me how "Silicon Valley" now means "people invested in tech", not "people making tech".

This is commonplace where I live in Vermont, to the point where sometimes things are taken which you didn't mean to give away. You put "free" on it -- or don't, see above -- put it by the curb, and it's gone within the hour.

There are also plentiful thrift stores which take donations. The profound selfishness of throwing this stuff out rather than passing it on so eventually some person with less can have a better life -- the thrift stores generally are non-profits supporting the homeless, hospices, and so forth -- boggles my mind.

Here's another observation (not a thought experiment): To figure out which scenario pollutes more, one could add up the various inputs and outputs. A producer is limited by the volume and cost of different means of transportation. It isn't apodictically true that the same volume of tar is delivered regardless of the means, so preventing a pipeline from being built does not necessarily increase net pollution. That being nebulous, the Democrats' motivations are less nebulous.

Here's a thought experiment: if the diesel train works as well as the pipeline, why build the pipeline?

> The democrats in the U.S. are the blocker for god knows what actual reason.

It's not just God. I also know!

The Democrats believe climate change is real, the externalities of fossil fuel extraction, processing, and consumption are real, the injured parties in pipeline construction are their constituents, and the fossil fuel companies fund Republicans and Republican-aligned organizations.

It's a really deep mystery, but I've sussed it out. Me and God.

There is all this variety in their behavior, shape, and influence on our biology, yet they have only 37 genes? How many nuclear genes augment these 37 to make all of this possible? Do any of these genes encode for the ribosome proteins necessary to convert the remaining genes into proteins?

What guides the behavior of a mitochondrion utterly lacking mtDNA? I suppose they still contain the proteins these genes code for, so maybe the genes are needed only for repair and reproduction.

I imagine one gets a sense of how surprising the actions of others are. If you foresee what they will do, you know your model of them is accurate.

Once upon a time Congress would botch something and all one could do without getting into weeds no one cared about was blame Congress. No one wanted to hear a list of 200 assorted representatives.

In these partisan times one can always be more precise: it is either the Democratic caucus or the Republican caucus. Almost no one goes against their caucus. In this case, and in every case until the midterm elections, it is the Republican caucus.

Assign blame or merit where it is due and maybe voters will have enough shame, pride, or sense of self-preservation to fix things.

Botching security is currently a Republican project.

> I think comparing the wrongs of one administration vs another is not really viable.

Yet this is what we do at every election.

It is true that lies are about different things and have different impacts. People value different things. Lies are difficult to enumerate. Yet if person A says he ate 99 jellybeans when he only ate 98 and person B says he ate 99 jellybeans when he actually ate your mother, we can safely say that person A's falsehood is sufficiently different from person B's that we would rather put A in charge than B.

You can make this abstract argument, but imagine you have two politicians, call them T(rump) and H(arris). You ask advocates for T and H to make lists of the others' politician's lies ranked from most to least egregious and present them for judgement to a third party who will make an effort, showing their work, to evaluate their truth. Neither party may be fully satisfied by this process, but one is going to look ridiculous much faster than the other. When the argument is particular, not abstract, it becomes much harder to sustain.

Throwing your hands in the air and giving up because we cannot calculate a numerical measure of honesty like we can digits of pi is silly, because we still have to make decisions based on imperfect information. Claiming one must do this -- give up on evaluating honesty -- while still advocating for a particular candidate or policy is itself dishonest: you clearly do not believe your own argument but propound it in the hopes that others will and will then withdraw from the debate.

I believe "purged" here means primaried or threatened to primary. I'm sure you know of certain famous examples. Here are some recent headlines:

https://www.scrippsnews.com/politics/president-trumps-first-...

https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/06/politics/cornyn-texas-senate-...

This list will contain more examples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Republicans_who_oppose...