Lurker > Intro2Logic

DarthAragorn posted...

what's the price range

$100-200

I like convenience of earbuds but I think I'd be better off with some tried and true over-ear headphones, just for hardware longevity reasons.

Ocarina of Time - on the Gamecube

Trumble posted...

The years pictured are times when things particularly flared up. They'd be among the highest, not lowest, in recent years.

What he said.

I think we'll agree to disagree on whether the president runs his administration, or it runs him. I'm of the view that the buck stops with him, and if he wanted his cabinet and advisors to be less pro-Israel, he has ways to make that happen.

ClayGuida posted...

I truly doubt that unbridled Israeli allegiance was on the application.

Did views on Israel not come up in the hiring process for White House foreign policy positions?

I'm sympathetic to the idea that Biden gets flak for things that due to the nature of American government are outside his control. But the people who he fills his administration with are in fact under his control. In the 6 months since 10/7, he's had time to reconsider his personnel if it was thought they were putting him a position he didn't want to be. But instead we've seen multiple people leave his administration because they felt their pleas for a more humane policy were not being heard.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/03/27/gaza-state-department-resignation-dissent/

https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2024-04-25/us-state-department-arabic-spokesperson-resigns-in-opposition-to-gaza-policy

https://apnews.com/article/israel-gaza-war-biden-administration-protest-016e100792ece81b69dd6301de08cd3d

It is an unfortunate fact that campaigning against a system will result in that system campaigning against you. But there's no point in whining about it; just means you have to work harder

hockeybabe89 posted...

I have no idea. Depends on the country that has been doing the genocide for decades.

Does the US have any influence or leverage over that country?

As the climate crisis worsens, the insurance industry will either leave states like California and Florida that are particularly prone to disasters like flooding and wildfires, or raise rates to levels that are unaffordable to most.

ClayGuida posted...

Then you understand my point. Biden needs to shed the aids and handlers that are encouraging this shit.

He hired them in no small part because they share his views on this shit. He's not being led astray by them; he agrees with them.

ClayGuida posted...

So Miller gets a pass because trump is a racist piece of shit?

No. I did not say that.

CervusCanadensi posted...

Honest question and don't mean to stir any pots.
What is the goal/ intention or purpose of protests? (In general)

For a lot of campus protests in particular, there are calls for their universities (which hold substantial financial resources through their endowments) to divest from companies, such as military contractors, that do business with the government of Israel. This mirrors similar tactics employed in student protests against apartheid South Africa.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/04/26/dc-police-george-washington-university-protests/?

When the cops think they don't have to crush a protest, what the hell are University admins doing?

ClayGuida posted...

I'll be honest, and it sounds like Biden slurping, but I don't blame Biden here, I blame his aids and handlers. They're clearly the ones in his ear.

Just like we criticize Stephen Miller, whomever is in Biden's ear, Blinken as well, about how Israel is the good guy and everyone else criticizing them is a bad guy, needs to be called out. It's clear there's a huge pro Israel and Anti anyone else group in the Administration that needs to answer, not just Biden, who's seemingly taking their advice.

What evidence do we have that Biden, who has a pre-presidential career of being ardently pro-Israel, is less so than his advisors?

TMOG posted...

Are you going to buy a third pair, or are you going to learn the lesson instead?

I am debating with myself as to how stupid I am. Stay tuned!

The Momentum True Wireless 2 followed by the MTW3

Really annoyed. I love how they sound but I can't be replacing my headphones every year like this.

What similar community?

CervusCanadensi posted...

Oh, this current events board.
The format of :
-thing or idea-
hyperlink
And minimal or zero discussion about it from OP
and then replies of woo or boo hooing it, and shitposts

Sounds good to me.

CervusCanadensi posted...

You didn't even read this
You have nothing to say about it

I have this to say about it: this guy is emblematic of a genre of freak that has spawned out of the tech industry in the past decade or two. In exchange for their prominent positions in the economy, they have produced nothing of value and many things that are actively harmful. They seek to remake the world to prevent people from noticing their lack of clothes.

Garabandal posted...

I've frequently joked about how if this place got shut down my reaction would be "I'm free". But now that these boards are dying a quick painful death I can't help but feel kind of bummed out.

Same. Shit sucks

https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasan-network-state-plutocrat

To fully grasp the current situation in San Francisco, where venture capitalists are trying to take control of City Hall, you must listen to Balaji Srinivasan. Before you do, steel yourself for whats to come: A normal person could easily mistake his rambling train wrecks of thought for a crackpots ravings, but influential Silicon Valley billionaires regard him as a genius.

Balaji has the highest rate of output per minute of good new ideas of anybody Ive ever met, wrote Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the V.C. firm Andreessen-Horowitz, in a blurb for Balajis 2022 book, The Network State: How to Start a New Country. The book outlines a plan for tech plutocrats to exit democracy and establish new sovereign territories. I mentioned Balajis ideas in two previous stories about Network Staterelated efforts in Californiaa proposed tech colony called California Forever and the tech-funded campaign to capture San Franciscos government.

Balaji, a 43-year-old Long Island native who goes by his first name, has a solid Valley pedigree: He earned multiple degrees from Stanford University, founded multiple startups, became a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz and then served as chief technology officer at Coinbase. He is also the leader of a cultish and increasingly strident neo-reactionary tech political movement that sees American democracy as an enemy. In 2013, a New York Times story headlined Silicon Valley Roused by Secession Call described a speech in which he told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become the Microsoft of nations: outdated and obsolescent.

The speech won roars from the audience at Y Combinator, a leading start-up incubator, reported the Times. Balaji paints a bleak picture of a dystopian future in a U.S. in chaos and decline, but his prophecies sometimes fall short. Last year, he lost $1 million in a public bet after wrongly predicting a massive surge in the price of Bitcoin.

Still, his appetite for autocracy is bottomless. Last October, Balaji hosted the first-ever Network State Conference. Garry Tanthe current Y Combinator CEO whos attempting to spearhead a political takeover of San Franciscoparticipated in an interview with Balaji and cast the effort as part of the Network State movement. Tan, who made headlines in January after tweeting die slow motherfuckers at local progressive politicians, frames his campaign as an experiment in moderate politics. But in a podcast interview one month before the conference, Balaji laid out a more disturbing and extreme vision.

What Im really calling for is something like tech Zionism, he said, after comparing his movement to those started by the biblical Abraham, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism), Theodor Herzl (spiritual father of the state of Israel), and Lee Kuan Yew (former authoritarian ruler of Singapore). Balaji then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts. And if you see another Gray on the street you do the nod, he said, during a four-hour talk on the Moment of Zen podcast. Youre a fellow Gray.

The Grays shirts would feature Bitcoin or Elon or other kinds of logos Y Combinator is a good one for the city of San Francisco in particular. Grays would also receive special ID cards providing access to exclusive, Gray-controlled sectors of the city. In addition, the Grays would make an alliance with the police department, funding weekly policemans banquets to win them over.

Grays should embrace the police, okay? All-in on the police, said Srinivasan. What does that mean? Thats, as I said, banquets. That means every policemans son, daughter, wife, cousin, you know, sibling, whatever, should get a job at a tech company in security.

In exchange for extra food and jobs, cops would pledge loyalty to the Grays. Srinivasan recommends asking officers a series of questions to ascertain their political leanings. For example: Did you want to take the sign off of Elons building?

This refers to the August 2023 incident in which Elon Musk illegally installed a large flashing X logo atop Twitter headquarters, in violation of building safety codes. City inspectors forced him to remove it. This was the second time Musk had run afoul of the city in his desire to refurbish his headquarters: In July, police briefly halted his attempt to pry the Twitter signage from the buildings exterior. But in Balajis dystopia, he implies that officers loyal to the Grays would let Musk do as he pleases (democratically inclined officers, he suggests, can be paid to retire).

Simply put, there is a ton of fascist-chic cosplay involved. Once an officer joins the Grays, they get a special uniform designed by their tech overlords. The Grays will also donate heavily to police charities and merge the Gray and police social networks. Then, in a show of force, theyll march through the city together.
...
While the Blues would be excluded, they would not be forgotten. Srinivasan imagines public screenings of anti-Blue propaganda films: In addition to celebrating Gray and celebrating Red, you should have movies shown about Blue abuses. There should be lots of stories about what Blues are doing that is bad.

Balaji goes onand on. The Grays will rename city streets after tech figures and erect public monuments to memorialize the alleged horrors of progressive Democratic governance. Corporate logos and signs will fill the skyline to signify Gray dominance of the city. Ethnically cleanse, he said at one point, summing up his idea for a city purged of Blues (this, he says, will prevent Blues from ethnically cleansing the Grays first). The idea, he said, is to do to San Francisco what Musk did to Twitter.

It feels awfully generous to suggest that this site's owners have a strategy for funneling new users to the site.

The judges don't have the courage to treat him the way they would anybody else who flagrantly disregarded court orders the way Trump has. He knows this.

His behavior will continue until someone imposes an actual consequence.

Whiterun_Guard_ posted...

Stopped reading when they said students live out their prime criminal years in college.

I mean it is true that 18-22 is like peak getting into trouble with the law time.

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/college-is-an-education-in-bullshit

The nicest thing that can be said about college as an institution is that it gives the kids able to afford it an appropriately sheltered place to live out their prime criminal years in an environment where they will not be as harshly prosecuted for their various youthful hijinks as they would be if they were not in college. The not nice thing that can be said about college as an institutionat least as it exists in Americais that it is one of the most distilled expressions of the rot at the heart of how this country chooses to function: Take a public good (higher education), have Republicans choke its public financing, privatize it, make the ability of people to have a decent life dependent upon buying it, and then run it like a business, in the sense of creating lavish tiers for very rich customers and inflating prices to extortionate levels and attacking labor and climbing happily into bed with some of the most sociopathic billionaires the world has ever produced.

While there are legitimately important stories to be told about elite colleges and universitiesin particular their sly inclusion in the class war in the form of the adjunctification of their faculty and the way that they function to groom a superficially diverse cast of young people for their roles as the next generation of class war overseers at McKinsey and Wall Street and the halls of politicsthose are not the stories that most cultural commentators like to tell about them. Instead we get an obsessive and frankly bizarre focus on the rhetorical and political and fashion choices of a bunch of 20 year olds, who are held up as the collective Children of Omelas that all of society can come together to crucify so that sad adults can feel better about themselves. This weird tic, which pervades the media like an infectious disease, means that college does serve one more useful function: If you listen to people talk about it you can very quickly tell who is not worth listening to at all.

It is very easy to be annoyed by college kids. After all, they are young and healthy and have their whole lives ahead of them and the rest of us have already chosen our dreary paths, which we regret. Arithmetic tells you that college students have not had as many years to learn things as older people have had, and sometimes they act with the brashness and overconfidence of youth. This is a trivial observation about the nature of the human lifespan. It is not a weighty subject for political commentary. To the extent that any writer or politician or intellectual treats it as a matter that rises to the level of public importance, or, more absurdly, that reflects some new sociological trend that has not been present for the past several thousand years, the commentator in question is at best a fool and at worst a fraud. If you were to take the five hundred members of the US media who talk about college campuses the most and cast them all into the sea, the overall quality of our national discourse would rise significantly, because at least it would contain a lower amount of pure, goading distraction.
College campuses are little bubbles that exist outside of the real world. That is, of course, how they are designed. Getting mad at college kids for this fact, in the form of criticizing them for being sheltered, is sort of an upscale version of getting mad at prison inmates for being in prison. We put them there! Thats where they they are! What else are they supposed to do? Political protests on college campuses are set pieces, yes, but that is a very deliberate result that was engineered not by college students but by their institutions. To whatever extent college kids are able to break out of the comfortable trap of campus activism and connect their protests to the wider world, I salute them. As should we all.
Seen from this perspective, the protest encampments in support of Gaza that are sweeping elite college campuses across the nationand being ruthlessly crushed by riot cops at the same rateare valuable arenas of political education, more valuable than anything those kids will learn in the classroom. These experiences will teach these kids some of the most important truths they will need to know to accurately assess the way that America operates: That the polished people in charge of things are often merciless dictators at heart; That awful atrocities will be tolerated as soon as they can be ignored; That one millimeter beneath the smile of the boss lurks gritted teeth and a determination to call the cops to break your head open if you dont listen. To have young people set out to protest the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians and then be met by hysterical repression from the same institutions that have been tasked with making them good citizens is one of the best lessons I can imagine. It is an act of wiping off the makeup to reveal the pig beneath. We wouldnt want that pig to be concealed forever, would we?
Just as important as the tear gas and the billy clubs and the administrations cancelling their graduation ceremonies are the words of those condemning the college kids for doing all of this. All of those wordsfrom the somber cable news hosts pretending to fret about chaos, from the insincere lobbyists trying to smear human rights as antisemitism, from the once-friendly politicians afraid to embrace obvious moral judgments due to the naked demands of empire, from the university administrators who turn from gentle friends to militant gremlins when the invisible line into actual disruption is crossedreveal the contours of the bullshit that envelops all of this. We send kids to college to learn, but not to understand; to become independent, but not independent minded; to become responsible, as long as that sense of responsibility does not extend to everyone else in the world. Sometimes, something so bad happens that it causes an uprising that breaks the whole facade. Vietnam was that for my parents generation, and Gaza is that now, and there will be other things to come. The people who think that this is all wrong just show that they never really understood what education is in the first place.

Education is vital. College is dumb. A fabulously expensive ticket to the middle class that is lorded over by middle managers who love giving speeches in goofy gowns, and take their orders from hedge fund managers who have sucked their fortunes out of the pockets of the working class and splash their names on campus buildings like two-year-olds declaring themselves the King of the World. The ability to make a good living in the higher ed industry is inversely proportional to the amount you actually care about education. Universities are, at best, a grand sorting ground that divides those who can and cannot see through bullshit. Im sorry that a lot of kids may get kicked in the teeth in coming weeks to learn this. But the adults who arent smart enough to see that the kids are right are a much, much greater tragedy.

I think the combat in the Judgement games is my favorite in the series.

The beatings will continue until morale improves

Hey man thank you for taking trash from a site owned by a white nationalist and posting it here

The lesson of 2016 and 2020, the explanation that holds consistent with other results from that period and since, is that Hillary Clinton was so disliked she made otherwise surefire losers into competitive threats.

Listen: I was 29 the first time I had a sexual experience and it ended with my d bleeding and the woman not wanting to see me again. It felt, as you described, like a cruel joke. But, I decided from that experience to keep pushing, keep working towards achieving that goal, and by the end of the year I had a girlfriend. It won't be easy. There will be disappointments and setbacks. But the effort you put in towards overcoming anxieties and insecurities can be rewarded.

Is it reasonable to ask for things in the nine months before the next administration begins?

This is good news

People perceive benefit subjectively, not objectively.

Cops have a vested interest in portraying the populations they police as rioutous, out of control, in need of a billy club to beat them back. What we're seeing here is an attempt by police departments and powerful institutions to replay the 2020 protests but with a license to violently put them down.

The conservative supreme court is going to split the baby in a way that causes the criminal trial to be delayed past the election. That's how this ends.

For me, it is mostly my flawlessness that causes me to act that way.

ClayGuida posted...

The only things you can blame biden for are not getting manchin and sinema in line and his ridiculously unwavering support for Israel.

Thats literally it.

His border policies have also been pretty bad/too in-line with Trump's. But in general he has been better than I anticipated.

The unoccupied homes stuff is mostly a red herring. They're mostly in places homeless people aren't; they've been abandoned and unoccupied because fewer people want to live in the Rust Belt than they used to.

I'm just not that bouyant

Biden once again the lesser of two evils here

I'd like to reiterate my suggestion that these discussions about November should be accompanied by markers designating which state (or non-state) people live in, so you can decide whether it's worth your time getting mad at them.

For the record, I live in DC, so you can safely disregard the flippant ways I'll be discussing my vote.

Bump

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

I still don't want nazis on campus.

https://www.statesman.com/story/news/local/2024/04/24/ut-austin-campus-student-protest-arrest-pro-palestine-protests-walk-out/73425149007/

If you were really worried about what Donald Trump could do with a second term, it seems like a bad idea to set the precedent that a social media platform can be banned for vague "national security" concerns. Really think about how this approach might be used in the future.

Remember when Mitt Romney said his favorite meat was hot dog?

CountCorvinus posted...

From the writer/director moron himself:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/alex-garland-civil-war-release-timing-1235852725/#!

I believe the term for this is gobbledygook

Butterfiles posted...

Few things have aged worse than the 1990s Utah Jazz

They made Michael Jordan the third biggest asshole on the court!