I watched all of Twin Peaks because I was interested in the hype around David Lynch and wanted to see his most recent work.

This episode made it all worth it.

I think you might misunderstand me. I’m not saying that the only way to attain power is through wealth. Im pushing back against your idea that since an individuals wealth isn’t cash, it’s not worth accounting for. It may stop making sense to count, but only in the sense that it literally becomes incomprehensible to, and at that point it is long overdue to say it is too much. The vast power those people have is due to their net worth. Because someone else has vast power without the wealth doesn’t contradict that fact.

Also I don’t really see why you’re tying up your freedom with billionaires, as if it is a binary choice between billionaires and personal freedom or no billionaires and tyranny. That’s a bit of a strange equivalency you draw. In any case, and in practical terms, you* probably don’t even have the freedom to be in the presence of the wealthiest of wealthy, let alone fart in front of them.

*assuming you are not ultra wealthy or somehow related personally to a member of the ultra rich

Edit: in other words, billionaires don’t grant you your freedom – and their freedom to extract capital and accumulate vast amounts of wealth probably has little bearing on your right to your house or personal property. In fact, they are far more equipped to seize things like your land, your data, your means of subsistence, than you are to defend them.

Untill I grew up and realised it’s not money they’ve got, it’s estimated net worth. It’s hard to turn that into cash.

I used to think that, too. But just because its not cash doesn’t mean it doesn’t still translate to wealth or power. They essentially park their money in investments, liquidate when they need to, but otherwise use their assets to extract further wealth exert further influence.

I like the finals too. It’s the best arcade shooter I’ve played since halo. It’s just dumb fun.

Ive been hooked on deadlock recently

This is the only hot take in this whole thread lol

My lukewarm take is that Star Wars has varied so greatly in quality from product-to-product, that any take that categorizes some of it as bad and some of it as good is a lukewarm, standard take.

I listen to NPR often and I enjoy it, but it ultimately has the same problem as other mainstream outlets in that they are beholden to advertisers and, in turn, to extractors of capital. It leans left socially, but as with almost all other major news organizations, it is self-interested and will almost always support neocolonialist US practices. One tiny, not-the-best but temporally relevant example – they have yet to call what’s happening in Gaza genocide.

As someone else mentioned, there is Democracy Now!, they are viewer funded, but that is also supplemented by groups such as the Ford Foundation, which obviously has ties to capital as well. Still, Democracy Now! will give more of an “outside looking in” view of the United States.

I like listening to both NPR and Democracy Now! to hear both the US-centric (capitalist) points vs the a more global (and anti-capitalist) viewpoint.

35mm film with picture negatives on it

nah you’re good you’re good, no need to apologize

Yeah I guess I should rephrase that – I knew lead poisoning wasn’t a myth, but I wasn’t sure about the theory that lead-exposure is the reason for the apparent rise in anti-intellectualism/conspiratorial thinking in older generations

At first I enjoyed the irony in this comment – thinking the lead-poisoning myth is my type of conspiracy – but it turns out, in a spectacularly non-conspiratorial way, researchers have shown correlation between lead exposure as a child and maladaptive personalities as an adult.

Isolated (mis)information streams and the need to identify with an ingroup are the two biggest features to me.

I actually was fortunate enough to visit the Sistine Chapel this summer, and although when you take a close look at images online of the paintings, it’s clear they aren’t “realism”, when you see the paintings in person they look very real. I was especially struck by how real Jonah looked, as if he was just hanging out, sitting on a ledge near the ceiling. Very cool experience.

Hackers acting as if they’re doing a public service by bringing down a free publicly accessible tool is a new level of assbackwardness.

If the goal really was to force IA to increase their security, they would’ve tried to consult with them. This is more about notoriety and chaos and the hackers have no moral ground to stand on.

Playing guitar. I’m bad, can’t really play with others, couldn’t play live, but being able to sing and play along to songs I love, putting my own spin on them, or getting into a rhythm and making up silly lyrics is one of the most valuable things I ever learned to do. Probably the single best thing I’ve done in my life is learn to play.

The proof is in the pudding folks

The adjustment period is real. I was showering twice a day when I stopped shampooing, because my hair (lots of it, but fine and not coarse) got greasy quick. After a few weeks, it normalized. I can shower once a day now. I still wash it by running my fingers and water through it over and over, so it doesn’t smell. I still have a somewhat dry scalp though, it didn’t really fix that. Don’t really have dandruff, but if I scratch my scalp a bunch or use a comb directly on it several times, I’ll have to rinse the dandruff out.

Same, although I’ve been going for longer than two years. Honestly, I cant really remember when I stopped use shampoo. But if I don’t shower for a day, it starts looking a little greasy. I have lots of straight fine hair, run the water and my fingers through it rigorously in the shower, and then I come out, scrunch it with the towel (dont rub, it will break the hair fibers) and then air dry. Get compliments on my hair all the time.

As for smell, it just smells like hair. It can get slightly more pungent if I dont shower, but otherwise it just smells like me. Every once in a while I ask my full-poo GF to check if my hair smells because my own noseblindness, and she hasn’t told me to go shower yet.

Definitely when you go from poo to no-poo, your hair is extra greasy. I don’t know the science behind it, but it seems to over produce oils and takes a couple weeks to normalize. During that period I was showering once in the morning and once at night, again running my fingers and water through my hair for ~2-3 minutes straight. After a while my hair didnt get so greasy.

When I use soap or shampoo, my hair loses all of its body and shine doesn’t go back to normal for a day or so.

I imagine for some people this works, but for others it doesn’t. I do feel a little weird when people ask me what my “secret” is and I’m literally like “yeah just don’t wash it lol”

I would recommend reading or listening to Noam Chomsky’s Understanding Power. It is a compilation of several of his Q and As about his ideas about the US political and media systems. He has a whole book about the media called Manufacturing Consent, but Understanding Power will give you the lowdown.

Essentially, all mainstream US media is beholden to capitalistic (for advertising) or state (for funding) forces, so a person should always be aware that news sources are never going to print something that is against its own interest. Things like LGBTQ rights and right to abortion don’t put news outlets sources of money at risk, so they’re safe to print, but you’d be hard-pressed to find something that challenges, for example, the military industrial complex.

I’m not doing it much justice but that’s a very very general and incomplete jist of why it’s good to be skeptical of the mainstream media in general.

it’s mostly political

Oh I gotcha. Interesting. I don’t follow FSF or GNU or anything, do you know if they tend to be antagonistic toward nonfree devs who still try to be as free as possible? Honestly, I read the Stallman quote about FreeBSD in this thread, and a statement from GNU that acknowledges the impracticality of their philosophy, and I kinda agree with their ethical takes. Except, I also think people should be able to install nonfree software, because otherwise you have a pretty bad dilemma with the word “free.”

Ultimately, if they are actively antagonistic toward those who don’t share that philosophy, I think that’s not great. Sure, free software according to the GNU project may be the only ethical one, but we live in a culture that promotes the exact opposite idea, so why would I be surprised and upset when an otherwise ethically acting person doesn’t conform to my own ethical framework, and they go on and create nofree software. I’m still going to get a beer with that person because at the end of the day we probably have common values and how else am I going to sell them the idea free software

I’m afraid to ask this because I’m not a dev, but I have a fair amount of linux experience. Why is it that the ability to install Google Play Services on GrapheneOS makes it not FOSS/open source, while the ability to install Google Chrome (or any proprietary software, I guess) on Linux doesn’t make is non-FOSS/open source?

I’m not articulating that question very well, and I’m assuming I’m missing some key component, but they seem comparable to me, as a regular user. Is it something like the level of access that GPServices has to the kernel?