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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: January 1st, 2024

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  • MLK advanced civil rights by being a nuisance. Gandhi pushed Britain out of India by being a nuisance. I’m sure there are others.

    It is in the nature of protest to be disruptive. It has to be. If it isn’t, it gets ignored. Climate change is getting ignored. What would you rather they do, go deface an oil refinery? That’ll just get them arrested and the news suppressed. Big public displays that can’t be hushed are the only way to make sure your message reaches the world. These folks have been considerate enough to make sure that message didn’t permanently damage its canvas. I don’t know what more you could ask from them.


  • Ah yes, it’s holding back the massive sweeping wave of change currently going on to fix climate change.

    No, don’t be a dumbass. It’s raising awareness, because it’s obvious nobody is giving a shit about this really fucking massive problem that is directly on our doorstep. Painting Stonehenge isn’t going to accomplish anything except be a nuisance, but being a nuisance is how you compel people to get shit done non-violently. MLK and his sit-ins pushed civil rights forward by being a nuisance. Gandhi pushed Britain out of India by being a nuisance. If you accept the status quo, the status quo will remain. You have to get out and make noise and attract a following if you want the folks in charge to pay attention to your existence.

    Trust me, you want them painting on Stonehenge for attention. This is the non-violent option. When this is ignored long enough, the non-violent option will be shelved and that’s when people will suddenly start paying attention.

    “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” - John F. Kennedy, 1962





  • I mean, you say that, but a new player looking to get into Stellaris or CKII is looking at a $300 bill if they want all the content. In fact that’s what prevented me from getting into Stellaris, I own the base game, but when I discovered I’d need to shell out an additional several hundred dollars, even during a sale, for not only new species but just for base game mechanics, I stopped in my tracks.

    Compare with Civilization, I own Civ V and Civ VI and all the released content for each, pretty sure I bought each of those for less than $20.


  • If we had an appropriate scheduling for it so that it could be properly researched and manufactured we could just treat it like every other plant-based medicine we have (of which there are VERY many) - isolate and extract the compounds you’re interested in and recombine them in a pill or gel or aerosol form. Making supplements or tinctures or whatever, from cannabis, wouldn’t be any more difficult than creating aspirin from willow. The only reason it’s difficult is because it’s so highly scheduled that nobody is allowed to work with it.







  • And if this attitude spreads, which arguably it should, the service will simply be shut down. Unfortunately I think this may end up being a great loss for humanity as a whole if that happens. Elsewhere in this thread I compared it to the Library of Alexandria for its sheer content of 20-odd years worth of nearly all of humanity’s culture, news, and technical information.

    I don’t know what to do with this. The dragon must be slain but the hoard must be preserved, and I’m not sure how we accomplish that. The contents of YouTube should be backed up and made available to a public data store outside of Google’s grasp, ideally as a public utility probably maintained by tax money, and youtube can remain as a front-end to that service. But actually getting that done in the modern day seems… we’ll say, slim. For one thing the total youtube data package is about a fucktillion gigabytes and the only people able to host it are the ones who already have it. For another, Google will argue in court that videos uploaded to their service are their property, and they’ll win that argument.

    So we can start again anew, but we must mourn what we lose, because it may be significant. Like it or not, YouTube is a significant percentage of the recorded data output of the human race. Just pray, once we kill the beast, that you never have to replace any parts on a car model year 2004-2018 - because you won’t find good repair manuals anywhere and all the good tutorials are buried in the belly of YouTube.


  • Unfortunately it is such a repository of information that it’s nearly unavoidable anymore. It’s a reference tool. Need to fix your car? YouTube knows how. Need to write a piece of code with a tool you’re unfamiliar with? A random Indian man has posted a YouTube video explaining how. Need to find a hidden item in a video game? YouTube. There are many and varied reasons I’d pull up a YouTube video outside of the intended purpose of “watching YouTube” for entertainment. Many of these things can, technically, be conveyed through different media but often poorly and with a much lower rate of understanding. The sheer volume of knowledge and culture lost if Google ever takes down YouTube’s servers will be akin to the burning of the Library of Alexandria and that is not a joke. I don’t want to “watch YouTube” anymore for the most part but it is inescapable to me for several purposes as a reference material.