thinking Hitler/Stalin is awesome

Guy who did the holocaust versus guy who stopped the holocaust. These are not the unless you’re pretty stupid.

With every snake I’ve handled, maybe a dozen species of domestic pets and wild ones, they’ve always been more afraid of me than I am of them. Even the rattlesnakes on hiking trails. One small part of their body is a defensive weapon while I have four limbs and tools. They can’t see well, they’re pretty dumb, and their mouth might not even be large enough to bite me.

They don’t really have mammalian affection but snakes do seek warmth. My chainlink kingsnake was almost 2m long and he wanted nothing more than to hold onto me while I did things. He could have constricted but I wasn’t posing a threat and he was fed regularly on a predictable schedule. On feeding and shedding days I didn’t handle him to minimise that conflict. The reward of having that pet was peaceful coexistence with something I have a mild phobia of and being able to see the behaviours that humanise it. They’re all the fun of an aquarium but you can hold the fish.

I feel like I’m trading American children for Palestinian children when I give a libertarian the benefit of the doubt, but at least they aren’t rabidly supporting genocide like the kind-hearted liberals.

Andor is probably the last Stars War that I’ll watch unless they come out with another one that learns from it. DS9 took Star Treks seriously and the result was a show that has relevant ideas 30 years later. Until Andor, none of the Stars Wars I’ve seen have taken the universe seriously. They’ve expanded on it in unnecessary detail and obsessed over that detail, but intellectually they’ve all felt flat and liberal. Andor spends three episodes showing the Death Star through Foucault and you get one brief shot of it after a full film-length of watching how a gear is made using slave labour. That dialectical materialist analysis of the empire is so much more interesting than any battle or Jedi scene across the whole canon.

“And I don’t mean R-rated to be vulgar. R-rated as a Trojan horse for emotion. I always wonder why studios don’t want to just gamble on something like that.”

An Andor-type film would be great but Reynolds seems like such a generic lib that I don’t think he’d make it compelling.

Oceanic acidification means that the kraken can no longer form its shell.

An ex wanted to break up because she was still in love with her ex. Her ex is in prison for decades after going on a rampage against homeless people and critically wounding at least a few. Live happybadger reaction:

That I haven’t played. The main three games were just gun slot machines for me.

I probably played the games more than most of the audience and wouldn’t have wasted money on it. The IP is terrible apart from being the first lootbox shooter. Annoying characters, boring plot, a flat setting- it’s probably the video game I’d least want to see made into a film.

I was a 9/11 truther because there were so many weird coincidences that day, but ultimately had to accept the accident theory. Shit happens.

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Cargo ships are your cheapest paid option. I’ve yet to do it, but contact the shipping companies and see what their passenger policies are. There are also shipping agents who coordinate with those companies as intermediates.

There’s also the potential of crewing a small boat if you have any skills or show them you want to learn fast. I did a lot of sailing around Panama just by sitting in a marina at either side of the canal and chatting with people who are about to sail somewhere. The work was either poorly paid ($50-100 per day) or free in exchange for a bed and food. For transatlantic/transpacific sailing though, I don’t know if you’re going to find as many yachters as I did who were just sailing in the Caribbean. That’s also a fun option if you want to build those skills since they need a certain number of crew to even transit the canal and they’re all going somewhere after.

edit: And for the latter you’ll also have luck on boater forums. I can’t remember which I used, but there was a designated subforum where people would post if they have or want crew work specifically for linehandling.

The only good work environment I’ve had was a municipal parks department. Not even unionised, paid $17/hour for the same work I could get $25-35/hour for at a private landscaper, no benefits for seasonal workers and few super-competitive permanent roles. But in decoupling from the profit motive, production became based on need rather than financial goals. I worked so much harder than I would at a private company because building a public pollinator garden is ecologically critical work that educates people on important things. Clearing snow at 4am in -10c weather was something I did until the point of exhaustion because I use those same bike trails and sidewalks the moment I get off work and each bike is one less car that might kill my neighbours. I got to do eco-Marxism without having to use any of the vocabulary alongside a mixed bag of liberals and radicals who intuitively understood those ideas through observation.

With strong unions and outright syndicalism, that kind of nuance returns to the incentive structure. It’s productivity based on socio-ecological need instead of production for profit. We cared about getting people their 40 hours per week and if you came up 5 hours short you’d get paid to study and design sustainable landscapes used by your neighbours. If you needed time off you got it, if you needed a break you took it. You got to spend all day making beautiful de-alienating things for your coworkers, wildlife, and community. When my neighbours hold the power instead of owners and shareholders, it’s so much easier to convince them that doing A instead of B will improve our shared conditions.

The largest arboriculture company here is employee-owned but not unionised at a national level. Their stock isn’t publicly traded and each year the permanent employees get to buy shares with a certain percentage of their income. That access to stock options increases with your rank. While they’re the only arborists I’d want to work for and set the industry standards for safety, I don’t like two things about that:

1. Seasonal employees don’t get stock options, nor do new employees without like a year under their belt. This concentrates the internal wealth of the company in upper management and senior employees, making the incentive structure represent them instead of Joe Schmuckatelli risking their life 30m up with a chainsaw.

2. The incentive structure is the same as a public company as a result of that. Make number go up so you get dividends at the end of the year. The only way to make number go up is to do more with less. Productivity is in direct contrast to the welfare of workers because they don’t have a union to represent their safety or rights. If I get a small bonus every year from dividends but I spent that year risking my life unnecessarily to boost the stock price, it’s just gambling on Russian roulette.

Tesla having an oligarchical stranglehold over US EVs is why I can’t affordably own a better brand like BYD. If you want to be idealistic about Tesla’s supposed climate change role, explain it to me in the context of The Purpose of a System is What it Does. Tesla uses public funds to make luxury cars while suppressing the EV industry through its proprietary infrastructure, obsession with private transit, and government influence. The Boring Company is a direct response to California trying to implement high speed rail so that the wealthy don’t have to share space with workers.

Of course I negatively judge someone for owning one. If it’s a cybertruck, they’re feral and I write them off as a member of society. Electrification is dead on arrival as long as they exist.

https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/cpdxzjw9p47o

Elon Musk’s appearance at a Trump rally this afternoon is garnering significant attention online over a one-armed gesture.

He made the gesture while thanking supporters for contributing to Trump’s victory. Musk thanked the crowd for “making it happen”, before placing his right hand over his heart and then thrusting the same arm out into air straight ahead of him.

“My heart goes out to you. It is thanks to you that the future of civilisation is assured,” he said.

Several users on X, the social medial platform he owns, have likened the gesture to a Nazi salute.

Musk has since responded, posting on his social media site X: “Frankly, they need better dirty tricks. The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.”

I wish western journalists would have opted to become compost instead. Compost is useful.

I think horticulture programmes are drastically underrepresented. It’s one of the most interdisciplinary sciences that you can use to teach pretty much anything. In studying the dialectics between organism and environment I could teach every component of those interactions from soil to sky. Plants are deeply political and a great platform for left-urbanism, socioeconomics, and historical materialism discussions. Operating a greenhouse is an education in several trades, while being able to grow a plant builds important life skills. It’s an excuse to take city kids into nature and show them why it’s worth defending.

Three things stand out to me:

1. The disparity between military and civilian certifications. If you’re a mechanic on a specialised machine, it’s easy to become a DOD contractor on that same platform. If you’re an officer, you can say you’ve managed X people. If you’re a medic, your scope of practice is command-by-command. You might work above an LPN level but leave the military with an NREMT EMT-B certification at most which qualifies you for a minimum wage job way below your scope of practice. There are only a handful of slots for advanced schools that give you any worthwhile certification, and the paperwork required to become an LPN ($55k/year~) is very difficult to amass. If you’re a machine gunner, you spent 4+ years mastering a skill that doesn’t transfer to any civilian job and you can only sell yourself as a whipped horse with a broken back.

2. Military culture itself is traumatic. It’s closer to feudalism than it is anything in the civilian world. There’s a rigid hierarchy and set of standards for every aspect of your life. You have a pathological obsession with being 15 minutes early because your lord can have you arrested if you don’t do everything perfectly. You’re supposed to embrace the toxicity of every part of your day, much less being a cog in the demon machine that hates you as much as it does its victims, and tie your self-worth to that scripted performance. The outlet for dealing with any of that is alcoholism and/or smoking. You can’t afford or make the time for civilian therapy, while military therapists are inquisitors that can have you arrested or end your career.

3. There’s no blueprint for civilian life. The allure of military life is that you know exactly what every expectation is. You can turn your brain off because you know what to wear and how to wear it, what to do and how to do it, and how doing A will result in B for your career. Your chain of command is a line of narcissistic older siblings and parents strictly directing you down that path. You have that stick incentive of being arrested if you violate any part of the carrot plan. All of a sudden you’re removed from that very traumatic environment and it’s replaced by a much more abstract system where nobody follows the rules you’re conditioned into.

Maybe you make that deal with the devil knowing you’re a good fiddler and you get a golden fiddle for it. If you didn’t explicitly do that for that reason and get the right paperwork for that goal, you leave with nothing and probably hate the field you were trained for but not meaningfully certified in.