When I walk (or more typically, drive ) around my city I'm always struck by just how much there needs to be done, and how much effort, time, and energy is wasted on meaningless bullshit. So much new infrastructure needs to be built out, but there's SO much maintenance work that just goes undone because it's not prioritized. "Sorry, we can't maintain the green spaces that we have, let alone build new ones, we gotta bulldoze that homeless camp again."

Patrick gets some crazy footage. Dude definitely needs to do a crash-course reading group to get rid of his brainworms, but I appreciate his dedication to getting footage you don't see elsewhere

I saw some tweet last week, I probably couldn’t find it now, but it was some jackass saying they don’t vote, instead they just make several donations to their local politicians, something like a few grand a year.
And when they need something, I think their example was the Texas power outage, they messaged that politician a few times, and their block was one of the first to get their power back. Blatantly advocating for bribery

Not really news, but the Foreign Minister of Isn'treal is using AI-generated Nazi propaganda to smear Iran.
xcancel link

I think Roderic makes a lot of good points and observations, but this thesis of his has shifted my perspective the most. Even though it is focused on the mechanism of propaganda, it elucidates a LOT of the western mindset and the failures of the western left. Really challenging but really eye-opening and sobering.

Obligatory: Propaganda operates as licensing more than brainwashing

Even 50k/km^2 would make these basically the most densely populated place on earth. "Israel" is monstrous

I mean, you're making a political argument, and one I don't disagree with. But the point of the theorem is about an idealized voting mechanism, absent ideology. There's absolutely arguments to be made about the usefulness of studying things like pure math, and I'm sympathetic to some of them, but even so, I think it's important to know how the system we use to implement democracy actually functions.
I think also the title is just pure clickbait, never take a youtuber at their word.

lmao you beat me to it by 15 minutes

I'm gonna assume it's about Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, which is about social game-theory, sort of. There are some weird paradoxes when you get into the mathematics of voting systems. Arrow's Theorem makes a few reasonable assumptions about a ranked-choice voting system, and shows that a third candidate will always spoil the results between the other two. In other words, adding in Jill Stein would change how Kamala and Trump are ranked in relation to each other (in a ranked-choice voting system).

ancient archetypes: tall, lanky, cool, and short, squat, funny