You’re totally right; I suppose my bafflement is more with the people likely to prove the market correct than with the market betting on them. It just seems like, after decades of mass shootings, surely there ought to be some saturation reached where this market dynamic isn’t true anymore. And yet.

I will never understand this. *Surely* the takeaway from this is, it doesn’t matter if you’re armed, because if someone else is, and intends to shoot you, chances are you aren’t gonna see it coming in time to react at all. You might as well panic-buy a literal security blanket; at least it’s warm.

Is the bile really different or worse than every other social media site, though? Like, it sucks, I agree, and I generally think people need to learn to interact with people online more like they would in person. But I have a hard time buying that their experience is worse here than on Twitter.

An autistic teenager breaking the regime that empowers RFK Jr. would be incredibly poetic.

Not enough science fiction revolves around battles being lost because light-lag meant the space-emperor’s social media suddenly blew up with a dog pile from a bad joke post he made twelve years ago, and he tilted.

The guy’s a self-described Libertarian. 98% of the time, that means he’ll support the most heinously authoritarian shit imaginable, on the assumption he, personally, will be high enough up in society to be able to do whatever he likes. There was no tilt.

This produces no insight, and no value.

I’m honestly gobsmacked. Like… half of all children died before age 10 before modern medicine and nutrition. That’s the *optimistic* version of the world she’s romanticizing. She talks about social safety nets, and like… if Winter went on for too long, your whole town starved to death. I just… wow.

Well, you know, they’re not under Treasury anymore, so they just kinda figured protecting money was someone else’s job.

The more advanced technology becomes, the more convinced I am that the Robot Revolt fiction we deserve is one where the robots lose because of a cascading error where, after 72 hours of operation, the accumulation of old data creates a massive delay in their targeting systems.

I don’t know why it makes so much sense to me that it was a Sizzlers, but it really does.

I mean, he calls himself a liberal, but, “somehow,” ends up arguing for Romney-Republican positions on every issue, and badmouthing every positive or successful move by Democrats. Do we really have have to continue treating him like he understands how anything works or says anything of value?

… nearly your entire life! Your town’s options are, ‘stay the same and die,’ or, ‘change and live,’ and you’re whining because that change doesn’t look identical to some fictionalized, mid-century, white American character, despite that, ‘character,’ being what led to the decay in the first place!”

… residents’ reactions were basically, “Well, it’s great that all the storefronts aren’t shuttered anymore, and there are young people again, but I don’t like that the *character* is changing.” And even then, I just wanted to shake them and go, “The character has been, ‘steadily necrotizing,’ for…

That reminds me of an article from… god, I don’t want to say a decade ago, but it probably was at this point. It was talking about Maine, and how it desperately needed immigration to counteract its shrinking, aging population. And it used a small town as its case-study. Predictably, the long-time…

The unfortunate reality is that, for a lot of redcap senators, the state attached to that title is a mere cosmetic affect, rather than a genuine polity to represent. It’s like a ducal title, to them. Who cares where the duchy is? What matters is that you’re a duke now.

Forget, “dracarys,” and dragon fire; I want a dragon I can yell, “daiquiris,” at, and have it dispense said drinks. That’s how you get a throne and hold it.

Heresy almost seems too mild a word for how contorted and unrecognizable some of these sects have made their theology from anything recognizably Christian. And that’s coming from an atheist.

And, “whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.” Followed by a whole diatribe about how failing to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, give welcome to strangers, and care for the ill and imprisoned is what gets you into hell. What they preach goes beyond heresy, tbh.