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Cake day: September 2nd, 2023

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  • I had been using YouTube for years without being presented rightwing propaganda in my suggestions. I mostly just watched strategy gaming, history, technology channels and some peculiar travelling blogs. And my suggested was just mostly those things.

    Then one day I used my YouTube account to cast kid shows for my niece for the first time. After that I was suggested more kid shows which didn’t interest me personally, but I also started getting suggested cat videos, which I obviously clicked. And the week after that half my suggested feed was rightwing misogynist/racist/culture war misinformation, and it took a lot of “do not recommend channel” to clean it up again.

    So now I believe that there is a concerted effort by some malicious actors to train Google’s algorithm to assume that if someone is interested in cat videos, that they would then also be open to becoming a misogynist racist prick.




  • On the other hand, when someone claims something is impossible/something has never happened before/something happens every single time, but you have just 1 anecdote from a credible source that contradicts that claim, then that 1 anecdote is enough to know that they are wrong.

    Example: some pundit states: our government has never executed an innocent man. You just need proof that they have executed a single innocent man to show that the pundit has no credibility on the subject and that it’s thus not an impossibility that other executed men were also innocent.



  • Dogs also love to wrestle over the stick/ball/… Think 2 dogs holding onto the same stick with their teeth while growling and pulling as hard as they can, they’re having fun.

    The dog I grew up with (malamute) would fetch something once and then have you try to get it out of her mouth, which was impossible to win for a human, so you’d have to feign giving up and then she’d drop it. And if you then threw away the object again, she would give you “the look” after which she would saunter off and ignore you. So I’m pretty certain that she didn’t like fetching, but she loved wrestling and pulling.


  • My scalp condition is that I have too much hair. Too dense and thick, it gets greasy after not washing it 1 day, so I don’t even dare to replicate your experiment.

    I also used to have a cold weather dandruff problem, but that was solved entirely when I started always air drying after every shower. Thanks to a random tip years ago on reddit. My dandruff problem was apparently because of humidity.



  • My family (parents etc) have mostly learned their lesson now after all the news coverage, but before that I used to resort to hiding my good non sticks whenever they were staying over. If my parents complained about the shitty old pans that were available, then I pulled out my very sticky nonstick ceramic pan that they had roughed up despite my protests. I’m never throwing that shitty ceramic pan away, it’s way too effective as a rhetorical ploy now.

    Friends I still mostly don’t trust since I don’t know their kitchen habits well enough, but they’re less likely to try to help with cooking anyhow, only with dish washing and there it’s easy to hide the wrong sponges.

    If your chipped nonstick is teflon, then it’s garbage now imo. I would never cook in it again, too risky imo.

    And I now realize that I’ve become paranoid in my own kitchen.




  • Inspired by is not the same as based on. I don’t think that it can ever be canonical because the time period was never explored in depth by Frank Herbert himself, but I do think that the what ifs of this time period could make for a very interesting premise.

    Either way, the showrunner is apparently Alison Schapker, who was also the primary showrunner for Altered Carbon, which I really liked. So I’m definitely going to give the first episode a chance :)


  • From imdb: “Ten thousand years before Paul Atreides joined the Fremen to lead an uprising on Arrakis to take down House Harkonen, two sisters (Valya and Tula Harkkonen) create the mysterious all-female order called the Bene Gesserit. In Dune Prophecy, the siblings combat forces that threaten the future of humankind.”.

    Iirc, 10000 thousand years before Dune was the time of the Butler Jihad, when humankind fought against the thinking machines. So I think it’s a series based on apocryphal stories on how the feudal society in Dune came to be. Lots of creative freedom for the creators, kinda like Knights of the Old Republic was for Star Wars.


  • And the most damning part of all imo: “the owners and the scientists familiar with the effects of radium carefully avoided any exposure to it themselves. Chemists at the plant used lead screens, tongs, and masks.”.

    The plant owners definitely knew that they were killing people, there should have been murder charges imo.


  • I’m absolutely certain that it wasn’t ads that put a firm like TomTom on a downward slope. This was actually the first time that I’ve heard someone proclaim that ads are the reason.

    If your business is to sell maps + navigation devices for money and then the times change and now nearly everyone already owns a smartphone with built in gps + some car manufacturers provide sat nav as a default + another company is giving access to a map away for free, well then your business is in trouble.

    I’ve never even heard of ads in TomTom or Garmin, since I stopped using a dedicated sat nav once I had a smartphone, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was one of the things they tried to stay afloat after smartphones became ubiquitous.


  • I consider as most effective, the system that is most effective for the whole market in the long term, not the system that only works best for a few in that market. And yes, I realize that authoritarian market intervention is great for maximizing short term profits for those few companies/persons, but if the rest of the market suffers in the long term because of it (and they are), then we’re dealing with rent seeking and that’s pretty commonly accepted to be bad in the long term. Bad for society, but also bad for wealth creation. And if it’s bad for wealth creation, then it’s definitely not effective capitalism. This is why I consider authoritarian capitalism to not be the most effective form of capitalism.

    And yeah, I’m aware that the USA is on this trajectory. Other western democracies are too, but of those that are, I think it’s still mostly to a lesser extent than the USA.

    About China: China’s competiveness has significantly regressed in the last few years. Xi Jinping’s authoritarian and imperialistic policies have not been good for business. Under Xi Jinping guanxi is also much more important again than it was under Hun Jintao: companies have no real rights, they too are dependant on maintaining relations and obeying the government. If they fail to maintain relations or if they bet on the wrong political horse, then the company leadership will be gone pretty fast.


  • Authoritarian capitalism is not the most effective form of capitalism. It is the most effective for those that are already on top, but for the market as a whole (and especially for the society around that market), it’s going to be worse in the long run.

    Companies that are protected from competition by an authoritarian government will be able to extract higher profits in the short term, but their products and services will become worse in the long term, which not only harms their customers, but also the company’s chances of selling their products on actually competitive markets. The American car makers are a good example of this imo.

    Companies that are protected from having to pay fair wages and/or providing good working conditions, will be faced with labor shortages if the workers have alternatives, or with a depressed consumer market because the people have less money/time to spend on consuming things.