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MeFi post: The East Coast Is Sinking
People will move inland and it will be chaotic. We should start planning for that now, and have retreat scenarios that support the people who will need new homes, using projections of future population pressures/housing needs, etc.

I mean, we can handle this, if we want to. The US is big, we have room to move people and communities inland, though it won't be as simple as "move NYC 20 miles northwest" but we don't have to just wring our hands and wait for chaos... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by emjaybee at 10:35 AM on February 29, 2024
> There are too many people on this earth.

nope.

just, nope. people are lovely and it's good to have a lot of them around. the problem is not people. the problem is things.
posted to MetaFilter by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 10:17 AM on February 29, 2024
MeFi post: Losing everything
Ugh, bureaucracy.

My oldest brother became my legal guardian when my father died. He spent my orphan's pension on himself, mostly alcohol. I had a scholarship at a boarding school, and I lived there most of the time, but after I graduated I couldn't stand living with him, so I ran away.

Then I turned 18 and my orphan's pension was cut off. So I applied for youth allowance. On the application forms there were questions about my parents income and... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by adept256 at 8:49 AM on January 31, 2018
MeFi post: A Christmas Pardon From Dank Brandon
At what point do we end the legal gray area and just legalize? It's flippin' weird to be living in a state where every beer store sells THC-laden drinks, legally, but not Federally legally, but no one is enforcing it, but as a Federal employee I can still lose my job if I drink a (nearly) totally (but not Federally) legal beverage that I can buy at my neighborhood store... but it's cool if my wife has some because she's a state employee?

You think... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by srboisvert at 12:12 PM on December 22, 2023
MeFi post: Ding, dong,
I fear I'm not going to express this all that well but I've been reflecting on Kissinger's career and one of the things that strikes me about it and that I think will be too little discussed is that his legacy, which was monstrous, was achieved not so much through exercise of his own power - he commanded no armies, had no arsenal of weapons - but chiefly through providing intellectual and institutional cover for other men to do the things they wanted to do.

I say this... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Nerd of the North at 2:24 AM on November 30, 2023
MeFi post: Vim creator and maintainer Bram Moolenaar (1961 – 2023-08-03)
I'd leave a dot, but I'm afraid I'd die too
posted to MetaFilter by ChurchHatesTucker at 8:31 PM on August 5, 2023
MeFi post: The S-Files
This is the level of pedantry I come to Metafilter for.

For which I . . . oh, forget it.
posted to MetaFilter by The Bellman at 11:48 AM on July 17, 2023
MeFi post: Twitter now requiring login in order to view site
Nelson: "It does make me wonder why he bought a middling social media company and is running it into the ground though."

Because he has the emotional development of 14-year old wannabe edgelord and thinks he's funny and is easily goaded by more advanced edgelords, obviously.
Or was that a rhetorical question?
posted to MetaFilter by signal at 7:33 PM on June 30, 2023
SpaceX is run by Gwynne Shotwell, not Musk. Telsa also seems to be run by people who know how to build cars with Musk sometimes meddling from the outside. Not sure what you mean by the third company. The tunnel thing is going nowhere.

I'm not saying Musk doesn't have a skill. He's great at declaring audacious goals, convincing investors he can achieve those goals, and rallying excellent leaders and engineers to achieve those goals. (See also, Steve Jobs). It's not... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Nelson at 7:28 PM on June 30, 2023
MeFi post: Red Hair the Nobleman
THERAPIST: And you are here instead of your friend, because...
SUBOTAI: He is Conan, Cimmerian. He will not go to therapy, so I go to therapy for him.
posted to MetaFilter by phooky at 9:31 AM on January 10, 2023
MeFi post: And when you smile for the camera / I know I'll love you better
I get the sense that for at least some of the college age students that I have contact with, it’s a Thundercat world, where Stevie Wonder has replaced the Beatles and the Stones as a foundational reference.

Yes. The article doesn't really talk about the revival of 70s jazz-funk - with conspicuously excellent musicianship and stylish production - over the last 15-odd years that's probably driving people to listen back to some of the current bands'... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by offog at 4:25 AM on June 17, 2023
MeFi post: Do Not Cross
Can we please not pretend that the web has to be enshitified because no other alternative is feasible?

Can we stop saying that obnoxious, intrusive sidebar ads and constantly clicking unsubscribe to emails we never signed up for in the first place is normal?

Can we not just hand over everything to surveillance capitalism while smugly insisting that you'd have to be naive to have an expectation of privacy?

Because those... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by AlSweigart at 5:37 AM on June 12, 2023
MeFi post: sometimes, it *is* lupus
Once a patient has a diagnosis of a mental health condition on their health record, especially a serious one like schizophrenia, nothing else they say is ever taken seriously by any doctor (or often anyone else). Doctors like those in this story are truly rare.
posted to MetaFilter by hydropsyche at 5:08 AM on June 9, 2023
MeFi post: "Women, millennials, and “dudes with beards and tattoos.” W, M, D."
I see the GOP playbook moving towards outright voter suppression, increasingly outside even the color of law. They know they've lost the people, and they intend to move forward without them.

For a while there, I was worried that GOP leadership was going to do the smart thing, and try to ally itself with the incredibly-culturally-conservative religious parts of Black and Latinx communities. There are some really nasty and virulent veins of sexism and... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 2:00 PM on June 5, 2023
I see no one has mentioned climate change. Today's climate related disasters haven't really penetrated US politics as a thing that something needs to be done about. Tomorrow's climate disasters are going to make 20th century republican political issues such as bigger tax cuts for oligarchs entirely irrelevant.
posted to MetaFilter by monotreme at 1:54 PM on June 5, 2023
MeFi post: Quantum Physics Falls Apart without Imaginary Numbers
Trees, bears, mooses, and vultures are real concrete objects that exist in the objective world.

Numbers are not.

Literally all numbers are logical constructs that exist in our minds. In that sense, they are all imaginary.


Although I agree with your wider point, I feel I should point out that trees bears mooses and vultures are also logical constructs that exist only in your mind in the very exact same sense as numbers.
posted to MetaFilter by nzero at 2:56 AM on June 3, 2023
What does the B in Benoît B. Mandelbrot stand for?
Benoît B. Mandelbrot
posted to MetaFilter by avocet at 5:28 PM on June 2, 2023
MeFi post: Living to work... on reelection
Democrats skew older than Republicans. There could be various reasons.

My interpretation is that the Democrats have been more effective at suppressing internal challenges to their leadership. The Republicans have repeatedly been disrupted by challenges from the right since the '80s, recently by the Tea Party and then by Trump's coterie. This brings new blood into the leadership.

For reasons I don't completely understand, the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by grobstein at 9:03 AM on April 7, 2023
MeFi post: TRUMP INDICTED
I can't predict the future, but I think Trump's longest-lasting legacy to the United States of America will be how he finally pried the lid off the Republican jar of expired pickles (many others had loosened it for him, to be sure) where they kept their ids. Whether or not the contents of the jar go on to spoil the rest of the stuff in the fridge remains to be seen.
posted to MetaFilter by The Card Cheat at 11:54 AM on April 4, 2023
The problem is that the US should never have gone nearly a quarter of a millennium before putting any former Presidents up on charges. Off the top of my head there should have been consequences for Chester Arthur (corruption/ NY Customs house criminal enterprise), Harding (Teapot Dome), Nixon (All of the various Watergate charges), Reagan (Iran/Contra), Clinton (perjury in office, harassment and likely rape going way back to the Arkansas governor's mansion), Bush 2 (fraudulent initiation of an... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by tclark at 4:10 PM on March 30, 2023
MeFi post: How an endless voyage round the world stole my childhood
Having said that, I have noticed that some survivors of educational neglect really thrive academically after they manage to enroll in school. It doesn't justify the abuse, but it's an interesting phenomenon.

My theory is that because educational neglect rarely occurs in isolation, these kids develop extreme independence and competence because they had to in order to survive. The time management, planning, and self-motivation skills required to... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brook horse at 10:25 AM on March 25, 2023
This situation and millions like it are why I’ve come to think all children should be required to attend schools with accreditation and government oversight. Every single child should have regular access to a school nurse and a school psychologist who are public employees.
posted to MetaFilter by pickles_have_souls at 8:39 AM on March 25, 2023
MeFi post: Hold my Hair and Tell the Future How I Died
So I think they concluded Beethoven, his father, or grandfather was the product of an extramarital affair.

What the paper actually says is
Considering the strong historical and genetic evidence for the authenticity of the five matching hair samples, and our Y chromosome evidence for the lack of discontinuity in the paternal lineage between Aert van Beethoven and the five living descendants, we conclude that the most plausible... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by zamboni at 5:34 PM on March 24, 2023
MeFi post: None of these were on my 2023 bingo card
And in the wrong thread to boot!
posted to MetaFilter by sammyo at 6:37 AM on March 17, 2023
MeFi post: man is unsure if the woman at the yoga spot is flirting w him
Color me (red and yellow) unsurprised that a grown man who relies on his wife to pick out his clothes lacks the social intelligence to understand when a different woman is flirting with him.
posted to MetaFilter by Panjandrum at 11:53 PM on March 11, 2023
MetaTalk post: 192: The week between last week and this week
is it mixed such that jessamyn is in the left channel and cortex is in the right channel?

It’s harder to listen to with headphones like this as the voices are different pitches, and so volume control is higher for one than the other, just FYI for next month. Also hard for those with hearing loss in one ear.
posted to MetaTalk by ellieBOA at 6:56 AM on March 6, 2023
MeFi post: they're killing the children
I do wish this wasn't always framed in terms of "...and they'll come for you next!" like what they're doing now isn't that bad or scary really, but you should be worried anyway, because if who's next.

What they're doing now is atrocious. What they might do in future is a distraction, it partly cedes the ground on what they're doing now.
posted to MetaFilter by Dysk at 9:57 PM on March 2, 2023
MeFi post: Why is every character suddenly an 'antihero' now?
I thought for a moment you were talking about Heathcliff and Cathy the comics characters. But then sanity intruded.
posted to MetaFilter by GenjiandProust at 5:04 PM on February 13, 2023
MeFi post: The world doesn’t want boxes. That’s not what’s in the human heart.
God, we'll just grasp at any fuckin' technological dreamland hype to avoid hunkering down and building the incredibly basic midrise apartments with retail on ground next to a reasonable-width street with frequent bus service that any city of 50,000 people in Europe could do in their sleep, won't we?
posted to MetaFilter by Superilla at 9:27 AM on February 13, 2023
MeFi post: US balloons in Chinese airspace?
wanna worry about cbrne threats? shipping containers is where you begin.
posted to MetaFilter by j_curiouser at 7:59 AM on February 14, 2023
MeFi post: “One day, Také stopped, too tired to go any further.”
You can't live with an animal and hide from death.
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl at 1:35 PM on February 8, 2023
MeFi post: Well, that's rich. Or is it?
On a tangentially-related note, I've been re-watching Black Sails of late and the other day I wondered how much loot Spain took from the New World. Some googling led me to Earl Hamilton's 1929 paper on the subject. Hamilton went to Spain and pored through the registries and the accounts and the bills of lading and so forth. He claimed that (1500 to 1660) the take in silver was 16,632,648.20 kg and, over the same period, the take in gold was 181,234.95 kg. Using modern... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by which_chick at 6:57 PM on January 29, 2023
tl;dr
posted to MetaFilter by lalochezia at 6:26 PM on January 29, 2023
MeFi post: fishy business
The world became a William Gibson novel so gradually, I barely even noticed.

The world has always been a William Gibson novel, it just wasn't evenly distributed.
posted to MetaFilter by zamboni at 7:34 AM on January 17, 2023
MeFi post: if you find yourself curious how the digital future was displayed...
Uh... were they also not a 'marketing partner' for... ':CueCat' ?
posted to MetaFilter by rozcakj at 5:30 AM on January 17, 2023
MeFi post: Red Hair the Nobleman
Oh there is a whole lot in the Conan mythos about rejecting the libertine trappings of the ruling elite, not out of any sense of justice or egalitarianism, but because power and wealth must be earned. Very, very libertarian, and the setting adds in a bonus implication of the virtue of primal man vs the feminization of being civilized.
posted to MetaFilter by thecjm at 6:31 PM on January 11, 2023
MeFi post: Full text meme search
Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?
posted to MetaFilter by uncleozzy at 2:33 PM on January 12, 2023
MeFi post: Guitar Legend Jeff Beck has died
Something that's been buzzing around my mind...

There's something about the way that the guitar solo is a kind of highly emotional expression that's available to people for whom it doesn't, perhaps, come easily. I think it's telling that so many young men of a particular generation of Englishmen, mostly working class or lower-middle class, were so good at it, across genres - Beck, Clapton, Page, Green, Gilmour, Knopfler (born 1949, so the same generation, pretty much),... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Grangousier at 3:44 PM on January 12, 2023
MeFi post: Cocoon
Mice just seem so amenable. Starving makes them live longer. Feeding them protein makes them live longer. Messing with their DNA. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that booting them around the lab every day makes them live longer. It never transfers to humans.
My guess is that mammals have several ‘settings’ that determine their lifespan. Mice have all the knobs turned to 1: almost anything might jog one of them up a bit. Humans already have all the dials at 10, we’re already as... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Phanx at 2:10 AM on January 13, 2023
MeFi post: Red Hair the Nobleman
Halloween Jack: Red Sonja, canonically is Hyrkanian (proto-Iranian) though of Irish religion (champion of Scathath the Goddess of vengeance); RHG is Vanir, or proto-Scandinavian. So Sonja might actually be closer to the Cimmerians and Conan (Cimmerians being a Scythian adjacent people who lived on the Caspian steppes).

Though the entirety of the Hyborian mythos is nightmarish smorgasbord of early 20th century archeological and anthropological conjecture.
posted to MetaFilter by LeRoienJaune at 11:15 AM on January 10, 2023
the Khan's question and Conan's response wasn't some indication that Conan had a "king's" mentality, just the opposite: Conan had been a slave for so long and done nothing but kill that he'd lost all his humanity.

Potato, potato.
posted to MetaFilter by gauche at 8:35 AM on January 10, 2023
MeFi post: The Internet Wants To Get Murdered By Clue's Sexy New Cast
Hasbro's definitely missing a beat here not immediately releasing a bunch of remixable art of each character standing by themself.

They are too busy fucking over the role play community.
posted to MetaFilter by Mitheral at 9:12 AM on January 7, 2023
MeFi post: Republican leader Kevin McCarthy still not Speaker
This pic, but shopped to say EVER KEVIN

It's a slow day, why not
posted to MetaFilter by May Kasahara at 10:14 AM on January 5, 2023
Oh look, it's your country's turn to have a shitshow. Is this where I'm supposed to come in and explain how this relates to my country's politics, ask whether the Queen is going to intervene, and what if Sinn Fein take their seats?

Sending love and popcorn from across the pond. I hope we can both have functioning governments one day.
posted to MetaFilter by automatronic at 7:11 PM on January 4, 2023
Even if Kevin gets in (especially if by lowering the bar), he’ll have zero authority to lead. He’s damaged goods. Any sensible person would have stepped aside.

But, well, there’s the problem.
posted to MetaFilter by Capt. Renault at 5:56 PM on January 4, 2023
This will end in a gunfight on the floor, mark my words.
posted to MetaFilter by nickggully at 5:37 PM on January 4, 2023
Spotted on Twitter by @jacksonboaz_

McCarthy doesn’t have the votes.
Scalise doesn’t have the votes.
Biggs doesn’t have the votes.

There’s only one man who can truly unite the Republican Party…

Neurosurgeon, Nobel Prize winner, and WWII hero GEORGE SANTOS.

posted to MetaFilter by ActionPopulated at 4:59 PM on January 4, 2023
MeFi post: it’s always worth pausing when we’re told “X University” “banned” Y
The liberal inclination toward prescriptivist language is one of our most annoying tendencies. We often get it wrong (seems like people are slowly realizing how myopic “Latinx” is) and people plain don’t like being told how to talk. It’s alienating. I believe it’s a reflection of our obsession with process over results — missing the forest for the trees.
posted to MetaFilter by TurnKey at 12:35 PM on December 30, 2022
MeFi post: Archaeology is Not Often Thought of as a Tool of Politics
Gonna quibble with the post title: archaeology is often a tool of politics. Indian archaeology has been a hot topic here for these past few years see for example here or here.

This fabrication of a Chinese claim to Tibet is new to me but Chinese scholars have been doing similar things for decades in service of the national story of a single uninterrupted nation going back 2000+ years. (Or 5000 years, improbably.)

Here in the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Nelson at 9:54 AM on December 29, 2022
MeFi post: They say of the Acropolis, where the Parthenon is...
It's kind of like a weird little poem, what with the rhyme and Demeter
posted to MetaFilter by phooky at 8:03 AM on December 29, 2022
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