𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍

LOL. Op walks around town, leaking Razrs and building their own mesh network.

I know my limitations. One of them is patience.

Enshittification is probably a large part. However, I can see it.

Our’s are plastic, 25 years old, and look like crap. Wash them all you want, they just look dirty all the time. I’d replace them except for the absurd cost for a piece of molded ABS.

I take them off to wash them. I can imagine someone having an accident with one, like washing them in dishwasher and having one fall down onto a heating element. Those are big, but our’s are small enough to get knocked down onto the garbage disposal - it would’t be easy, and would require an unusual sequence is events, but I’ve fucked up even more unlikely sequences of events in my life.

I really wish I could get decent aluminum replacements for our’s; it wouldn’t make the range any newer, but it’d make it look nicer than the black plastic shit that it came with.

Good luck finding a 2G wireless network in the future.

Pguilletines

Those would be great. 50501 is trying hard with the protests, but without media coverage they just get swallowed. And I can only think that strikes aren’t happening because of a combination that the labor economy is shit, and because an astonishingly large number of union members are Trump supporters. You see this occasionally when union leadership, who knows better, clash with their members.

I don’t think violent revolution, if it breaks out, is going to be that so much as another civil war. The rich have learned from history, and are very effective at turning the classes against each other.

Like, gallows? Is gallows a step? Where do pitchforks come in?

I appreciate the sentiment, but not from me, anyway. Mangioning should be reserved for the truly wicked, not merely everyone who disagrees with me.

I can vehemently disagree with someone’s positions without believing they should be lined up against a wall. Actively purchasing a giant social media platform specifically to promote Nazi-ism, sure. Break out a gallows. But just being a misguided, duplicitous asshole? Naw.

Ok, fair enough.

I still feel responsible for Bush Jr, as when I was younger I believed in the protest vote, but I’ll never make that mistake again. If Booker gets the nomination he’ll get my vote, because the lesser of two evils, until we fix our voting system. I still hope Democrats field a better candidate to root for in the primaries, although from the reaction to Mamdani we’ve observed, I suppose I shouldn’t hope for much.

I’m still not certain there’ll be a next election, so it may be moot.

Fucker won’t make it past the primaries, if I have anything to do with it.

So if it is family members, it really doesn’t matter if they are out and about does it?

But yeah, it does, because it’s usually some estranged family member, grabbing the kid while they’re out. It’s not who’s grabbing them, it’s where.

Yeah, Texas is fucked up, in a great many ways. No argument there. It’s interesting reading, isn’t it?

No, I haven’t done an age breakdown. Getting more specific statistics, or culling them out of larger reports is more work than I care to invest in this.

Yes, you have a point about teens. 14 was “young adult” for ages; I’m not always convinced pushing it to 18 has been a wise thing. I kind of think having rites of passage and some more clear interstitial period where we recognize teens as “not children” would result in healthier teens.

Oh? What’s your source for that claim?

The US population in 2014 was 318.3M. In that year, 186 amber alerts for children were issued. Last year (2024), the population was 340.11M, and there were 188 alerts. That’s almost unchanged (0.56/0.58) in the past decade. In 2011, there were onu 158 alerts in 311.56M people, lower than today (0.51) (amberalert). There have been years where there were more, and years when there were less; 2006 was pretty bad (0.87).

I can’t get reliable statistics from 1880, when 72% of the population lived in rural communities. The population flipped from predominantly rural to urban in 1920 (1910: 54% rural; 49% rural in 1920, c.f https://www.seniorliving.org/ has a handy yearly breakdown), but the next best thing is to count alerts per million by demographic, and the metrics don’t break it down like that, unless you count % alerts by state, and measure the population in each state and the rural/urban breakdown. I’m not sure that’d be valid for extrapolating back into history to estimate how much safer children might have been from strangers in 1900. Anyway, amber alerts don’t tell us anything about stranger danger, since abductions are as likely to be by family members as not.

The point is, from amber alerts alone, 2011 was safer than 2024. The alerts/pop/year are all over the place, and claiming that it’s safer than it ever has been is wild, and I’d like to see some substantiation before I swallow that - even if we count only recent history for which we have reliable metrics, which is necessarily going to exclude anything earlier than, say, 1950.

Perhaps “just entering” was an overstatement.

Wikipedia has the Gen-Z range from 1997-2012, so they’re 13-28. This year, about 68% are eligible to vote; something over 50% were eligible to vote in the last presidential election, and one statistic I saw claimed they made up only about 8% of the total vote. They are, however, the biggest generation in history, ever. Given that the birth rates in the US stopped climbing and started falling in 2007, it’s conceivable that they may be the biggest generation ever, forever.

In any case, statistically, young people vote at far lower rates than older; 18-29 (GenZ, at the moment) vote around 50%. At around 30 it’s 60%, and by 65 it’s over 70%.

So, given that some 65% of Gen Z are eligible to vote, and statistically about half of them will at this age bracket, that’s only about 35% of Gen Z voting. That number will grow over three next decade and become the dominant number, but right now it’s fairly small… hence “just entering voting age.”

You’re right, my wording wasn’t accurate; the meaning was.

Ancillarily, births in the US peaked at 4.3M births in 2007 and have been declining since; they haven’t hit 4M again since, and are down to 3.6M in 2025, below 1994 (3.9M) levels.

I agree! I don’t think we can vote out way out, not in one fell swoop.

We need to vote locally, and support voting reform efforts. If we can normalize IRV at the local level, so that people lose their fear of the unknown, we have a chance to get it into congressional elections, and that’s where real change will happen. Eventually, ideally, we get rid of the electoral college and use IRV in presidential elections, and then we might see a surprise third party win. We can do most of this without constitutional changes.

But, can we survive as a country long enough to get there? It’s a long road, and I don’t know.

My numbers were mixed in the previous post; I was mixing total global and total annual use. I’m sorry about that; the numbers looked off but I didn’t catch the time scale difference.

AI companies are projected to use 1kTWh in 2025. Transportation is projected to use 1.2TWh, industry, 1.1TWh. Bitcoin, everyone’s favorite whipping-boy, is estimated to use only 173TWh globally, a mere 17% of AI. Residential is only 800TWh, 4.5x Bitcoin, but 80% of AI. Commercial is less, at 600TWh.

These all come from different sources: homeinst.org and Deloitte are the main ones, but the Bitcoin stat comes from Cambridge and the EIA (eia.gov), and the AI industry number comes from an MIT and backed by a different Deloitte report.

The industrial sector is the largest energy user, but AI is a close third just below transportation.

I was surprised that cryptocurrency energy use was so relatively small, given the hysteria. Bitcoin alone is 173TWh, far smaller than all of the sectors, and a fraction of AI; but even adding all of the other cryptocurrencies, the estimated consumption rises only to 215TWh. That pushes it past the smallest user, the agriculture sector sitting at 200TWh, but still well below everything else.

AI is the third largest energy consumer, annually, globally.

Reclamation is an effort, though. If all you’re doing is adding symbols as a tag line, there’s no qualification and readers can’t tell what your Swastika means; and since it’s also concurrently being used by Nazis for their meaning, it’s leaving the interpretation to the reader.

I’m not trying to argue that it’s right. I’m saying that it’s unproductive to simply obstinately keep using it and let people associate you with extremists.

“Should” is doing some heavy lifting here.

Sleep patterns start changing around puberty. Young kids tend to get up earlier, naturally; teenage biorhythms are tuned to stay up later, and sleep late.

But we don’t have a society where it’s safe to let teens run around by themselves, except for some rural communities, so schedules are based - as GP says - around parent’s schedules. And because of workplace demands, whether it’s a reasonable requirement because the job demands an in-person presence like the service sector, or because of idiotic, arbitrary in-office policies, that usually means parents need to have their kids in school before 8, or 8:30 if they’re lucky, so they can be at their desks by the standard 9am.

Little kids, this is less of an issue, but it really fucks with teenager’s biorhythms, because they’re designed to be sleeping until 10 and going to sleep at midnight at that age.

There’s a ton of studies about this, and there’s been a lot of work by K-12 to figure out how to accommodate a balance; and some companies even have policies allowing for flex time to help, but on average - as usual - Corporate America fucks it up.

Sam Altman (OpenAI) is a Millennial. So is Zuckerberg. LLMs are one of the big energy sinks right now, reaching 1,000 terawatt-hours by 2026 and the current rate of use is doubling every year. For comparison, total global commercial (excluding industrial and transportation, so, office buildings - lights, AC, computers) energy use is 50,000 TWh.

It’s still being ignored. Boomers are out of the work force (if not politics), and Gen X is just starting to retire. Between Millenials and Gen Z, they hold 32% of the voting power in the US, the same as Boomers. And Gen Z is only just entering voting age, at 8%.

Half the voting population is under 50 and global temperatures keep increasing. There’s every indication sticking your head in the sand is a cross-generational behavior.

I didn’t know, so I looked it up. Apparently, the interpretation is debated:

In the 1960s, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) used it to call for what they saw as a “decolonized” state encompassing the entirety of Mandatory Palestine. By 1969, after several revisions, the PLO used the phrase to call for one-state solution, that would mean “one democratic secular state that would supersede the ethno-religious state of Israel”.

Many pro-Palestinian activists consider it “a call for peace and equality” after decades of military rule over Palestinians, while for many Jews it is seen as a call for the destruction of Israel. Hamas used the phrase in its 2017 charter. Usage of the phrase by such Palestinian militant groups has led critics to say that it advocates for the dismantling of Israel, and the removal or extermination of its Jewish population.

It’s pretty clear that once a symbol has been successfully co-opted, and that original meanings have not been vigorously defended, the best option is to cede the use and find a different slogan. That term, originally secular and peaceful, has been co-opted, and even if Pro-Palestine, non-antisemitic groups would like it to adhere to the original meaning, the cause is lost and they can only harm their cause by continuing to use it.

The Swastika may be the best example of this. You can only carefully use it, despite the origins having nothing to do with Nazis, and it being an important symbol to many religions around the world. The Nazis fucked up the symbol for everyone and railing against that and insisting on using it only causes trouble.

I agree with you: it seems that, despite the benign origins of the phrase, it’s been successfully co-opted by extremists and is now only divisive.

TIL

I asked my cat about this, and he said,

“You’re literally describing capitalism, Ruairidh. Do you not pay taxes, you dumb fuck? Now scratch my head, just a little, and then give me treats.”