MST

@benonwine Bureaucrats.

What do you call a group of parasites where you’re from?

Large is a somewhat more formal-sounding term, and tends to be emotionally neutral. Big tends toward informal usage, or emotive context. If someone says you made a big mistake, it means you’re now in a bad mess. If someone says you made a large error, they might simply be pointing out you inadvertently dropped an order of magnitude in your calculation. Children will usually describe things as big, not large.

アメリカの兄弟達 largeとBIGの差って largeはある程度の大きさ表してて BIGはでかいもの全般みたいな意味？？

@alrobcraws @PeterDClack Thank you. Exactly.

For forty years we’ve been told the planet has a single 'global average temperature'—a made-up figure treated as more credible than the weather outside your own window. The great flaw in this is that there really is no one temperature scenario that applies to any geographical point anywhere on Earth. Not in the way people imagine, any more than there’s a single 'global mood' or 'sense of irony. If you say, 'The planet's average temperature is 15°C', it means absolutely nothing to a person struggling across frost-bitten Siberia or sipping a piña colada on a humid summer's night in Brazil. It's meaningless to human geography and policy. Statistically, you can average the temperature of a polar ice cap and the Sahara Desert, but the resulting number describes a place that doesn't exist. It’s a computer model—not reality. The concept of a single global temperature metric only makes sense from a cosmic distance. It's a planetary metric, designed for satellites, not human life or geography. When international bodies focus entirely on moving a single global average by 0.1°C, they treat the Earth as a Lego land thermodynamic system. But the planet doesn't experience climate that way. Earth's climate is fractured into multiple distinct climate zones (roughly 14 separate scenarios) based on lived experiences. All of them are entirely regional, dictated by local topography, ocean currents, vegetation cover, and atmospheric pressure systems. Tourism campaigns market Hawaii as an idyllic, uniform tropical paradise. But anyone who's actually been there knows the island contains roughly 10 of the world’s 14 distinct climate zones, ranging from continuously wet tropical rainforests to arid deserts, and even alpine tundra on top of Mauna Kea where it snows. International institutions are quietly backing away from their most extreme 'collapse' scenarios. The entire apparatus was built on a flawed premise - trying to govern the world based on a single, aggregated temperature marker that no human ever actually experiences. The Hawaii analogy shows how local reality obliterates uniform narratives. The true danger isn't a minor shift in a global statistical average, but the civilisational paralysis from letting central bureaucracies replace reality with ideology. When an immense institutional and bureaucratic apparatus is built around a specific set of numbers, targets and narratives, it develops an enormous amount of structural inertia. It doesn't just stop or turn on a dime because the underlying assumptions shift. We’ve elevated heavily processed, continent-sized guesswork into a Holy Scripture, then handed trillion-dollar policy levers to people who treat any questioning of the guess as heresy. It turns out there is no thermometer big enough to measure 'the Earth'.

@newstart_2024 @VoluntaryOnly The U.S. dropped that minimum Requirement during the latter part of the Vietnam War. The recruits from below the mark died at 3X the average rate.

Jordan Peterson dropped an uncomfortable truth on Triggernometry. The U.S. military that is desperate for recruits won’t accept anyone with an IQ under 82. That’s roughly 10% of the population. They’ve tested this for decades and found these individuals become a net drain, no matter how hard they work. In complex environments, the disadvantage is real. This lines up with ASVAB data. The military generally requires the 31st percentile (~IQ 92) but can dip to the 10th percentile (~IQ 81-83) in limited cases, confirming Peterson’s core point. Conservatives struggle with it. Liberals often claim anyone can be trained to do anything. Both approaches fall short. This one made me pause. We talk a lot about equality, but raw cognitive differences create real limits that are hard to solve. Ignoring or sugarcoating these realities doesn’t help the people at the lower end, it leaves them without practical paths forward. Do you think society can have an honest conversation about IQ differences, or is it too dangerous?

@BellaBaddie__ Add a zero. I’m hideous.

If someone handed you $8000 but said it was because you're ugly, would you take it???

@NoDMsPerfavore Me.

BOAT IS SINKING AND THERE'S ONLY 1 LIFE JACKET- WHO ARE YOU SAVING?

@WarBot3000 @japan_nobunaga Depends on the particular State. And it may differ urban vs. rural. I’m in Maine and we have a firearms section in our local Super Walmart.

@japan_nobunaga Not at Walmart anymore. Not even ammo. They stopped that a few years ago. We do have gun shops that sell guns, ammo, attachments, and other things.

Hello from Japan 🇯🇵👋 I have a question for Americans 🇺🇸🙋 I've never seen a real gun in my life. Only in anime and movies. Is it true that Americans sometimes see guns at stores like Walmart? In Japan, we only see them on TV. Is that normal in America? 🤔

First, there are two different “tos” in that sentence. The first one indicates the infinitive form of the verb: to take, to be, to do, to think, to run, et cetera. The second is a preposition, indicating motion toward something. I am going to school, as opposed to, I am coming from school (movement away). Taking out either or both tos makes the sentence very peculiar to our ear, though we would likely get your meaning. “I like take my dog the park.” This is able to be parsed by most people, but definitely marks you as a non-fluent speaker.

アメリカの兄弟達 I like to take my dog to the park って文を勉強してるんだけど toってなんでこんなに文に入ってるんですか？？ toをぬいたら文の意味めちゃくちゃ変わりますか？？

@JimFergusonUK Motive implies reason. He was a Nutter.

🚨 AFTER A SHOOTING OUTSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE — ONE QUESTION REMAINS UNANSWERED: WHY? Officials say the suspect was stopped by Secret Service before reaching the White House compound. President Trump has praised the response. But investigators reportedly still do not know the full motive. Commentators point to a troubling reality: Political violence, threats against public figures and security incidents appear increasingly common in America. Whether this was ideological, personal or something else entirely… The unanswered motive may become the biggest story.

Well, Jackson killed Saruman early at Isengard. How was Sharkey going to show up in the Shire? Lots of knock-on (or -back?) effects as well. Sam doesn’t receive his second gift from Galadriel, the only one of the Fellowship to do so; the box of Lothlorien earth with which he regrew the Shire Trees, etc.

The Return of the King – Homeward Bound scene is actually quite different in the book. This section depicts The Scouring of the Shire, a very tragic and epic part of the story that completes the Hobbits’ character development. In fact, according to many Tolkien fans, it is one of the most important sections of the LOTR book. However, Peter Jackson deliberately chose not to include The Scouring of the Shire in the film. He believed that shifting to a new, local conflict right after the epic climax of the Ring’s destruction would disrupt the film’s pacing and disappoint the audience, and instead he included the Homeward Bound sequence, which creates a happy ending. So, do you think Peter Jackson was right to make this change?

When I was 11, YouTube came on three channels and appeared at the end of a flat wire that ran up the side of the house to an antenna. At least ten minutes of every hour of content was devoted to influencers. There was one such noteworthy “lifestyles” guy I recall: “The Marlboro Man.” He was on all the channels, all the time, except Saturday mornings.

When i was 11, unless you were crazy, you could get 300 bytes per second, and streaming video barely existed

@Nick_Davidov @rankdrugs They already do, in many cases apparently.

@rankdrugs Chinese too. They’d have to go work for China

The biggest bullshit move by DHS in its history. So everyone on a O1 or H1B visa would have to stop working legally in the US, go back to their country and wait for years of backlog? This includes top scientists in our universities, founders of billion dollar companies (at least 3 just in our portfolio would be affected by the way). And if we look at individual countries it becomes even more bs. Indians would have to wait decades. Russians don’t have anywhere to go (there is no US embassy in Russia, hello?). This is the worst imaginable way to disrupt important work for the country and pretend you’re fighting some loophole.

Don’t ask about the Chinook winds along the Rockies, usually in winter which can bring the temperature from -20C to +20C in an hour or so. And also the temperature flips in the Great Plains in the spring as they get buried in Canadian Arctic air masses, then get hit with hot, humid Gulf air, and back again.

アメリカの兄弟達 一昨日は暑くてクーラーだったのに今日は寒すぎて暖房だよ😿 アメリカだともっと寒暖差あるところがあるってきいたから1日の間にクーラーと暖房つかうこともあるのか？？

@esrtweet @tuuu28283 Then again, here on the coast of Maine Wednesday we were in the mid 80s (30C) and Thursday we barely cracked the 60s (15C). And I’m from the desert SW where day/night temperature swings can exceed 40F (22C) at any time of year.

@tuuu28283 Yes, such large temperature swings are common over much of the United States insert parts of a year. Not on the coasts, though, due to marine moderation effects. The inhabited parts of Japan are all coastal.

Yup, and yep, are very informal, and tend to be Western US cowboy related. Yeah/yeh/yah variously spelled, is also informal, are much more geographically broadly-based, and also shows up in informal British English. Probably widespread in the U.S. due to the influence of many immigration waves of Germanic speakers with native dialectical and linguistic variants of “ja.” North-Eastern “Yankee” States have a very old-time accent (into the Maine seafaring areas especially) where it becomes “a-yup.” (Pronounced ah-yup.) You can signal certain amounts of regional accent by the particular use of most of these. (Regional accents are getting flattened out in the age of mass media.) For instance, Southern regional dialects have a tendency to make some one-syllable words into two, so you’ll hear ‘yes’ pronouced, “Yay-yus.” We also grunt or hum assent, “uh-huh,” and negation, “huh-uh,” accent on the huh syllable in both cases, either open mouthed or closed. Closed mouth sounds more like mm-hhm or hhm-mm. “Nuh-uh” is also used for no (tends to signal a rather childish context), as well as “nope.” Yes and no are usable in all contexts, and are the correct formal words.

アメリカの兄弟達 日本人なんであんまりわかってないんだけど 英語のyesとyupは意味ってほとんど一緒？？

@HedgieMarkets @anagatakaya That almost sounds like Mr. Ponzi has joined the chat.

🦔Building the future requires capital that has to come from somewhere, and the labs are now charging current customers more so they can fund the next generation. That works until customers decide the current generation is not delivering enough value to justify the bill, which is the situation Microsoft just landed in.

🦔Microsoft canceled its internal Claude Code licenses this week after token-based billing made the cost untenable, even for a company with effectively infinite cloud resources. Uber's CTO sent an internal memo warning the company burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months. American AI software prices have jumped 20% to 37%, and GitHub (owned by Microsoft) is dropping flat-rate plans for usage-based billing across its products. My Take The AI subsidy era is ending in real time. The same company that put $13 billion into OpenAI and built the Azure infrastructure powering most of Anthropic's compute just looked at the bill from a competitor's coding tool and decided it was not worth paying. That is not a productivity failure on Anthropic's end. Token-based pricing is forcing every enterprise customer to confront the actual cost of running these models at scale, and the number turns out to be far higher than the flat-rate experiments suggested. This ties directly to my Gemini Flash post yesterday. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all raised effective prices in the last six months. Enterprises that built workflows assuming AI costs would keep falling are now watching annual budgets evaporate in months. Two outcomes look likely from here. Either enterprises scale back AI usage to fit budgets, which slows the revenue ramp the labs need to justify their valuations ahead of IPOs, or the labs cut prices and absorb the losses, which makes the unit economics worse at exactly the wrong moment. Both paths land in the same place, the numbers stop working, and somebody has to take the writedown. Hedgie🤗

@ClownWorld Arguable that he’s doing the dog owner a favor: if this discourages the dog from hauling ass out into the road to chase vehicles, it could save the dog’s life.

Obviously not “impossible choices”; they are routinely made. “Impossible” is a value judgement based on the Cultural Imperialism of the Beeb. How dare they. Next thing you know they’ll be tut-tutting about genital mutilation like they used to back in the bad old 1990s, before they felt threatened by the practice of many of the newly arrived immigrants of the Religion of Peace. And how dare they feel threatened! That’s Clitoral… sorry — Cultural Imperial Paranoia.

Yeah, selling off girls is just fine, not at all a sign of a culture where women are actually worth nothing.

One Solar Mass (our Sun) is 1047 times the mass of Jupiter. It is 333,000 times the mass of earth. Our solar system consists mostly of the Sun plus Jupiter. The Sun is a smallish yellow star. There are stars that are 1500 to 1700 times as big as our sun. 98% of the visible mass of the Universe is hydrogen and helium, including our Sun and Jupiter.

@festiva1202 科学的な知識に自信がないけど…恒星は惑星を重力で縛れるほど巨大で、惑星の総質量より恒星の総質量が大きくて、主成分が水素とヘリウムだからって推測で合ってます？

私が水素とヘリウムは宇宙で最も多い元素と言ったことに対して何でそんなことが言いきれる。もしかしたら酸素が宇宙で最も多い元素かも知れないし、相対性理論だって本当に正しいかは分からない、重力だって目に見えないから本当にあるかは分からない、原子だって目に見えないから本当にあるかは分からない、ウイルスだって目に見えないから本当にあるかは分からないという意見がきた。 申し訳ないけど科学の知識が無さ過ぎて、反論する気にもなれない。