Urbane Myth

I am living in the dystopian cyberpunk future of my dreams.

@CJHandmer EZ, once a company becomes too big to fail, just nationalize it.

Amazon: Re-invests in fundamental infrastructure, shows no profit for 20 years. Capabilities prove fundamental to COVID resilience, procurement, government functions, running the entire Internet. Amazon has a bigger economy and pays more tax than most states. Senator Warren: Bezos is hoarding wealth.

@JoePostingg I love that the central conceit of Parenthood is that Mommy used to very actively change and wipe our botty and then just sort of lost interest.

I like that a central conceit of Christianity is that God used to very actively intervene in the affairs of man and then just sort of lost interest

@suchnerve Hell yeah. There are subjects I struggle to talk about even with my wife and kids even though they interest me a great deal.

emotional abuse indicator (conditioned to assume that knowledge of your interests will be used to hurt you by denying you access to your interests, mocking your interests, sabotaging you, etc)

@InsightTweeting I treat it like a pan of boiling oil. Occasionally I put things in it to see how they cook.

How am I – how are we – supposed to interact with all this shit? This digital, manipulative, emotional, compelling shit?

A concept you should know about: * Mass Misreading , wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Mass_Misreading = "the systematic construction of positions that were never held, followed by their systematic demolition". Richard Hames: "Mass misreading — the systematic construction of positions that were never held, followed by their systematic demolition — is one of the defining features of contemporary public discourse, and its costs are not trivial. The first cost is epistemic. When the response to an argument is almost always the argument’s caricature, genuine disagreement becomes structurally impossible. You cannot update your position in response to a counter-argument that was never actually made. The feedback loop that keeps thinking honest – the loop that runs: here is a position, here is a challenge to it, here is a refined position – is broken. Everyone gets louder. No one gets wiser. The second cost is social. The inference machine does not just produce wrong readings of texts. It produces wrong readings of people. The writer who argues X becomes, in the reader’s mind, someone who believes Y and Z and probably also holds views that were never expressed and would be denied if raised. The person disappears into the position attributed to them. And the position attributed to them is the one most useful to the argument the reader was already having. This is not a new problem. But the scale of it is new. The speed is new. And the architecture that incentivises the most energetic misreading — that rewards the confident attribution of motive and the viral demolition of the position that was never held — is new, and it’s operating at a civilisational scale." (richarddavidhames.substack.com/p/the-text-bel…)

@mbauwens I have personally been a victim of this, because I criticized X, they automatically assumed I was in league with Y. It's not fun at all.

@paulg @shaunmmaguire x.com/YousefMunayyer…

@paulg @shaunmmaguire x.com/e_galv/status/…

How did we get to the point Where so many Americans are rooting against America?

I don't even care about yet another CEO saying dumb shit. Time will be the greatest judge of all these morons.

@kamilkazani Western countries describing their enemies as irrational madmen, seems to be just projection.

Everything I see suggests that the Iranian leadership is *extremely* rational, and the nearly universal premise that they are some kind of madmen who don't know what they are doing has been a falsehood hammered into everyone's head simply by repetition

@RGA This is Major Tom to tech support I’m clicking on the tab But it’s acting in a most peculiar way And the menu ribbon looks quite different today

@Colin_P_A_Jones @RGA The background has gone blue And there's nothing I can do

Imagine being prompted to sign in with Authenticator from here

@MojoboJomo It's been done as an experiment/art exhibit in Belgium: humanpowerplant.com/2017/09/18/pro…

why wouldn't this work? like, all that wasted energy going nowhere, why not use it? But I probably don't know anything about this

@timecaptales Slop has been a useful term for a good long while it seems.

In the summer of 2000, as the Harry Potter series was quickly becoming a global sensation, legendary Yale critic Harold Bloom gave one of his most unpopular takes, calling 35 million readers wrong

@BanderaBeau x.com/VitaeKate/stat…

"This is the stupidest war in history" For fucks sake stop challenging them...

@pplsartofwar Firing the chief of the Chaplain Corps is a _really_ bad sign.

Firing these three leaders means Hesgeth had a catastrophic disagreement with how the military is managed, its doctrine, and its moral compass. That is a morale problem. And these three clearly had major objections to this war.

I suggest the more neutral terms "Moon Occupation", "Moon Invasion", or "Moon Domination". Colonization is too Woke sounding. ;)

I am sold that there is something to the overkill hypothesis but I think sometimes draw a perverse conclusion from it--that people everywhere and always are ravenous despoilers--when the real story is that in its wake Holocene people worldwide innovated more sustainable ways of life, which is how any of us are here. We look at the modern environmental movement as some kind of singular civilizational achievement and can't imagine that, say, indigenous American practices of 500 years ago were themselves the innovations, reforms, and technologies of people with experience of great ecological loss.

I've noticed there appears to be a fundamental misunderstanding about how the oil and gas industry actually works, especially in the US. So let me try to put this into proper perspective. You can’t dramatically increase oil output without bringing new wells online. There is no magic dial you can just turn up when ever you need more. From leasing and permitting, to site prep, to drilling, to completion, to production, the process can take anywhere from 4 to 12 months. So companies don’t respond to today’s prices, they respond to where they expect prices to be over that entire window. If the expectation is that current conditions are short-lived, there’s very little incentive to ramp activity. If the message being communicated is that the conflict is already over, or close to it, that reinforces the idea that by the time new wells come online, prices will likely have normalized. Because of that, we’re unlikely to see a meaningful increase in rig count in the US in the near term, and in fact, activity has already begun to trend lower. The only thing that reliably drives higher activity is sustained confidence that elevated prices will persist long enough to justify the investment. In other words, they are waiting for a clear signal that current conditions will last, not just spike. In this case that signal would probably be an openly communicated commitment to a lengthy ground war. Everything I've just stated is basically a fact, although I'm sure some will disagree about specific details. Now here's where the speculation starts. If someone were trying to plan for this potential disruption in advance without a clear understanding of how the industry works, they might assume Venezuela, the country with the largest oil reserves, could simply be brought in to offset any future supply disruption. And from that perspective, you could imagine taking aggressive action in an attempt to force that into reality. But that was never a realistic short-term solution. Even under ideal conditions, increasing production there would require tens of billions of dollars in investment and many years of development before meaningful volumes reach the market. Unfortunately, having reserves is not the same thing as having supply.