The underlying fallacy, I think, is that people think the purpose of elections is to send a message to the government, instead of choosing the government (and that all political problems can be solved by sending the right message via presidential election votes).

The best way to approach an election is to find the most likely scenario in which your vote would actually determine the outcome, and then consider what difference that would make in terms of actual policy (rather than symbolism).

This alone won’t fix all the problems with government—that would require other types of involvment beyond voting.

I think the fear that their children might end up like Elon is the thing persuading many people not to have kids to he first place.

Homer’s Odyssey.

Most modern adaptations present the stories Odysseus tells while visiting the Phaeacians as if they were the actual plot—but Homer’s audience would have known Odysseus as a notorious liar and trickster and wouldn’t necessarily have regarded his stories as true even within the context of the frame narrative. Homer’s epic focuses as much on the parallel stories of Telemachus and Penelope—I read the underlying story as their struggle to untangle Odysseus from his own web of deceptions and fantasies and bring him back to reality.

Morocco is currently the only African nation with an operational high-speed rail system.

I would have thought Egypt would be the perfect country for high-speed rail, with practically all of its population living along one line.

I think there’s a part of our brains that treats these stories as fiction—in particular, the kind of folk fiction used to reinforce community mores. The strength of our reaction to such stories signals how strongly we support the standards, not necessarily what we think should be done in real life to those who violate them.

They’ve been overstepping enough on a regular basis for the last fifty years—the real problem is that they’ve subverted the “reform” process so that reforms that seem adequate to the general public get neutralized or twisted to work in their favor.

That’s why you have more-experienced reform advocates eventually pushing things like “defund the police”—they may be shooting themselves in the foot in terms of popular perception, but it comes from a long history of frustration with lesser reform efforts.

See my comment here.

When cats meow, there’s a one-to-one correspondence between the aural qualities of the sound and the communicative intent of the cat—the same meow doesn’t have different meanings depending on the preceding and following meows. That’s how animals normally use sounds to communicate.

There are two common exceptions, where animals string arbitrary sounds together in longer sequences in which the individual components don’t have distinct communicative intents in the way animals usually interpret them: songbirds and humans. (Another possible exception might be cetaceans.)

(For example: If I said “pass the butter”, “don’t eat all the butter”, or “I need to get more butter”, the word “butter” would have different communicative intents even if I said them the exact same way—like a note of a bird’s song, and unlike a cat’s meow.)

Animals are good at interpreting other animals’ nonverbal cues, and can often pick up a human’s general intentions without understanding their speech. But the speech itself probably seems like a bad attempt to create an accompanying musical score.

A pretty-much arbitrary system based on a standard letter size of 8.5 in x 11 in, with multiples and fractions thereof. It lacks the critical √2 aspect ratio, so pages designed for one size have the wrong proportions when scaled up or down.

Buying recommendations as in a list of products provided on request, rather than intrusive narratives that disrupt what you’re trying to watch.

Or perhaps an AI that blocks ads and then gives you buying recommendations based on products from their competitors.

Which… might be ok, if the object is to reduce plastic consumption and pollution.

Did you mean to say “an incompetent person you agree with”?

International standard paper sizes (A4 etc.) in the U.S.

It’s like eleven Floridas crammed into the space of Michigan.

The charges appear to stem from faking listener traffic to get royalties from the streaming services, not from infringing copyrights—the fact that it was AI-generated is probably irrelevant.

if he wasn’t able to run for election because he was sent to jail

That wouldn’t legally prevent him from running—Eugene Debs ran for president while in prison for protesting WWI.

There is no dark side of the moon Facebook, really—matter of fact it’s all dark.

My mom watched the Watergate hearings while she was pregnant with me.