You have friends that have made a therapeutic ritual out of using essential oils which helps them only because the placebo effect can be very powerful for pain. Literally anything could stand in for the essential oils. Swap their oil vials out with convincing fakes and they’ll never know the difference because it’s the ritual of smelling and/or applying the oils that’s helping them, not any real physical mechanism of the compounds in the oils interacting with their biology.

Looks like an American suburb but without yard space.

This is the logic behind conversion therapy and they actually do this (albeit with the addition of electric shocks and all sorts of abuse).

You’re connected to someone by a time thread like in Your Name and you just ruined someone’s life.

I think my desire for a small electric pickup truck might override my caution in this case, we’ll see if I get burned. At the very least I’m not going to preorder and will wait for real critical reviews after it’s released.

What I wonder is how exactly are they going to enshittify it? It’s extremely barebones and modular in a way that anyone can design add-ons and accessories for it. I can see them doing subscriptions and the like for various add-ons but you can always just get the base model and get add-ons elsewhere.

They’ve been promoting it recently and have several working prototypes that they’ve been driving influencers around in. There was one video with Marques Brownlee and they even let him drive it himself.

It’s not illegal to call it cheese because it has an emulsifier in it, it’s illegal to call it cheese because it’s mostly water. That’s what the emulsifier is for; it allows the cheese to mix smoothly with the water. They would rather call it “American cheese product” than “mostly water with <50% cheddar” because no one would buy that when the 100% cheddar is sitting right next to it.

It’s an emulsification of water and a mix of cheddar cheeses with preservatives, stabilizers, and an emulsifier (obviously) added. It has some culinary applications but the real reason it’s made that way is it lets them get away with selling less cheese overall for the same price as a block of 100% cheddar of the same volume by marketing it as a different type of cheese (American) rather than what it actually is (watered down cheddar).

So they’re trying to stop him from calling a vote on a bill that would create a pathway to citizenship for foreign workers. It’s xenophobes resorting to force because they’re afraid they can’t win democratically. Makes sense given how conservative Japan is and how low voter turnout is among the youth.

Moralizing to drug addicts helps no one. All it does is make you feel better about yourself for a bit and make someone else feel worse when they’re already down and using to cope. Your attitude actually contributes to a culture that promotes unhealthy relationships with substances.

I don’t think Rossman is a leftist. He’s pro-consumer and sticks up for the little guy against big corporations, but he’s not anti-capitalist.

Base 1 is a tally system. The symbol can be anything as long as it’s discrete.

*W. Sisters now.

British food isn’t real, British food can’t hurt you.

They’re talking about the Global Sumud Flotilla, a group that regularly attempts to break Israel’s blockade and deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza, and is intercepted by Israel every time. Israel tortures and humiliates the activists before sending most of them back to their respective home countries. The most recent one had the sister of Ireland’s president on it and the Israeli terrorist Itamar Ben-Gvir recorded the abuse of the activists and posted the video on social media celebrating it and european countries still haven’t done anything about it.

I somehow doubt the owners of Anthropic are revolutionary socialists or even just pro-union.

I’m not saying that imperialist aggression didn’t / doesn’t contribute to the collapse of socialist states - it most certainly does - I’m saying campists tend to get tunnel vision and think that it’s the only reason they fail. Cuba has actually been quite successful at enduring in spite of imperialist aggression, and I think there’s a lot of benefit in asking what it is they are doing better than past socialist states. In my opinion the answer lies in the fact that their governmental structure is far more horizontal in comparison to other attempts at socialism such as the USSR, and that has resulted in policy that is far more responsive to the specific material needs of local communities within Cuba. Contrast the USSR in which the pseudoscientific beliefs of a central authority figure turned what could have been a brief and localized food shortage into a full-blown famine spanning the entire union.

With regard to China being state capitalist, I skimmed the essay you linked well enough to see that it does not address the anarchist critique of state “socialism,” namely that state ownership does not truly constitute collective ownership because the state is a hierarchical institution that centralizes decision-making power in such a way that the will of the people affected is often ignored. Don’t get me wrong, I acknowledge the undeniable successes and advantages of central planning when compared to the neoliberal method of not planning at all beyond the fiscal quarter, but those are not the only options. I believe that horizontal planning is superior to both, and is the only way for an economy to be truly socialist in character. Examples of this being done can even be found in the revolutions that created the USSR and the PRC before they seized state power. It’s also not a discrete binary; there is a spectrum between totalitarian dictatorship and full horizontalism, and the projects which are most successful tend to veer towards the latter rather than the former.

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