monotremata

It's an episode of "The Climate Denier's Playbook" entitled "Let's Just Plant a Trillion Trees."

Thanks! I debated whether to include it, because it's definitely one of those "well my brain sure isn't normal!" things, but now I'm glad I did.

And the ringer in the phone was a physical bell with a little magnetically-actuated hammer, so if you slammed the receiver down hard enough, the bell would actually resonate for a little while after. You know how some people use a bell slowly fading out as a meditation tool? That's the association I have for that sensation.

As far as I know there's not a way to just add it to the house supply, like they do with water softeners in some places, but you can get drops you can add to an individual glass of water. There are also tablets you can take. What I do at this point is use a fluoride mouthwash in the evening (the purple listerine; you have to avoid eating or drinking for 30 minutes after using it, so the evening is convenient that way) and also get the fluoride treatment at my dental hygienist appointments, along with using a fluoride toothpaste (which you're most likely already using).

It's a hassle, though, especially during the transition. When I moved out here, my teeth got worse in a hurry until I adapted to this new routine.

I grew up near a place called the "McGuffin Lumber Company." It was just a tiny storefront business, and I never saw anyone go in. And, of course, "MacGuffin" is a Hollywood term for an arbitrary thing that motivates the plot of a movie, like the Maltese Falcon in that film. So it was a running gag in my family that it must be a front.

Huh, I had the reverse reaction--I heard about this 10+ years ago and I'm glad to finally be hearing something about it again, because it seemed like it had fallen off the planet for a while there. Human trials in the US is a huge leap forward.

Oh wild, my next thought was "now we just need someone to get that 'bionic' lens replacement thing I heard about around the same time and then never again," and I looked it up and there's a report from them from this month about an upcoming human trial. That's a lot worse than finding out the trials of the RISUG thing have been running for two years now, but it's still pretty exciting. I probably won't be able to afford it, though. https://ocumetics.com/message-from-ceo-april-2025/

Yeah, I started to write about that, but it's unclear that this guy would have actually gained anything by getting out of the courtroom. A lot of folks are released pending trial, in which case there's really no advantage to getting your friends to grab you out of court, rather than just, y'know, skipping town. If he was already in police custody, I imagine there actually would have been more checking of the authority.

But yeah, making court a place where your enemies know you'll be there and they're free to come and grab you is a terrible precedent anyway. If you can't expect due process even in the courts, what does the rule of law even mean anymore?

Yeah, this was the part that really got me:

“Show us a warrant,” the video shows one of the two women demanding as they attempt to get between the detainers and the detainee.

“Do not touch me or impede me in my lawful duties,” the man in the pink shirt responds. “We are officers from Homeland Security.”

That's a real bully-logic move right there. How are we supposed to know that these are your lawful duties if you're refusing to show us your warrant or even your badge? Like, if she had blocked them at this point and the issue were brought to court (and yes, it's ironic that this is happening in a court), then I can't imagine a jury saying "well yeah, you can't prevent a guy from abducting someone just because he won't give you any indication other than a pinky swear that he has the legal authority to do it." But, of course, the obvious implication in the moment was that since he was from the "abduct people in an unmarked van with unlimited authority" branch of the government, this wasn't going to a jury trial, and she was either getting out of the way or she was going in the van too.

I dunno, man. It's scary.

Does it really? That's batshit.

Especially since he's already been on TV talking about how "these are people who will never pay taxes. they'll never hold a job. they'll never play baseball. they'll never write a poem. they'll never go on a date. many of them will never use a toilet unassisted." He's explicitly pushing the narrative that autistic people are useless.

Seriously, I was thinking about getting evaluated, and this gives me the chills. I will not be seeking an evaluation at this time.

Honestly this isn't really all that accurate. Like, a common example when introducing the Word2Vec mapping is that if you take the vector for "king" and add the vector for "woman," the closest vector matching the resultant is "queen." So there are elements of "meaning" being captured there. The Deep Learning networks can capture a lot more abstraction than that, and the Attention mechanism introduced by the Transformer model greatly increased the ability of these models to interpret context clues.

You're right that it's easy to make the mistake of overestimating the level of understanding behind the writing. That's absolutely something that happens. But saying "it has nothing to do with the meaning" is going a bit far. There is semantic processing happening, it's just less sophisticated than the form of the writing could lead you to assume.

So, this is wild speculation, but I'll tell you my guess. I think it's about TSMC, the world's leading semiconductor manufacturer. China has, for years, been saying that Taiwan isn't an independent country, but is instead "Chinese Taipei," a part of China. They've been using this idea for years to gradually build towards an invasion of Taiwan. Taiwan, of course, does consider itself an independent nation. The US officially holds no position on this question, which is kinda bonkers; there's this whole diplomatic dance about whether the US would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion. The US might not care if it weren't for TSMC, which runs the plants that produce a huge proportion of the world's CPUs and GPUs and AI chips. All the best chip-making technology and know-how is with TSMC. It's a major vulnerability in the US supply chain.

China has been ramping things up in the past several years. It's suspected that a big part of why they're going along with the Russian invasion of Ukraine is that Russia probably promised to go along with China invading Taiwan in exchange. It's all very sub-rosa, but there's been so much military maneuvering and posturing and so on back and forth around Taiwan that it's been kind of dizzying.

This is, unfortunately, part of why China was enthusiastic about getting Trump back into the White House. Trump's policies of isolating the US from its military allies, instigating worldwide trade chaos, and cozying up to dictators make the conditions a lot more ripe for China to make a move on Taiwan. And since the US has never been able to actually talk about Taiwan before, it's gonna look absolutely batshit to the majority of Americans if China invades Taiwan and the US government suddenly wants to go to war against China over this, which seems like a huge risk. But since, as Trump so eloquently put it, "everything is computer," we basically can't stand by and let China take Taiwan without a fight.

So he's trying to gin up sentiment against China on his own terms to lay the groundwork for a war that seems increasingly inevitable.