mozz

I can give you a bunch of examples of Biden pushing domestic economics and climate change policy real real firmly back towards the center. But, on the broader point about the Democrats in general I actually agree with you. If anything I said sounded like "Let's stop working to make the Democrats better or else find a replacement," it wasn't intentional on my part. Both of those sound like great things to do. (And fixing FPTP to avoid this situation in general in the future)

In the meantime, I do think that voting for the non-apocalypse, and choosing the outcome of "needs some improvement and really should be replaced" over "will definitely try to end the world," are good things to do.

It's like if the neural net runs the life support on the spaceship, and it's clearly not doing a good job and we desperately need to find a better solution, and so one guy says hey it's been so long of this that let's just turn off the life support, what's the worst that could happen.

*on a podcast from his living room swaying unhinged-ly back and forth

There was a whole crew of six-figure idiots from the DNC that all got together and decided that Debbie Wasserman-Shultz should be in charge. Carville's right up there with them; he was furious at the idea of having Obama instead of Hillary Clinton, and he wanted to skip the primaries entirely and just have Nancy Pelosi pick all the candidates. He's a full-blown loony. And a dumbass yes. I'm genuinely very surprised that he's managed to say something that I so fully agree with.

Before: All phyla differentiated but all the creatures are soft and blobby and sort of unremarkable
After: All of a sudden there's trilobites everywhere, they can see and some of them hunt, and all creatures everywhere suddenly have all this armor and mobility and a lot of them have spikes

I don't really know (even enough to talk about what might be the competing theories), but it seems like it fits and it doesn't seem all that farfetched. That said, it kind of seems like all the scientists think me and Andrew Parker are wrong though, so IDK.

(Also - I didn't know about this before as it's semi-new, but apparently Anomalocaris also had eyes and hunted, so star power of the trilobites aside maybe those guys were involved as well. I have to say though the timing of the way it's written in Wikipedia makes a little more sense if the sequencing is: Cambrian explosion -> some species turn into predators, as opposed to the other way around)

What humans are doing to the natural world right now is a global extinction event (not much different from has happened a handful of times). It's happening too fast for anything to adapt to except in the most short-term emergency ways. Mostly stuff is just dying.

If we stay around for millions of years doing this same thing then I would expect the biosphere to develop defenses and then rebound into a new equilibrium with defense measures included against what we tend to do to it. Even that outcome wouldn't really be another Cambrian explosion though, because everything before it was so universally blobby and unremarkable. That is actually exactly why I like this theory -- the clear lack of a certain type of selection pressure before the explosion happened is as much as part of the theory (there must have been something missing from the threat matrix that suddenly arrived, and what was that thing?) as what things looked like after the Cambrian.

Threatening the court is always what innocent people do. It's a totally normal way of standing up and being vigorous in defense of their innocence.

The oil industry has entered into a new economic regime. It used to be how can I maximize how many dollars can I make this quarter, whereas in the last couple years, it's turned into how can I most efficiently make the most amount of dollars from all the oil that's still left. That's why they're making record profits, ironically enough -- they used to reinvest some amount of income as refineries, new drilling operations, capital outlays that would accelerate the extraction. Now there's no point to that, so instead they just keep the cash (EE I think described it pretty aptly as "the party at the end of the world.")

I wouldn't automatically assume that a sharp drop in their willingness to spend money accelerating extraction, means a sharp collapse in the amount of oil or the difficulty getting it from the ground. They're just abruptly adjusting their incentives, without necessarily a sharp jump in the physical-oil reality (just a continuation of the steady downward slide.)

Oh, they're hugely important. I'm just saying that the likely apocalypse that's coming is going to destroy many many hugely important things which are more directly visible (crops we eat, places we live which are currently safe from deadly extreme weather, etc). But yes it's a big deal; I wasn't trying to make it sound like it's not.

Yes -- which is why people in-the-know who are training neural nets periodically get frustrated and say "You know what, this thing's not producing the results I want, it did something really wrong as a matter of fact. Fuck it, I'm going to stop applying a gradient in the direction of better results, until it gets its act together."

Oh and also the neural net is physically in charge of all of our lives in this example

Again: You're using a model that doesn't translate into politics.

Leaving an abuser is a hard road to a better outcome. Working to end the genocide in Gaza is a hard road to a better outcome (and yes, absolutely if that includes affirmatively putting pressure on Biden in whatever way.) Categorically refusing to vote for the non-democracy-ending candidate until something changes by magic from above is not a hard road to anything. It's just more genocide (by quite a lot).

It's like trying to fistfight the police when they're going to arrest you. It's like getting abused by your abusive partner and so refusing to make a decision to leave because the shelter is behind on their taxes. It's like getting a cut that's infected and refusing to get it treated because you don't like the American medical system and think it needs to change. It doesn't make any fucking sense. It's just a non sequitur.

The problems are real, but refusing to engage with the system where the outcomes can be impacted, until they get better on their own, will in this case make those real problems absolutely catastrophically worse.

IDK how long I want to go back and forth about it, but that's my feeling on it.

Just to put some context:

• Predatory scorpions a couple feet long
• Armored millipedes larger than a man; they were probably herbivorous but as the article notes they "would have had few, if any, predators."
• There is a theory, possibly not real well accepted but it makes sense to me, that trilobites were the creature that way-back-when invented effective predation shortly after evolving vision. (Before which the world was a fairly benign place.) The theory further supposes that the Cambrian Explosion was caused by every other organism on the planet having to scramble not to have their soft blobby flesh munched on at leisure by a limitless army of armored, invulnerable hunters, which they couldn't see or avoid, but who could see and follow them.

This is just a weird paternalistic point of view to me.

It is absolutely true that rich abusive criminals are in charge of the country, doing all kinds of horrifying stuff. You can put Biden in that category if you want; at least as far as Gaza is concerned I won't really fight you on the classification.

Sitting back and waiting like "well it's on them to fix it, and until then I won't take steps that will change the outcome to one that's better" is absolutely guaranteed to fail. If you want things to be better, work for better outcomes. That is the only way it will ever happen.

You wanna work for better outcomes in Gaza? Fuckin a man that sounds great, tell me how. You wanna give Biden a hard time about Gaza? Fuckin a man sounds great.

You wanna commit to sitting out and not taking positive steps until something changes from above to make it worth your while? If that's your choice, then buckle the fuck up, because I think there's a definite possibility that you might get a chance to firsthand experience how much worse than present-day reality it can get if enough people do that.

I would rather have Vinegar Man than any 100 anchors going on TV and treating this election like a normal election where neither of the candidates wants to kill his political opponents and have the military seize the voting machines, and the Supreme Court is thinking about letting him