That's not how capitalism works. Once you have shown businesses what you're willing to pay they will not cut prices below that. It's called price stickiness. It's why we are going to have long tail inflation long after Trump is finally out of office and his tariffs are removed and his dumb wore in Iran is sorted out by a Democrat.

Blue sky is full of hobbyists. They mostly keep to themselves. If you are seeing a bunch of left-wing politics over on Blue sky it's because that's what you went there for and the algorithm is serving it up to you.

Now that said once you get tired of that crap it is really hard to get it out of your feed on most platforms. Reddit in particular is basically useless once it gets a whiff of you being interested in politics. YouTube at least what you just start blocking things and you can eventually get me crap out of your feed.

I say this is somebody who is obviously left wing based on my comment history however I'm sick and tired of low effort outrage porn showing up in my feed regardless of whether it comes from the left or the right.

Honestly even the handful of channels that don't just do outrage porn have become pretty useless because they are just busy trying to keep people on the left wing from completely giving up. I mean we are one election away from being a Soviet dictatorship so it's understandable.

I do think we will just barely survive but that's only because I don't think Trump's health is going to hold out and without him JD Vance can't keep the cult going

That's not how any of this works.

What's actually happening is social media use has plummeted across the board. I don't know if I've seen anyone explain why yet but everybody's numbers are way way down.

In particular young people are giving up on social media. Which surprises me giving that urban sprawl and the high cost of cars kind of isolates them. Maybe there's so many people packed in single family homes now that's less of an issue in some ways. A buddy of mine used to talk about how in Vietnam you'd have entire families in what we would call a studio apartment. And that he saw America heading towards that kind of poverty.

I mean I guess that's one way to solve first world problems, turn your nation into a third world hell hole...

Most of the cool retro game stuff is gradually moving to Blue sky. None of the people in the community really care about the politics stuff much but it's hard to hang out on Twitter when there's Nazis and porn bots everywhere and the system isn't hiding them anymore.

With the Nazis they always had to manually remove them because automated systems would identify Republican politicians as Nazis and ban them automatically. That's because computers go right through dog whistles. They can easily draw the connections between what a republican politician is saying or really any right-wing politician and the Neo-Nazi movements in a given country. It's a pretty straight through line if you're really paying attention but most people don't so.

Muskrat fire it all the guys who are doing that manual review and naturally he did not turn on the automated system because if he did well again it would be banning Republican and right-wing politicians so it's now oops all Nazis!

So eventually hobbyists get tired of it and they switch to Blue sky or threads. I don't see a lot of them switching to threads it's almost always Blue sky.

A lot of them seem obsessive about work. Musk is a good example. Claims to work long hours, although how much of that is spent shitposting on X is hard to say. But he claims he does, and seems to expect everyone else to as well. In reality he seems to contribute very little beyond being a good liar and hype man, and having some financial sense. He also uses drugs to enhance his performance and to relax, an option not available to most plebs.

Massive drought and wildfires, leading to flooding when it does start raining this week and the ground can't absorb it.

We may have to start looking at desalination, like Middle Eastern countries. Certainly we need to get much better at storing water from the winter. The UK is particularly bad for that, because we sold off publicly owned water utilities and they didn't bother investing in storage, they just paid out massive dividends for shareholders. Decades later and we are being hit by climate change too.

That's why it is so dangerous.

When ambient temperature equals of exceeds body temperature, your body can no longer radiate heat. The only way to shed it is via sweating, which risks dehydration. When it's also very humid, you can't even sweat it off, and you die.
That's assuming you are healthy, it's worse if you aren't.

It's also why in Europe you usually can't be made to work in an environment about around 32C, and even that is borderline.The laws vary but generally that is around the point where doing anything other than relaxing or seeking shelter from the heat starts to have very negative consequences for your health.

Microsoft in Japan, a country with notoriously long working hours, just tried a 4 day working week: https://mashable.com/article/m...

They found that productivity increased by 40%. So it's not the same pay for less work, it's the same pay for more work.

I used to work in this area for a short time, so I have some insight.

The company made what the newspapers called a "fish disc", basically flashing lights and speakers placed underwater to drive fish away. There were also UV lights to stop stuff growing on them. They worked but were problematic. Difficult to install and in need of a lot of maintenance. Not 100% effective either, the nuclear plants they were protecting still needed filters and regular cleaning, just less of it. And of course when one was hit by lightning and knocked out temporarily, the plant was in trouble.

Fighting nature tends to be a losing battle. Much better to try to integrate with it. If you are building say an offshore wind turbine, you just need to accept that stuff is going to live on and around it, and design it to deal with that. Fortunately it's not that hard with a stationary turbine, but for a nuclear plant that relies on fresh water for cooling, dealing with stuff living in the water and the water itself heating up is a major problem.

Oh yeah, some of those French plants shut down because the water got too warm in the heatwave.

IQ is bunk because it is influenced by education and practice. Therefore it is not a measure of raw intelligence potential.

Can we be sure that the open source code is what they are running on their website though? Because it feels like e.g. Elon Musk's posted get boosted more than others, even if his own Grok AI usually debunks them.

I don't know I thought it was pretty funny when we found out that 90% of right-wing influencers are either Pakistani or Indian and they're just grifting stupid right wing Americans.

So yeah it would be funny to actually see the algorithm with all its warts and all.

But that said the algorithm without the data isn't a complete picture. Especially because we know that the owner of Twitter routinely has the data altered artificially in order to fit with whatever silly little agenda he has this week.

I mean I guess yeah technically since Elon Musk and Jeff bezos are lizard people but I think they're native lizard people rather than the usual batch of aliens we get.

Literally there's about 3 or 400 people who are going to destroy the entire planet except for a small section of it that they will be allowed to live on protected by automatic killbots and periodic Mass cullings.

And your Boomer uncle is all in favor of it as long as he doesn't have to look at trans people or let them drink his beer.

More data centers. Data centers all the way down.

This is plain bullshit. Itâs that until recently, air condition was not necessary at all. Europe is very far to the north. Great Britain for instance lies between the latitudes of Vancouver Island and Juneau, Alaska. On the other side, Montreal, Canada is on the same latitude than Milan, Italy, and Toronto is as far to the north as Florence. Most of the continuous U.S. is somewhere between the Mediterran and the Sahara Desert. No one in southern Italy doubted the necessity of air condition in the Summer. For Germans or Scandinavians on the other hand, air condition was just a waste of space and energy, because it never was hot enough for A/C to make a difference, except in large office complexes with their large windows and basically no shadow. And they all have air condition. This year, nearly all European places have posted new local temperature highs. Europe today is hotter than it ever was in recorded history.