wow, I need more of where that came from.

A geohell (pronounced gooey-shell) is a type of littoral mollusc.

lol guys the entire internet is a big time slot machine where you pay in time and sometimes cool **** drops out but usually you just waste your time

i have zero self control and click on stuff way too much. like us all. the internet breaks us. it's pretty much a giant rat trap time sink. social media websites should all be deleted

give me a phd in wisdom right now

Basically haven't been following world politics lately but with Trump around there's plenty of geohell to go around. Just look at the record temps this summer!

https://twitter.com/KeatonPatti/status/1001906391987245067

https://twitter.com/KeatonPatti/status/1004115184108044289

https://twitter.com/KeatonPatti/status/1006244403562893312

https://twitter.com/KeatonPatti/status/1012164192898617345

https://twitter.com/KeatonPatti/status/1014220692936589312

https://twitter.com/KeatonPatti/status/1006961202998726665

Stop using it like television then.

See also: http://www.timwu.org/AttentionMerchants.html

If Google and Facebook were socially responsible, they'd put those two resources in a sticky post on their homepages.

You should treat the web like a TV set, where 99.999% of the channels (forums and social media included) are trash: there's no harm in flipping through them, so long as you flip back to program that you came to watch in the first place (this is limited to things for which you can define a start and end before you even begin. It doesn't include much, but things like writing emails, looking up documents, and closing bug reports count).

Otherwise, these sophisticated machines we've built are no better than the ol' idiot box.

I just need to be more disciplined in my usage. I avoid gambling because I'm aware how it works, I don't avoid the internet because it doesn't feel like gambling even when it is exactly gambling.

Like this, yes.

You just have to be more selective about what you consume.

To paraphrase Donald Rumseld, there are an unknown number of unknown things on the web that we could be consuming, and the only way to find out what we're missing is to consume more such things in the first place. (In the category of slot machines, substitute cash payout for rewarding media consumption.)

Unlike slot machines, though, the web can be objectively beneficial in small doses (which makes it harder to justify bluntly avoiding altogether). But then the question becomes: is it possible to consistently consume a constant amount of media? In my experience it tends to come in spurts, because it's not uniformly rewarding, which makes it harder to avoid the runaway effect. I think the only solution is to be so selective, that you actually underconsume on most days.

And that just means you have to find the really good stuff out there, so that even a small amount of consumption is highly rewarding.

But then what happens when the people who are promulgating the very best stuff are themselves participating in social media that promotes over-consumption (Eversor just linked to some good stuff on Twitter, which is ground-zero for that)?

I go back to the TV analogy: no matter how good Eversor's links were, I treat it like trash TV: I change the channel immediately when the important channel I had been waiting for comes back (e.g., code finished compiling, I realize what I wanted to say in an email, etc.).

If google and facebook were socially responsible, they'd purge their entire platforms. Well not all of google but most of it.

Haha, yes. I realized that my idea was ridiculous when I wrote it.

On the other hand, they could put the sticky up as a way to blame people when they inevitably ignore it. Kind of like the warnings on cigarettes (which people ignore).

whatcha mean bra that's some primo 'tent

Don't worry, I TiVo'd it (along with the REM songs and the podcast you posted).

I am unfortunately giving in and getting internet at home. I need to do some work that requires pretty consistent access and also nothing here is open outside of the regular semesters ****. I'm going to lose a lot of time to this. However, this means I will be able to set up my raspberry pi which plays episodes of always sunny 24/7

Still no internet in my pocket though. Still afraid of how much more it will be touching me. Ick.

In other news, it's apparent that Reddit is trying hard to morph the site into a Twitter / Facebook clone (much to the ire of its existing user base).

Yeah because the current platform is hard to monetize. It's no secret Reddit has had a hard time with that. So it's become time for them to be more aggressive about personal information.

The internet sucks.

The internet isn’t what sucks, it’s the rents of transaction clearing monopolies that make services that deliver low marginal value in small increments (like search engines and social media) financially infeasible, unless that value proposition is flipped on its head, so the value goes to a handful of people that receive large benefits in large increments.

(This is “why bitcoin” but, unfortunately, as I’ve made fun of this before, they fixed the rents problem but didn’t fix the transactional costs problem)

Jaron Lanier has some interesting things to say about some of this stuff in the most recent episode of Ezra Klein's podcast https://art19.com/shows/the-ezra-klein-show

What I want to know is why I'm seeing in my news summary an article by Ezra Klein about the Supreme Court nomination, in which he seems to be jumping up and down and how by nominating his pick for the court, Trump is evil because he lost the "popular vote". ??? This just smells like a bad self-parody of the worst of Clinton-flavored, anti-alt-right crusaders.

So a conservative Supreme Court justice retires, and a Republican president nominates a (impeccably well qualified) Supreme Court justice to replace him. How is this even news?

It is a little rich that he'd simultaneously claim that the Supreme Court is an anti-democratic institution while also seeming to advocate packing the court.

I have to be honest I don't fully understand the outrage about this on the left. It seems that most of the criticisms of the Supreme Court as an institution ultimately stem from frustration that the Supreme Court isn't an institution dominated by Democrats. I can't imagine that many of these concerns would seem nearly as relevant to Democrats if the shoe was on the other foot, and Democrats held a slim majority over the court.

Also, given how many Democrats want to use every device at their disposal to try to stop the appointment, it should bring about a reevaluation of McConnell blocking Garland from being considered.

The stakes were just as high for the GOP as they were for the Democrats, and only one side could win. The GOP couldn't afford to allow Garland to be appointed: it'd mean suffering the exact same loss that we're suffering now. In fact, it actually would've done more to upset the balance of the court, since it would've replaced one of the most conservative judges with a moderate one. Really the only difference between then and now is that in 2016, the GOP had the power to stop Garland from being considered. The Dems don't. If we did, we'd be using it right now.

dont have to pay transactions fees if you dont make any because they are too expensive

jon just because innovators arent disrupting in the way you want to doesnt mean they arent disrupting. transaction costs are solves when people dont want to make transactions because they are too expensive okay

The main concern from my understanding is a 1990s opinion from Kavanaugh that claimed a president of the United States cannot be indicted while in office, and should not be investigated while in office (and does not need to comply with such investigation).

your groceries are now ad-supported because it’s not worth the transaction costs to get people to pay for them.

At the same time, he also contributed to the section of the Starr investigation into Clinton that advocated that Clinton be impeached. That could mean a few things: it could mean, for instance, that he's a partisan conservative who's incapable of being impartial (as I suspect people who think that the Starr investigation was fundamentally partisan would say). But it could also say something about what he thinks of as the legal constraints (or at least the norms) that limit (or ought to limit) presidential power.

what if an ad ends up on my goat milk that could be offensive to goat milk drinkers

As per the norm, the "sky-is-falling" folks are focusing on only a specific portion of his opinion, taken out of context.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/no-brett-kavanaugh-did-not-argue-that-a-sitting-president-is-above-the-law

I don't think I'd mind a conservative nomination if there wasn't a concerted effort by conservative billionaires to taint the courts. It's easy to create these half-wit thought experiments and ignore, you know, the actual evidence of where it happens.

It's just like all those right-wing nutcase conspiracy theories about pedophile sex rings and the Clintons. On the one hand, you have people tea leaf reading emails for coded messages and trusting Qanon, on the other, you have federal court records of Trump's name appearing in Jeffrey Epstein's flight logs, actual accusations of sexual assault against him (and other conservatives..) on underage girls.

It's pretty common of conservatives to say "imagine if liberals did this thing" in comparison to the conservatives who.. really do the thing.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/koch-network-plans-to-spend-millions-backing-trumps-court-pick_us_5b33ea8ee4b0b745f17a4817

I mean, it's not as if this would never happen on the more liberal end, but conservatives have the point of their spear targeted at the courts. There is very much a one-sided effort to tip things in their favor.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1016695490438619136

wont someone plz think of the billionaires?

then everybody will freak out and pull their ads. after ad revenue falls off, the food billionaires will use their food recommendation monopoly to subsidize their grocery business while searching for a new revenue model. eventually the shareholders will force them to cancel their grocery stores. unfortunately they had used their food recommendation monopoly to drive all other grocery stores out of business, so then there won’t be any food for sale anymore.



Not my country, but if it happened here I would much rather have a socially conservative Supreme Court than a business right one.

Business right + competitive threat -> fascism

With a socially conservative Supreme Court you at least know where you stand. The status quo will be preserved, and social progress will require strongly and carefully worded legislation in order to pass muster. That’s the way it should be, anyway.

A business right Supreme Court may offer some token support for social conservative goals as a matter of realpolitics, but they’re really interested in helping their business friends achieve their goals. When a Supreme Court isn’t even ruling consistently with their own case law you have a major problem.

Does the muskrat really qualify as an engineer?

that tweet gets ****ing dumber every time i read it

he sounds like a 14 year old

well, he has a physics undergraduate and taught himself web development, so