The coming enshittification of Reddit.
“Of all the Garfield Minus Garfield strips, the following 15 stand out as some of the darkest to ever be created.”
“Let’s put a very fine point on it: Showgirls is a ’90s id fantasia; it’s dark brown lip-liner, it’s perms, it’s Versayyyce, it’s boat shows, it’s French tips, it’s ham-handed Sapphic romance, it’s Gina Gershon, it’s unforgettable. The Idol could never! The Idol is a wet cigarette; it’s dead eyes, it’s braided rattails, it’s your friend’s little sibling declaring “I definitely know what sex is,” it’s soggy vibes, it’s fetid air, it’s naptime.”
“[No Labels] is literally funded by the top Republican donors in the country and run by a couple of reprobates half motivated by pique over being expelled from the Democratic party and half by the intrinsic corruption they displayed while they were part of it.”
The Cheyenne Squirrelpocalypse. That’s it, that’s the link.
RIP, Big Pokey, Houston rapper.
“Declaring oneself a constitutional county undermines the authority of officials authorized to act under the Constitution. I believe it ultimately subverts the authority of the Constitution itself.”
“I’m sure that somebody, somewhere, experienced some kind of genuine religious conversion as a result of Pat Robertson’s decades of “televangelism.” That’s probably happened dozens of times over the years. But the donors and monthly supporters of The 700 Club weren’t funding a missionary enterprise designed to seek and to save lost souls. They were funding a fundraising enterprise designed to seek and to soak anyone willing to write them a check.”
“To Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, and others, the yeoman farmer was the ideal citizen who set his own schedule and was beholden to no one. With a little suspension of disbelief, one could imagine the darkest days of 2020 as a time machine transporting knowledge workers back to their freehold farms. There, we tended our intellectual crops at our leisure, reviving a model of work long forgotten. We discovered we liked it.”
“Texans making 4,000-mile round-trip journeys for abortions. Weeks-long waits for appointments at clinics across the Midwest. Desperate calls to abortion funds asking for help with procedure costs, flights and gas. One year after last summer’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, this is the new reality of abortion in the U.S., as thousands of people are unable to obtain abortions in their home states or nearby — and tens of thousands more travel farther and farther to end their pregnancies.”
“Scientists have detected the presence of the sixth and final essential ingredient of life in ice grains spewed into space from the ocean of Saturn’s moon Enceladus.”
Weird Al >>> “weird” AI.
RIP, Teresa Taylor, former drummer for The Butthole Surfers and actor best known for Slacker; her image is on the movie poster.
Scientists shouldn’t debate gaslighters.
Scientists should also think real hard about whether it’s still worth it to have a Twitter account.
“Somewhat like some colleges or the service academies match a sponsor family with first year students or cadets, [Leonard] Leo seemed to do that with incoming Supreme Court Justices. You know … a place to stay over the holidays, watch a movie, get emotional support, a place to take a nap on an off day. It’s basically that, a sponsor family for each new Justice.”
Spare relationship causes awkward split is a Hall of Fame headline, and like Ray Ratto I am duly impressed. But seriously, you need to read the story, or at least Ratto’s recap and the comments, to truly take in its full flower.
“We already (sorta) know how to have less crime”.
“It’s been one year since the Supreme Court ended the federal right to an abortion, and OBGYNs say that it has impacted their ability to perform miscarriages and react in pregnancy-related emergencies, according to a new KFF national survey released Wednesday. Now, they fear those restrictions have led to worse maternal mortality rates, and they fear for future recruitment and retention in their profession.”
“It’s rarely malice that generates the events that lead to a safety regulation. Carelessness will do. So will pushing onward just one step too far because you want to show someone that you can deliver on your promises. That you can give them what they paid for. That you can make them happy.”
“Since Wednesday, users of Polymarket, a crypto-based futures trading platform, wagered over $300,000 on whether the “missing submarine” would “be found by June 23.””
Keep Vanna White. And pay her more, while you’re at it.
“In a perverse way, the Titanic got lucky. Its century-long growth into a worldwide cultural phenomenon is rooted in two often overlooked factors: demographics and timing.”
An alternative view on Reddit, including the fact that at least some of the API makers, like Apollo, have already been raking in big bucks. This is really like sports free agency and millionaires vs billionaires, with more ardent fans like subreddit mods, only in this case, it’s even more arguable the “fans” shouldn’t have been such suckers in the first place. https://socraticgadfly.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-reddit-strike-one-week-in-from-semi.html
Sam Howe Verhovek wrote an editorial in the Washington Post telling people not to be so harsh in their judgments of Stockton Rush. Personally I don’t have any patience with or much sympathy for libertarian m/billionaires who bitch and moan about safety regs as if their sole purpose is to cramp their entrepreneurial styles. Judging from the comments, I have lots of company. If you wish to engineer on the cheap and risk your own hide, that’s your prerogative, but making it into a business model crosses a pretty hard line. Yes, the passengers signed waivers informing them of great risk, but was the risk assessment accurate? Did they know the craft was being operated outside the regs? Mr. Rush might have asked why get out of bed or leave your house if you didn’t like risks, but if those activities are as risky as going more than 2 miles under the ocean, then I’m living in one very nasty dystopian Hellscape. Even the most risky thing I commonly do, driving, is far safer than it would be in the absence of all those pesky safety regs. Also if you want to operate in international waters that put you outside the regs, you should also be outside the tax-payer funded search and rescue zone- yes we’ll send the Coast Guard, but also a bill.
As a biologist, I would be so massively geeked out by even little bacteria in the waters of Europa or Enceladus.
Donald, with boxes. Randy Rainbow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zDXVw0aatQ