It can definitely have side effects. Psychological (eating disorders, debilitating feeling of hunger) and physical (unbalanced diet, or fatigue because the body gets in the “oh fuck must conserve energy” mode).

There is no one size fits all solution. A random 50 year old IT worker with a sedentary lifestyle and a Big Mac diet does not need the same help as a physically active 25 year old with severe hormonal imbalances. Using Ozempic is bad in the former case, but so is shaming the latter person for relying on it.

We knew it was bad then too. This is cynical propaganda to try to normalise its use in the face of a mounting public health crisis.

Much like fossil fuel companies today will continuously put out statements and ads and fund studies that either refute their impact or minimizes it. The cigarette industry pioneered this approach which essentially consists in putting just enough doubt and uncertainty into the public discourse to make regulation seem unnecessary overreach, despite overwhelming consensus from the subject matter experts who unlike lobbyists can’t just buy their way into getting real estate in magazine stands.

It also trends much more political than /r/popular. (Low quality liberal bait like “DAE think trump bad???” most of the time, but still). Their explicit goal with their “alternative” feeds was to de-rank the political discussions in favor of 9gag-esque slop.

When a big political event happened, you could go to /r/all and be blasted with tens of discussions about it, or go to /r/popular and watch staged animal rescue videos or whatever.

Now I’m not saying it’s a conspiracy necessarily, but it certainly is yet another major loss for free political speech online.

Except the Armageddon is real but no-one will rise up to save us when every major city is nothing but glowing embers under an ever gray nuclear sky while the remnants of humanity fight each other with sticks over the last grain silos.

So-called American “revolutionaries” make me sick with their reckless disregard for the unavoidable responsibility their country has with regards to their military. An “accelerated downfall” won’t just affect you bozos. Especially not if the means are “stoking the fire of imperialism”.

If I could press a button to accelerate the US downfall and magically contain the fighting to the lower 48 in a way that leaves whoever is left standing nuke-less, I would, but that’s not an option on the table, so barring that, please vote against the guy who really can’t be trusted with the nuclear briefcase, yeah???

Or it’s the opposite. I refuse to watch shows without giving them my undivided attention, but that kind of pacing begs to be background noise while you do something else.

Sometimes there is nothing significantly plot-relevant happening for entire episodes at a time, both for bad reasons (the incentive structure for children’s show rewards empty filler slop with zero plot value because it’s easy to re-run) and less bad reasons (children like repetition). Both of which are painfully evident throughout the whole experience.

Good for you if that’s your jam, if you find it comforting or like it as background noise or like it because it leads to better paced seasons down the line or whatever, but I refuse to accept that it’s an issue for me to dislike objectively horrendous pacing.

I tried but like most children’s shows I just can’t deal with (at least the early seasons’) pacing. It’s excruciatingly slow, full of obvious filler content, and doesn’t seem to be trying to get anywhere.

Typically those children shows’ pacing tends to get a lot better in the latter seasons as the audience ages out and the showrunners are trusted with bolder story arcs, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are tens of hours of slop to get through before that point is reached.

Americans loooooooooooooooove pointing out at their population density as a thought-terminating cliché although it’s very rarely relevant to any discussion.

The size of your continent does not influence the size of your metro areas, dipshits. LA isn’t the way it is because Wyoming is empty, LA is the way it is because a bunch of dumbasses decided that local mass transit and terraced housing should be outlawed and bulldozed in order to fuck over African-Americans communities.

Can’t easily prove a negative but here’s an example.

On 19 April 1943, the twentieth transport left Mechelen transit camp carrying 1,631 Jewish men, women, and children

Three young students and members of the Belgian resistance including a Jewish doctor, Youra Livchitz and his two non-Jewish friends Robert Maistriau[a] and Jean Franklemon [fr], armed with one pistol, a lantern, and red paper to create a makeshift red lantern (to use as a danger signal), were able to stop the train on the track Mechelen-Leuven, between the municipalities of Boortmeerbeek and Haacht.[1] The twentieth convoy was guarded by one officer and fifteen men from the Sicherheitspolizei (SiPo-SD), who came from Germany. Despite these security measures, Maistriau was able to open one wagon and liberate 17 people.[1]

Other prisoners escaped from the convoy without any connection with the attack. The train driver, Albert Dumon, did all he could to keep the slowest pace between Tienen and Tongeren, stopping whenever it was possible and justifiable, and so allow that more people could jump without killing themselves. In all, 233 people succeeded in escaping from the train.[1] 89 were eventually recaptured and put on later convoys.[1] 26 others were killed, either by shooting or by the fall, and 118 who succeeded in escaping.[1] The youngest, Simon Gronowski, was only 11 years old.[1] Régine Krochmal [fr], an eighteen-year-old nurse with the resistance, also escaped after she cut the wooden bars put in front of the train air inlet with a bread knife and jumped from the train near Haacht. Both survived the war.

Emphasis mine. Albert Dumon “did his job” (the French version of the article goes a bit more in-depth). He didn’t overtly defy the orders given to him under the threat of immediate execution (!). He didn’t quit his job knowing that if he didn’t drive the trains a German train driver would take his place. He followed the regulations to the letter of the law, as incompetently as he could afford. And his malicious compliance saved 118 lives.

Here is my favorite video essay of 2025: Fantasies of Nuremberg.

A bit of a heads-up: do not watch this video if you want to retain any hint of a fantasy that such a reckoning even did happen in the first place. Do watch if you want a fantastically well written essay about one of the most mythologized and relevant events in history.

A weak dollar will work great for you when you bring back all those manufacturing jobs from overseas and start exporting the surplus production. Any day know. Any day.

He’s a child of apartheid and, according to his own daughter, was always an awful person in private.

There’s lots of precedent for white supremacists keeping a low(-ish) profile when it suits them. Just look at famous card-holding Nazi and prolific mass-murderer Werner Von Braun and his public perception in the US. If he could cultivate the image of America’s Dearest Scientist, literally anyone could.

Also Trump literally illegally kidnapped a head of state to the U.S. And we’re supposed to pretend the first thing they did was not simply… Move the murderer somewhere out of state where they couldn’t reach him even if they tried (which they won’t because no blue state has the balls to meaningfully stand up to Trump)?

I mean, realistically that guy could twerk in front of the Minnesota Capitol with some ICE buddies to back him up and giant sign saying “I did it” and Minnesota still wouldn’t do shit.

“State’s rights” are exactly like the “2A rights”. They only serve conservatives, whom the law protects but does not bind.

This is not just me being salty BTW. I am trying to get across the point to anyone reading this that if your plan to bring back U.S. Democracy relies on the Constitution playing in your favor, you’ve already lost.

I’m sure that pointing out the narrative’s glaringly obvious inconsistencies is going to land Russia in very hot water over the shoot down of that civilian airliner over Ukraine in 2014. Any day now. Any day now… Just one more “le epic debunk”…

Technically true but irrelevant.

A majority of Americans do not give a shit about Danemark and would not lift their pinky to help one of their staunchest allies. That is true.

MAGA is a (large) minority. That is also true.

This is all enabled by a very sizeable chunk of Americans being literally mentally unable to conceptualize people outside their village as living, breathing, fully conscious people deserving of love and safety. They are colloquially known as “non-voters”.

I know it’s not the biggest deal out of all the awful shit going on, but man this pisses me off. The journalistic institution, top-to-bottom, is utterly failing to accurately report on anything that is going on, seemingly out of fear of sounding “overly alarmist”. Time and time again the would-be alarmist statement turns out to be true, and yet they do not learn.

Every so-called journalist and news institution is directly responsible for the fall of democracy because they abdicated their duty to inform the public of what is actually going on. You can literally open any history book covering 1930s Germany to get factual material on why this is bad. Not doing so is a journalistic and moral failure of the highest order and I’m tired of pretending this is what “journalistic integrity” looks like.

Few Celtic roots*

For instance char comes from the Celtic carros.

Furthermore French has a strong Frankish influence, hence the name of the language and its relative distance from Italian Spanish or Portuguese which are more directly descended from Latin. But also many other influences. French has a surprising amount of Arabic vocabulary for example, and not just from recent immigration/colonisation.

Either way if you ignore regional languages you’re not doing linguistics. And the author could not even get it right for national languages, if we even accept that arbitrarily picking one makes any sense.

This map is a masterclass in what not to do and it almost feels like intentional engagement farming.

I don’t trust the US government to do literally anything right with this, and I’m kinda surprised Google didn’t already gift an underage child to Trump so he’d make the problem go away.

However a perfectly viable option that I’m sure the previous government looked into would be to entrust Chromium (which is Open-Source though not copyleft) to a new, independent nonprofit made of Google’s former chromium team led and paid for by a consortium of the major commercial chromium users (Google, Microsoft, etc.). It would be in everyone’s best interest to share the relatively small financial burden so that Chromium can remain decent and competitive.

This wouldn’t be anything revolutionary. This approach of financing an independent open-source project as a “common good” is basically how the Linux kernel has been developed for many years now, most Linux code is written by corporate sponsors.

North American trees species have evolved to have more vibrant fall colors than European species.

So you’re basically proving that British guy’s point that yes, they are a different color but no-one believes it because they think they know what fall looks like in temperate climates.

music-library $ du -h -d 0 .
270G	.

I am not looking for a compromise. I listen to my high-quality digital library on shuffle most of the time, and am very well aware that my phone allows me to access orders of magnitude more music than even the most compact CD player.

When I do listen to my favorite albums as LPs, the clunkiness and the artifacts are part of an Experience. I can listen to exact copies of the digital masters of those songs any time I want to, but sometimes we do things BECAUSE they are not maximally optimal. Sometimes I want to take a walk alongside the river and get my feet a little bit wet even though I could have worn boots. Feel a little something, you know?