Alistair Young @cerebrate@schelling.pt

I have seen many variants of this meme, and one day, I hope one of these caring folks will have the empathic chops to realize that what makes people mad is invariably _step two_.

Why did we call it "energy conservation" when we could have called it "philenthalpy"?

At some point, I really need to come up with a filter algorithm patch for Mastodon that can spare me the necessity of having three and counting different variant spellings of "tech bro" in my cutlist.

@dashdsrdash

It's more that only cancer, in the category of things that grow, has an exponential curve rather than an S-curve, because it's the thing for which growth is a terminal goal. For everything else, it's instrumental.

(Even the Daleks, as pretty much the gold standard for highly-focused monomanic civilizations, don't want to wallpaper the universe. They just want to be alone in it, and growth is a tool.)

((Even if they could destroy the Cybermen with one Dalek.))

I think about estimates of how long it would take a determined civilization to expand itself throughout the universe, and I ask myself --

Does cancer have fun?

@MeiLin @isaackuo @Hcobb @cstross

I should probably clarify at this point that fashionability is just my snarkriff.

The real problem is that if you're a critter, be it meat or machine, that is accustomed to life in the busy infosphere of a developed solar system, voluntarily signing yourself up for long-distance STL bandwidth and data rates is like, as a human today, signing yourself up for a few centuries in a sensory deprivation tank.

@Hcobb @isaackuo

Comms density. Heading off to another star means being isolated by years of light-lag from within delta of everything interesting in the universe, and subject to permanent unfashionability.

(h/t to @cstross for this notion, or at least where I ran across it)

@zarpaulus

If there is one thing my career has prepared me for, it's following detailed procedures precisely and not making single-digit slipups that lead to disaster.

@zarpaulus 🙄

Well, that was predictable.

Vice President should be the modern title for the Master of the Revels.

Change my mind.

@zarpaulus Not in any particular detail, no. Seems like a rather bad idea at the moment.

Also: "Inviting a Communist Party into our market, even as it bars foreign competition in its own, is no one’s idea of advancing capitalism. What exactly do these groups think they're defending? Is this really their conception of the free market?"

I will defend to the death the right of my enemies to believe half-baked economic theories which lead them to subsidize cheap goods for me at their expense, for reasons that should be obvious to anyone not prone to leave free money on the table.

> But now [...] find themselves hoisting aloft the Chinese Communist Party’s banner in the name of “liberty,” arguing for the CCP's right to a free market and free speech.

YES, BECAUSE WE'RE SUPPOSED TO BE BETTER THAN THEY ARE, YOU FASCIST FUCKNUGGET.

"But China block our social media platforms!"

Clearly since they are stabbing themselves in the face, we too must stab ourselves in the face.

MR. PRESIDENT, WE CANNOT ALLOW A FACE-STABBING GAP.

I am told that libertarians are badly isolated in this TikTok fight, and how much our kicking and screaming is hurting our credibility in the conservative coaltion.

Gentles all, _fuck_ the conservative coalition.

If you don't have principles when it's inconvenient, you don't have principles. And you don't deserve to have any credibility, either.

For clarity, from now on only measures of weight will be referred to as "tonnage". Measures of volume will instead be referred to as "fucktonnage".

Now, admittedly, this is the midwittiest of midwit arguments, but doesn't banning something because Dastardly Communists might be abusing it seem like the sort of thing that Dastardly Communists do?