Alistair Young @cerebrate@schelling.pt

"Might've been the losing side. Still not convinced it was the wrong one."

There are those who say that adhering to principles over pragmatism condemns you to be a loser.

Myself, I say it depends on which game you are playing. You may well lose the game of "wield political power in 2020s America", but if the game you're actually playing is "avoid becoming an integrity-void sack of shit", you're going to come out way ahead of the field.

There's something special about seeing someone defend the Florida ban on cultured meat as "libertarian", on the grounds that it's a defensive move against hypothetical future plans to ban animal meat.

Much like trade wars, fighting bans with bans is another variant on the strategy of defeating your opponent by punching yourself in the face until they give up.

Or, as Nietzche might have said, "if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss crawls right up your asshole and eats your brain".

Meanwhile, if people are going to accuse others of working for the international Jewish conspiracy, could they at least call them "minyan minions"? I mean, come on, conspiracist nutballs. Put the work in!

(Given my particular skillset, "missile bus" is totally the name for my post-apoc madcap technical.)

Why do we call it an "ammunition ship" when we could call it a "missile bus"?

The bear discourse has successfully achieved its goal, if its goal was to make me want to go live in the woods with the bears.

'Cause they're the only group involved that hasn't posted concussively dumb-assed takes on the whole concept.

Donald Trump speaking at the Libertarian Party National Convention will undoubtedly surprise the half-dozen people left in the world unaware that the Libertarian Party is about as libertarian as Chairman Mao's hairpiece.

Vault-Tec did nothing wrong.

Change my mind.

Since it has crossed my eyes once more, let me just take a moment out of my day to reassure you that if there is a stupider and more patently disingenuous meme out there, I have not yet seen it this morning.

Farewell, my old friend.

https://www.techspot.com/news/102684-zilog-discontinuing-z80-microprocessor-after-almost-50-years.html

Pax prompter vim.

Peace through text editing.

(This is also a commentary on why the #eldraeverse is unfilmable.)

Of course, it's necessary that it be that way, from the writers' perspective. Largely because if the Doctor ever *did* decide that he was done with people dying on him all the time and therefore, well, _fuck death in the general case_, there is a very good chance that he might actually be able to pull it off.

Which leads to the universe becoming very weird, and not in a cute portrayable way for companions and bystanders to boggle at, in rather short order.

So I've been catching up on my Doctor Who ( #drwho ; currently in revival series 9), and while I do enjoy the show, as a transhumanist, I am frequently irritated by the pro-death-and-mortality position that the show and the Doctor takes, well, almost every time the subject comes up.

(Death is necessary to give life meaning/make people appreciate life, and anyone who attempts to not die/finds themselves immortal goes horribly, horribly wrong.)

So it's not like I have to worry about operationalizing the plan involving wearing a leather posing-pouch as I round people up at rebar-sword-point and force them to walk the treadmill powering my k8s cluster.

But those of you who have children and would prefer them not being slaves or slavers - both being _real_ shitty lifestyles - might consider taking a moment to be appropriately terrified, m'kay?

(Also, build fission plants.)

This message brought to you by the Campaign for an Erg Day.

Now, myself, I don't really have to care all that much about this issue. I and my loved ones will be safely dead, and if there's an afterlife, I'll be looking up from some netherworld delivering sarcastic commentary.

(I'm gonna be a big hit down there, 'cause dead people are mostly old, and old people do love bitching about how their descendants fucked everything up by the numbers.)

....well, then, we should expect certain other alternative energy sources to come back in a big way.

Yes, I'm talking about the return of slavery. Because the thing about slavery, you see, is that while it's nowhere near as efficient as industrial energy, it requires little complex infrastructure or technical knowledge, and can be practiced effectively on the small scale. All it actually *requires* is ethically-challenged human beings, a resource that has never been in short supply.

The conclusion which is fairly easy to reach is that if (a) we fail to adequately manage the energy transition away from fossil fuels in a way that preserves per-capita energy usage and preferably also preserves the ongoing secular increase in per-capita energy usage; or (b) are big enough fools to succumb to degrowth ideology and assume that people will, in fact, be satisfied to replace it with a secular settling for less...