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Sep 25, 2020 4 tweets 1 min read Read on X
What's a productive organizing thing we can do this winter if Trump is re-elected?
Look, this is weird advice, but if you're in a dark place about what would happen if Trump was re-elected I encourage you to read this Metafilter thread from election night. Note all the doomsday scenarios that didn't happen. I'm seeing a lot of them again metafilter.com/163328/Of-the-…
You're not going to emigrate, you're not going to stand in front of the tanks, and democracy in all 50 states won't disappear if we lose a tough election. But it would be helpful if #resistance 2.0 was less reactive, less fractious, and more focused than the original
And again, sorry for the electoral pessimism, but I've been in Trump country for a while. Maybe if I was in Arizona or Michigan I'd be humming the Internationale

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More from @Pinboard

Jan 5
Cryptocurrency and generative AI make roughly the same size claims to being transformative innovations, so it's interesting to see how many interesting things people have already found to do with the latter, while the first has mostly been an expensive tour through human folly
I like thinking of cryptocurrency as "financial string theory", but for the parallel to really work a lot more physicists would need to be in jail
With both crypto and string theory, you have domain experts in thrall to a mathematical apparatus so intellectually satisfying that they get emotionally invested into bringing it into contact with reality. But instead each failed attempt pushes them further out into la-la-land
Read 5 tweets
Dec 21, 2023
Rising from the crypt to talk a little about how pre-wikipedia generations lived. There was a big encyclopedia in the library, but only really rich families would own one. The best that poor kids could hope for was grocery store encyclopedias, bought one volume at a time
Grocery chains really would sell the world's saddest encyclopedia, one slim volume a week, and you felt lucky to have it. Unrestricted access to a full set of the Encyclopedia Britannica is the thing that felt most like having access to the world wide web in the pre-www days.
Naturally when the web came along, we all wondered how encyclopedias would work online, and for a brief while it looked like Microsoft would sell expensive access to a kind of crappy one. And then wikipedia appeared and blew everyone's mind by the fact that it worked
Read 8 tweets
Aug 28, 2023
Early this year I went online after taking too many drugs and ordered a Mongolian yurt. Here is my yurt, and here is my story: Image
The great thing about yurts is you can get high, make a deposit, and forget you bought one for seven months. Then in late July I got email giving me an imminent delivery date and demanding to see a photo of the finished substructure. I tried to bluff them with a quick Lowe's run Image
The yurt company was totally on to me, though. Everyone lies about the substructure. Demands for photo evidence grew insistent, and I found myself having to level heavy things in the desert while getting heatstroke


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Read 19 tweets
Jul 28, 2023
This whole thread on large-scale circulation in the Atlantic Ocean is great, but the real showstopper is that global-warming induced breakdown in this flow will result in significant *cooling* for a large chunk of Eurasia, greatly complicating the politics of climate response.
The existing strategy for mitigating climate change is incoherent because:

1. It demands a total restructuring of societies worldwide
2. Most of this burden would fall on developing nations
3. It ignores imminent tipping points that (by definition) there is no coming back from
But with no politically achievable plan for capping (let alone reducing) global emissions, what will happen is we'll run into one of these tipping points, and if that happens to be AMOC collapse, then suddenly a bunch of G7 economies have much less incentive to decarbonize
Read 6 tweets
Mar 2, 2023
Cantonese and Uyghur have since been put back into Signal. But this whole thread shows a troubling level of ignorance from the person in charge of software people are supposed to entrust their lives and freedom to. There's no such language as Traditional Chinese, for starters.
People in Hong Kong speak Cantonese, which is written with traditional Chinese characters but is not legible to nonspeakers. In the past, the CCP's belief that Cantonese is just a wacky subdialect of Mandarin has made it easier for Cantonese speakers to hide in plain sight online
I don't expect Whittaker to know the subtleties of every language Signal supports, but to not understand the basics of how people would use the app in Hong Kong or the Uyghur diaspora this far in to her tenure is pretty appalling.
Read 6 tweets
Feb 28, 2023
Let's see what Google's been up to with their political giving—it's been a while! As a reminder, Google's PAC collects voluntary employee contributions, then gives that money to politicians the company supports. We begin our evening with a nice $5K to the Republican Majority Fund
Krysten Sinema fans on Twiiter will be chagrined to see Google only gave her $3000 (out of a possible $5K), but it's still early days in the 2024 election, plenty of time to top things off later.
On November 18 Google's PAC made the maximum legal donation, $5000, to Mitch McConnell's 2026 re-election campaign.
Read 11 tweets

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