Nononono, this time building the doomsday superweapon will ensure peace

“Correction: email where we can read your personal communications and use that to serve precisely targeted ads is great”

Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public

Impressive fascism as material analysis through the mirror darkly

Literally bolting his body together as it tries to do the right thing and fall to pieces.

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The April 21 options expiration is the key. May 2026 WTI crude futures and options expire on April 21, 2026. The US‑Iran ceasefire is also set to expire on April 21 (OPEX is on the 21st EST, ceasefire is on the 22nd IRST). That is not a coincidence. The US has been trying to tank the futures market by selling contracts into the rollover period; they want to pin prices lower ahead of the May contract expiry. But Iran is letting them do it.

I’m not quite following here, can you elaborate? I get the part where the government is trying to keep prices low by building up a large short position, one that pays off if they’re able to permanently reopen the strait and oil prices drop and results in catastrophe if they can’t and prices shoot up. But I don’t really get how oil options trading works - if you’re short at close, do you have to physically buy and deliver oil? Essentially the opposite of that one time prices dropped into the negatives because storage was full and people who accepted the negative contracts discovered that they suddenly had to find a place to put a bunch of physical oil.

We must maintain our fighting force’s maximum effectiveness in the war against the very basis of our existence

be me
have bad teeth, bad eyes, and a small mental illness starter collection that I’m still seeing a therapist for almost weekly at the age my dad had me
somehow manage to find a partner: “yeah, I know what pregnancy does to the body and I’m not a fan, what if we got a cat instead”
forced to buy into the Giant Scam Machine, the bottom of which might fall out at any minute, in order to have a hope of retirement
cat is the most adorable thing ever
study climate change adaptation and policy
struggle to find a job despite a gazillion college degrees
boomers are currently selling their houses for prices that can only be paid via dark bargains with rumplestiltskin
houses in question require a lot of work thanks to the all the deferred maintenance
yeah no I think I’m going to pass on the amazing opportunity to continue the human lineage, sorry ancestors

So it should be called the shrew elephant

Yep, it’s a quick listen.

I feel like I’ve given up trying to understand what the reaction to the various stressors is going to be or how long we’re going to be able to keep the current system going. However, in retrospect, getting rich in the stock market and then using that to build a self-sufficient submarine capable of traveling around the world indefinitely probably should’ve been my first career choice.

We’re probably about to witness the poleward migration of some 800 million people over the next 50-60 years. I’ve read multiple journal articles warning about it, and the parts of the world that aren’t sliding into nativist fascism are sitting there waiting to be blindsided. It has legitimately kept me awake at night.

It’s cool, I feel the same way

It’s been openly discussed in the literature for a while that Bangladesh is probably going to be functionally uninhabitable by mid-century due to the combination of high heat and high humidity leading to frequent wet bulb events. The humid tropics are not going to be a place where people want to live.

This is an important and very concerning result. It shows that the ‘pessimistic’ models, which show a strong weakening of the Amoc by 2100, are, unfortunately, the realistic ones, in that they agree better with observational data.

So who wants to bet that 2100 deadline is going to start getting closer?

My Year in Mensa is a podcast series about how the social group specifically built around individuals that score well on IQ tests has been taken over by a bunch of Trump-loving libertarian 4-chan-adjacent edgelords.

They just needed 24 hours for the rug pull:

Preposterous and irrelevant.

No, there’s a point here. While history might be unable to converge on a lot of figures who actually lived due to poor recordkeeping and the inherent unreliability of a predominantly oral tradition, I was pointing out the alternative possibility that he was a composite figure based on multiple dudes who might’ve shared superficial similarities with the fictional character in the book but which can’t be localized to a specific personality. The idea that that there was a Real Historical Jesus that was the prime mover for the ideological offshoot that went on to become Christianity ignores the more reasonable possibility that the movement arose as the result of the coordinated actions of a lot of people who converged on an account of a life that could have happened

We don’t need to assume a guy got killed because there are multiple sources for Jesus’s crucifixion by the Romans. There were definitely hundreds of itinereant preachers who could’ve spawned religions. One of them, Jesus, led to Christianity and a complex web of mythologies were constructed around him after his death.

The non-Christian sources all leave a lot to be desired. From the RationalWiki article:

The Jewish historian Josephus is claimed to be the earliest non-Christian to mention Jesus, in his Antiquities of the Jews (ca. 93-94 CE) with the two references being referred to as the Testimonium Flavianum and the “Jamesian Reference”. However, there is much debate regarding how much of the Testimonium Flavianum (if any of it) was written by Josephus as there is no reference to it before the 4th century.

In his Annals (ca. 109 CE) Tacitus gives a brief mention of a “Chrstus” (generally read as “Christus” but in reality it could just as easily be read “Chrestus”), in a passage that shows evidence of tampering and contains no source. Also, the entire section of the Annals covering 29-31 CE is missing: “That the cut is so precise and covers precisely those two years is too improbable to posit as a chance coincidence.” His account is also at odds with the Christian accounts in The apocryphal Acts of Paul (c. 160 CE) and “The Acts of Peter” (150-200 CE) where the first has Nero reacting to claims of sedition by the group and the other saying thanks to a vision he left them alone.

Pliny the Younger was a Roman official who wrote innumerable letters. In one (ca. 112 CE), he references “Christians” (but not Jesus), and his “Christ” could have referred to innumerable other “messiahs” that various Jews were following.

Most of the Pauline Epistles were indisputably written by a dude named Paul in the Levant a few decades after Jesus’s death. He wrote about James. He wrote about actually existing churches and conflicts. These were not constructed a century later (except for the ones that obviously were,which has been determined via textual criticism and analysis) - they are much closer to contemporary than most classical historical figures! Just because it is in the Bible doesn’t mean it’s automatically fake. It is a corpus to which we can apply historical criticism like any other, not some exceptional fabrication.

In addition to Paul writing about events two decades after the fact and never actually meeting Jesus,

Paul had no knowledge of Jesus’ early life, just his claimed ultimate activities, and his teachings sometimes seem at variance with those of Jesus in the Gospels. He also does not mention the handful of churches that arose in Jesus’ name, but having nothing to do with his own Christianity. Although Paul writes about numerous other people seeing Jesus, he provides no corroborating evidence or means by which they could be identified. He does (e.g. in Galatians) speak of meeting some of the Disciples, but, as the John Frum cult shows, even the mention of James (the Just) as Jesus’ brother doesn’t mean much as John Frum got Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (who has only sisters) as a brother only 17 years after the first record of his movement.

Just because he talks about real stuff doesn’t mean he can’t also be making stuff up or embroidering actual events with fictional details. The existence to churches dedicated to Jesus also doesn’t really say much, since there are a lot of churches dedicated to fictional entities.