Having spent a couple of days in Miami earlier this week I could have written stories about the sad state of Florida. There were homeless people everywhere. Smell of urine all across the city. Poop on the sidewalk. And empty storefronts all along Lincoln road (which is a major tourism spot in south beach). Any horror story written about California can pretty much be written about Florida … but that story wouldn’t fit the Fox News narrative.
while I still can’t think of a need for the announced Apple VR/AR headset, one thing I haven’t seen many people talk about is Apple adding the Pro Tag to the product name. Usually Apple ads the Pro tag after several iterations of a product, here it’s in version one. This makes me wonder what the non Pro version will look like. My number one guess would be the outward facing screen will be gone in a plain/regular version. But beyond that I have a hard time to think of ways to cut cost while keeping it justify a price premium over Oculus headsets … in a way a non Pro version would have to be in the $999 price range I think to make it become close to competitive and be a success for Apple.
So I am not as old as Bill Maher but closer to his age, than I am to millennials. But I honestly don’t get his obsession and disdain of young people. He did this podcast chat with Dr Phil the other day where both of them, similar to the two grumpy old men from the Muppets, bitch and complain about young people. As if they and their generation where the shining example everyone should aspire to. They bring up how dumb young people are using videos of people asked mostly history or geography questions. Own example Bill Maher brings up is a person being asked “Where is Venice” responding with “Is it Paris?” … then he laughs how stupid the young person is and ends with “these young people don’t even know what a continent is.” … really and it looks to me like Bill Maher and his stupid generation doesn’t seem to know what a city or country is because the logical answer to Where is Venice, would really be either Italy or Los Angeles. Yes, Venice is in Europe but unless the question is which continent is a city on the logical next question would a city is in a county. But maybe they didn’t teach countries in school when Bill was young.
Also making fun of random people, taken off guard had a long tradition. As a German I remember how all the way back to the 70s and 80s TV shows made fun of “dumb Americans” who didn’t know geography.
So Bill Maher, maybe talk to young people and realize how smart a lot of them actually are before you make yourself look like an old, angry, fool.
Judging by the “anti woke” nazis on Twitter, YouTube, Fox News, and the GOP one would have to believe that white men are a minority, being overrun by a Trans majority.
Like so many things the right-wing media, Twittersphere, and podcastspehere likes to propagate, the whole issue of wokeism is a non-issue. It is just a bunch of snowflakes bitching that someone is pushing back against their entitled and outdated worldviews, and I guess they never had to deal with people that challenged their opinions. This interview with Graham Norton nails it:
Listening to a podcast the other day, one of the participants started to talk about the meaning of life. It all sounded pretentious. None resonated. But then I stopped walking and a thought hit me: “there is no meaning of life.” Life has no meaning. The universe doesn’t care. There is only one fact of life, and that is: we all die. Since then I have thought more about this and it feels pretty freeing.
Republicans questioning the NY DA’s decision to charge Trump shows that they are only tough on crime when it comes to black and brown people. For white men they are happy to look the other way all day long.
Matt Levine writing Bloomberg’s Money Stuff column is brilliant. This opening of one of this recent pieces is
“The basic function of crypto is that you can buy cryptocurrencies with dollars and sell cryptocurrencies for dollars. I suppose there are other functions? But the main thing is that if you think Bitcoin will go up, you spend some dollars to buy some Bitcoin, and then if it goes up (or doesn’t), you sell it for dollars.”
Toxic masculinity is the latest target by right wing hotheads such as Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan. These podcast heros and everyday snowflakes are able to string together all kinds of words but it looks like despite that, they don’t have a great grasp of the English language. Toxic masculinity does not mean masculity is toxic … someone should tell these machos of the podcast sphere.
It is a sad day when a president from a country that was attacked by a authoritarian regime has to remind Congress why the US needs to keep supporting their country and people.
the way Musk uses user surveys to test product ideas for Twitter, is like him surveying Tesla owners if they want seatbelts or not.
The most conservative Supreme Court is politicizing the constitution with their right wing interpretation. This has zero to do with originalism it is solely pushing their views on the majority of Americans. Also, by overturning recent precedent the Court pretty much makes itself irrelevant.
Is this how a safe haven currency looks like?
Where have all your crypto bros gone?
Fuck Pro Life … as long as that movement stays quiet and at most offers thoughts and prayers after mass killings like yesterday, that movement is dead, with no moral authority whatsoever.
we endlessly debate abortion rights, but are unwilling to protect life once it is born. it is sickening that shootings like today’s keep happening. unless one assumes Americans are just more violent by nature (which I don’t think is true) then all the data from around the world, clearly shows this is a solvable problem. no need for thoughts and prayers, solutions exist. these events are a manifestation of our (specifically of Republicans) unwillingness to act.
You are entitled to free speech … but people don’t realize that they are not entitled to a platform for their speech, nor to an audience.
US #1
via U.S. Has The Worst Rate Of Maternal Deaths In The Developed World
This is what Musk tweeted recently. The problem with this though is that it provides a highly inaccurate view of the world … in a way one should say that Musk is rather blind on this right eye.
But that shouldn’t be a surprise, because I would say he already gets the starting point wrong. Musk thinks he is left of center at the start (2008), though I would say that he, like his PayPal pals are not liberal, but rather libertarians … and libertarians I would say are anything but liberal (at least, liberal in the US view), libertarians are conservative, highly egocentric, and I would argue they call themselves libertarians because they don’t want to be seen for what they are … conservatives. They think libertarians are more hip. So the starting point should already be:
But, the main problem with this graphic is that it completely ignores what happened to the right. All the “action” here is about the left moving further to the left … the only example for that is wokeism (in case that is a word). But the graphic forgets:
There are many other examples of conservatives moving further and further to the right and toward embracing white supremacy. All of these further moves to the right would position Musk (who with his silence on them seems to embrace them) much farther to the right compared to where the conservative stickman is in that graphic.
Oh and note, that graphic is not by Musk but by a guy called Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) … who I guess, like Musk is a right wing apologist.
Obviously the war in Ukraine is not about NATO and the West, if it was, there wasn’t a need to massacre innocent Ukrainian civilians.
Why are American conservatives/Republicans so stupid? Watching the Supreme Court nomination hearings, one really just wants to bang one’s head against a wall.
As there are more signs for a peace treaty in the Ukrain war, I hope that won’t mean going back to a pre war state for Western Democracies. Sanctions need to stay in place until there has been a regime change in Russia. Also, Europe needs to fast track cutting itself off from dependency on Russian gas and oil. Russia needs to be treated as what it is, and that is a anti western, anti democracy, anti human pariah. If the West can’t stand firm on that, if money and greed trump our ideals again, well then we might as well give up those ideals and join Russia and China in their autocratic models.
“If you had played it long and put $10,000 into Russia a decade ago, you’d have $1.6k worth of equities. Had you backed the Nasdaq’s key tech stocks (via the QQQ ETF) your investment would have grown to $52k, despite the sector rotation we’ve seen at the start of the year.”
From ExonentialView
If this is how Russia treats its brothers … I don’t want to know how it treats its enemies.
I think it is important to recognize how well Biden has handled the whole Putin agressions. The West (and beyond) is unified, and acted swiftly. Biden’s actions are at the heart of it. With Trump in power this would have been a disaster. Let’s hope the American people recognize how well Biden and his administration navigated this situation.