the full text of the bill, for those curious. It’s only five pages. It seems to amount to Congress saying, “Hey states, think about charging large-load energy buyers for the costs of incremental upgrades, ok bye”.
There’s nothing in the bill to incentivize such a move, nor is there any legal barrier to states doing that now, that I know of. It’s a do-nothing bill designed to shore up independent support for faltering Republican midterm campaigns.
When you’re bleeding out, the first step is to staunch the wound. You still have to do the other steps, but you gotta do the first step first.
The following is my guess, I don’t know what the Debian project’s selection criteria for security advisories are.
Taking the first one as an example, CVE-2024-52560 is a bug that affects version 5.15 of the Linux Kernel. The oldest version of Debian that’s still in general LTS is Debian 11 which shipped with Linux 5.10. So they are still supporting releases that may be running the affected kernel and can’t upgrade the kernel for some reason, but would still benefit from some downstream patches that mitigate the exposure of the kernel bug.
If you can’t get 2/3 of the senate to convict, impeachment is so much political theater. Democrats will be quite lucky to take a majority in the senate, 67 is theoretically possible but not realistic, I don’t think, and unless a lot changes quickly there won’t be many republican defections. Not that it’s useless, because impeachment proceedings are another time sink for the executive branch, but it’s foolish to put eggs into that basket because it’s a broken mechanism.
The more important function of Congress over the next two years will be the stoppage of rubber stamping of Trump-friendly legislation, subpoenaing executive officials and forcing them to choose between testifying under oath and risking contempt (and public reporting of same, for whatever that’s worth), and investigating and reporting on the crimes that Trump and his administration have committed over the past two years.
Without looking it up, I have no idea what significance US News and World Report has beyond giving awards to universities. They’re like J.D. Power and his mysterious associates, but for higher ed instead of cars.
Oh, I see what you mean. I wonder when the last OoT remake will be. They just remade Nosferatu 100 years later. I could see it happening.
I think video game remakes will be a thing long after millenials are gone, just like movie remakes. And I bet most of them will be disappointing, with the occasional faithful or even surpassing remake, just like with movies.
It would be cool to chart the distance in time between the original video game and all remakes. It’d be cool to see which games get evergreen remakes, and which go through unpopular periods before a renaissance. People will always remake the classics, but I bet most remakes will go in a cyclic fashion of cashing in on middle-aged nostalgia.
For bullet two, one of the best things you can do is show up to vote, and be loud if / when your rights are denied. Contact local news, tell the ACLU about your case, put it on Facebook + all social media, tell your friends at work, church, wherever about it. The legitimacy of election interference claims are much harder to deny if it doesn’t all come from the top.
I think we need more global holidays. Right now we have New Year’s and… I think that’s kind of it. April Fools’ Day had a bit of momentum at the start of the internet but I feel like it lost something as it got chewed up and digested by the corporations that control so much of the internet now.
Some ideas, off the top of my head:
Friends’ Day: tell your friends you care about them. An opportunity to message someone you haven’t talked to in a while, just to let them know you still think about them. A time to meet up with your local friends too. I’ve had a few Friendsgiving get-togethers over the years and I find them highly preferable to the born-into-family version of Thanksgiving Day.
Neighbor Day: Have a block party with the people who live around you, or get to know someone on the other side of the world. A time for the world to recognize that we’re all in this together so we might as well get to know each other.
Big Problem Brainstorm: we can’t all focus on all the big problems all the time. I think it’s good that we all take breaks. But, I think we should have one day a year where we all take the day, pick a problem, and try to make it better. We don’t all have to work on the same thing, but we all pick something. Energy crisis, food crisis, housing crisis, environmental crisis, just pick a thing. Maybe you pick a problem and find out you like working on it, maybe you meet some people and decide to form a group to work on it long term. Maybe you don’t, and you just spend one day more than you would have thinking about how to make the world a little better. I think it would be cool.
Carnival: I know we already have this one in parts of the world, but I think it would be cool if we all celebrated it all at the same time. Global Carnival. Sounds dope.
People who don’t usually post day (better name TBD): Everyone who talks on the internet the other 364 days of the year just chills for a second and lets the rest of the world talk.
Of course, effective addiction recovery is very near to my heart, and I care about getting it right. I’d be curious to see which studies you’re pulling from that define AA in opposition to “Real Treatment”. Most treatments for alcohol addiction are rather hit-or-miss, and all the literature I’m familiar with generally find that combination therapies are more effective than any one therapy alone. Peer recovery groups are “a” therapy, AA is one of them, and they help some people, not all.
AA groups are as religious as their members; some of them are chill about it, many of them are insufferable about it, particularly in the southern US, and I suspect this is a big reason why people wash out of the program. Some of those washouts find their ways to more accepting groups or programs, some do not. I think the widespread attitude of “the program works if you work it” is a pretty grisly and self-satisfied example of survivorship bias, in AA and a lot of similar programs, propagated by people who found something that works for them and insisting that it’s the one true program that should work for everyone. This happens in religious and non-religious groups and it gives people the idea that if they can’t find help in that one group, that they must be broken beyond repair. I struggled with that for a long time before I found my people.
That’s a bit of a diversion, I don’t want to get into the gritty details of the many things I think are wrong with addiction recovery culture. Suffice to say that peer support groups can help, we haven’t really worked out all the problems with doing it well, and addiction is a hard problem. I think it’s worth taking the imperfect tools we have and trying to improve them, rather than throwing them out entirely because they are imperfect.
No, I elaborated in another comment but I don’t think 12 step or similar recovery programs are cults themselves. However, there are cults and scam operations that use recovery groups as recruiting grounds, sometimes hosting their own meetings masquerading as recovery programs in order to ensnare new members, as is described in the article.
I think the reputation is partially earned. I’ve been in a few AA and AA-like groups over the years, and while I wouldn’t say that AA itself is a cult, there are cults that use AA and similar recovery groups as recruiting grounds, and it’s very possible that your dad got caught up in one of those. The sudden taking up of a new and very specific charitable cause is a big red flag.
Hard agree with your last point. I was fortunate enough to (eventually…) find a network of peers that helped me and I am doing much better now than I was, but it is a bitter truth that there are people who will find you when you’re at your lowest and most vulnerable, and exploit you. I’m sorry your dad wasn’t able to get the help he needed ❤️
None of that is anti science. There’s no “distrust in studies”, unless you’re referring to the distrust in the “some studies” you cryptically referenced in your post. Not that you bothered even to cherry pick, but cherry-picked studies can show results that the preponderance of evidence does not support. Nor do I claim that quantity beats quality. Scientific communities are as capable of systemic bias just like any other. However, the preponderance of evidence does cut against your unsourced assertion that peer groups don’t aid in recovery. Lastly ancedotes: they aren’t anti-science, nor are they useless. They are statistically unsuitable for the purposes of drawing conclusions about large populations or general trends, and therefore shouldn’t be used as the basis for broad scientific claims, which is why I did no such thing. They are stories that humans share with one another in casual conversation, and I thought it was one worth sharing here.
And not that you deserve this, making your wild claims with no evidence, but as Exhibit A for the scientificness of my paragraph I’d like to enter into the record the first result when searching for AA meta analyses on pubmed. Relevant sections are presented below.
Main results: We included 27 studies containing 10,565 participants (21 RCTs/quasi-RCTs, 5 non-randomized, and 1 purely economic study). The average age of participants within studies ranged from 34.2 to 51.0 years. AA/TSF was compared with psychological clinical interventions, such as MET and CBT, and other 12-step program variants. … AA/TSF (manualized) compared to treatments with a different theoretical orientation (e.g. CBT) (randomized/quasi-randomized evidence) RCTs comparing manualized AA/TSF to other clinical interventions (e.g. CBT), showed AA/TSF improves rates of continuous abstinence at 12 months (risk ratio (RR) 1.21, 95% confidence interval (CI)
Bet. If you can explain which paragraph is anti-science and why, I’ll move it to the top of my comment.
Brendan Carr is a fascist tool, but the anger I hold for him pales in comparison to the incandescent rage I feel for cultists who prey on people struggling with addiction. Exploiting people who are there because they have nowhere else to turn, usually while their life is actively falling apart or recently fallen apart. Turning the vulnerable into tools in their goddamn pyramid schemes or objects of their power fantasies. Making me feel sympathy for Brendan fucking Carr.
God they are the worst.
No, not all of them are cults. Some individual AA groups (as well as other peer support recovery groups) are feeder programs for cults, but not all. AA being christian is incidental to cultism; non-faith-based peer groups can also be cult feeders.
Secondly, “some studies” can show a lot of things that aren’t true. IIRC the majority of peer-reviewed research shows that peer support groups like AA usually have a positive impact vs. no peer support. Anecdotally, my peer support networks saved my life, more than once.
Like all peer groups, the group is as good as the peers. That’s why you gotta shop around and find one where you fit in.
Always has been.
We can’t. We never could, and never will. Art is inextricable from the context that created it, which includes the artist(s), the time, the place, the culture and acquaintances and ideas that are all woven into the fabric of the work.
When we say “separate the art from the artist” we mean we elect to ignore a part of the art that makes us uncomfortable, but ignoring a thing neither makes it not so nor prevents it from influencing us. Art has ideas and subideas the same way a musical note has overtones, but on a million different ontological dimensions. The artist is only aware of some of these; the others are assumptions, biases, cultural and personal blindnesses, prejudices, coincidences, and bursts of artistic genius.
Side note: you don’t have a one-way relationship with art. If you think you can experience art without that art changing you in some way, you are merely blind to its influence. Art changes you. Not always in big ways, and not always for the better. Your options are to either acknowledge and explore the nature of that change, or not. Even refusing to engage with a work of art is an acknowledgement of that work’s influence on you.
Back to the main note: even though it’s impossible to really separate art from its context (like where it came from), ignoring the context does flatten the appearance of the art and make some of the ideological overtones of the art invisible. We do this for all kinds of reasons: art as unchallenging entertainment is easier to consume passively, so ignoring the challenging parts of it feels good. Like enjoying the rhythm and melody of a pop song without dealing with the misogynistic lyrics, or the political affiliations of the artists. Thinking about those things is hard. Not thinking about them is easy, and it gets easier with practice. Practice ignoring the uncomfortable parts of art long enough and it becomes habitual. Eventually you ignore them without even thinking about them.
They don’t stop affecting you, though. Those overtones seep into your brain and influence your thinking in ways you will never be aware of, because you have lost the ability to detect them. It happens gradually. After ten thousand subliminal messages, you’ll hold beliefs you neither understand nor can even fully articulate, and you won’t know how to change them. It’s possible, but it takes almost as long to undo as it takes to do, because they’re hard to find.
Second side note: Propagandists are well aware of this property of art, which is why propaganda works, more or less, even when the audience “knows” its propaganda. It’s a quantity over quality thing: the overtones slip though unobserved even if you are aware of the main gist of the piece.
That’s why you don’t separate the art from the artist. You can’t, and pretending to do so denies what art does, much to your detriment.
I just assume anything with “Freedom”, “Liberty”, “Patriot”, etc. in the name are grifters trying to scam and/or datamine MAGA. “Libre” I think is still safe because it sounds too European.
… brief search interlude …
aaaaand LibertyMediaLLC is a wholly owned subsidiary of Liberty Media Corporation, a sprawling corporate holding company that is 49% owned by one John C. Malone, Atlanta Braves owner, Trump Inaugural Committee (round 1) donor and onetime largest individual landowner in the US.
…yup, that tracks.
UPDATE: I based the above off the parent comment, but view-verse lists its parent company as “Liberty Social Media LLC”, not “LibertyMediaLLC”. The former is much harder to pin down, the contact information on the google app is “Liberty Smith” and the dev site is a generic vibe-coding-looking website hosted on base44, so it may not be under LMC, just riding its coattails. Still, would not trust.
I agree in part, and disagree in part. It is divisive nonsense, and it’s also politics. I’m not sure how widespread this sentiment is, but the fact that it’s being amplified on tiktok at all is newsworthy in and of itself, I think. We need to align ourselves against this kind of wedge driving, and to do that we need to know that it’s happening. If twenty-somethings are seeing this kind of content and I’m missing it, I’d rather rebut it than ignore it on the basis of it being ridiculous. I’ll continue to do so until it stops happening, so… presumably for the rest of my life. So be it.
As hard as things have been for me, I believe they are worse for my younger friends. These kinds of stories should be named and shamed as the distraction bullshit they are. That’s how minds get changed, not by withdrawing into news cliques where we only see news we agree with.