This is it, I’m pretty sure. I had plenty of brushes with nettles as a kid, but I’m not super aware of them to be able to avoid them as an adult. However I spend less time in high grass and forests, since I need to be present in the spreadsheet factory, and when I do make it into the wild, I usually wear pants and the like to avoid scratches, ticks and poison ivy; so less likely to get nettles.

Side note: we bought some nettles from a local farm last year and made a couple dishes with them. Pretty tasty, if you already like tho ha like spinach or mustard greens (think saag paneer)

Yes I would tend to agree—it seems anecdotally correct that if you restrict the possibility space for a child down to something very narrow, the opportunity to learn and adapt must reduce as well. Which is probably why “good parenting” is such a tricky concept, because you have to somehow maximize the possibility space while also removing anything that can plausibly kill/hurt your child. A daunting task…

I have noticed some nephews of mine being particularly limited—they grew up during pandemic years and are home schooled, and they don’t have meaningful interactions with other children or adults, which seems to really be leading to some issues.

His argument went one step further as well I think: aside from the literal culling, he argued also that they used their brains far more often to solve actual real problems and avoid harm, and that this active engagement of their brains with their environment likely led to higher “general intelligence” than say safe western world inhabitants. As an employee of the “spreadsheet factory” I find this speculation highly plausible and compelling.

I saw possibly these same elephants a year ago during a visit to pilanesbirg, and they were majestic and gorgeous. Our guide was very experienced and was very clear with us that the elephants didn’t want trouble with us, but that they will knock over cars and charge people if they feel like their babies are under threat. We saw some tourists in private cars try and drive up close to a mother helping two babies (calves I guess?) across the road, and she turned on the jeep, stamped and made a very impressive trumpet blare (basically her being like FUCK YOU, BACK OFF) before walking back off.

I feel bad for the guy, and it’s a sad story, but having seen one of these herds, and seeing how incredibly large and powerful they were, I cannot imaging trying to walk up to them or approach them in any way.

Seeing animals like these elephants was a humbling experience for me that drove home that we are small, and probably not as special as we like to think. I locked eyes with one while they were eating a tree and I don’t know how to describe it, but it felt like looking at another human—my brain had no doubt that this was a highly intelligent sentient creature. I would rate this visit to pilanesburg as probably one of the most memorable and impactful experiences I’ve ever had.

They basically did something similar to what happened to Bernie with the DNC. they did a full court press antisemitism campaign against him, but like many of the charges of antisemitism in the US right now, it was largely based on criticism of Israeli policy AFAIK.

Edit: to clarify—they ousted him because labor was looking ascendant, and the more centrist and corporatist elements of labor could not stomach the idea of actually having a PM that wanted to do left wing things that aligned with the theoretical purpose of the labor party, so they took him out by getting enough articles published in the famously above-board uk media to force him from leadership.

I would say that based on whatever calculus/evidence they have access to, Canada has decided that the threat of an all-out war, or least Israel carpet bombing Lebanon with munitions the US just sent them is high enough to warrant evacuation. That’s an above-average signal that something bad is about to happen, because it’s a big deal to evacuate all those people. It doesn’t mean something is definitely going to happen.

That said, bibi needs forever war for the time being because he’s facing jail if he gets punted from his position, and they’ve pummeled Gaza about as much as they can at this point while still pretending that they can end Hamas, so murdering civilians in another country is probably starting to look pretty appetizing to him. They’ll still keep slamming Gaza but he needs something big and existential for his domestic audience to keep them from taking him out.

So long story short, I’d say the probabilities of something like regional conflict happening have been raising pretty sharply lately. Hopefully the Canadian evac will prove to be alarmist, but our timeline hasn’t exactly been going the way I hope last few years so…

I watched the video from the “creative scientist” has on YouTube and unless someone has further info, this looks like a completely speculative fiction project.

Everything about this screams fake. It also all sounds like a horrible idea. They’re basically discussing traumatizing inmates at 10x speed. Given that a lot of criminals come from a background of trauma, I’d wonder here if you’d be doing more harm than good. There’s claims in this article that are absurd, without some form of clarification. What the hell is a “creative scientist” as a title—I’m not familiar with that discipline. Also, let’s uhh say am that all this was real, and possible. This tech would be a net evil in the world. If you can use it to brainwash inmates into cringing when they think about doing crime, you can also use it to torture dissenters into conformists. Given that the tech is already aimed at an element of the state security apparatus, there’s like no chance this wouldn’t get used for much worse purposes. I think they’re also misunderstanding how prison is used in many places. In NA, prison does not seem to be about rehabilitation, but just punishment and getting free labor.

Yeah you’re not wrong, he’s not as absurd as Austin powers. But he definitely looks like a time traveler from the 70s. I have another actor in mind, can see his face, but also can’t quite pull the name or movie up. But a British guy with sideburns and similar haircut. One of those staple actors of the 50s-70s that my parents would know, but was likely dead before I was born haha.

Hahaha came here to say: this is some serious warhammer shit

Yeeeaaaah baby

“It’d be a real shame if something happened to your work file. If you pay us monthly, we can make sure your work is protected”

Oh and I guess, potentially, the post about Micheal j fox could also be about prions, since it’s suggesting his Parkinson’s is the result of accidental ingestion of human remains (probably brain matter, like the how the kuru disease was spread). So maybe we’re up to 3 posts for prions!

Haha I just saw that—excellent. Prions definitely belong to the creepy/weird category of potential threats.

I can’t find the specific article, but it was basically arguing that prions are an unavoidable existential crisis that will eventually kill everything on the planet. The basis was the fact that they are virtually indestructible, can lie latent in our environment indefinitely and basically just always make more of themselves.

Mind you, the time frame for this particular apocalypse would be pretty big. It was still an eerie thought though, just like this inexorable accumulation of alien/bizarro world proteins that would eventually kill/convert everything. I guess it’s kinda like the grey goo planet theory.

Anyway, we’ll almost certainly kill ourselves via climate change or massive war first, so no need to worry too much about prions.

It’s almost worse than actually just laying off x% of a workforce—you stress everyone out and force them to contemplate leaving, some amount do (achieving the ulterior motive) and the rest who didn’t leave now have increased workload and are also immiserated by being forced to commute to a stupid cube farm some portion of the week. It’s like they found a way to make layoffs affect everyone more than they already did in the past.

Yeah I went after commenting and read up on it, sounds like super hype, first release was meh, now they’ve retooled and are enterprise oriented. The 2.0 headset sounds sorta neat, but still pretty niche.

Sigh, I was excited for the seamless whales flying across the sky… but I should have guessed it was too good to be true.

Some of it is just Apple fandom, but this headset does make more of a leap into AR/productivity than others have as a main feature. From reviews it sounds like it still ain’t thaaat great at it, and I’ve heard the meta quest pro or whatever can do some similar stuff, but this is another step towards it I guess.

I realize google glass and the Microsoft ar glasses attempted this a bit, but both were such immature tech that they seemed like Proof of concept instead of a potentially mass market product.

I want to know what happened to magic leap… all that super hype about light fields and AR, and then some super expensive goggle things and silence for a while, maybe I just haven’t been saying attention enough or something.

I feel like originally it was a semi-safe taboo to break that made a standard porn setup seem more forbidden/risqué. It always seemed weird, like how many people have step siblings that also fantasize about them sexually, how big could this be? But it just kept on coming, so to speak.

Now I think it’s just a meme/SEO thing, where you have to include it even if the video is not even pretending to be about that. Also it happened around the same time that websites were pushing/pivoting into more content creator type things, and so it’s probably related to that as well. Like the annoying face+exaggerated reaction thing on YouTube…

Either way, always seemed whacky that everything the sites serve is almost completely step-porn on the front page.

Wild, so understandably android is a much greater share, given the wide variety of phones it can run on… I’m guessing iOS is a favored app market because it’s more monolithic or stable? Or put another way the android share is fragmented all over the place?