There are ways to do good, approachable, clickable science communication without resorting to lies, ommission, or exaggeration which is futurism.com’s whole schtick. There’s so much happening in science that doesn’t get covered by these low-quality sensationalist outlets because a misleading headline about petri dish cancer or mouse Alzheimer’s gets more clicks and requires far less research than an article about whatever interesting advancements actually happened in science this week.

Except the Trials where that precedent was supposedly established actually allowed a great many people to escape conviction using that exact defense, then the prosecution subsequently gave up on the trials altogether. The Nuremberg trials were a travesty of justice, not because the Allies set up kangaroo courts, but because in an attempt to avoid such accusations and through unbelievable prosecutorial incompetence they let almost every Nazi who was still alive run free.

What I’m getting at is, don’t expect justice to magically administer itself.

Americans loooooooooooooooove pointing out at their population density as a thought-terminating cliché although it’s very rarely relevant to any discussion.

The size of your continent does not influence the size of your metro areas, dipshits. LA isn’t the way it is because Wyoming is empty, LA is the way it is because a bunch of dumbasses decided that local mass transit and terraced housing should be outlawed and bulldozed in order to fuck over African-Americans communities.

Not ever. Even when every male under the age of 50 is conscripted into one of Trump’s pointless wars against former allies, Democrats won’t do shit because resistance is illegal and they have an unshakably legalist worldview. Calexit was already a complete joke before their government started executing their own citizens in broad daylight with no repercussion - legal or otherwise.

Americans: stop with the escapist fantasies and start finding actual ways to fight back because your elected representatives aren’t going to do it for you.

Can’t easily prove a negative but here’s an example.

On 19 April 1943, the twentieth transport left Mechelen transit camp carrying 1,631 Jewish men, women, and children

Three young students and members of the Belgian resistance including a Jewish doctor, Youra Livchitz and his two non-Jewish friends Robert Maistriau[a] and Jean Franklemon [fr], armed with one pistol, a lantern, and red paper to create a makeshift red lantern (to use as a danger signal), were able to stop the train on the track Mechelen-Leuven, between the municipalities of Boortmeerbeek and Haacht.[1] The twentieth convoy was guarded by one officer and fifteen men from the Sicherheitspolizei (SiPo-SD), who came from Germany. Despite these security measures, Maistriau was able to open one wagon and liberate 17 people.[1]

Other prisoners escaped from the convoy without any connection with the attack. The train driver, Albert Dumon, did all he could to keep the slowest pace between Tienen and Tongeren, stopping whenever it was possible and justifiable, and so allow that more people could jump without killing themselves. In all, 233 people succeeded in escaping from the train.[1] 89 were eventually recaptured and put on later convoys.[1] 26 others were killed, either by shooting or by the fall, and 118 who succeeded in escaping.[1] The youngest, Simon Gronowski, was only 11 years old.[1] Régine Krochmal [fr], an eighteen-year-old nurse with the resistance, also escaped after she cut the wooden bars put in front of the train air inlet with a bread knife and jumped from the train near Haacht. Both survived the war.

Emphasis mine. Albert Dumon “did his job” (the French version of the article goes a bit more in-depth). He didn’t overtly defy the orders given to him under the threat of immediate execution (!). He didn’t quit his job knowing that if he didn’t drive the trains a German train driver would take his place. He followed the regulations to the letter of the law, as incompetently as he could afford. And his malicious compliance saved 118 lives.

It’s not just that the people downvoting you are too comfortable to fight back, it’s that by the virtue of being born in positions of extreme privilege (by worldwide and historical standards) they literally cannot conceive of a world where rights are acquired and retained through illegal or violent means, although every civil rights movement had an illegal and most often violent component to it.

There’s a reason we’re seeing pictures of Black Panthers patrolling the streets. They remember and understand that rights aren’t handed out by benevolent elites, they are acquired through violence - either direct acts thereof, or the explicit threat of it.

I honestly don’t know what to do about any of that. The task of educating Americans on the history of effectively protesting against authoritarianism seems impossible. For all that some aspects of their society are hyper-violent, the vast majority of the anti-MAGA crowd is astonishingly uninformed on the importance of unauthorized resistance, and all the major newspapers and social media platforms are actively suppressing attempts to correct those misconceptions.

It’s fascinating. Trump is following in Hitler’s footsteps closer than anyone could have predicted, but one area where the present differs from the past is that in the years before Hitler became chancellor, Germany was rocked by frequent acts of deadly violence between Brownshirts and Communists. However I cannot think of a single analogue for the 21st century. Some people on here are talking of Civil War - clearly out of their ass, but I’m not sure that there is a line that Trump or Vance could yet cross that would trigger acts of blue-on-red violence more notable than an average British football match.

Well obviously a thermonuclear war is not good for business. However do not make the grievous mistake of thinking that Trump is a mere pawn in the oligarch’s game who can be relied on to act rationally in their self-interest. He’s done their bidding aplenty, but he’s also doing a lot of stuff that weakens him, his buddies, and his country, just because he’s so fucking dumb and vain. Like invading Greenland, a country he already had full access to for military purposes and that US companies were always welcome to exploit for minerals. His generals are literally using every trick in the book to try to redirect his attention away from Greenland because the US has literally no interest – military, financial, or geopolitical – in it. Literally the only explanation for this fixation of his is that Greenland looks big on a Mercator projection and that makes his tiny dick hard.

M.A.D. only works when all actors:

1. Have reliable information (certainly not always true, see Stanislav Petrov)
2. Can be assumed to be acting in their own self-interest

Number 1 is in doubt with Trump because he and his cult spend a lot of time in a made-up reality. I can totally see some war hawks explaining to him that the UK and France don’t have the nuclear capacity to glass the entire continental US outright, and Trump interpreting it as “we’re untouchable” because he’s not into concepts such as “nuance”. To a degree the same is true of a dictator like Putin or Xi Xinping who are also surrounded by yes men who purposefully feed an enabling narrative (see also: Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine because he thought he could get away with it).

Number 2 is simply completely incorrect. Trump is so unpredictable even his own administration can’t guess his next move – they’re constantly acting on his latest rant and doing a poor job of pretending it was part of the plan all along. I’d love to believe that he can be deterred by the thread of M.A.D, but I’m unfortunately too acutely aware of the news to lie to myself like that. That’s the main difference between him and Putin – I can actually believe that Putin will only act in what he believes to be his self-interest, and he knows a nuclear exchange ain’t it.

As someone who lives relatively near a “strategic target” that would be targeted by one to several ICBMs should Trump happen to have a particularly bad (but certainly not unthinkable) outburst one of these days, please know that I am saying this with as much restraint as I can muster:

I do not care what happens to MAGA, they must must stopped at any cost.

None of this shit is about looking good in the history books anymore. Trump is diving head first down a path that leads to WWIII. This is not a joke, this is not hyberbole. He’s literally doing everything that Hitler did but with thousands of nukes at his absolute unchecked disposal. This is about the survival of human civilization, and any action that helps bring about the downfall of the Trump regime is a legitimate one. Unfortunately no-one is willing to admit it until billions die in a nuclear winter because a demented turd couldn’t handle someone telling him no for once in his fucking life.

Here is my favorite video essay of 2025: Fantasies of Nuremberg.

A bit of a heads-up: do not watch this video if you want to retain any hint of a fantasy that such a reckoning even did happen in the first place. Do watch if you want a fantastically well written essay about one of the most mythologized and relevant events in history.

A weak dollar will work great for you when you bring back all those manufacturing jobs from overseas and start exporting the surplus production. Any day know. Any day.

He’s a child of apartheid and, according to his own daughter, was always an awful person in private.

There’s lots of precedent for white supremacists keeping a low(-ish) profile when it suits them. Just look at famous card-holding Nazi and prolific mass-murderer Werner Von Braun and his public perception in the US. If he could cultivate the image of America’s Dearest Scientist, literally anyone could.

Love the technosolutionist mindset, but the parties trying to made that happen lost BIG TIME in the 2024 elections and neither you nor I are in charge of the energy policy. Feel free to found a startup to explore all your big ideas but our problem is neither a lack of ways to decarbonize our energy nor a lack of reasons to go off of fossil fuels.

What I’m not hearing is a solution to the problem that the European far-right is now directly funded and supported by Putin, Musk, Thiel, Zuck, that the parties currently in power have no interest in curbing this obvious foreign interference, and all that is all but guaranteeing that the far right will take full control of the region within the next few years in exchange for a few favors like – among other things – handing out to the oil barrons a blank check. That’s not a technical issue to be engineered out, that’s a political landmine the size of a continent that we’re barreling towards. Well, if we don’t get dragged into WW3 before that, at any rate.

I agree fossil fuels are bad and renewables are good, but electric heat pumps aren’t going to be deployed in every house over the summer no matter how violent the price shock. To go green we need industrial capacity, lots of it, and a ton of political will that the far-right simply does not possess because they’d rather buy Russian gas in exchange for campaign financing.

No-one “needs” anyone but economics aren’t a zero-sum game and both the EU and the US benefited enormously from our economic and military ties, and cutting those ties will be painful and the faster it happens the more painful it will be.

If we employ the economic nukes against the US right now, we will lose most digital payment systems for a few weeks as countries and bunks rush to implement Wero and the digital Euro, and we will face strong gas shortages as we currently rely on the US to make up for Russia’s. Europe and NA would immediately enter into a deep recession.

The payment systems are a hugely understated threat but are being worked on actively. The fossil fuels aren’t understated but we also lack short-term solutions as electrification takes time (but also we aren’t doing nearly enough).

However it is true that the EU is profoundly neoliberal and that ideology is very ill-equipped to deal with a fragmented world order in which free trade is no longer the default. Those assumptions are being challenged, however the far-right seems primed to bring about the populist “solution” of turning Europe into a bunch of mini-Russias.

The game has more breadth than I thought it would, and the systems it does have (exploration, fighting, construction, farming) have wayyy more depth than Minecraft’s it does not feel fair to compare. There’s definitely enjoyment to be had for a while playing if the occasional random lag spike or disconnect is not a deal breaker for you.

But it’s not yet a Minecraft killer. Minecraft still has a much higher gameplay variation. In a couple years though I don’t think there will be much reason to play vanilla Minecraft except nostalgia.

Are we already forgetting that trump invaded Venezuela for oil, then the oil companies said “excuse me but we can’t profitably exploit their notoriously shitty oil”?

Part of being a literal Nazi is that the o.g. Nazis got themselves stuck in an increasing number of military quagmires not because they had to but because they refused to do consider the obvious peaceful solutions for their problems. The war machine had to be fed even at the cost of their own self-destruction.

Except this time they have a nuclear arsenal capable of wiping all civilization and somehow people aren’t freaking out nearly enough about that.

No, blame the streaming companies. Dynamic range is a known standard. All they need is:

• a “louder dialogue” toggle switch to amplify the center channel in the downmixing settings (Kodi, many TVs, and all dedicated receivers can already do this FYI for this exact reason)
• a “night mode” toggle switch that turns on an audio compressor (my 20 year-old receiver has that feature – it’s hardly rocket science; I believe YouTube calls it “stabilized audio”).

Upsides:

• preserves high dynamic range mix for audiophiles
• works with already released movies (!!!)
• improves the life of people with tinny speakers, strict loudness requirements, or hearing impairments

Downsides:

• Can’t feel superior to audio engineers who are doing their jobs, I guess?
• Streaming companies need to reinvest a few thousand dollars out of the billions they are making to add those two buttons

Drawings are one conversation I won’t get into.

GenAI is vastly different though. Those are known to sometimes regurgitate people or things from their dataset, (mostly) unaltered. Like how you can get Copilot to spit out valid secrets that people accidentally committed by typing NPM_KEY=. You can’t have any guarantee that if you ask it to generate a picture of a person, that person does not actually exist.

I mean, Nestlé killed hundreds of thousands in impoverished countries. I think the Oracle service APIs can’t be that bad, though I’m sure they would be if it made Larry Ellison $50.

Your description of the sound just got me making a bunch of seal sounds by myself. Congrats!