I think he claims to have been overruled on USSR restructuring and was radicalized by the process, but I’m a little fuzzy on that. He does have pretty good takes lately though.

He really does. I’d say coincidence… but the probability is that it’s more intentional than accidental.

That’s fine and all but I’m technically an elder Millenial, and we definitely played online pvp games when I was in high school. I was there for the first counterstrike alpha/beta. My brother and I spent an entire week playing CS one time while my parents were in a trip, 10 hours a day with breaks for pizza. We had a system for sharing play because we only had the one desktop… lol.

We had quake lan parties and even did a quake tourney in our school computer lab because this was before they really sorted out locking the computers down. I feel like tribes and unreal tournament were out pretty quick as well. Quake arena. Half life multiplayer and then CS, day of defeat, etc.

Super toxic online was sorta a thing, but I feel like that didnt mainstream until COD lobbies on consoles, and the advent of voice chat. Or rather most of the servers I played on were specific servers, hosted by people with admins, and while people would misbehave, you generally wanted to not get banned and keep coming back—you knew the other names and such, so that had an ok moderating effect.

It makes you wonder if it even matters if you stay on the page for the ads to pay. If it’s just page load, then they don't care if you read the article, in which case the system is incentivized to have them only focus on headlines that will drive click-through.

Because I’ve noticed similar things, where it’s functionally impossible to read the content on phones, which you’d think would be a primary demographic, if you cared about presenting reporting.

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.

Alternate hypothesis: you know how ceos and “master of the universe” always seem to like doing diaper play or being whipped… maybe this owl, who is a badass killer by night, just loves being flipped over and immobilized by pink human meat-sack generalists. Like he’s a king by night, sub by day.

I mean being an apex predator means you’re just really specialized and good at killing some other animals. Makes sense that there’d be weird glitches and blind spots in their abilities for other things, they didn’t evolve to lie in bowls, they evolved to be super light, quiet, nocturnal predators that can see small prey at great distances in the dark. There has to be some sort of compromise or they’d be too OP and have to be nerfed for balance.

I was leaving on a car trip a few years back, and unbeknownst to me, about 20miles up the road, a huge thunderstorm had brought down some trees and power lines, blocking one part of the northbound highway, during early rush hour. We got stuck for 3 hours trying to get past it. No matter which side road, turn, whatever we took, it was jammed. We waited for an hour on one small side road only to get sent back because a line was down at an intersection. This wasn’t a major natural disaster, things went back to normal in a couple hours. But it really drove home to me how pointless it would be relying on escaping/evacuating from a real disaster if you didn’t get out early. I don’t say this to suggest that people shouldn’t follow evacuation orders, they absolutely should; an evacuation order is early warning. I’m saying this to suggest that none of us should assume that we’ll just be able to get out in an emergency, particularly in a car. It just doesn’t take that many people on the road to completely seize the system.

My thought is Its a strategic choice to enhance visibility/awareness. The people you’re protesting rarely care, but it creates a higher stakes scenario that makes people pay attention and makes it more likely for your cause to get engagement.

To some degree, it also serves to legitimize your commitment and make the opposition look weak—I’m willing to die for this cause, and they won’t budge or make sacrifices, etc.

When prisoners do it, in certain circumstances, it has more leverage, because the captor might not want them to die in their care, as this would make them a martyr or cause them uncomfortable political blowback or scrutiny.

Despite? How about: “because”

An article from 2019, highlighting the risks of this thing becoming a problem: https://www.latimes.com/projects/marshall-islands-nuclear-testing-sea-level-rise/

Yeah I mean that’s fine, but you’d run the same risk there with bluff-calling and standoffs. Like clearly Texas is trying to bait the feds into either rolling over for a cheap win, or doing something that they might be able to use to spark something more significant. Not sure which is worse, but I know which one will look more weak/will incite further escalators acts on Texas’ part.