I saw a director talking about this. She said they call it second screen content. Apparently they've done research that shows people are looking at their phones, lose the plot, and then shut it off.

I feel like the solution is movies that aren't shit and cause people to get bored enough to grab the phone. Making it repetitive seems like a way to guarantee people will stop paying attention in the first place.

I've been thinking about this lately.

Trump being so open about imperialism will make it easier to convince people that the US war machine is about profits, but it also makes it easier to convince them that imperialism is necessary to maintain their economic privilege. It's easier for people to be against something bad when they don't think they're getting any benefit from it.

I don't think those minerals will benefit anyone but the ruling class, but your average American could be easily convinced they will.

Proposing new legislation happens all the time from both parties, thousands of bills per Congress. Most a doomed to die from the start. This link has a bunch of bills proposed the week of 1/9/23:

https://legiscan.com/US/legislation/2023?page=385

I don't think we can say Republicans are getting shit done until they pass some of these. The media is just covering this stuff now because the Trump admin doing scary stuff is good at selling papers.

I'm not saying they won't succeed, it's just too early to say.

Cumtown was on a list of leftists podcasts I saw before I'd ever heard of it. I got some clips of it in my YouTube feed and it was all racial jokes and jokes where the punchline is someone is gay.

"Everyone person should have the right to make a bad deal for themselves" is the logic of the Lochner court decisions. They said the government shouldn't stop anyone who chooses to work in a hazardous workplace, or sign a contract that says you won't join a union or choose to put their 12 year old children to work in mines.

Our laws have to protect people, otherwise we're just doing libertarianism.

They have a stronger version than the US because lawyers can argue for it to the jury. In the US they aren't allowed to do it, and most states have model jury instructions that tell them they are not allowed to ignore the law because they think it unjust.

Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber(pdf) has a lot to say on the subject of pointless, low effort jobs that pay well.

Once again, the conservative, berry-heavy portfolio pays off for the hungry investor!

That was my experience with therapy. The only thing I ever got from it was someone to talk to when I was completely isolated. Everything else felt very unsuited to the seriousness of my problems.

My guess is that they just don't have the tools to really help with serious mental health problems. I have no real knowledge of what therapists are taught, but it seems like therapy is really more geared toward helping with less serious issues.

One thing I noticed is that there is no kind of consistency of treatment. They all seem to be just trying different unproven things and deciding what they think works. I've had therapists that want you to find some kind of spirituality, want you to try some weird device, want you to fill out worksheets, even had one that wanted me to smile in a particular way. It's the wild west out there.

I read somewhere else that this analysis is incorrect. They were saying it wasn't caused by something in the threat intelligence feed, but an updated .sys file(a driver component) that CrowdStrike inexplicably pushed to all clients at once.

That explanation is even funnier, because they pushed a software update to everyone at once instead of the widely used practice of staged rollouts of updates. Normally big companies push updates to a very small number of users first, then gradually increasing the number so they can get bug reports before wrecking every system.

Charles Barkley did 9/11 as a distraction because Michael Jordan was making his big NBA comeback on 9/11/01.

There are a lot of American Catholics who think Pope Francis is a false Pope because he pays hollow lip service to poor people.

They are above hypocrisy. They'll simply redefine their religion, whether through splinter groups or on a personal level to make it consistent with their greed.