hi hi and also yesterday I read their complete contributions to the iNat forums and apparently they turned up a few weeks ago out of nowhere and started demanding iNat change their entire UI in order to uprank ficus. Also to make it easier to downvote incorrectly identified ficus. Also change the forum policy to allow them to link to specific bad identications of ficus so they can mock bad ficus-identifiers.

But even though a few weeks is being left to drown:

“d” asked me to send him pics and i was like “nope”. when he finally sees the tree in person it’s going to blow his scholarly socks off. he’s gonna really regret not seeing it sooner. and i’d be surprised if he didn’t write an article about it

I mean, don't get me wrong, I love me a single-minded gardener, but even when I am obsessively uploading pictures of the lifecycle of the swallowtail caterpillar eating my parsley, I'm not trying to turn a citizen science site into Polymarket.

the otherwise nameless woke menace that’s coming for their precious bodily fluids.

aaaaargh I wish I could draw.

every single bathroom bill requires that the most masc, bearded trans guys legally have to use the women's toilets because they were AFAB. It has never not boggled my mind.

(Except that what it actually means, obviously, is that those trans guys are prohibited from peeing and perforce existing in public, because anywhere with bathroom bills is somewhere where a trans guy is sure as hell putting his life at risk by using the women's toilets. Goddammit.)

(Edited to add: I know this is obvious to everyone. But it's still enraging.)

There really is a difference in professional ethics guidelines, though. Matt Levine used to work at Goldman, he totally always sides with financialization, and for that matter everyone at Bloomberg is paid by Mike Bloomberg, but they still have professional guidelines preventing them from most trading.

ETA: lol. lmao, even

A Vox spokesperson declined to comment on whether the company has an ethics policy in place around reporters betting on sports they cover.

But betting? There’s being an insider and then there’s profiting, and aren’t most journalists prohibited from trading or betting on their covered areas?

Imagine saying “we have no specific views on eugenics”! You should, buddy. You should.

Solutions: AI-guided suggestions to parents about the traits they should select

There’s a joke in here about and that’s how the human race all became polydactylic with extra elbows, but it’s too early in the morning for me to figure out how to make it not be at the expense of people with limb and facial differences.

But what’s the point of being a trans woman in his narrative? Trans women will also be replaced by uterine replicators and sexbots! They will also be disempowered and sent to the salt mines with the cis women! That’s the part I find inexplicable.

I can see there’s a shitty faux-feminist idea that cis women will be replaced by trans women, like an XX chromosome is inherently inferior (so feminist!) and anyone with both a superior XY genome & a nice rack will obviously be a threat. But in this case Roko’s own argument says that robots are superior to flesh, so trans women aren’t the threat.

I realize that I’m trying to find logic in something that’s so beyond dumb it’s come out the other side into a sort of sublime form of perfection, but at least the basilisk follows some bizarre internal logic. This one is self contradictory. Is it so much to ask that I want misogynist and transphobic assholes to understand how to build a basic logical argument?!?

Wait, are we banning electrical boxes that transfer electrical energy between electrical circuits, or trucks that turn into weird little guys or sometimes are cassette tapes that turn into cats?

I can’t tell which one is a viable replacement for men.

The prose on that The Spruce link makes me hate the concepts of design, aesthetics, and houses.

It’s weird, but it’s normal weird. It’s the kind of thing you see in design magazines and pinterest and the spruce. I don’t know if actual rich people do it but it’s definitely fairly normal middlebrow home decor.

(A lot of fireplaces in older US buildings are vestigial, often blocked up, and are inefficient at heating.)

If you walked by some strangers having a conversation with each other out in public and one of them said something you didn’t understand, would you go running up to them saying “please don’t talk to each other without explaining everything to me, I think you’re making stuff up because I don’t have all the context”?

(You would not.)

If you have something to ask OP, ask it. Politely. Don’t come in to somebody else’s conversation demanding context and calling them a liar.