💯%. the US was heavily isolationist at the start of WWII, and pretty anti-Semitic. for example, the St. Louis, a boat full of Jewish refugees, was turned away from the US and Canada in 1939 - and turned back to Europe, with many Jews eventually imprisoned and murdered by the Nazis. there were also the blackshirts in the UK, who were pro-Nazi, and PM Chamberlain had a peace treaty drawn up with Hitler. and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with the Soviets, of course.

so if the Nazis had been content to murder only German, Austrian and Czech Jews, they would have gotten away with it.

on the other hand, Nazi ideology (e.g. "lebensraum" and their belief in the destiny of the Aryan race to conquer the "inferior" races) drove them to war, to invade Poland and to break their pact with the Soviets. and they also spent tons of resources on the Holocaust, at the expense of their military.

so basically yeah, isolationist Nazis would have totally survived, but otoh Nazis aren't isolationists.

the amount of consumer goodwill that statement bought easily pays for any losses from the hotdogs. companies seem hellbent on torching their brand reputation for short-term gains these days. little gestures go a long way.

and ironically, LLMs could be great for this! recognizing what's ads and what's content, what's slop and what's high-effort, wading through the cesspool of feeds and dark patterns to find the stuff that's relevant to you.

unfortunately, the money is in using LLMs to generate more slop and make things even worse, not make it better.

"planetary defense" usually means tracking and maybe deflecting asteroids that are likely to hit Earth.

it's short for Pajeet, which is a somewhat common Indian first name. I associate it with UK racism more than US racism for some reason.

me in the ER when a neurology professor and her gaggle of students came to examine me after the ER doc called them up. it was giving House.

eyebrow crabs?!! doctors are a different breed, that's nightmare fuel to me.

Westoids live in the wealthiest, easiest, most affluent era of human history.

decades ago, houses were affordable, college was cheap, Americans weren't crushed under mountains of dischargeable student debt, wealth disparity and effective wages were far better, and we had a far more functional political system.

I can't think of much that hasn't gone downhill since 2016. the world isn't ending, but it's ahistoric to claim that history is the steady march of progress. dark ages happen. empires decline. democracies wither.

Friendship ended with nuclear non-proliferation. Now nuclear proliferation is my best friend.

things I dislike Reagan for:

• ignoring HIV because he was okay with it just killing the gays (until straight people started getting it.)
• trickle-down economics (how we got the billionaire oligarchy)
• Iran-Contra.
• firing the striking air traffic controllers.
• doubling down on the War on Drugs.

things Reagan was kinda based for:

• actually wanting to eliminate nuclear weapons. everyone remembers SDI as a ridiculously expensive boondoggle (which it would have been tbf) or as a trap to get USSR to spend itself into bankruptcy (it wasn't imo, since the Russians realized they could build MIRVs), but I honestly think Reagan sincerely wanted a missile shield to have a missile shield. apparently he was hawkish on nuclear war until he watched The Day After, which terrified him and left him depressed for weeks and completely changed his thinking on nukes. he got so close to bilateral disarmament at the Reikjavik summit, but it fell apart because of his insistence on pursuing SDI.

• not being a raging egotistical jerk like Trump. he was respectful towards Carter and Mondale. he even respected the Soviet Premiers he met with, despite his anti-Communism. he had actual principles and ideals, even if I disagree with some of them.

when the USSR collapsed, Bush ignored Russia's pleas to help it restructure and rebuild, to secure its nuclear weapons stockpiles, to integrate its economy. so we ended up with a country with starving nuclear weapons designers trying to grow potatoes in their back yards, and a Mafia takeover, and massive distrust and antipathy towards the West. I think Reagan would have actually lent them a helping hand, and Putin wouldn't have happened.

oof, never thought I'd see the baseline for "normal" set to after covid.

nope, a mostly straight jail. they won't put us together. specifically, trans women like me are sent to men's prison and assigned to be the prison wives of violent inmates to pacify them and as a "reward" for good behavior. it's called v-coding.