xkcd still has the best approach to this; four random common words

The tourist-y parts of it are pretty much all newly rebuilt anyway; there’s not much of the original wall left at Mutianyu or Simatai or wherever.

Or - as many of us hope for - we manage to make the economics of the fediverse work (don’t forget to support your instances, people) and the most valuable users move to blissful ad-free places like Lemmy and Mastodon.

Indeed, throw in open-source AI (thanks, weirdly, to Zuckerberg) and Wikipedia and you can start to see the contours of a post-advertising internet.

I love how everybody is so busy about mining your behavior for ad tracking data and then like 2/3 of the ads I actually see are utterly irrelevant gut doctor / toenail fungus / 17 Most Embarrassing Topless Celebrity Moments crap.

(I think the reality is that they’re mining that data to identify a small number of people susceptible to high-value scams - like getting addicted to an F2P mobile game and spending $1000s on it - and the rest of us just get generic infill)

The good news is that Iceland won’t have to go around apologizing for its name anymore.

Can’t wait until my King Arthur AI-Generated Flour turns out to be a 5 pound bag of uncut cocaine.

The Stardewification of everything continues - can’t wait until Half-Life 3 finally comes out and it turns out that Black Mesa has purchased a dilapidated farm in the countryside that they’ve taken Gordon Freeman out of stasis to restore for them.

I hope they make it - snow leopards seem to be in the gray area in between endangered species which humans can + will spare no expense to keep alive, like pandas and kakapo, and endangered species that are almost certainly done for, like the Vaquita and the Javan rhinoceros.

Yeah, Bribercutter has really gone downhill since the NYT acquisition

“Hammerskins” sounds like a bunch of guys who hang around smashing each other’s genitals with hammers

So this is why Elon is suddenly more upset than usual about bots

I don’t work for anybody, and I don’t know what list of talking points you think I’m repeating other than the specific assertion that Germany shouldn’t have shut down its nuclear plants.

I could just as well accuse you of astroturfing for the coal power lobby.

But since you’re accusing me of being a shill anyway: yes, nuclear power is clean and safe and our refusal to embrace it has cost us decades of progress in reducing carbon emissions + is continuing to do so now. The anti-nuclear lobby has a tremendous amount of blood on its hands and I’m not the least bit ashamed to be on the opposing side to them.

So we’re currently at the ‘apology that actually makes things worse’ phase, which means just a few more days until ‘unconditional surrender but even so nobody will ever trust you again’

Sure, but nevertheless they’re burning a lot more coal than they would be if they hadn’t pointlessly shut down their nuclear plants.

“We were able to grow enough soybeans to replace half of the whale meat we were eating, but we can’t replace the other half yet because even though we have plenty of lentils, we hate lentils and don’t want to eat them anymore”

Nuclear output 12.2021: 5599.8 GWh
Brown coal output 8.2023: 5422.0 GWh
Black coal output 8.2023: 2049.2 GWh

So if you, y’know, hadn’t shut down those nuclear plants, you’d be burning 1/4 as much coal as you actually are.

Germany of course is the country that recently shut down a bunch of nuclear plants + temporarily (we hope) replaced them with coal.

How many times are developers going to put up with being used as sticks for one group of rich assholes to whack a different group of rich assholes with before we start supporting open platforms?

Gamers: pointlessly sacrificing the moral high ground since 2014.

Todd Howard doesn’t do what Todd Howard does for Todd Howard. Todd Howard does what Todd Howard does because Todd Howard is… Todd Howard.

One thing I’d note about Canada in particular is that the current Liberal Party administration under Trudeau has gotten deeply, deeply unpopular - Conservatives have opened up a 10-point lead in opinion polling - and while their next election isn’t until 2025, it’s entirely possible that after that they end up with their right wing in charge.

(that being said, the current Conservative leader is both pro-abortion-rights and pro-gay-marriage, so maybe not that horrible a possibility compared to what we’re dealing with in the US)