astroboy's posterior
People are happier and more satisfied when adopting sustainable lifestyles and resisting the temptations of consumerism.
Materialistic approaches to life do not lead to increases in happiness or wellbeing. Nor do they lead to sustainable consumption necessary for planetary health.
The tragedy of prevention goes like this: The most effective way to save lives (prevention) is the least noticeable, which leads us to undervaluing it in our individual choices, in what we celebrate, and in public policy. That undervaluing of prevention leads to a great deal of needless death and suffering.
A tricky thing about modern society is that no one has any idea when they don’t die.
https://kottke.org/25/05/the-tragedy-of-prevention-no-one-knows-when-they-dont-die
Do not get lost in a sea of despair, do not become bitter or hostile. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble. We will find a way to make a way out of no way.
You must be able and prepared to give until you cannot give any more. We must use our time and our space on this little planet that we call Earth to make a lasting contribution, to leave it a little better than we found it, and now that need is greater than ever before.
– John Lewis
it was like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle without realizing we were actually looking at multiple different puzzles mixed together. We couldn’t see the full picture, the genetic patterns, until we first separated individuals into subtypes
The Social and Behavioral Challenges group is characterized by core autism features, such as difficulties with social interaction and repetitive behaviors, but these individuals typically meet developmental milestones at a similar rate as their neurotypical peers. They frequently experience additional conditions such as ADHD, anxiety, depression, or obsessive-compulsive disorder. This is one of the more common subtypes, representing about 37% of the study population.
https://scitechdaily.com/groundbreaking-study-identifies-four-biologically-distinct-autism-subtypes/
the Social and Behavioral Challenges subtype — which typically has substantial social and psychiatric challenges, no developmental delays, and a later diagnosis
Copaganda makes us afraid of the most powerless people, helps us ignore far greater harms committed by people with money and power, and always pushes on us the idea that our fears can be solved by more money for police, prosecution, and prisons.
Based on the evidence, this idea of more investment in the punishment bureaucracy making us safer is like climate science denial.
moral panic is followed by calls for more police surveillance, militarization, higher budgets for prosecutors and prisons, and harsher sentencing.
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/copaganda-when-the-police-and-the-media-manipulate-our-news
this method effectively allows these organizations to link mobile browsing sessions and web cookies to user identities, hence de-anonymizing users’ visiting sites embedding their scripts.
if you wanted to calculate the trajectory of a cue ball coming off an object ball and then a cushion using Newtonian physics, you’d need an accurate measurement of every variable, some pretty complex differential equations, and a lot of calculating time.
Snooker declines to lend itself so readily to the amusement of dilettantes.
The mercurial temperament, the absurd talent, the lurching highs and lows: it all just goes together.
Professional players are visually indistinguishable from ordinary people, except that almost all of them are men.
Snooker dramatizes obsession in a very pure form, hyperfixation made visible.
In other sports, the sphere of play is coterminous with the sphere of competition—players are not obliged to do anything in excess of trying to win matches. But snooker is different.
What field of study could articulate the answer—physics, cognitive science, psychology, philosophy of mind?
Why can computers beat human beings at chess, but not (yet) at snooker?
How is it possible for a snooker player to predict the outcomes of complex interactions in physics, with millimeter-level precision—without appearing to perform any calculations at all?
£10,000 isn’t nothing. And throwing it away—for no reason, just out of mischief, just because you’re the only person in the world who can—that isn’t nothing either.
https://nybooks.com/articles/2025/03/27/angles-of-approach-unbreakable-ronnie-osullivan/
Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
Today, democracy teeters as our capacity for collective action seems to have withered away.
Structural change is rooted in people, human beings, and the power we can create with each other when we find values we share, and our capacity to turn those values into sources of power.
Power does not exist out there, in some bank or something.
the general was called stratigos, and then the soldiers were called tacticas.
Structure is the commitments we make to one another about how we’re going to work together.
The benefit of rock bottom is that it delegitimizes what’s gone before.
Organizing is about enabling people to speak for themselves. It’s not a charity project. It’s a justice project.
https://ssir.org/articles/entry/marshall-ganz-interview-building-power#
TeleMessage’s server – hosted on the public AWS cloud, run by an Israeli company that’s led by a former IDF spook – has plaintext access to the Signal chat logs they’re archiving.
The modified Signal app is almost entirely identical to the authentic version of Signal, except it also archives copies of every message.
The communication between the TM SGNL app and the final archive destination is not end-to-end encrypted.