Not to brag, not I encountered “Spiralism” over a decade ago.

I was in grad school studying biochemistry and stumbled across a crank article in a lower tier scientific journal by some weirdo with a pseudo-spiritual philosophical belief that life was fundamentally and intrinsically developed out of the concept of a spiral. It was hilariously vague low-quality stoner nonsense that I couldn’t believe he got published anywhere. I remember it because I sent it on to friends to laugh about.

My impression now is that ‘it’s all spirals, mannn!’ is apparently one of the most popular valleys you wind up in if you follow every dumb thought further down to its lowest conclusion. So of course a machine that churns out the most vapid, generic human output in a concentrated slop inevitably keeps arriving at this destination.

It’s a parasocial dopamine hit. It’s like commenting on a Twitch stream. There’s a fantasy that they’ll notice and reply to you, and suddenly you’ll be having a conversation with a famous attractive person.

I’m also curious. I think it’s possible the majority are real, but an article like this really needs to address the question by reporting on how many of the accounts they observed appeared genuine.

Why? I don’t understand this comment. Are you unfamiliar with these terms?

I can speak from experience here, because this actually happened to me!

My partner (born female) and I married in our late 20s. He was already casually gender non-confirming before we married, and I described myself as hetero-flexible. His transition was rather gradual, with no strict coming-out event, but it was something we discussed openly. After he began presenting as male on work settings, I began identifying myself as bisexual.

It worked out very well. As the person above noted, you can really call yourself whatever. If you wanted to, you could identify as straight with an exception made for a single person. Although I would advise against it, as your partner might take some offense, and it confuses people if you identify in a way that conflicts with your long term partnership. Most co-workers assume I’m gay because I’m married to a man, and I don’t bother to correct them.

Sometimes it comes up, because my husband and I have a biological son together, which isn’t a secret. Sometimes when taking about him and genetics, it leads me to explaining all of this. But as you can see, it’s unusual, but not that hard to explain.

I don’t think so. I think that if you were blind and a screen reader have you those instructions, you’d likely ask a sighted friend to check if the screen reader glitched out message the professor for clarification.

I also wouldn’t be surprised if some blind students immediately understood what they were hearing.

I don’t want to diminish the experiences of the people who used this site, but it doesn’t sound surprising. It sounds like a marketplace for softcore, romance-based sex work.

I would imagine that if you were in a long-term serious remote relationship, at some point you’d transition off the pay-per-action dating site onto email and WhatsApp videocalls.

I’m saddened that people get exploited, though.

I wish there were more concrete facts, but a good article nonetheless.

Where do you work? How hard is it to find a new job? How likely are they to fire you if you stand up to them?

The best case scenario would be that you and the entire staff stand up to HR and say that you were all led to believe this was permitted policy, and that if they’re going to declare retroactively that it isn’t, you all want a compensation raise because you considered this a job benefit.

Obviously you shouldn’t do this, though, unless you feel like you’ve got a strong position and you’re not afraid to find a new job.

If you’re looking for the safest option, I’d go with lie and deny: deny having eaten what you ate. Deny having confessed. Deny that you even work there if you have to.

Don’t bother throwing your coworkers under the bus. This is very unlikely to change HR’s reaction. They will punish you the same either way, they just might punish others too. There’s no benefit to you, so either stand up and fight or deny deny deny and promise you’ll be good.

They’re also different enough that people will disagree on taste.

The worldbuilding of the expanse is head and shoulders better than Firefly. But Firefly’s strength was characters: the writing and acting made the crew so loveable. I like the crew of the Roc, but I never felt the same level of connection to them.

I wouldn’t bother pitting then against each other. They’re very different, but if you like Firefly, you should check out The Expanse.

Personally, though, I recommend the books. I watched the first few episodes of the show first and was underwhelmed, but then checked out the books and was hooked right away.

First: It’s not like ice are going to walk up to white girls with blue hair and be like, ‘No voting for you, liberal.’ They don’t need to assess anyone to guess how they’re going to vote: the plan is to just reduce overall turnout at voting sites in places with a lot of Democratic voters.

The way I expect this to go is for Maga folks to drive into big cities and station themselves outside voting sites in poor, non-white neighborhoods and pretend they’re ‘looking out for non citizens who might try to vote’. The goal is to create hassles and long lines so that people who have limited time decide to leave instead of wait.

If you are able to arrive early and don’t mind waiting you’ll be fine. But a better response is to contact your county and volunteer as an election worker. If you do, you can help enforce distance requirements for observers, make sure there are no bottlenecks, make sure there is seating available, keep the line moving in good spirits, etc.

If you just make voting smooth and efficient as a volunteer, they lose.

Friends is pretty good. I haven’t seen Seinfeld in a while and don’t know how it holds up, but I remember liking it when I watched it.

Is there a link to read this behind the paywall? Or am I the only one without a Bloomberg subscription?

I like him. I listened to him on Marc Maron, which is always neat because you get to know a bit more of the real person instead of the character he plays. Obviously, those people aren’t totally divorced. But his real self is a lot more cerebral than the stage version.

This is funny but I’m surprised Mint is at the bottom.

I guess I shouldn’t be. I didn’t really notice how popular it’s gotten. I’m used to thinking of it as a cooler Ubuntu.

The difference is between doing it secretly or in the open.

I assume I’m monitored on my work computer, but me and my company both know they aren’t supposed to.

When they admit it and make you look them in the eye and consent to it, that’s when the social contract unravels in a big way.

There’s a line from a great comedy in which an oligarch is berating his son for playing elaborate games to ruin the life of a schlub who once disrespected him, right after we see the oligarch at a party where people are shitting on glass coffee tables with prostitutes under them. The son says, “How is it any different from what you do?!?” And the dad says, in a posh Oxford accent, “The glass, son. The glass.”

I think figuring out how to find solidarity across the working class is a guidepost to revolution.

It’s more than okay to admit that it’s challenging. Anything else is just untrue.

I do think the effort is worth it. I think uniting for a better world is the prize we win when we figure out how to construct a society that accommodates as much diversity of thought and lifestyle as our civilization contains.

Peter Frase wrote an article (and soon after a book expansion of it) called “Four Futures” in which he examines this question.

According to Frase, the future we wind up with can be categorized into a Punnett square based on two questions: will essentials be abundant or scarce? And will they be distributed selfishly or universally?

If we have more than we need and we give it away universally, that’s Communism. If we have less than we need, but we share what we have and our burdens equally, that’s Socialism.

Now here’s the two you’re asking about. If we don’t have a populist revolution, we wind up with one of the bad ones.

If we have abundance, but it’s hoarded, we get Rentism. You can see outlines of this already. It’s where you pay for digital files that can be endlessly reproduced and are forced into subscriptions to continue using appliances despite the fact that their continued use is free to the company. This is the one you’re asking about. If we reached full automation, but still charged people for everything, you’d have a version of serfdom, likely with a basic income. The income would likely be based on a social credit system in which people who show the most obedience are rewarded with money to buy things that are basically free to produce. There might be a system of artificial scarcity to force people to devote a certain number of hours each day to unnecessary work or watching advertisements to receive income.

The last one is called Exterminism. You can read about it in the article. It’s pretty self-explanatory.