GTA, Elder Scrolls and Fallout series all allow for violence against women and not just the mutual violence of combat or whatever. One small example in one game from a long-ass time ago isn't really a broader trend (not to say that society at large doesn't view violence against men and women differently in different contexts)
the userbase for gemini is so miniscule, I can't imagine they could get enough data to want to even bother. Bit like trophy fishing in the puddle of rain runoff next to the stocked pond of monster bass.
There are far more gopher phlogs than gemini gemlogs.
Still, both communities overlap of course.
Setting up a gopher phlog requires no TLS at all and any machine from 1980 (even maybe ITS
with a Gopher client written in MacLisp) will be able to read it with no issues.
that's another large chunk of gemini; rehosted gopherholes. Which is silly unless the originals aren't accessible anymore since gopher is already a minimalist protocol
They render better on Smartphones. Lagrange and such do a good job but is not perfect.
Oddly, the best client for Android (albeit clunky) has been Emacs+Elpher as it has the perfect options for word wrapping.
Altough as most Gopher sites are hosted under Unix, running fmt/fold/par on files is a non-issue modulo ASCII ART and inline code with hard requeriments on indentation (TCL for instance on code blocks) or Python.
> think any attempt at commentary right now would end up eerily reminiscent of modern life.
The genre was always an extrapolation of contemporary society as the authors saw it. You could absolutely do that today, with appropriately updated technical speculations, but without the signifiers of the petrified genre of Cyberpunk that we are all familiar with in 2025, folks might not recognize it as such. Doesn't mean it's not engaging in the same milieu
there's still regular ol classism, too, racism is just part of the calculus. Poor white folks don't have it good, they just have it less bad than poor not-white folks
Some bits here and there. That faded as the US became a super power, and came back a bit as the 80's started stripping down the middle class thst was growing.
Of course, but the 2010's it was decided by the powers that he to re-introduce identity politics as the new form of class warfare. Which was 80% sexism/racism and 20% classisn.
In America maybe, in south africa it's quite the opposite considering the government provides a lot more support for poor non-white folks than for white folks (specifically based om race)
Yes, a bastion of pro-black racism, post-apartheid South Africa.
All those white folks fleeing the country looking like the fucking Monopoly Man with their bags of money were doing it because of... anti-white racism.
I concede that I don't work in industry so maybe I'm just dumb and this is actually really useful but this seems like the exact opposite of what I would want out of my computer about 99.98% of the time.
This would certainly explain why I've found using search engines over the past decade or so to be extremely frustrating and intuitive but, again, I am a self-admitted doodoodumdum so maybe I just don't know what I'm doing
This seems like the very thing that AI advocates would want to avoid. It certainly doesn't fill me, as an outsider to the whole thing, with much confidence for the future of AI-generated content but maybe I'm not the target sucker....err, I mean target demographic
And it can get worse. Over shooting right (left) invariably leads to overshoot left (right) which we absolutely do not need either.
The American sense (when we get off our butts and do it) is common sense, slowly changing law that always apportions control in equal parts to accountability.
It's the last part that is more galling (because increasingly we've failed) and ultimately will be the more decisive in any future inflection point.
We overshot so far to the left on the ACA that it was a Republican proposal a decade prior. We overshot on the right and just stripped health care away from 12 million people who can't afford it to pay for tax cuts for the rich
The dyad left-v-right is just stupid. The issues are complex. We must move under and out of the political bs of conservative v. liberal if we're gonna get anywhere.
While I generally agree with this framing, “whatever you call what’s currently holding the reins of power” vs. “not that” still feels useful currently; the empowered party and its ideology are pretty extreme.
When has the US actually overshot left though? There was a short period of social justice awareness, but that didn't translate to actual leftwing economic legislation. Even protests and movements with left wing goals were co-opted by the nominally center-right establishment and neutered.
This both-sides stuff gets me, man. Our history is by and large very right wing and every time there's a flutter of left leaning ideas, people chalk it up to some far-left political success and therefore the far right backlash is deserved, as if things ever actually went left in the first place.
Surely you're joking, right? The current administration building concentration camps and cutting medicare for 12 millions people is just balancing... what? Obamacare? Don't be ridiculous.
Take the stupid of the far right and idiots like Trump, then multiply through by -1. It presents differently but it'll still screw stuff up keeping the idiocy in cycle. There's morons on left too!
The middle ground is far, far preferred. Instiutional competency is much preferred. Course correction is preferred. Equal justice under law is preferred.
But as I say under the political noise is a larger problem: failure to balance control with accountability. Congress isn't checking Trump in any substantive way. The DOJ probably took too long to prosecute Trump. And on the right the housing crisis booked no jail time after a run of deregulation. Failure to respect due process or judges orders is another problem on the right. Forget outrage: where are the real world consequences?
Congress time and time again is directly implicated in many of these issues. If Congress was doing its job instead of pretty boys shadow boxing twaddle wedge issues for complex problems on TV, there'd be less of a power vacuum that Trump ultimately filled.
I think one would have to be nieve in thinking the left did not play a major part in its own demise 2016 and 2024.
I think the century of American dominance is probably over. Maybe we can fight our way back to having a functional government, maybe not. I think either way our position in the world order is already diminished and will steadily diminish further. I can see a future where America is a strange backwater, reliant on resource extraction and rules over by a grubby and constantly shifting mafia state.
As an American, I would welcome the world without American domination. Or without any single country domination for that matter. Competition of systems is good for the world.
It doesn't need to turn the US into some grubby mafia state. It could, but I think it is unlikely. But the road for both the US and the world IMO goes down before it goes up as many systems and alliances around the world that depend on US domination shift or crumble. My 2c.
It doesn't have to be China or any other country. It can be corporations who move to capture the governments in other countries the way they've done in the US.
Why does it have to be China and why does it have to be any one country? Why can’t it be China, EU, and the US all having about the same influence?
But besides, with the rightward, populist/religious nut tilt of the US and corporations being able to bribe the President to get what they want without repercussions (Disney, Paramount, Meta, X, etc), I don’t see how the US is much better. All of the branches of government are giving power to the President that should be theirs.
Because there will always be someone with an advantage over the others.
Equilibriums in geopolitics are inherently unstable, states naturally compete for their own self-interest. No state will be willingly co-equal with another unless some actor with greater power forces it into that position.
To your last point, given the state of the US, it would probably be better for the world if the EU were on top at the moment. But they will not be.
While I’ve only personally spent a day in an EU country so far - a day trip from London to Paris last month (more coming over the years) - I would much rather see European values exported to the world than US values - lack of universal healthcare, gun violence, corporate takeover of government, anti-vax, anti-science nut cases, etc.
It's not clear to me that China is batting that well. I do not wish bad upon the Chinese citizenry, and China has done well in its own day since the 1960s.
But don't forget at the same time where China was during the end of the British power, nor Chinese revolutions, nor the state control over the Chinese populace.
Although the US vastly overweights what we think non-US-democracies would do (think Middle East and our meddling there) given the chance for US like freedom, I do not think we're seeing China in the natural so to speak. HK, for example, was not pleased with the "two systems one country" rule the CPP landed on.
Add in the fact that trade can no longer be assumed to be Chinese central, and China is slowly getting dragged into wars through Russia, and China still hasn't tried its mettle with Taiwan. A post invasion China will hit different. It's got internal issues of employment, real estate, have v. have nots ... it's got its hand full.
My guess is that China, like the US is seeing now on stretches, will be the master of its own demise. In the US a major contributing factor to Trump is the fact the US Congress has become an institutional zero especially since Gingrich. That power vacuum has been filled by the Executive branch under Trump. There's more to it of course, but this two-part crisis is an important matter to keep in mind.
China takes its state craft more seriously in some sense, but that seriousness may get it into trouble. And in fact, several articles in the Economist have argued that if China wants to keep 5%+ YOY GDP growth, the CCP will have to take a back seat which is the one thing it will not do. CCP political power is foremost; good economy is damn nice to have to when you can get it -- and the CCP will go after it hard -- but there are limits ...
I would too. If we agree that monopolies are bad for private industry, why isn’t it just as bad as having one world power. I think Trump and MAGA are uninformed idiots. But they have caused the EU to start building up their own military industry, countries to focus more on their own research and decouple themselves from the US. I can’t see how that’s a bad thing.
The US has given me all sorts of opportunities I wouldn’t have anywhere else in the world as a native born citizens. I plan to extract as much as I can from it and keep my eyes open to retiring somewhere else.
I continuously vote and advocate for policies like universal healthcare, pre-K education, etc. But what are you going to do when voters vote for politicians thst ars against their own interests - getting rid of FEMA when the states that need it the most are Republican, Medicaid, etc.
This isn’t a pie in the sky shrill “I’m leaving the US tomorrow”. But my wife and I already did the digital nomad thing domestically for a year starting in late 2022 and going forward starting next year, we are going to be spending more time out of the country in US time zones while I work remotely starting with Costa Rica.
The US wasn’t the dominant superpower due to cooperation or agreement or leadership, it was the result of pure technological force.
Oppenheimer, Teller, and countless nameless others at NASA and Lockheed and Boeing and DARPA.
The US built the best weapons, spy planes, launch vehicles, satellites, and communications systems, and was willing to take a no-holds-barred approach to geopolitical strategy. This led to a circumstance which it seems was unparalleled in history thus far.
Who else is able to commit such technological progress to being able to command the world order by edict?
China, perhaps, but I don’t see the next TSMC or SpaceX or OpenAI or Google starting there. Technology is the name of the game. (My own personal take is that mass scale reusable rockets is the key strategic piece to geopolitical dominance over the next 50-100 years, with perhaps the ability to effectively integrate AI as an alternate or close second.)
It may be that we never see a monolithic superpower of the same kind again for generations. The post ww2 world order was really very very kind to the USA.
It was also the result of Europe (now the EU) choosing not to oppose the US (at least mostly - they did in small areas). The EU has more people and combined could - if they wanted - be more powerful than the US. However they have never seen any point - they mostly (not entirely) agree with the US and so it would be a waste of their limited time to do that instead of what they were doing instead.
> It was also the result of Europe (now the EU) choosing not to oppose the US (at least mostly - they did in small areas). The EU has more people and combined could - if they wanted - be more powerful than the US.
Europe was destroyed by war, and then occupied by the US and USSR. The US liberated Western Europe and backstopped their independence. The Europeans didn’t choose to be on the American side, they were forced to by circumstance of their own making.
> The Europeans didn’t choose to be on the American side, they were forced to by circumstance of their own making.
Europeans choose to follow the US. Even recently Sweden joined NATO. If they wanted to develop their own inter-European military alliance, they could have done so but instead joined and alliance where the US calls the shots.
Also since the fall of the Soviet union, the European countries decided to basically gut their military budgets and redirect the money to other things, as seen by the fact that until very recently only a small fraction of the NATO countries actually met their 2% military budget targets.
De Gaulle after the war did not want to join NATO because he understood what that meant, alas his successors all be gave up on the concept of military independence.
In the 1950s that was true. By 1960 it was already changing. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s Europe was plenty rebuilt enough that they could have redirected their efforts to opposing the US, but they mostly choose not to. Sure the US had a head start, but they have plenty of power. China is moving in the direction of opposing the US in the world, and seeing results.
> It may be that we never see a monolithic superpower of the same kind again for generations. The post ww2 world order was really very very kind to the USA.
And why do you think it couldn't remain that way? Considering SpaceX, OpenAI, and Google were made far, far closer to today than to WWII, why would the assumption be that the output suddenly stops?
well in the past year, we have stopped funding science in the US, arrested and deported thousands of foreign students here legally, removing the pipeline for the smartest people in the world to move to the US and start world changing companies, and started a trade war with the entire world, making American businesses much less competitive at buying/selling goods internationally.
to consider your examples specifically, Musk and Brin were both immigrants to the US, and musk specifically did exactly the type of visa shenanigans that now is landing people in El Salvador
The US used to be run by people with the ability to think strategically, or by people who listened to educated people who could think strategically. The current US leadership either allows or endorses the capricious whims of an TV-educated idiot to consistently undermine national security and the most fundamental national interests. The complete and total mismanagement of the covid pandemic stands as a perfect example of the scale of the positively massive amount of preventable destruction being wrought presently. That’s just one out of many.
Hard to build high level stuff while the cities are flooding or burning, measles are spreading, the food is becoming toxic, the water is becoming undrinkable, out of control rogue agencies are kidnapping people indiscriminately off the streets, the literacy levels are falling precipitously, and a greater and greater percentage of the population struggles to buy food, much less healthcare or secondary education (or a useful primary education). You simply won’t have the talent pools required to do hard things at scale after a while. This is to say nothing of the complete unpredictability of the economics of
supply chains, as incoherent economic policies are arbitrarily whipsawing tariffs around on a monthly basis. It becomes impossible to plan a year in advance.
You need some basic levels of functioning society and infrastructure and economy to build advanced institutions and structures and companies and technology. The US has been attacking its own society’s foundations for decades, and has recently accelerated the pace substantially.
I personally anticipate civil breakdown within a generation, certainly not continued technological innovation.
Corporations. European politics can be captured by large corporations the same way the US has been. It was unthinkable in the US, 50 years ago, that corporations would call the shots politically. It can happen elsewhere as well.
Did you read TFA? This had nothing to do with neoliberalism or whatever.
Everyone agreed with the spirit of the rule, even the two republican appointees who voted against it.
They voted against it because the FTC cheated and broke their own rule making process, they believed it would be struck down by the courts because of this.
They were right. The courts sympathized with the rule, but held that the FTC cheated it's process, and that if left unchecked it could create a tyrannical FTC issuing rules at their whim, ignoring the true economic impact of their rule.
All this court ruling said is that the FTC needs to follow the law and their own defined process for rule making.
They are free to implement this rule, they just need to do it the right way.
While we may not be happy with the short term effect, this was a good ruling. The FTC will go back and do this properly, and hopefully next time will follow the law when making rules.
I don't see the neoliberal deregulation you're talking about, so I'll bite.
Regulatory capture I have seen too often e.g. net neutrality getting killed by a Verizon cronie masquerading as a public servant in the FCC. However, from my perspective, it's been mostly conservative powers undoing consumer protections. Unless you mean liberalism in the more European sense, in which case I agree.
The Asian Financial Crisis in 1997: deregulated capital flows allowed speculators to rapidly pull money out of countries like Thailand, causing their currencies to collapse. The IMF stepped in, but their 'rescue' packages demanded strict conditions- forced privatization, and further deregulation, which often made things worse. And let's not forget Black Wednesday, when speculators broke the Bank of England. This was called "a textbook case of a speculative attack enabled by capital mobility" which is a core neoliberal policy.
Just like all politics: never trust the meaning or identity of something derived from it's headline, title, name, or label- those are always the first lies we are told.
"Neoliberal" means free markets. Most US conservatives insisted on free markets from 1980 until 2016. They claimed it would benefit the overall US economy (and maybe it has). They claimed those benefits would be shared by all Americans (which listen to them now).
If there were an evolutionary advantage for more things to being in an arid region over being in a place with abundant, easily accessible water, I reckon the niche would have been filled. the natural world isn't really "interested", for lack of a better term, in maximal efficiency outside the context of following the path of least resistance in any given domain. Lightning might strike your chimney even tho there's a giant metal tower 300 feet in the air a quarter mile down the road that appears to be a much better path to ground.
There is plenty of natural selection pressure on not being eaten. If a mold or something could evolve to live off of a dry atmosphere plus sunlight and whatever minerals it can eek out of rocks, it could blanket millions of square kilometers of desert. Presumably other living things would find it hard to digest because its protein and chemical structures are so different. Nature is constantly finding weird little niches at the edge of sustainability. Waterless deserts should present an enormous opportunity for something to fill, but it hasn't happened.
Except in science fiction (so far); see, for example, "Dragon's Egg," Robert L. Forward's superb 1980 novel of life on a neutron star with surface gravity 67 billion times that of Earth:
I'm sure any future endeavor to plant trees in the goddamn desert will have no negative environmental consequences at all. It's not as if the city in the goddamn desert is already in the middle of a regional water crisis as of last year or anything...
> In 2014, Southern Nevada’s gross water demand was about 205 gallons per capita per day (GPCD). In the region, single- and multi-family households account for 60 percent of water consumption—70 percent of which is used for landscaping.
That's because that doc is talking about Southern Nevada (read: Vegas) in isolation, 78% of Nevada water usage is agriculture (followed by 13% residential, 7% mining)
This is relevant though towards the argument that Vegas isn't typical in it's water consumption and trees may well have a much more detrimental effect than in other places.
Having lived in the desert, and not talking Vegas, but Nevada desert where folks bought cheap lots, dragged a single or double wide trailer into it, and started a life.
Trees were the first thing planted. Fast growing trees, placed to cast shade on the house.
After a few years, those dirt lots transformed into some very nice properties where sitting outside in the shade with the desert zephyrs rustling the leaves provide a very nice, idyllic place for conservation or reading.
There are a few of these plots outside of Crestone, CO that I've always dreamed of visiting. They truly look like oases and it must be surreal to sit in the shade and read while looking out onto the surrounding desert.
Southern Nevada uses a tiny amount of water compared to most states, about 2% of the total that’s apportioned from the CO river, and recycles about 40% of it. For indoor usage, 99% of water is recycled.
I agree growing things in the desert may be inefficient, but speaking for the CO river, that problem is in California and Arizona.
> [Las Vegas] used 38 billion gallons less water in 2024 than in 2002, despite a population increase of approximately 829,000 residents during that time. This represents a 55 percent decline in the community’s per capita water use since 2002.
Is it your suggestion that the Levant was once as well-watered and verdant as, say, the Netherlands or Hawaii?
While human activities undoubtedly contributed to desertification, the Levant is geographically and climactically a desert. The amount of surface water that is available may be directly influenced by human behavior, but I do not think that human behavior changed the fundamentals of the landscape.
We identified why north Africa greened approximately every 21,000 years over the past eight million years. It was caused by changes in the Earth’s orbital precession - the slight wobbling of the planet while rotating. This moves the Northern Hemisphere closer to the sun during the summer months.
*What Really Turned the Sahara Desert From a Green Oasis Into a Wasteland?* - 10,000 years ago, this iconic desert was unrecognizable. A new hypothesis suggests that humans may have tipped the balance
While I personally veer toward the more recent slight orbital variation cause, neither account factors much in the current AGW debate .. cyclic changes in local regions of the planet are a distinct issue from a steady rise in global atmospheric insulation properties.
The Sahara was once a forest. Its desertification was not caused by human activity.
On the other hand for the Fertile Crescent: the overuse of irrigation and water steering with shorter term agricultural goals with only direct affects in mind. The area was largely marshlands in the past.
And also mismanagement of forests lead to desertification of formerly fertile areas on the timescale before the current large scale climate change era began. This was before humanity could have as big possible part in the forming of climate as currently.
Yes, because living in the desert is absurd and obviously unnatural. Setting aside of course 3,000 years of civilization in Egypt. While we're at it, let's also unpack all these skyscrapers in New York and Tokyo and make sure no one is living at any height greater than the monkeys in the trees.
Egypt went from 8 million to 80 million in the last century. In large part because of the rest of the world (massive grain imports from Ukraine ... for example). But it can obviously work, thanks to globalization and how cheap it's to transport things by container ships.
Desalination that runs off of Solar panels makes it pretty viable for places like Dubai to exist. The cheap solar energy from the Desert, makes it attractive for future data centers to be placed there. Also, Ancient Egypt had slaves. A lot of the modern middle eastern states rely on cheap labour from India and Afghanistan.
And Oil money ...
My understanding is that agriculture in the desert works because of all the sunlight, so if water is provided it ends up actually being really good for growing plants.
(also, I don't think the Central Valley is actually a desert?)
Similarly, agriculture in a swamp works because of all the water. So if soil and sunlight is provided it ends up actually being really good for growing plants.
When I think of swampy areas I'm familiar with, they don't get as much sunlight as desert areas. It's possible to provide water to many areas that don't have a lot, but increasing total sunlight hours isn't possible.
Sure you can, you just give them unlimited free electricity and shine light on them. Basically what we do with water to sustain agriculture in deserts.
There may be counter intuitive effects in there. Plants roots creates water buffer zone underground that can capture some of rainfall and make better use of it, allowing larger growth.
MIT should deploy their desert water tech in LV[0]
Since the point of the trees has been discovered to be just shade and not evaporative cooling, they just need to figure a way to reorient their panels?
Perhaps the desert will repent its desertness and accept that sand, minimal water and a massive diurnal temperature range will somehow become amical towards good old Plane trees.
OK, let's go full mad world: a vast web of PV for power. Is there a handy massive water resource deep underground? If not then moisture in the air will need redeploying. Tall towers and probably gobs of power are indicated for that.
Trees grow in the desert. Mesquites, pines, junipers and more are all widespread in areas around Vegas. You don't need a tropical paradise to have vegetation, as the native forests of Arizona and Utah show.
There are proven methods for growing plants and trees in arid regions [0], but they have disadvantages which will become more evident as desertification expands with global warming. I agree that forcing non-native trees there is a losing battle in the long run.
If people were really serious about living in deserts in a sustainable way, they can't expect to have decorative greenery or classic architecture. A society as advanced as ours should be able to make compromises that allow modern comforts while adapting so well to their environment that the cities would look almost alien.
Not alien. Arabic, Spanish, mid-mediterranean, Puebloan, and a few more.
The architecture has existed for centuries, maybe even millenia. Some of us already live that way.
The irony is that the key thing - large thermal mass - has now become the province of only those with lots of money, or those with no money. Everyone in the middle is stuck with silly construction options for a desert climate.
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