Real "Bad Luck Brian" energy

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/bad-luck-brian

I'm biased, but I think you're on to something. People are writing about this under the broad framing of "cognitive surrender"

See "Alarm fatigue" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue

It's not like these guys have any media literacy or emotional intelligence to speak of. If they did, they wouldn't have gone to work for Thiel and Karp's perfectly named company.

I'm pretty sure this is the same population of people who lost (and may still be losing sleep) over Roko's Basilisk. They're clever but not smart.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager

The F-35 is a perfect pork-barrel example: by using subcontractors distributed in many house districts, the project owner ensures its political viability. By my count, only Louisiana, Wyoming, Nebraska, and North Dakota show less than $1MM in "economic impact".

https://view.ceros.com/lockheed-martin/f35-domestic-impact/p...

The polite way of saying that is "Its a jobs program."

Modern e-readers are waterproof enough for pool or bath reading. It's nice!

If you're even the slightest bit tech savvy you can find a DRM stripping utility for Calibre. Apprentice Alf is long retired, but a fork of that DeDRM still is maintained

Newer Kindle books published in the last few years require more than the Calibre plugin. Amazon is tightening the loop.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Calibre/comments/1q1uza4/successful...

Life is too short and my reading backlog too large for me to spend any time, money, or effort whatsoever on DRMed books.

There are enough copyright‐expired and copyrighted‐but‐DRM‐free books to keep me fully occupied in perpetuity.

It never worked with the few books I got from Amazon, because I could not get them anywhere else. I usually only buy epub/pdf.

I just tried this _today_ and its not easy, you need DeDRM and at least one or two other utilities. I have yet to convert a single book.

When someone tells you who they are, believe them.

I guess we can believe they are Tolkien fans, then.

This is honestly a meaningless cliche. There is a bottled water company called Liquid Death, is that a reason to expect their product to be more hazardous than competitors? A lot of free software has traditionally used self-deprecating names, should we expect them to be bad as a result? How about when something is called Truth Social?

My rule is, "if you have to say, it isn't". If the tofu were really yummy and tasty, you wouldn't need to say so on the package. (Some years ago, when Americans' idea of uses for tofu was mostly as a salad topping, Texas had a tofu brand that said "yummy and tasty!" on the package.)

"Truth Social"? Probably a cesspool of lies. "Liquid Death"? Well, I would have expected it to be full of alcohol, capacsin, and/or cinnamon, not bottled water...

For others' sake, I double-checked: 2.59 million served, of which 648,500 were draftees. Right at 25%

Is there a study of soldiers who enlisted but only because their draft number was low? There were substantial benefits to enlisting, because you could choose your branch of service.

Should break that down by people who had enlisted before hostilities began. Material difference enlisting during peace time vs when there is an active theater of war.

It would be more interesting to see those numbers broken down by frontline service. What percentage of the guys actually dying in the jungle were drafted?

17,725 draftees died, just over 30% of all American combat deaths in the war

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_draft

That's the spirit! But you shouldn't underestimate the power of suggestion:

"This was cooked with fish sauce" -> "This tastes fishy"