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Cake day: January 13th, 2024

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  • Elon hadn’t fully committed to his right-wing heel turn in 2013 when the model S arrived in the Canadian market. Back then he was far less forthcoming with his opinions in general and was largely known as a leader for the promotion and advancement electric car technology, rockets, and PayPal.

    It wasn’t until 2018 that he tweeted about the British cave diver being a pedo after helping rescue 12 trapped boys in Thailand, and became a lot more public with his “based takes” from then forward.

    It’s easy to say with hindsight that the evidence was always there, but there was a time (not that long ago) when he wasn’t in our news cycle everyday. And when he was in the news back then, it was generally for more positive reasons.

    None of this is a defense of Elon. I deleted my twitter accounts the day he bought it. But I have sympathy for people who made a purchase decision for car that should last them a decade+, especially if they felt they were doing it for the right reasons, who now regret it given whose pockets they’ve lined in the process and wouldn’t chose to do it again now.


  • Just the latest social group that’s still broadly acceptable to shit on.

    There’s not a ton of global census data out there, but in Canada trans and non-binary people make up 0.33% of the population. Which means there’s a lot of people who don’t know anyone who is trans or non-binary. Unfortunately there’s also a lot of people who are unwilling to emphasize, or even sympathize, for those they feel are different or strange to them. It take time and effort to listen to others’ stories and to gain appreciation for their perspective, and it’s an effort many people are uncomfortable making if it feels they are deviating too far from society’s norm. What you’re observing is those in power taking advantage of the same human weakness that’s been used forever to discriminate on whoever the current permissible outgroup to hate is.

    How many times have you heard, “I don’t care about anyone being/doing Y, but…”, and then proceed to say some sort of transphobic, homophobic, racist, or sexist shit? When I grew up it was the G in LGBT. When my parents grew up it was African Americans. Women only got the right to vote a century ago, you better believe some of our great granduncles had some shit to say that would make today’s uncles look like saints.





  • The etymology section of your link suggests different:

    The demographer, anthropologist, and historian Alfred Sauvy, in an article published in the French magazine L’Observateur, August 14, 1952, coined the term third world (tiers monde), referring to countries that were playing a small role in international trade and business. His usage was a reference to the Third Estate, the commoners of France who, before and during the French Revolution, opposed the clergy and nobles, who composed the First Estate and Second Estate, respectively (hence the use of the older form tiers rather than the modern troisième for “third”). Sauvy wrote, “This third world ignored, exploited, despised like the third estate also wants to be something.”

    But you’re right in that the term began to be used far more widely during the Cold War for political alignment.












  • The author hopes for a future version of Windows that offers more user control and less interference from Microsoft’s software-as-a-service products.

    Currently there is zero incentive for Microsoft to do this, and only upside potential to keep doing what they’re doing.

    You’d need thousands of companies to abandon their dependency on Windows, Office, and the entire Microsoft ecosystem for them to change course now.