Thanks, this is a great article. It completely tallies with my experience teaching higher ed as well.

So cool!

I’m sorry. Just wanted to give you a virtual hug if you’d like one.

Ugh, yours sounds even worse than ours.

We just elected a centre-right party that needed to go into coalition with our most right-wing party, who are libertarians, and our most populist party. They finally formed yesterday and now we have a government that is going to destroy the environment and decimate social services.

In our case it was a city of about 40,000 that only existed for two weeks, so it’s hard to say how it might scale

Keeping order is one thing, but police do a bunch of things no one else has time for.

Endless follow ups, liaising with social workers, taking long statements for inquests, or spending all day protecting someone’s right to peacefully protest.

Maybe it’s because I live in a country where the police don’t carry guns (and sex work is legal), but I found it really hard to put my finger on exactly what they are advocating for here.

They seem to be saying that police only exist to enforce middle class interests? I don’t think that’s entirely true.

I would like to see more change in how policing is done, but the idea that communities self-police is idealistic. Sure they do in some ways, but it can be just as selective and just as damaging as anything police do.

Remarkably, the letter’s signees include Ilya Sutskever, the company’s chief scientist and a member of its board, who has been blamed for coordinating the boardroom coup against Altman in the first place.

I am so confused.

Yes this was pretty telling:

Instead, an individual’s economic success would be tied directly to the quality of their work and the strength of their ideas. Gesell imagined this would create a Darwinian natural selection in the economy: “Free competition would favor the efficient and lead to their increased propagation.”

I was a bit offended by tourists doing that mmhmm thing until I found out that it’s considered polite in the US.

I was interpreting it as “yes I know you are thankful to me, and so you should be! By the way, I’m an oaf.”

“c’est moi,” meaning, “it’s me who thanks you.”

Ah so that’s what that means. I thought I was mishearing. That’s pretty close to what I was brought up with, “it’s my pleasure” (meaning it’s me who is pleased to be helping).

The informal/vernacular in my country (NZ) is “sweet as” which puzzles most visitors, or sometimes “it’s all good”.

That’s such a cool idea!

That sounds hard.

Do you meditate at all?.Sometimes it can help reset the critical inner voice.

That’s so cool that you’re doing NaNoWriMo! I’ve always felt too daunted by lack of plot. Let us know how it goes!

Ah that explains it. Thanks!

I thought they had already done it. I got the notification months ago.

The top result is already out. Obviously the John Oliver fans got their wish and Pūteketeke won. Thousands of them had to be disqualified for cheating, though.

We are all waiting now to see who is in second. Fingers crossed for the Fairy Tern, New Zealand’s most endangered bird!

I’ve never used twitter in my life, still have a vague interest in what Musk is doing to it though.

I love it!

Another way of looking at it is bottle openers look remarkably similar to beetle genitalia.

I think the beetles were here first.

That tracks.

Pretty sure Elon Musk railed against bots on twitter despite having been proven to have used bots on twitter to manipulate opinion himself.