If your concept of marriage demands ownership or subservience, I sincerely hope you never get married.

It’s a fun way to do CNC / free use play because you both get to spell out exactly what is and isn’t off limits in a way that diagetically fits within the fantasy. It’s gotten a bad rap because it’s a big part of 50 Shades, but it’s actually a really fun concept when done properly.

For anyone not aware, this happens regularly, and has happened regularly for a long time. Recent events have made it seem more newsworthy, so mainstream press is reporting it like its a big fucking deal, but this kind of airspace testing has been standard Russian practice for a long time. Not saying it’s a good thing, but it doesn’t represent any kind of sudden escalation.

If we’re coming at this from a perspective of fighting climate change, I don’t think plastic straws are really the hill to die on.

The reality of any political battle is that you always have to ask “What is the thing that will create the most net impact?” But net impact includes “Not making my cause toxic to the average person.”

The public, in general, are very amenable to changes like getting rid of disposable plastic bags and plastic packaging, and those can have as much impact or more than getting rid of plastic straws. Those are also changes that don’t create significant negative impacts for people with disabilities.

And that’s before you even get to the industrial scale changes that would have far more impact. If you look at, say, plastic waste in the ocean, about half of it is fishing nets. Changing fishing industry practices would be a lot more of an impactful approach.

Banning plastic straws is like putting out the grease fire on the stove while the whole house is burning down around you. Yes, technically it’s a thing we should do, but it is not even remotely the first thing we should do. And the people advocating for it are often doing so as a way of pretending to do something meaningful while ignoring the far bigger industry level changes we could be making that would have a far bigger impact.

As a political issue, plastic straws have become entirely toxic, and given how small a piece of the puzzle they are, there really is no benefit to dying on this largely worthless hill when our efforts could be better spent elsewhere.

And that’s an excellent argument for not using these kinds of automated detective systems in the first place.

“Hitler loved my joke about gassing the Jews” isn’t exactly proving your point, Dave.

I mean, I think that comes down to what kind of scifi is more your cup of tea. Player of Games is exciting to someone who wants intrigue and suspense. On the other hand, Consider Phlebas has some of the craziest action set pieces in the entire series. I love them both, but I could easily see someone finding Player of Games boring compared to Consider Phlebas. Part of Banks’ skill is that his books cover everything from explosive action at staggering scales to a pair of alien diplomats spending an entire novel talking about how weird humans are.

One of my all time favourites series of books.

Ironically, Bezos and Musk are both fans, because they see all the cool scifi stuff and miss everything else that’s going on. Neither of them understand that Banks would have spit on them if he’d ever met them. The man was a proud socialist and fucking detested men like them.

When people say “Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism”, the Culture is what they’re describing.

IMO, Consider Phlebas really is the best way to introduce the Culture, because it explores the kind of mentality that would want to reject a genuinely utopian society. Horza and the Idirans are a searing critique of our present society, just as much as the Eaters are. The whole book is laying out his thesis for why the Culture really is a better way forward, by examining it through the eyes of someone who fucking hates it.

Well, their excuse here is essentially that it’s better to have a false positive than a false negative.

And that’s actually a pretty standard way of thinking in any industry that deals in automated detection systems. I work with a product that fills a somewhat similar role - automatically detecting a hazard - and what it comes down to is this; a false negative comes back on you, the company. Someone died because your product was supposed to do a job, and didn’t. A false positive on the other hand, you can always counter with “But what if there had been a danger and we hadn’t alerted you?”

When pressed between those two options, the customer (that is, the execs at the top) will always prefer the false positive. Now, those false positives bring with them a whole host of problems, just like the article describes. Staff get fatigued by constant false alerts, and often start to hate the entire system. But the thing is, the people who pay for the system never have to directly deal with those negative effects. But someone dying who shouldn’t have, that’s absolutely something those people up at the top get it in the neck for. So they’ll happily keep paying for the system, and forcing everyone to use it, even as it burns out their staff. “Better to be safe than sorry.”

I’m not remotely arguing that schools should be using this product. I’d need to see a LOT more data on its actual detection rate vs false positive rate to form any kind of opinion on that. Just saying that if you’re going to make a product like this in the first place, well, yeah that’s how you’d do it.

The fact that we’ll never get the rest of Raised By Wolves is a fucking tragedy. Easily one of the most weird and inventive new IPs we’ve gotten in years. I have no idea if they were going to stick the landing - big danger that it could have ended up as another Lost - but god did I want to see them try.

And not just the impracticality, but the cost. Apparently one state alone is looking to spend $15m on just this technology next year. Plus all the other security theatre like school security guards, magnetic scanners, etc. Imagine how much money their schools would have to spend on actually teaching students if they weren’t spending it all on failing to keep them safe from guns.

If you genuinely think The Martian is a bad movie, I have nothing to say to you. You’re clearly not operating on any metric of good film-making that’s even tangentially related to the reality most people live in. But I do hope you’re enjoying yourself out there wherever you are.

Ah, good to know that the criteria for being good at anything is “Literally never making a single questionable call ever in your entire life long career.” That’s a totally reasonable and normal standard to apply to anything.

Ridley is actually a shockingly consistent director. The big career slump he got known for was during a period where almost all his focus was on his brother’s mental health. No surprise that he wasn’t putting out his best work. But he came back to full form spectacularly with The Martian, and he’s always had a real knack for scifi. I think it’s OK to be optimistic about this one.

I have watched the first one, and at the end of the day it is an extremely competently made movie. That’s something that can’t be ignored. The plot is cliche as hell, and it’s basically doing all the worst parts of the Dances with Wolves white saviour bullshit, but at the end of the day James Cameron is an absolutely phenomenal director, especially when it comes to action, and that does a lot of work for it.

It’s the kind of movie where the things that bother you tend to bother you later, because you do get caught up in the spectacle of it all. Cameron does spectacle very well, and there’s an art to that.

The Avatar movies are a bizarre phenomenon. Absolutely nobody ever talks about them. They have almost zero cultural presence, and yet they are incredibly successful, despite the staggering cost of making them.

When communism creates victims, it is failing at its intended goal. When capitalism creates victims, it is working as intended.

Everything has it’s limit.