I feel that way whenever I finish a reread of Wheel of Time or the Broken Earth trilogy that makes me have to avoid the genre for a bit afterwards

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The problem isn’t socialism in the countries I’m sure you’ve seen (Soviets, etc), it’s totalitarianism. Leaders have used the guise of socialism to get the initial public support to gain power, and they make a show of it, but the real game in town is the power structure. Look into Pinochet’s Chile for a similar example with a hardcore capitalism as the economic system

This is interesting. I’ve been wanting to sign up for something like this, Incogni, or DeleteMe for a while, but haven’t done any research yet

Link for people who, like me, spent 10 minutes trying to get links other than Barnes & Noble and publishing houses: https://hardcover.app

I also recommend StoryGraph for this same purpose

Don’t forget the Baha’i, the Babs, and the Druze. Don’t know if they’re considered people of the book or not. Same with the Samaritan Israelites

While it is true that most early astronauts were aviators, specifically test pilots, it’s also important to consider that it was the case then as it is now that the US Navy operates more planes and has more pilots than the US Air Force. Just percentage wise, that would edge towards more Navy pilots who use the naval terminology in their ranks (the Mercury 7 were 4 Navy pilots, 2 Air Force, and 1 Marine I think, though I could be wrong). I would assume that the culture would skew even more Naval as space flight progresses as early spaceflight was a couple of guys in a tin can to larger scale craft.

Another weird quirk too is that common military rank terms like “captain” and “lieutenant” don’t line up between the Navy and the others (at least in the US). So the OG Star Trek guys would be Colonel Kirk and Captain Uhura under Air Force terminology, and that just sounds weird

Stopped drinking soda, started walking daily. 60 lbs over the course of a year a few years ago, haven’t gained any back

I mean, the absolute cheapest place to put it would be DC if the constraint of not moving the capitol is in place. About 4 million federal employees in the US, DC metro area has about 9 million, so plenty of room, plus most of the federal buildings and offices are right there already. Fairly urban and with a reasonably robust public transport system too. Think you were going for someplace like Kansas, but whatever savings you get on real estate evaporate after you have to take into account cost of transportation to and from DC plus building out the new city’s infrastructure

Think it’s just a familiar form factor for the product given that most are used to how the former birdsite’s apps (both first and third parties) looked and operated. A few of them are even made by the same developers who had made third party apps. May eventually drift towards something else, but at least for the time being, telling people “instead of logging into this website, you log into this website” and everything else works and looks the same is an easier sell especially during the mass adoption and scaling phase of the platform

My degree and professional training is all in physics. Biggest one for me is that they use “high temperature” when relating to superconductors like we’re going to have superconducting phones next year, when in reality high-T superconductors are still colder than 100 K (-173°C, -280°F). Also they gotta stop flipping out over Water on Mars. That’s so passe, there’s a literal list on wikipedia on how many times that’s happened. On the plus side though, most have just stopped trying to explain anything around physics and instead go for a more “x does y cause physics” approach

I’m still soured by how the primary shook out in 2020. Before any votes were cast, all everyone said about all the candidates were that anyone could beat Trump. Bernie won the first 3 races, and the Democratic establishment fought anyway they could to kill the movement, including pressuring flailing campaigns to back out. Biden finally won and the only message is for the left wing of the party to get in line. Kind of a hard pill to swallow when the Democrats claimed to be the party of the youth, but the youth voted 80%+ for Bernie in the primary. Ended up voting Green in 2020. Will I do so again in '24? Who knows, but at this point it isn’t looking good. I don’t like that the right wing of the Democrats (center-right overall) expects the left to follow along no matter what they do.

I’m not sure I buy this whole “third party votes are wasted votes” or “third party votes are a vote for the opposition”. The US system heavily heavily biases towards having a two party system, but third parties exist, and just because Democrats and Republicans are the two major parties right now, doesn’t mean they will be in the future. The Whigs were one of the two major parties for 25 years of US history, even winning the Presidency a few times, but now they’re not. It took people not willing to accept the party line and jumping ship to change that, which again the system biases against, but it still happened. Democrats aren’t the end-all-be-all of lefty politics. The next left wing party won’t be the end-all-be-all either. Democrats have no incentive to change the current system. By continuing to vote for them, whether you believe it or not, you’re approving and perpetuating the behavior. It isn’t a useful method of change to say “I don’t agree with anything the Democrats say, but that’s the world we’re in”. That’s how you end up in a situation where 70% of the country supports universal healthcare, but only 5-6 members of Congress do. Voting for a further left party than the Democrats will cause the Democrats to wise up to what their traditional base wants.

Politics in Democracy is not a passive system. Passivity leads to what we have now, two parties that write the rules for the states and the governments that represent the interests of almost no one, but have convinced us that they’re the only and best options. There are agents of the Democrats currently in jail for breaking election law in their efforts to keep the Greens off the ballot. I’m sure the same is true for Republicans. Don’t tell them its okay by giving them your vote. Don’t give in to the political version of the Paradox of Thrift.

For me, I’ll generally find the theses and arguments of books like this interesting so I’ll try to read them. In the end, I could have gotten as much out of the books if they had been 90% shorter and I’ll quit less than halfway through

Just in case

Can’t answer all of your questions, but I’ll give at least a few of them a go:

• In the specific case of Sazed, it should be noted that Preservation and Ruin don’t perfectly cancel each other out. In the second era, it’s made comment that Harmony has trouble acting as time has gone on as the two oppose each other, but several characters talk about Saze becoming more like Ruin over time. I think this is probably because Preservation gave up part of their power into humanity and so is just generally weaker than Ruin (same reason Preservation lost influence in the world over time)
• I don’t think it’s nearly as clean as 8 vs 8. To date we’ve only really seen 3-4 “negative” shards: Odium, Autonomy, maybe Ambition, and maybe Dominion. For example, one of the shards is Whimsy, and there isn’t one like “Seriousness” or anything like that
• Presumably if someone held all 16 shards, they would be like Adonalsium. Dawnshards are less clear. After the Shattering, its said the Dawnshards changed form somewhat, so who knows what holding them all would do
• I don’t think shards have that level of control over their respective magic systems. At most, I think they can just restrict access to using it
• The 10 surges are associated with Honor, Cultivation, and Odium. I would say that most often, they’re all associated with Honor as the vast majority of surgebinders use stormlight to access them. Lift I think is the only character in the books that uses lifelight, and that required direct intervention from Cultivation. Navani only is able to use towerlight due to her bond with the Sibling. The fused access the surges through voidlight, but even then they can only use 9 of the surges as Adhesion is more intricately related to Honor than either of the other two. I don’t think they technically constitute different magic systems, but to my mind the surges are more fundamental to the foundation of magic usage within the entire Cosmere as surgebinders are essentially just slinging around raw investiture (in the form of the lights) and only gain access to them by the Nahel Bond with splinters. Presumably if there was a “higher” version of the spirits on Komashi, they may be able to form a Nahel Bond (the spirits from rock stacking highly resemble creationspren)
• Brandon Sanderson has actually talked about how it’s a mistake in his books that Atium can’t be burned by non-allomancers. Atium can only be used by Mistborn and Seers (atium mistings). Brandon’s mistake actually makes it more confusing, but assuming that it’s corrected and non-allomancers can use Atium, it makes sense because God Metals, unlike the other metals, are the actual source of investiture being the condensed investiture of the various shards. Lerasium, Atium, Trellium, and Ettmetal aren’t considered part of the 16 metals because of this. So theoretically, anyone could swallow a chunk and access that investiture. Similarly, that’s why anyone can use unkeyed nicrosil, it’s storing raw investiture, so you would be bypassing the “through Preservation” bit. And anyone means anyone, I’m pretty sure at one point Hoid takes some Lerasium to gain access to allomancy
• At least so far that’s the gist of the Cosmere arc, but honestly at this point it’s too close to call. There’s going to be at least 6 more Stormlight books, one or two more eras of Mistborn, sequels to Elantris and Warbreaker, a Threnody series, the fabled Dragonsteel series, and who knows what else given that he’s only just started to flesh out other parts of the universe like dawnshards and aethers. He’s brought on at least one other author (Dan Wells) to write Cosmere novels too. Even after 7 Mistborns, Elantris, Warbreaker, White Sand, Tress, Yumi, 4 Stormlights, and all the novellas/short stories, something tells me we’re only in the beginning stages of the full ark

Hopefully this answered some of your questions.

Combination of free bookmarks I’ve gotten from book orders and old Pokémon cards

Not part of the Fediverse, but The Movie Database is a good alternative to IMDb without all the adds and stuff like that. A lot of the information is user added and supported, so you can contribute as well as consume. Also for iOS, there’s a new app for it called Callsheet that gets its data from TMDb

“The Snowman” by Jo Nesbø. Most of the Harry Hole series are pretty great

Capitalism has become such a bore Wish waged labor existed no more I’d rather pay taxes Take billionaires assets And distribute some wealth to the poor

Swiss Army knife, bottle opener, pocket pen, and most important of all: one of those wavy keys to open toilet paper and paper towel dispensers