Philosoraptor

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This is a long shot, but I'm trying to replace the water pump on my wife's 1988 Toyota pickup. The guy who put the last pump on used a TON of RTV liquid gasket to seal it on, and it might as well be fucking welded in place for all it will move. It's an aluminum engine, so I'm trying not to attack it with a chisel or anything too violent. Any comrades here with car mechanic experience got any tips? I'd prefer not to drop the $400+ the mechanic is going to charge to do it.

I was sure it was going to be professional genocide ghoul Shapiro. Color me surprised.

In 2023, the CO2 growth rate was 3.37 +/- 0.11 ppm at Mauna Loa, 86% above the previous year, and hitting a record high since observations began in 1958, while global fossil fuel CO2 emissions only increased by 0.6 +/- 0.5%. This implies an unprecedented weakening of land and ocean sinks, and raises the question of where and why this reduction happened.

Despite the incredible, unprecedented work of The Most Progressive President of Our Lifetime in the US, global carbon emissions continue to accelerate. However, in general carbon that's introduced into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels doesn't always just stay there; in fact, most of the time most of that carbon gets absorbed by one or another carbon sink as part of normal geosystemic processes. These sinks include getting sucked up by plants as part of photosynthesis, dissolving into the ocean to marginally raise its pH (mostly this one), or reacting with rocks on the surface to from new minerals. The upshot is that a lot of the warming potential of the fossil fuels we've been burning has been averted by the natural carbon cycle absorbing much of our collective waste.

This natural absorption showed an alarming drop off in 2023, even as carbon emissions continued to rise. This is very, very bad and is setting us up for warning and other climate change impacts that may happen far in advance of what our models predicted--decades instead of centuries.

Liberals not being total losers challenge (difficulty: impossible)

Loser energy at levels never thought possible before

Friend of mine that lives in Gerlach got it at about 11 last night. Crazy that it made it this far south.

The kids are alright.

There's one overwhelmingly common mistake that people make about enshittification: assuming that the contagion is the result of the Great Forces of History, or that it is the inevitable end-point of any kind of for-profit online world.

In other words, they class enshittification as an ideological phenomenon, rather than as a material phenomenon. Corporate leaders have always felt the impulse to enshittify their offerings, shifting value from end users, business customers and their own workers to their shareholders. The decades of largely enshittification-free online services were not the product of corporate leaders with better ideas or purer hearts. Those years were the result of constraints on the mediocre sociopaths who would trade our wellbeing and happiness for their own, constraints that forced them to act better than they do today, even if the were not any better.

Corporate leaders' moments of good leadership didn't come from morals, they came from fear.

Politicians are terrified of the protests, but they are even more terrified by the prospect that the protests could continue past the end of the school year, spilling over the bounds of the campus and into a long, hot, summer. It is the responsibility of anyone trying to stop this genocide to ensure that their nightmare becomes a reality.

Some choice bits:

[A] huge win would be a Gray Pride Parade with 50,000 Grays, that would be massive. That would start, to say: "Whose streets? Our streets!" You have the AI Flying Spaghetti Monster. You have the Bitcoin parade. You have the drones flying overhead in formation ... You have bubbling genetic experiments on beakers. You have the laser eyes, you know, Bitcoin maximalist ... You have the police at the Gray Pride Parade. They're flying the...drones, they are there and, ideally, you know, you even design the police uniforms.

Every week ... ideally every week, have a policeman's banquet. Okay, all Gray sympathetic policemen are allowed to come to this banquet. Those that are not very sympathetic, you do need to filter you don't just because there's some sort of some policemen who are full Soviets, right?

Take total control of your neighborhood. Push out all Blues. Tell them they're as unwelcome as ... just as Blues ethnically cleanse me out of San Francisco, push out all blues. And then you'll easily win.

Reds should be welcomed there and people should wear their tribal colors. No Blues should be welcomed there. And in addition to celebrating celebrating Gray and celebrating Red, you should have movies shown about Blue abuses. For example, there's this guy who's addicted to drugs, who was addicted to drugs he posts on Twitter about how the Blue government helped him get addicted to drugs. You should have an interview with him. There should be lots of stories about what Blues are doing that is bad.

If you tried to put this in a satire, people would think it was too much.