onfocus

While the latest increases are in line with Disney’s past behavior, the timing isn’t ideal given the PR crisis that followed Disney temporarily pulling Jimmy Kimmel Live! off ABC.

LOLOL winning business

We all need to transition to this way of cooking, because clearly this is where the future is going. I expect in a few short years kitchens will be much smaller. Gone will be stoves and ovens and flat tops. Restaurant kitchens will only be a small closet with a microwave.

[sensible chuckle]

Chien added that we need a broader societal conversation about the looming environmental costs of using that much electricity for AI. Beyond carbon emissions, he pointed to hidden strains on water supplies, biodiversity, and local communities near massive data centers. Cooling alone, he noted, can consume vast amounts of fresh water in regions already facing scarcity. And because the hardware churns so quickly—with new Nvidia processors rolling out every year—old chips are constantly discarded, creating waste streams laced with toxic chemicals.

Fancy autocomplete is a nice-to-have not a destroy-the-planet-to-have.

“We’re going to get out there and we’re going to do a pretty big number on those people in Portland,” he said, describing them as “professional agitators and anarchists.”

The most important thing to remember about deploying troops to Portland is that the Epstein files still haven’t been released. Trump seems desperate for an armed conflict somewhere. Please remember who has the power here and who the aggressor is.

“Free speech culture” means that you can call for censorship, disproportionately abuse other people for speech, chill and deter people for speech, even call for violence against others so long as you do it in certain ritualized and stylized ways that people who were on the debate team like. If you dehumanize fellow Americans from a lectern or with a debate moderator or as a contributing writer to a magazine, that promotes free speech culture; if you do it in a social media post denouncing the speaker, or from a protest outside, or in a letter to the Dean, that harms free speech culture. “Prove me wrong” is a magical incantation that renders what follows pro-free-speech-culture.

Excellent description of how the term "free speech" means something very specific in maga culture.

Papers, please. The hallmark of fascist states of eras past and your favorite movie about authoritarianism is now also the official policy of the United States...

This episode discusses a recent Supreme Court shadow docket decision that allows ICE to stop people based on their race or location. I haven't seen much (any?) discussion in the media of what seems like an obviously unconstitutional decision so it was good to hear this discussion.

The Trump administration, from the president down to the middle levels of obscure Cabinet departments, is populated by people whose defining experiences in public life involved being silenced by social platforms.

Antisocial trolls getting revenge. See also: Musk.

The fundamental issue with “debate me bro” culture isn’t just that it’s obnoxious, it’s that it creates a false equivalence between good-faith expertise and bad-faith trolling. When you agree to debate someone pushing long-debunked conspiracy theories or openly hateful ideologies, you’re implicitly suggesting that their position deserves equal consideration alongside established facts and expert analysis.

We are basically living in GamerGate culture now. The trolls won. All the tired tactics: just asking questions, sealioning, whataboutism, gish gallop, strawmanning, slippery sloping, or just joking gaslighting is what people mean when they say debating, blarg.

"We don't even watch Jimmy Kimmel at all," Gary, 54, said. "Things that are supposed to be thought of as a given as it relates to American life, those things are being constantly trampled down."

No kidding. I don't watch him either, but I want to live in a world where Jimmy Kimmel can do his thing. We need the ability to critique and poke fun at the people in power. It's the American way. Voting with our money is also the American way. Plus, how thin-skinned must you be to get Jimmy Kimmel fired?

Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) said she was reminded of the history of "slave patrols" after conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court gave Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents the ability to target people based on their ethnicity.

Supreme Court majority implicated in repeating the most shameful parts of US history.

What happened to Kirk is horrifying, and we fear deeply for whatever will happen next. But it is undeniable that Kirk was not just a part of the extremely tense, very dangerous national dialogue, he was an accelerationist force whose work to dehumanize LGBTQ+ people and threaten the free speech of professors, teachers, and school board members around the country has directly put the livelihoods and physical safety of many people in danger.

Running a harassment mob aimed at college professors is not a noble cause.

His entire business was saying the other side was evil and dehumanizing them. The debates were simply performances, and he could not have an entertaining public fight without opposition. Turning Point did not work to bring people together; it worked to bring about a country where anyone who wasn’t a white Christian nationalist wasn’t welcome. I won’t celebrate his death, but I’m not obligated to celebrate his life, either.

We should be discussing the paradox of tolerance. If your debate partner advocates for your death is that really an open debate? I’m not sure you’re an ‘open debate advocate’ in that case.