Charlie Loyd @vruba@everything.happens.horse

@Wolven Yeah. Sometimes I dare to hope that improving this situation, as unimportant as it seems to the big picture, might provide some inspiration for progress on more pressing issues.

@Wolven Are you connecting that to what I said with “… and I would rather the conversation about them focus on that and not irrelevant things” or with “… so I think any attack on them is legitimate, even if it might promote misunderstanding” or with some other thing I’m missing?

@dantheclamman Yeah: the explosion wasn’t the concerning part here.

@robinsonmeyer Exxxactly. This is the system working as designed at the moment.

Public ownership of gray, stable, safety-of-life infrastructure that should not be run at a profit is clearly necessary. It does not follow that everything publicly owned should be boring and reliable.

I think a lot of people who favor public ownership of publicly important things get tricked this way, into thinking that we should have the status quo but with different structures on paper.

Imagine a NASA that wasn’t being dogwalked by Congress, that got to apply most of its budget to weird-but-might-work stuff like New Horizons and the helicopter on Mars. Imagine a NASA with a 35% failure rate but a 65% “holy fuck, whoa” rate for uncrewed space missions.

Yes. SpaceX has done bad things and deserves to be criticized for them. But (and I think this is analogous to a lot of issues) the problem here isn’t that SpaceX isn’t NASA; it’s that NASA doesn’t have the political room to experiment and inevitably sometimes fail that SpaceX does. This is too complex an issue to fit all the layers and nuance into one honk, but “SpaceX is bad because their rockets explode” is not a good analysis. https://chaos.social/@russss/110249195107310284

The cat loves to be skritched but hates to be touched, and so far the best solution is for me to “lick” her face with a paintbrush, but she has to sniff it suspiciously before each session, make it take its shoes off, remove all electronics from its bags, etc.

Sometimes I feel like I’m still a kid pretending to be a grownup, but other times I catch myself thinking, as I just did, “The squares on this roll of paper towels are so well sized that I’m going to use fewer so the roll lasts longer.”

You see a lot of big black trucks with troubling bumper stickers on the highways, but null County does have a deeply rooted alternative arts scene and some gorgeous scenery. https://onewilshire.la/@CALandscapeBot/110228020545711615

We only have a couple grammatical markers for “this is a person and not a thing” but as long as we do I’m going to respect the hell out of them.

I understand how using “that” instead of “who” in contexts like “people that were there” is normal and has a long history and language changes and I’m the weird one, but wow does it rub me the wrong way.

Imagining an animist looking at this with the same eyes that mainstream Christian theologians used for Hóng Xiùquán saying he was Christ’s little brother. https://www.chatpdf.com/