Earth squeezes and stretches and wobbles & rotates.

Sort of, yeah, Earth is a bit wider around the equatorial axis than around the polar one.

Time as we know it changes in length because it is the common nature of “time” to become chaos which then becomes order. Hylomorphism or Impermanence is to Entropy as measurement is to the fundamentals of size. Who is to say that the distance between two points should be constrained to the barriers of human existence & understanding. All we have is pictures & words, maybe a few trinkets that will become dust that becomes something else that attempts to quantify reality.

This reads like an unfortunate confluence of psychosis, psychoactive substances and LLMs.

I think this snippet misrepresents the accuracy of the former definition of the metre. Sure, it’s no longer the distance from the equator to the pole (the modern definition uses the speed of light and the period of transition for a particular atom), but the difference is quite small. The circumference of the Earth around the poles (so 4 times the distance from equator to pole) is 40007.863 km. In Napoleonic times scientists had a pretty good idea what the shape of the Earth was.

AI can innovate, but it needs be more advanced than an LLM, which just rearranges existing knowledge. You need some kind of evolutionary loop in its programming. How it continues after that depends on the particular flavour of dystopian sci-fi.

Was? Ein Rechtsextremist eingeladen von Rechtsextremen? Was kommt demnächst? Katzen im Katzencafé?

Do you use horse-drawn carriages? No? What about the horse breeders and cartwrights?

[…] is making customers do the job of paid employees for free.

So if everyone used self-checkout, groceries would be cheaper…

For the time being, it’s still relatively easy for US citizens to move to a prosperous society. If things continue on the current trajectory, then at a certain point waves of refugees will start flowing outward, and with nationalism on the rise globally it’s likely to become more difficult on the medium- to long-term.

The American obsession with inflation is interesting, considering the unanimous agreement among those with an above-kindergarten-level understanding of economics that modest inflation of a few percent is generally the optimal state of affairs, for a variety of reasons. (There is a summary on the Wikipedia article on inflation, for those interested.) No reasonable case can be made that inflation ranks among the top 1000 problems in US society or its economy. I say it’s an American obsession, as it’s really not popularly discussed among laymen to the same degree in most other above-average economies.

From an anthropological/sociological perspective, it’s a fascinating question what drives this obsession. I’m not qualified to give an authoritative answer, but I may speculate that weak unions and a lack of collective wage agreements drive job-hopping as a major source of keeping up with inflation. This results in people associating their wage gains with their own career advancement and skills, rather than with inflation causing their own labour costs to increase. On the other hand, when wages are indexed to inflation automatically, at least to a large degree, then people care less about inflation eroding their wages. People perhaps do not have sufficient abstract reasoning skills to realize that when their wages are flat and inflation is a few percent, it’s in fact not so much inflation eroding their wages, but employers actively deciding to cut their real wages.

Platz 8 nach IHDI und 11 nach Social Progress Index, ist das so schlecht?

Okay, es sieht nicht wirklich so aus, als ob die Regierung Sachen macht um die Top-Performer (Norwegen, Dänemark, usw.) zu überholen, aber die Deutsche Wirtschaft bleibt einer der stärksten weltweit, deutlich stärker als bspw. die USA oder Frankreich.

Trump’s support has fallen by another 0.1% this month! It will be soon.

Here are some approval ratings for context:

• Trump: 39.5%
• Merz: 14%
• Macron: 27%
• Starmer (just before resigning): 23%

Trump’s lowest ever approval rating in RCP’s average was 37% (Dec 2017), which was around the time it was revealed to the public Trump aided the Russian military in attacking US targets.