Unless you’re a raw milk TB-chaser type the milk you drink is probably processed too. Being processed doesn’t make something inherently worse, and “no nutritional value” is a daft claim. OK if you consume milk as your only source of protein or fat, you probably want to choose your milk substitute tailored to whichever the rest of your diet is deficient in, but better or worse for us is a fairly arbitrary concept.

Livestock for dairy production are unarguably bad for the planet though.

Most people don’t vote

About 70% of the electorate vote nowadays, it has varied higher or lower but never been as low as 50% of eligible voters to even say “half of eligible people don’t vote” let alone “most”

https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-8060/CBP-8060.pdf

So assuming you have say 20 old people on your fictional bus, even assuming that all of your voter info is correct and everyone is on the register, the chances of all of them being able to cast a second vote without any of them being caught are billions to one.

The idea that millions of people will risk a significant chance of a lengthy prison sentence for their individually tiny extra votes is absurd when any actual attack on election integrity would not happen at the point of “turning up at the polling station and hoping for the best.”

Even if one in a million voters did try and get away with this - which again is a hugely inflated number from anything we get an indication of - if to do so you stop tens of thousands of people from being able to vote at all that still makes the election less democratic overall.

Why would you need a passport if you aren’t leaving the country?

It’s a piece of paper you buy every ten years if you want to travel across national borders, it’s not like some intrinsic part of your being.

At the point that the new voter ID legislation was introduced, about 8% of the electorate - ~3.5m people - did not have a passport or a driving licence.

It is a very good book. I have some more by the same author on my shelf but haven’t got to them yet.

Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming is a history of industrial use of fossil fuels; in particular I believe it discusses how fossil fuels became so prevalent because they are a method of power generation which can be privatised more easily than things like water power.

I also have White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Dangers of Fossil Fascism by Malm and the Zetkin Collective but I don’t know much about that one yet, I mostly picked it up because of the Black Skin, White Masks reference in the title.

Some states do use their own definitions of terrorism to explain why it’s bad when other people do it but OK when they do it, but that’s definitely not a uniform definition.

the calculated use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective.

- Britannica

The use of violence or the threat of violence, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political goals.

- American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language

the use of intentional violence and fear to achieve political or ideological aims. The term is used in this regard primarily to refer to intentional violence during peacetime or in the context of war against non-combatants.

- Wiki

(Government, Politics & Diplomacy) systematic use of violence and intimidation to achieve some goal

- Collins English Dictionary

the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes… government or resistance to government by means of terror.

- Webster’s

HDK is the record label, that’s just a playlist someone made of a few other releases from that label.

As far as I know it’s bandcamp only. You can listen to it free on there though, although it does normally ask if you want to buy the album after you’ve listened a couple of times.

While stuff like Tomb Raider is the quintessential example, for a five year old you would probably be better with something more colourful and fun, even if you are the one playing it.

With that in mind my first thought was A Hat in Time although I’ve not played it through to verify end to end appropriateness.

You could also try Mirror’s Edge because bright colours and dynamic movement, I don’t remember it being that violent but maybe on second thoughts consider the safety aspect of introducing a child to the concept of jumping between buildings and maybe I’m talking myself out of this.

Celeste is colourful and fun and honestly at that age I don’t know that she would pick up that much on the heavier aspects of the story which are allegories for anxiety/depression/gender dysphoria. A five year old is basically going to see it as a story with an evil twin I think.

I haven’t played Child of Light but that might be appropriate?

The main character in Crypt of the Necrodancer is a girl called Cadence, although that is one you would really have to enjoy to make it worth it imo. I’m mostly thinking rhythm and bright colours are child friendly again to be honest, but you still have to play what is basically a roguelike mixed with a rhythm game and if that’s not your jam it will be a waste of money.

You can always play a game with selectable skins too, like Spelunky 2 has a few characters you could pick between which all play the same but has a variety of designs you can play as.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cegalOZqmEo

I don’t normally plan my reading much ahead of time but August is an exception on a few counts.

Firstly, Whalefall by Daniel Kraus comes out on August 8th. It’s such a goofy idea for a story (think Jonah and the Whale meets The Martian) and I have been so pumped, I’ve been talking people’s ear off about it for months. It’s like scientifically accurate Pinocchio.

Secondly, one of the bookclub picks for the Discord server affiliated with [email protected] is The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K LeGuin

And then it’s Tropeical Readathon (a semiannual reading challenge thing) again so I have a couple dozen books picked out to cover that, but the only other sci-fi one apart from the above is Under This Forgetful Sky by Lauren Yero.

I made a kind of “if you like PHM you might like these other books” rec chart thing when I first read PHM; if you’ve finished reading it you might enjoy some of these (although it does mention a few key elements of the book so if you’re going in completely blind and aren’t far in yet then don’t look at this yet).

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Well There’s Your Problem episode about the Goiania incident

Reading & Writing

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It’s a machine learning chat bot, not a calculator, and especially not “AI.”

Its primary focus is trying to look like something a human might say. It isn’t trying to actually learn maths at all. This is like complaining that your satnav has no grasp of the cinematic impact of Alfred Hitchcock.

It doesn’t need to understand the question, or give an accurate answer, it just needs to say a sentence that sounds like a human might say it.

The impacts of the environmental damage are not necessarily worse than the environmental damage from not sinking superyachts in the long term, if it becomes a common enough threat that rich people no longer feel secure in owning them.

The concern with anything too destructive is with the property and safety of workers on board imo, not the ships themselves.

I’d recommend Andreas Malm’s book How to Blow Up a Pipeline if you want to hear more about the reasoning for this sort of thing.

Scientists can just make stuff up, but in this case Paul’s complaint appears to be more to do with the article than any underlying research as he is trying to draw information that the article doesn’t pretend to intend to provide.

A lot of the problems with publicly visible scientific research are to do with media communication and the way that journalists will interpret or spice up results in their coverage.

There are also problems with the incentive to publish surprising results more than confirmation of existing information, as well as with the incentives for research funding, and scientists can bring their own biases into research consciously or unconsciously.

For things like company sponsored research, it is not uncommon for multiple trials to be run and only the ones with positive results to be published. I’d recommend Ben Goldacre’s pop sci industry journalism books Bad Science or the even better sequel Bad Pharma for more discussion of this.

Then there are journals which function more like vanity press, with insufficient peer review processes and that just charge people to publish their papers.

But there are also scientists who just wholesale make things up, whether for obvious financial gain like Andrew Wakefield making up the autism from vaccines MMR scare because he had competing vaccines he wanted to sell, or just for easy prestige like Jonathan Pruitt just copy and pasting underlying data samples to boost trends.

It is not unthinkable for researchers to invent information, although my gut will always be to trust the researchers not the international megacorporation with an obvious financial incentive and the idea of suing researchers like this without substantial proof of fraud could have devastating effects on scientific research should J&J manage to push it through.

(YT video essay about Pruitt)

Have you read any Robert Rankin? His Brentford trilogy might be your cup of tea too.

You cannot do that with other social media.

Facebook likes, Twitter likes, Discord reacts, LinkedIn reacts, etc. are all publicly visible. The only possible slight difference with this is that in some cases people might not be aware, in which case the issue would be that it is less obvious to a casual browser than Facebook’s “AncientMariner and 23 others liked this post” rather than that the likes are visible at all.

Guru Larry’s Fact Hunt videos can be fun, although he definitely uses an over-the-top personality. He often does listicle style videos but almost always forgets that any video game has been released since 1993. Lots of lists will contain like amiga ports of arcade games and stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/@Larry

For example in the video “Purposely Broken, Unbeatable Games by DICKISH Developers” the game selection is Smash TV, Gladiator/Great Gurianos for the ZX Spectrum, Robocop for the Commodore 64, Dennis the Menace for the Commodore Amiga, and then Tony Hawks Pro Skater 5 but it mentions how weird it is to mention something so modern

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mn-4y8YrU4

I’d definitely agree with the people recommending Robert Rankin.

Tom Sharpe is also funny (Wilt, Porterhouse Blue, etc.)

Also (disclaimer that it’s by someone I used to know which may affect my judgement) Go Up by Simon Broadbent is clearly influenced by the Terry Pratchett books set in Ankh Morpork.

I didn’t like it quite as much, and it is more middle grade, but A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking feels kind of Pratchett influenced.