Do what I can to help out the local encampment calling for university divestment from Israel

You don't need to run a candidate for president to gain popular support. And the candidate will never be the center of the revolution - that's "Great Man Theory" talking.

Revolution happens through popular support of the workers. Building and growing a coalition of working class orgs is where we should be putting in our efforts.

our current outlook on science which is metaphysical.

Metaphysics, coming from the Greek words for "the things after physics," is something that by its etymology is literally outside of science. To understand where you're coming from, you'll need to elaborate on how you're defining "metaphysics" and how your conception of "science in general" is based in it.

By which I don’t mean the scientific method... but science as a whole and as itself.

There is no disentangling the scientific method from the term and our conception of "science." It is the cornerstone of the philosophy, and is inherently dialectical by its nature: it is a process by which a falsifiable (hypo)thesis is pitted against its antitheses through experiment and observation. The synthesis is a new, revised thesis that is again pitted against its antitheses in iteration. Its fruits are a testament to power of dialectics.

As others have noted, bourgeois decision making regarding the application of science does not tend to use dialectical analysis, but that is not unique to "science," and I'm not convinced that the decision making of the bourgeoisie is "metaphysical" in any essential way.

I'm reflecting on how much value has been extracted from me. If I had been able to keep the yearly insurance payments, I could have bought the car all over again.

Over the past 7 years I've paid my car's initial worth in insurance payments, it's great.

Capitalists, reactionaries, liberals, and fascists will cry crocodile tears for Princess Anastasia while voting to bomb brown children without a single second thought.

The propaganda aspect is especially obvious since OP’s friend invoked the nonsense emotional appeal of “would you shoot the Tsar if he were me?”

From OP's friend's perspective, it's likely a sensical appeal coming from a place of valuing life, which is an excellent opportunity to force him to confront the contradiction.

I was dissapointed that the one communist didn’t brutally blow Anastasia’s brains out, but I definitely think the play ... inspires violence in me.

I don't think this is a good thing. It is true that violence becomes regrettably necessary in resistance and revolution, but it should not be something we take pleasure in, for a myriad of reasons. It leads to adventurism, it hinders our ability to grow our movement, and it puts our culture in a bad spot post-revolution towards successfully building towards communism.

And on a personal level, no, you should never, ever tell your friend that you would kill them under some hypothetical scenario. You should never let the conversation get to the point where that's even a question being asked.

My disillusionment in Mormonism and subsequent embrace of atheism is what set me on the path that led me here.

We've got the University of Michigan here in Ann Arbor, Michigan State University is in Lansing. Very distinct and unique names /s

But yeah, checks out. Very much an affluent "middle class" city. The genocide in Gaza has stirred militancy in the student population here and in the surrounding area, Biden is not popular.

I cut out carbs and started hiking but I didn't cut out all of my "vices." Caffeine and the occasional shot of liquor, sex, video games. Way too much YouTube, the most pernicious of all.

Watching the weight go down on the scale also helped form a positive feedback loop.

It gets easier after a month-ish and you've somewhat adapted, but yeah it's a struggle. I completely fell off when lockdown started years back.

That's gonna be a lot of wet Astrophysicists. Also anyone with a cellphone, really.

Yeah, I read the comment. The thesis of the title isn't supported by the article, which makes for a confusing read.

That's not based on the article is it? The article seems to attribute growth primarily to the war economy.

Not only is it not Linux, but the operating system is closed source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarmonyOS. According to the article it's built on top of "OpenHarmony," but that does little to assuage my disappointment.

Yes, in that it uses the Linux Kernel. It's not typically considered a Linux distribution because most everything else in the OS is custom and Google-suffused. In particular Android lacks GNU libraries and tools.

Which is doubly worse because those higher-level libraries are black boxes, and you can’t always fix things that arise inside of them easily.

If by "higher level" you mean something like Java libraries, I'd say the opposite is true - at least if you don't have the source for a Java class it is trivial to decompile and have something immediately readable. Can't say the same for something like a dll originally written in C++.

https://archive.is/vJlze

https://archive.ph/Iwvfl

• old webpages (like from the 2000s) are fast and snappy
• new webpages take much longer to load

Modern webpages are less like a page and more like a full blown application. If you're not careful you'll get an unoptimized mess, which is exacerbated when you put a bunch of ads on top.

That being said I don't have memories of everything being snappy 20 years ago - there were messy scripts and gigantic images that made Geocities and Angelfire sites near unusable back then as well.