Author, techie, mom. FREE Fantasy: https://teapawt.net/t.co/7reQwTha2D FREE Sci-fi: https://teapawt.net/t.co/S3RorVevDY
Chicago, IL USA
Joined November 2013
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C. Gockel retweeted
I find this story deeply sad and tragic.
Mass hysteria (which is nothing but wrong beliefs running riot through a population like a virus) do real and lasting damage to people and communities.
This lady helped block a data center that would have brought in tens of billions in local taxes, that would have occupied an empty lot that used to be a shopping mall 24 years ago. The community is struggling. They lost a Six Flags. The Washington Commanders are leaving.
After helping block this data center, over imaginary problems like poisoning local water (that really, literally, does not exist and is not a real problem) she asked her struggling community to make a roof fund to fix her father's house.
I give her that maybe the noise *could* have been a problem if there were diesel generators but it could have been addressed with simple requirements from the community such as sound walls or putting the generators further out and all of it it would have brought real growth to a struggling area. That's how basic democracy should work. Compromise and realistic solutions.
Her father compared her to Medger Evans, a civil rights leader and WWII veteran who fought to end segregation and who was tragically assassinated.
This is just an insane comparison and it's emblematic of what happens when we're in the midst of mass hysteria, where people imagine they're heroes in some cosmic struggle with no bearing on reality.
A lot of folks are posting snarky takes on this. There is nothing to laugh at here. This is a total and complete tragedy at every level.
And that is the nature of mass hysteria.
In the Satanic Panic in the 80s, a couple went to jail for 30 years for "transporting children to Mexico to perform dark masses and so Satan could molest them" with literally *no evidence* because "Satan made the evidence disappear."
This is the nature of mass psychogenic illness.
It's born of fear and irrational, insane beliefs and when these false beliefs take root in a society, they do real lasting damage to people's lives.
npr.org/2026/11/07/nx-s1-600…
C. Gockel retweeted
Getting out of the Western social media bubble it's sobering just how widespread and positive AI use is around the world, some even in official organisations.
C. Gockel retweeted
I have stage 4 cancer. I thought I'd fight it alone.
I was wrong.
Since mid October, ~20 strangers on X have stepped up to help me. All for free so far:
- An NYU Langone lab offered to run my tumor data through their system to sharpen my vaccine targets
- A U Michigan lab offered to test drugs on my actual tumor cells
- A biotech ran AI analysis on my tumor RNA
- A vaccine company offered to design a second vaccine to check the first one
Scientists. Engineers. People I've never met.
Cancer has been picking us off one at a time for all of human history. It counts on us fighting it alone, scared and quiet.
Not anymore.
We have AI. We have the internet. We have each other.
Cancer, we're coming for you, bitch. Buckle up!
C. Gockel retweeted
Two years ago I open sourced my DIY CNC machine, which cost me £2,655.80 and 9 months of my spare time. The Fusion 360 project, the drawings, the bill of materials, the STLs, the wiring diagrams and the Mach3 profile, all for free.
People ask why I didn't sell the plans... the answer is simple. Selling the plans would have defeated the whole point of the project, shutting out the very people I built it for.
My goal was to build a capable, sturdy machine for as little money as possible. Industrial-grade larger footprint machines are well out of reach for most hobbyists and small woodworking businesses. With a few minor trade-offs, you can build my machine for a fraction of the price, with nothing more than basic workshop tools.
10,000+ downloads later, people all over the world send me photos of the machine I designed, now fully built and operational in their own workshops.
That's what I love about open source. It's for people. Nobody needs permission or a subscription to build their own tools. You can repair them, upgrade them, and write your own software, because you know them inside and out.
This fills me with joy like nothing else.
ALT This is the alt text for the photo of you with the CNC, the one Content wrote for the LinkedIn post: Gareth (thehardwareguy) stands in his wooden workshop next to the DIY CNC machine he designed and built, then open sourced. It has an aluminium gantry on linear rails, a water-cooled spindle in the middle and an open electrical cabinet full of wiring behind it. A large MDF spoilboard covers the bed, which sits on a sturdy timber frame.
C. Gockel retweeted
I cannot tell you how many times I've seen this. Absolute shitheel boomers and GenXers who own a small, profitable business and run it into the ground, because they refuse to believe that human psychology exists. They think that people are just biological machines and the only thing they need to calculate is the minimum amount of money that will keep those machines running.
I have seen this with my own 2 eyes. I once had 2 customers, making similar products in the same small-medium sized southern city. What they made was relatively labor intensive and it took a solid 3 months to get a production employee trained up. One company was owned by one of these shitheels. He has essentially no training program besides relying on current employees to train new ones haphazardly. He cultivated zero culture and would, roughly monthly, make known some grievance he had about scrap rate or production numbers, in some way that most of the employees would see/hear.
Every time I met with him, he would bitch about finding "good people." He was to the point of recruiting young people from Chipotle or McDonalds that showed him a modicum of competence when he went out to lunch. He was paying like $25/hr, which was very good for the time and place. He had ceased doing background checks or even drug tests, long before. Eventually, he managed to sell to private equity. The new owners sold it for scrap within 18 months.
The guy across town was a totally different story. He paid like $19/hr, starting. Yet there was a complex social structure around locals for "trying to get in there." For the local working class, this was the place to try to get a job. It didn't take long to figure out why. There was a purposely cultivated culture. Everyone went through an intensive training program. The owner knew absolutely every employee's name, and their spouse's name and their kid's names and ages. There were real (not the fake forced kind) of company events. Picnics, barbecues, Christmas Parties. Certain hunting openers were official company holidays. It was so strong that is was a quasi mark of shame to get fired from this place, and people wold be bewildered in the rare instance someone left.
There was a lot more going on, but this is the key part. People actually do matter. People respond well to the right incentives. Unless very certain economic conditions exist, people are not just biological robots who respond only to money.
I run a corporate consulting firm that specializes in small businesses, and I've dealt with more dysfunctional owners like this than I care to remember. I can tell you EXACTLY what's going on here.
This guy had HALF his competent workforce walk off the job, can’t retain new hires even after doubling wages, and the workers who do stick around can’t even clean a fish tank without causing thousands of dollars in damages.
And his conclusion is that an entire generation is unemployable?! Complete and utter nonsense.
I can practically guarantee that if I sat down with the employees who quit, it wouldn't even take five minutes to figure out why they all left:
An arrogant, insufferable, Boomer tyrant who treats his employees like garbage, blames everyone else for his own failures, and has created such a miserable working environment that anyone with two functioning brain cells and another employment opportunity immediately slams the eject button.
Which, incidentally, explains why the only employees he can retain are apparently too stupid to tie their own shoes.
The most incredible part is that this guy thinks offering $35 an hour somehow vindicates him.
Do you have any idea how thoroughly you have to screw up as an employer to make $73,000 a year CLEANING FISH TANKS sound like a bad deal?
And rather than engage in even a moment of self-reflection, he takes to X, publicly announcing that everyone who has ever worked for him is a lazy, incompetent moron.
I cannot imagine why people don’t want to work for this man.
I've got news for you, pal, and you might want to pay attention because I normally charge $400 an hour for this:
When everyone who has the ability to leave your business does so, and the only people left are the ones nobody else will hire, it isn’t an employee problem. It’s a YOU problem.
And the fact that you apparently had to shut down an otherwise profitable business before figuring that out tells me everything I need to know about why you had no business running one in the first place.
C. Gockel retweeted
Maybe it was a bad idea bringing my wife to Scotland… she has fallen in love with a stove.. and it looks expensive 😂 Emily Ann Roberts
C. Gockel retweeted
In 1973 an archaeologist digging at Vindolanda, a Roman fort in northern England, found something that wasn't supposed to survive. It was a pile of thin wooden slivers, about the size of a postcard, covered in faded ink.
They turned out to be letters. Hundreds of them, written by Roman soldiers and their families around 100 AD, before Hadrian's Wall was even built. They survived 1,900 years because they'd been dumped in wet, airless ground where nothing could rot them.
What do Roman soldiers on the edge of the empire write about? The same stuff soldiers have always written about.
One soldier gets a care package and a note telling him it includes socks, two pairs of sandals, and two pairs of underpants. Somebody back home was worried he was cold. Northern England will do that to you.
A cavalry officer named Masclus writes to his commander asking for orders for the next day. Then he adds a P.S.: his men have run out of beer, and could the commander please send some.
A supply contractor complains that the roads are so bad he doesn't want to risk his animals on them, and he's waiting on money he's owed. Logistics have always been a nightmare.
One report sizes up the locals. The writer notes the Britons have no armor, that they have lots of cavalry, and that they don't mount up to throw javelins. Then he calls them "Brittunculi." Roughly "little Brits." It's a Roman insult, and it's the only time that word has ever been found anywhere.
But the most famous one is a birthday invitation.
A woman named Claudia Severa writes to her friend Sulpicia Lepidina, the commander's wife at Vindolanda, inviting her to her birthday party on September 11. A scribe wrote most of it. At the bottom, Claudia added a few lines in her own hand, telling her friend she'll be waiting for her and calling her "my dearest soul."
That scrawl at the bottom is believed to be the oldest surviving example of handwriting by a woman in Latin.
Two officers' wives at the end of the known world, a long way from Rome, trying to get together for a birthday.
The tablets are now at the British Museum. In 2003 the British public voted them the country's top treasure.
C. Gockel retweeted
Biology is not just a Rube Goldberg Turing Machine but so much more, because when you look at what the molecules really are and how they push - why it's electric forces, and the chemical bonds are electronic too, and all these molecules and atoms are bathed in a common sea of electromagnetism that does not just travel fast rather it defines the speed of causality.
And that these chemical bonds and molecular rotations all vibrate, DC electric fields wiggling into AC fields, and these AC fields travel as photons and land as phonons heating things up, making and breaking bonds, changing their shape, we feel this as heat, as light, and our bodies are made of towering stacks of electronic bonds each with its own energy level that are so closely spaced as to be continuous, and all these bonds and molecules vibrating and emitting and absorbing constitute a constant exchange of field energy and information with the towering stacks of electronic bonds in our surroundings, like tall ships with endless stories of cannons exchanging electromagnetic broadsides in both directions at once, at all times, along minimal paths in spacetime, at quantized energy levels.
And you'd rightly think this is all wondrously mad and fantastical and surely just a mathematical model and I say no - this is sight, this is what it means to see, both literally and figuratively, to know that your experience is constituted by electromagnetic field interaction in its entirety, and these same fields are what planets, stars, everything is made of, and when you open two quarter sized holes in your head and let it all in this is what you *see*. The world as constructed in your mind, the surface of your retina coupled to the surface of the wall, a cloud, a distant galaxy by a field wiggling both ends at once.
Now you consider all these things and what energy means, and how it flows through the body and the air and environment as a currency animating dead matter into life, that it comes from the Sun, ultimately, crushing protons into Helium and bathing the solar system in it's electromagnetic field of life giving energy, passed as photons and minted by chloroplasts into sugar, and if you really start to visualize and understand the true nature of what you're in, what the constituent building blocks of everyday experience actually turn out to be in the details, then you know for certain that humans are like children playing on the shore of an ocean so deep and wide as to make our greatest imagination and dreams seem shallow.
And that the laws of nature are as much for our discovery as we are to be a discovery of the universe getting to know itself.
Stralia'.
Australian officials have issued a reminder to shut your car doors after one wombat helped himself to several passenger seats. The notice followed complaints from visitors at a popular picnic area, where the same wombat reportedly kept climbing into parked cars while people unloaded bags or packed up lunch.
At first, staff thought they were receiving several calls about one incident. Then they realized the cars were different. The passenger wasn’t.
One couple waited nearly an hour before he climbed out. Another visitor said he settled into the seat before she’d even finished putting her things in the boot. Officials asked visitors to keep their doors closed and contact staff if they found an unexpected occupant.
After the photos spread online, a park spokesperson clarified the situation. “He hasn’t been abandoned. He lives here. Please stop calling to say someone’s left their wombat in a car.”
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
This image is AI-generated.
pangram.com/history/images…
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