100% - stop imagining. Go do it.
Get a $10 tin whistle, spend 15 minutes a day for one month practicing, go on a hike. At the top of the mountain / hill / in a field / near a brook - pull out the whistle and play “Black Velvet Band.” You may have to dance around a bit to get others to figure out WTF you’re on about, but they’ll join in. And they’ll tell the story for ages, hoping you come on the next hike.
Good on them! The kids these days are figuring out The Scam younger than I did. The powerful few prey on the weak many, until the weak many rise up.
The next part of the recurring tale is ugly.
WWII was really good at cleansing the global soul of fascism. But that deep cleansing gave us longer to forget. Longer to become complacent.
Not bad; even your office servers score a 10 out of 11 on a scale from 0 to 3. :)
Mike Myers on the stairs
Ohhh! They must have been referencing that! I haven’t seen Halloween. Thank you, for the enlightenment!
Solid format. Here’s a demo, using the most obvious examples I could think of.
I like your artwork, and I like the jittery pixels thing. But I can’t get this out of my head: Elwood Blues leaving the penguin’s office.
I agree - they do usually cite their sources well, even if they are presented in an over-the-top fashion. I appreciate the citations.
futurism .com links often seem like clickbait for people who are skeptical of the broligarchy.
I’m all for covering that side of the story - we need a lot more resistance against the oligarchy. But clickbait is sleazy no matter what story it’s pretending it can tell.
Coupling those things causes lock-in with little upside. My VPN and email provider have no symbiotic connection. Lift & Shift leverages the key value of the free market; competition. “Ecosystem” is marketing speak for captive customer, not customer value.
Diamonds are an excellent product with horrible labor practices. Decent people don’t use products made by malevolent companies. Moissanite is fine in place of diamonds for most uses, and it’s easy to replace Proton.
You can inflect them to imply all three things go in, but I prefer pausing after each comma, suggesting that the third item in the list includes “in the ass” as part of its identifier.
The machines of the oligarchs are not neutral to the oligarchy.
The majority are not in a position to understand that.
This is as dangerous, and more imminent, than runaway AGI.
Dear Proton Engineers,
He means they won’t do it yet, because the backlash is causing problems. Either because they fear the loss of customers, or because they fear the engineers leaving before getting their replacements trained.
I suspect some folks would poison the training while looking for another job.
At first, I wondered why Comer would be opposing this sort of oligarchy-engineering. Maybe he’s just sniffing around to get his cut? But it could be Niemöller’s ghost finally rising to a level that reaches Comer.
And the CEO said:
The oligarchs might love this, but the third string C-suite execs that dine with Comer at the finest gas-station barbecue place in Paducah? The AIs have finally come for them.
they need to hustle else they get fired from their fourth job.
The problem is; wait another year and it’ll be, “get fired from their fifth job.” Alas; getting to that point, enough times, is what it takes. Once there is no time left, and no money left, and no food left, and the littles are too listless even to cry.
Get to that point a few times (eg: 1789, 1848, 1968), and you start choosing to stand in the tear gas early.
Rarely has so much been owed by so many to one comment.
The loudest economists use economic theory as a cudgel. You are right to find them infuriating. They assert certainty where economics does not, and cherry pick exceptions to hold up as rules. They are to economics as RFK Jr is to medicine.
The math of economics is more like the math of epidemiology or fluid dynamics than the math of mechanical linkages. It describes how things tend to interact within a system, but a given element or interaction is unpredictable. Even concrete sections, like price theory, have contradictions like the velvet rope effect. It describes probable outcomes in a chaotic system running on irrational humans.
Meteorology is still a math-based science that makes useful predictions, even though it cannot say with certainty whether a particular tropical depression will become a hurricane.
Try Thomas Piketty, or Emmanuel Saez. Or if you want someone older, try Jean Jaurès. Just because rich people love sociopath economists doesn’t mean there aren’t good ones out there.
[edit: adding a snippet]:
Together with economists Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman, Saez’s work claims top earners in the United States have taken an increasingly larger share of overall income over the last three decades, with almost as much economic inequality as before the Great Depression. Saez recommends much higher marginal tax rates, of up to 70% or 90%. Among other honors, he received the John Bates Clark Medal in 2009 and a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2010.
I am serious. And stop calling me Shirley.