I’ve stopped.being surprised when online comedians run out of material and just start lifting it from other comedians

I have poor circulation (possibly Raynaud’s Disease) so sandals without extra insulation have been a painful prospecr for two decades.

And somehow voyeurism is still illegal.

No,it only looks dead. It was holding still to get measured.

Look. I don’t come here to be verbally abused.

100%. The mechanism is (I think) this: legally, there’s nobody to prosecute or sue, now.

In the early 2000s some of us who were Way Too Online learned this lesson: A major pillar of internet security, a company whose entire reason for existing was to protect its customers’ personal information, went bankrupt and sold all its customer data to the highest (or possibly just first) bidder.

No matter how “trustworthy” the company, no matter what their Terms and Conditions say, no matter how “solid” their “values,” everyone sells your data when they go bankrupt.

(And most of them will do it long before then)

Does this mean kernels will be less stable? Big changes all at once seem to imply that, generally.

It hasn’t always been. That is what sucks about this.

Oh, has he had a change of heart? A few months ago he was being dragged on mastodon for telling everyone to stop complaining about AI.

I never said we get what we think we’re refusing to pay for, just that Americans think they can get something for nothing.

This is a thing at my university (I work there). I talked to one of the library folks about it years ago. She explained that (a) they would like to keep way more of the books but there’s not enough funding to have the space or staff for it–our school is in constant and recently much more intense financial crisis, laying off all kinds of people (except deans and provosts); (b) a lot of this stuff literally nobody wants, like 4th and 5th and 10th copies of mediocre textbooks rehashing the content done much better by other texts, and © yes, if I wanted to fill my car with books and rescue them I was welcome to do so.

A lot of it (definitely not all of it) seems to be that Americans want things and don’t want to pay for them. They demand care for the elderly but refuse to pay what it costs to staff a decent facility. They want healthcare but refuse to pay what healthcare workers are worth. But far more than that, they refuse to pay more than absolutely minimal taxes, unless they are terrified into doing so–fear of foreigners, Black people, immigrants, communism, etc. They’ve been believing politicians for decades who promise them the moon with no tax increases.

So Americans want healthcare but refuse to vote for a candidate who will divert money from cops or weapons toward making it affordable. They want college education for all their kids but keep voting for candidates who are Tough On Crime and Tough On Government Corruption while dodging questions about funding public education. They want better wages and jobs but keep voting for “pro business” candidates who remove regulations so companies can outsource the jobs to nations with cheaper labor. They want cheaper prices on everything but keep voting for candidates who block antitrust regulations and remove barriers to shareholder stock buybacks.

There’s just enough distance between the voting decisions and their consequences that voters can convince themselves–they’re motivated to–that the consequences are not connected to their decisions, and they’re always provided with a raft of rationalizations in case they figure it out. It’s motivated reasoning on top of ignorance. Like all good cons, these prey on the selfishness and greed of the hundred million or so marks.

Badge of honor

Oh, cool. Until now I thought “rough sleeping” was just the British term for homeless (TIL).

I think that is a reasonable take. It is s huge jump, in many ways, so I believe it is much more dangerous than other capitalist “innovations”.

There are lots of things going on at once and all of them are valid. I struggle, too. My life is pretty good, from a global standard, while many, many others’ lives are much worse. Happiness is wildly unevenly distributed.

Well, I guess I was warned.

Reasonable take, but the last part (“faster-growing”) is huge here. The sheer scale and multipliers on the bad things caused by AI are far beyond most (all?) previous technologies used by capitalists.

IDK if any of this is what it looks like, but it’s in the context of complete diplomatic incompetence for a decade. None of these people know what they are doing on the international stage. They made their careers as US mob bosses and bullies pretending to be politicians, and don’t understand anything beyond that scope. When Trump could no longer pull world leaders off balance with stupid handshake tricks, he looked like an idiot for a while. Whenever he or his lackeys encounter someone who can’t be bribed, intimidated, or extorted they sputter like Elmer Fudd because they have no other tools.