It's worth remembering with all the bad shit that happened, is happening, and is yet to happen:
American voters WANT this.
Nobody was tricked into putting trump back into office. All the data necessary to make a well informed decision at the ballot box was freely available for years. People chose to be misinformed so they could continue to vote as they were always going to.
This is who America is. I believe America can change for the better. But first, we must be honest about who we are.
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Y'know, on some level it's really funny how we burned billions of dollars to build a machine that can lie to us about how many "r"s there are in "strawberry" and then when someone did the same thing for millions instead of billions everyone started freaking out.
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So I'm rereading Pterry Pratchett's GUARDS! GUARDS! and I swear to you, that book is a phenomenal meditation on how tyranny can sweep a reasonably peaceful nation, and what needs to be done to dislodge draconian rulers.
Now more relevant than ever.
[#]Books
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Are there any tabletop RPGs where the entire world is a simulation, its denizens are aware they are simulated, and the player characters in particular are aware they're being played by actual people in the real world, and the goal is to break free? Like sometimes the character you play actively tries to resist you, the player?
I'm tempted to go crazy with this idea if someone hasn't done so already.
[#]TTRPG
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US presidents can't be charged for crimes committed as part of "official acts." Presidents also have absolute pardon power for federal crimes. So a US president can directly order someone to commit a federal crime and then pardon them, and neither of them will ever be charged.
If someone came to me with a game design like that, they'd be laughed out of the room. And yet here we are, running a nuclear-armed nation like this.
Cool.
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I distinctly remember joking about this exact thing (different, custom-tailored prices based on how much the customer can pay) about a year ago or so.
I can already see vulture capital feverishly figuring out an app that people with high credit scores can use to have people with low credit scores do the grocery shopping for them for those sweet, sweet discounts.
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/retail-grocery-automation-esl-kroger/
"It's one banana, Michael, what could it cost, ${PRODUCE4011_CREDIT_ADJUSTED}?"
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In 2017, trump did an Oval Office interview with CBS Washington correspondent John Dickerson, and when pressed about some shit he said, he responded with this:
Nothing that followed, continues to follow, should be a surprise to anyone.
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me, catching up on the week's news
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...so I say to the guy, "Dude, that's not even my pig!" Haha, hilarious!
Anyway, I'm back. What'd I miss?
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I think everyone's takes on the TikTok ban are frankly stupid and wrong.
The REAL point of interest here is what happens to a social media platform when you ban all Americans from it.
Like, it'd be awesome if the ban stayed in place for like a year, and then we can see how the platform's culture evolved without American contributors.
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I'm the lone neurotypical in a house where everyone else has ADHD, BPD, and probably some form of anxiety disorder, and today I had to emotionally coregulate three people at once.
I'm fucking fried, dude. I feel like I wanna just crawl into a cave and sleep for a couple of months, but I have neither the fat reserves nor the cave, so here I am.
I love these people, but fucking hell, man.
EDIT: Bipolar, not BPD. Like I said, my brain is soup right now.
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What if Fox News is the biggest TV news network precisely because they tell people exactly the kind of lies that'll let them continue to do what they were going to do to begin with?
You cannot force a person to eat healthy. Everyone knows the benefits of eating nutritious food and moderate exercise. Yet millions of Americans still pig out and sit on the couch all day knowing full well they're eating themselves into an early grave, because that's what they want.
So it is with their media diet.
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An abhorrent thought occurred to me.
It's well documented that people who get their news from right-leaning outlets and social media (but I repeat myself) are more misinformed. The conclusion most people draw from this is that if people stopped watching those news, they'd stop voting for monsters.
What if that's backwards?
What if people don't vote R because they watch Fox News, but they watch Fox News because they vote R? What if they WANT to be lied to so they can keep voting how they want?
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Not content with only ruining our night skies and our ozone layer with his stupid and useless Starstink satellites, E.Morlock is also ruining our oceans and coastal wildlands with his trash-tier rockets that won't stop blowing up.
Y'know, at least Bezos had the guts to fly on one of his own rockets; I think it's high time E.Morlock went on a ride on his dumb Starshit spacecraft.
https://universeodon.com/@revesdespace/113850739350699276
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Another fun thought: The incoming administration's decision to deregulate the living daylights out of cryptocurrency is going to make a handful of insanely rich people even more rich, propel a small number of stupid lucky people into unexpected and fabulous wealth, and make everyone else a lot poorer.
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You can broadly sort people among two axes: clever/stupid, and lazy/productive.
You know the drill: clever/productive does middle management, stupid/lazy does line work, clever/lazy goes to R&D.
Stupid and productive people are agents of chaos, a scourge that must not be allowed anywhere near any kind of responsibility. They're best suited for inconsequential busywork that is not mission critical.
Incidentally, that also perfectly describes A.I. agents.
[#]AI
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I get why legacy media are confused, offended, upset by, and silent about the fediverse.
The big journals are click farms now. As such, they need "engagement,” and they've (correctly, I think) concluded that absent an algorithmic feed that can be exploited to force-feed visitors the artless drivel they call journalism, people will not engage with their shit.
So without a way to put their fingers on the algorithmic scale, they don't get clicks; no clicks, no ad revenue.
Hence their disdain.
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Everyone's talking about Q3 and Q4 metrics and what our KPIs look like and how we're going to really juice the roadmap, and I'm thinking to myself, humans weren't meant to measure time in Qs.
We were meant to measure our path through time by the motion of stars and planets in a clear night sky.
Do product management based on solstices and equinoxes, is what I'm saying. Make project managers more like wizened old Druids and less like angry accountants. Live a little.
[#]OfficeLife #WaterCooler
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It'd be refreshing if one of trump's Cabinet picks said during a confirmation hearing, "Look, we both know I could be unmasked as the Long Island Puppy Kicker and it still wouldn't change one vote in this proceeding, so why don't we stop pretending like any of this matters and just get to the part where I am voted in."
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Most Americans do not have $1,000 to donate to a political candidate. Even if they did, making that kind of donation would be remarkably stupid; in a toss-up race (where big donations are usually headed) you're basically flipping a coin on whether you burn your money or get a candidate who'll hopefully maintain democracy.
Billionaires, on the other hand, have tens to hundreds of millions of dollars they won't even notice being spent.
Remember that next time you get a political donation text.
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