Uriel238 [all pronouns]

It’s because of guys like Tuberville that I do not regard myself as a man anymore.

I mean seriously, masculinity currently is defined in media by folks like Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro and Joe Rogan (and before them, Donald Trump and Bill O’Reilly).

When I was a kid, masculinity was defined by the capacity to be responsible for a nuclear bomb and not launch it. Id est, to be able to take care of business without being petty. Then that just became common adulting, and everyone is supposed to do that.

And now we’ve got a man in office in the White House who is eager to launch nukes and end civilizations (and has had to be told no more than once regarding nuclear authorization).

First, the struggle to make sure everyone has enough food, shelter, clothes, etc.

Then we have to get people to do the jobs no-one wants to do. Either we automate them or make the job tolerable. Until then, we might rotate workers in and out of duty, spreading the discomfort.

Then we have to adjust to the increased demand for some resources. Just as plumbing increased the demand for water (but also vastly improved living conditions) so will many other resources follow. Getting it all going while keeping it sustainable will be tricky.

And then, someday, maybe centuries later, post-scarcity communism. And according to the Fourth International–Posadists, this will be a prerequisite before we colonize space, or other worlds.

I think, once we regard greed and power consolidation as a treatable illness, human society can do this. But I don’t yet comprehend a complete path from here to there.

My wife telling me that she can’t deal with me anymore in November 2024. We were together for twelve years. TBH, I was also sore that Trump just won the election despite that Project 2025 was public knowledge, so I was super vulnerable already, and her departure pushed me into a long-term psychotic break.

I had been getting progressively crazier in the years leading to her announcement. My psychotherapist discontinued my service to go on maternity leave some years before and I had then moved to Sacramento. Then the COVID-19 epidemic hit, everyone needed psychotherapy and so they all stopped taking Medicare since their schedules were packed with better payers. And then they all burned out.

So I went without mental health care for years figuring I could deal better than those who are not used to being crazy. Evidently not so.

There are more factors. Her job in construction was going south so she changed jobs to a non-profit that helps victims of human trafficking (and is still brutally busy but is far more fulfilled by her work), and the income difference affected our lifestyle.

More Perfect Union did a video on Google’s descent into evil. I think it’s this one

TLDW: Once Google pivoted from being a search service to an advertising agency, it was motivated to keep users from hyperlinking away from Google, and so offered summaries and alternatives controlled by Alphabet that allowed it to keep offering you ads.

So this AI service is just a natural iteration.

We learned that a lot of jobs are this thanks to the RTO mandates after COVID-19 pressured companies to let everyone telecommute when possible.

Two things seemed to mainly motivate people to return to office, even though it cost more in commute time and fuel and workers productivity suffered at the office. One was that companies were still leasing office space that was now mostly empty, and that made upper management sad. And the other is that a lot of clerical jobs are just there as the entourage of executive aristocracy.

The boss missed forcing his secretary to fetch him coffee on command.

Curiously, when I saw it, I picked up that the guy was crazy and violent, and saw it as a horror film following the monster.

Years later, I’d learn that it was popularly seen as a white-guy underdog movie set (and produced) during the Rodney King crisis and the police war on gangs.

One article pointed out it takes $200 for a date, while another points out Zoomers are just not having that much sex, nor are they into romantic relationships.

Maybe if you work a people too hard and give them no hope for a future; if they can’t afford to have a life, they may not want to have kids.

The world started getting really terrible around Trump’s first term and I just kept getting more and more depressed. I went from blogging a couple times a week to once a month to not at all.

Here

Unchecked, power consolidates. Marx notes in Das Kapital the Capitalist will always seek to capture regulatory bodies in the name of profit.

The goal, thus, becomes to distribute political power (including wealth) as diffusely and evenly as possible, and create a system that checks efforts from outside to attack and break its integrity.

The USSR was beleaguered from the beginning by sanctions by the rest of the western world, as pressured by President Wilson. As problematic as the Leninist model was, we don’t know how it would have fared if it were left to engage with the world on its own terms.

Considering his continuous use of the Sleepy Joe epithet for Biden (who was far, far from this sleepy), it really highlights the notion that every accusation is a confession.

The cult leader always is excepted to his own rules.

The Reddit API situation brought me here. It’s a much nicer crew.

I don’t know who wrote the characters. Some developers in Ubisoft in the early 2010s, I presume. Looking at the extensive credits, I never found a name that I recognized.

It could all be coincidence, but there’s a significant amount of similarity.

In Watch Dogs 2 the initial hackerspace is in the basement of a game store in the lower Haight in San Francisco, which smacks smartly of Gamescape on Divisadero Street between Oak and Fell. It’s still there according to Google, even though everything around it was gentrified out of existence, including the cheap flat I lived in.

I’m pretty sure my years as a Gamescape regular inspired the character Josh Sauchak. I lived with the woman who probably inspired Sitara Dhawan, and we are pretty sure of the identity of the guy who inspired Wrench.

I suffer from major depression and have since I was a kid. I was diagnosed at fifty to be ASD and a recent assessment in March confirmed I’m spectrum AF.

I worked for a few years and was nearly driven to suicide and have been on disability ever since. Not a bad thing. All my career hopes either required education and credentials I couldn’t ever afford to acquire, or had spirit-crushing consequences (e.g. crunching, which practically all video-game developers are required to suffer).

We often have better perspective regarding other people’s troubles than we do our own.

We’re also often still wrong about it, anyway.

To paraphrase Bill Nye, eye protection on; if you raise the cost of fossil fuels, fewer people will use them; eye protection off.

The phrase “I voted for this” has become a common thing for far-right supporters of Trump to say when something particularly brutal has happened to their political opponents.

I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it, If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you. – Lyndon B. Johnson, attributed by Bill Moyers

Training AI on copyrighted material is no more illegal or unethical than training human beings on copyrighted material (from library books or borrowed books, nonetheless!). And trying to challenge the veracity of generative AI systems on the notion that it was trained on copyrighted material only raises the specter that IP law has lost its validity as a public good.

The only valid concern about generative AI is that it could displace human workers (or swap out skilled jobs for menial ones) which is a problem because our society recognizes the value of human beings only in their capacity to provide a compensation-worthy service to people with money.

The problem is this is a shitty, unethical way to determine who gets to survive and who doesn’t. All the current controversy about generative AI does is kick this can down the road a bit. But we’re going to have to address soon that our monied elites will be glad to dispose of the rest of us as soon as they can.

Also, amateur creators are as good as professionals, given the same resources. Maybe we should look at creating content by other means than for-profit companies.

Well I just lost some faith in the United States Air Force. Now I’m worried if we can trust them with General Electric 2.1 megaton hydrogen bombs. The USAF has more than a few.