Also, many people don’t have a choice.

Pure Stockholm Syndrome.

I don’t want electric cars. I want electric trains.

Her manager let her work

Truly magnanimous

Its a self-perpetuating cycle. Set aside the normally deplorable state of YouTube comments. Once you hit a critical mass of “Neat!” and “I liked it 💖🇺🇸🎆” and “Prussy en bi0” comments, why the hell would you bother reading much less participating? Then human interactions tank and its Oops! All Bots! in short order.

I am less annoyed by YouTube being shit and more annoyed by 3rd party websites clinging to YouTube for their video hosting needs because it is free. I’m also annoyed by the degree to which scrappers and other automation tools have made “Are You A Bot?” filters necessary to conserve the (relatively) limited resources of big retail web front-ends.

Like, fuck YouTube, sure. But they’re not putting these blocks up for the thrill of it. They’re trying to limit served content to actual humans rather than automated engines intended to juice view counts and harvest “free” data for AI training.

In this day and age with everyone carrying a smartphone, there’s no excuse for using work computers for personal activities

There are plenty of reasons, mostly amounting to “Nobody tends to give a fuck” and “I’m not running out to buy a second high end laptop just to casually browse the web from my couch on the weekend”.

What you’ve got is a very poorly enforced, very draconianly executed set of deliberately vague and inarticulate rules that vary from company to company. And none of that really has anything to do with the “kill switch” thing. In the same way you might say “Well but obviously nobody should smoke weed in a state that criminalizes it! That’s just stupid!” when you’ve got the police tearing apart a particular person’s house for a completely unrelated issue, based on an officer’s exclamation of “I smell weed!” at the front porch.

Just accept you live in a police state and stop buying into excuses made to surveil and punish.

The founding fathers never anticipated such dick-headery

George Washington was the richest man in the New World at the time of his Presidency. Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and John Jay weren’t far behind. And quite a few of them (particularly the Federalists) were notorious for the wealth they accrued on currency and commodity speculation. That was one of the sticking points of the First National Bank. Whomever controlled it could effectively finance scams and flim-flams at a rate unheard of prior to the institution of modern banking.

Go ahead and sell books you’ve never read nevermind haven’t written, and memecoins to dumb twats after you are out if you want, but this shit can’t happen in active office.

This is the whole reason people seek active office. Politics is just another avenue of celebrity, with the bonus of influencing policy in such a way that you can direct public spending into private pockets. This is the latest means of doing so. But its an age old tradition, older than the nation itself.

Idk about the sole point. Lots of people speculated on them believing there wouldn’t be a rug pull within hours of the coin’s official launch. Crypto is the new Box of Rocks. All advertisement, no substance.

I think you’d be surprised to discover how many people speak English as a second language, thanks to its extensive use in business and law. Even (perhaps especially) in China, where US-Chinese trade relations have been going strong since Nixon shook hands with Mao.

Only in the last ten years has the relationship between Wall Street and Hong Kong/Shanghai degraded and the appeal of English as a business language fallen by the wayside.

Been happening for a lot longer than we like to admit. Students coming to the US for education and then returning home to work have been the norm since the early '00s, on account of the US higher education system being highly subsidized by the States and Feds. This made US education relatively cheap for its quality, especially at the state university level.

But that was good, actually, because we became a nexus of research and development. Lots of students came, got education, and left. Lots more stayed around, lured by the high paying jobs at domestic firms. A few even joined the education staff of the universities themselves. A bit of brain drain was fine, so long as we produced far more than we lost.

Now we’re just hemorrhaging talent and expertise because we no longer value the work product of the professional classes. We’re pricing people out of public universities and imposing strict ideological tests on the students we do let in. We’re going full eugenics mode on senior staff and administration. And we’re turning education more and more into a means of profiting off credentialing than accruing working knowledge or performing independent research.

America is dismantling all of its socialist institutions.

Like many industry observers accurately stated that the shortages will subside long before any of the CHIPS spending could even possibly make a difference.

If you consider advanced microprocessors a strategic asset, the immediate short-term pinch in supply isn’t the problem. Its the long-term overseas outsourcing of production to regions we consider at high risk of foreign conflicts (Taiwan and South Korea). Simply moving finished chips across the Pacific Ocean is its own strategic problem.

One could easily argue that our steadily ratcheted hostilities toward China, Russia, and Iran is the actual root cause of our problems. And we’d do well to in-source production for supply flow reasons, but our real panacea might be to simply stop fucking around at the periphery of a rival imperial power.

But if you consider the Russian, Chinese, and Iranian peoples as inherently adversarial to the American way of life (on account of them hating us for our freedoms), then relying on Samsung and TMSC as your primary supply of chipsets seems imprudent.

Of course, if you wanted to give the economy any hope for viable electronics while also massively screwing over imports, this would have been your shot. So it seems strategically at odds with the whole “make domestic manufucating happen” rhetoric.

A big central problem of the US chips strategy is that we’re not building capacity, we’re building investment incentives. The goal is to make local manufacturing profitable rather than productive. But that’s at the root of the ideological divide between American and the BRICS we’re positioning ourselves in opposition to.

We wouldn’t be threatening war with these countries if we had a strong global socio-economic consensus.

Define ‘violent.’

No. You will simply receive a warning if we don’t like your activity on the site.

Really, what are you doing interacting with this website to begin with? Stop posting. Stop commenting. Stop voting.

Just. Consume. The. Content.

We need your eyeballs for the ads. Everything else is driving up our costs.

Doesn’t going to McD cost quite a lot compared to the amount of nutrition you get?

Heavy in calories, light in fiber and vitamins and the like. Also, the heavy sugar/salt content dehydrates you, leading to further food cravings. Its trash. Very bad for you for a whole host of reasons. But its a full meal that can go straight into the trash when you’re done. No cooking, no cleaning. You don’t even have to leave your car.

Ugh, I just made myself kebab and fries and haven’t had McD for ages

Hey, far be it for me to criticize the kebab shop. Definitely preferable to the crap McDs turns out, and arguably cheaper/faster to get your hands on while somehow being healthier to boot. I don’t think its a coincidence that kebab shops are all over the Houston downtown and underground, while the last McDs pulled out years ago.

Good street food is a blessing. But its also contingent on a dense walkable neighborhood. Far easier to find some good gyros in NYC, LA, or downtown Houston than out in the white boy 'burbs and exurbs.

unless they have your order ready when you drive into the parking lot, there’s several dishes I could cook as fast as it takes for you to go pick up a brown bag.

Sure. When you’ve got a stocked fridge and a clean kitchen and a working knowledge of home economics, its can work.

If you said “doesn’t have the energy to cook” I’d get it but time/energy, eh pretty interchangeable.

There’s also the simple addictive quality of high salt, high sugar, high fat foods made to order.

How would making food at home be more expensive than McDonald’s ?

Time is money and if you can’t afford the time to cook and clean, you’re stuck brown-bagging it at a fast food restaurant.

Is this some sort of an American thing I’m too European to understand?

It’s a consequence of American suburban life. Transit time costs are enormous. If you’re throwing an hour+ into your commute, you often don’t have time to cook. Fast food lets you grab a meal and eat in the car on the way home.

The advertising model has changed, but the food is still slop and the goal is still to draw in big families who can’t afford to make dinner. What’s changed over the last forty years has been the means by which people are incentivized to enter the building. You’re no longer trying to bait children from the side of the road with a big van that says “Free Candy”. Instead, you’re focusing on bombarding kids with advertisements on YouTube streams and targeting parents with gamified repeat customer incentives. But they’ve also focused more on getting customers out the door than in, improving the speed and reducing the front-facing staff, such that customers are encouraged to get their food and leave rather than linger in kid-friendly private sector daycares.

Tech itself is not the issue. How it’s applied is the issue.

At this point, I would argue that technology is the issue. Or, at least, the current iteration of it.

Internal Combustion Engines, always-on internet connections, and digital financial systems are generating real physical hazards that stretch beyond their benefits. This isn’t just an issue of use. There is no “proper” method of employing - for instance - cryptocurrency or single-use plastics or a statewide surveillance network that doesn’t result in a degradation of quality of life for the population at large. To take a more dramatic angle, there’s no safe application of a nuclear bomb.

When the iEye app notifies you that the enzyme is running low, simply crack open an ice cold, refreshing can of Tesla Cola Zero to refuel your device for another two hours. Need to sleep? We got you.

Except this isn’t a technological innovation, its a Science Fantasy. iEye isn’t a real thing. Tesla Cola Zero isn’t a real thing. Not needing sleep isn’t a real thing. You’re not a cyborg and you will never be a cyborg.

But the science fantasy is still having its own cost. People are making real material nationally-transformative (or de-transformative) decisions based on the fantastic promises we’ve been sold about Tomorrow. We’re underdeveloping our mass transit infrastructure and relying entirely too much on unregulated air travel to speed up travel. At the same time, we’re clinging to old bunker-fuel laden container ships and decimating the aquatic ecology, because we refuse to adapt proven nuclear powered shipping that’s over 60 years old at this point. We’re investing more and more and more money in digital surveillance and personal tracking. We’re off-loading our ability to collect and process information to unreliable digital tools (LLMs being only the latest in overhyped AI as a replacement for professionalized human labor). And then we’re trying to justify the bad decisions we make as a result by claiming secret wisdom inherent in machines.

We’re eating our seed corn after being told technologists will eliminate our need to eat ever again.

This is a direct result of technological developments we have made (or promised to make and failed to deliver) over the last twenty years. Revolutions in racial profiling, viral marketing, planned obsolescence, military expansionism, and genocide have not improved our quality of life in any material sense.

The cow has not benefited from industrial agriculture. And the prole has not benefited from de-skilling of labor.

Straight into mid-Feb, I was seeing journalists at The Economist and Financial Times repeating the “Take Trump seriously but not literally” mantra, insisting he wasn’t about to start a trade war.

Business conservatives were fully bought in on Trump just saying this to fleece the rubes. They assumed he’d be surrounded by the same old Wall Street Republicans that had been running the party since the McKinley Administration.

But if you’ve ever actually picked up a copy of The Network State or read a few chapters from Thiel’s Zero to One, you’d understand this isn’t Dick Cheney’s administration. These people really do believe a highly segregated and heavily policed series of balkinized libertarian enclaves is the future of the country. Trump is executing a plan that’s so far outside the neoliberal economics we’ve been growing up under that guys like Cornell couldn’t see it coming.

I fail to see the part where another country’s welfare is your problem, Israel.

It’s their problem because its occupied territory. Under the Geneva Conventions, what they’re doing should have invoked an international intervention years ago. Israel has been able to dictate what moves into and out of Gaza for over a decade and explicitly calculated calories entering the region as a means of gradually starving out the population.

Wikileaks has published diplomatic cables that showed Israel told U.S. officials in 2008 it would keep Gaza’s economy “on the brink of collapse” while avoiding a humanitarian crisis. To circumvent the blockade, Palestinians have brought in tonnes of goods through smuggling tunnels dug under Gaza’s border with Egypt.

This was, incidentally, one of the provocations of the Oct 7th attacks. Gazans were starving. They broke out across the militarized border to raid for food and other basic living supplies.

Crazy how they just gave up on the Narnia series. You’d think the original YA novel series would have been easy to punch up and deliver as AAA Cinema slop. Instead the whole thing fell apart inside three films (the first two of which were fairly well received, and riding tight on the LotR blockbuster adaptation, to boot).

I guess it was just too many characters, too much technical expertise, and too much hard work. Far easier to release a bunch of Sound of Freedom tier psycho-sexual thrillers. Something you can film with a handy cam, a fist full of confused child actors, and a dime bag of columbian white to get Jim Caviezel zooted out of his gord.