vexikron

vexikron, 3 months ago

Firstly: wow, an actual unpopular opinion!

Secondly: I will go so far as to say absolutely tooooons of people wear earrings that I personally find extremely silly, unfashionable, or outright gross.

Sorry ear plug people. They look goofy when theyre in and they look horrifying when theyre out.

Probably this opinion of mine comes from knowing a person who managed to get their … ear loop? caught on something and tear apart.

Also: I think its child abuse to force a 3 to 9 year old to get their ears pierced.

I used to date a person who worked at a Claire’s… and they would tell me that they would often, as in multiple times a week, have a family of recent immigrants from… India? Bangladesh? … come into the store, and they would have to physically restrain a screaming obviously unwilling child to get their ears pierced.

Anyway: I think it is too far to agree that earrings in general are just bad all the time, but there are lots of cases where theyre done poorly.

vexikron, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Absolutely amazing.

My guess is that at this point there are so many user prompts its received so far in its training set that bring up both Copilot and privacy concerns that it first interpreted the question, then searched for the most common topic associated with itself (privacy), then spit out a hardcoded MSFT override response for ‘inquiry’ + ‘privacy’.

vexikron, 3 months ago

What this tells you is that a man who spent a huge chunk of his life working for corporate cannibalization companies thinks that Trump would be so bad for the economy that even predatory corporations would suffer.

Its not like Romney ever had any actual policy positions based on anything other than political expedience.

'Course Republicans these days dont even seem to be pretending they have any coherent policy positions beyond ‘we hate immigrants’ and ‘women dont deserve basic human rights’.

Bleck.

vexikron, 3 months ago

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, a bunch of Anglo American economic advisers recommended economic shock therapy of basically removing still existing subsidies for lots of basic consumer goods, apartment rent, etc.

The effect this actually had was to basically completely collapse the economy even further to the point that it was pretty common for a worker to be paid not in money, but in what a factory produced, and theyd have to go barter it for other things.

It was also common during this period for people to have to attempt to barter say their TV or a tool for food.

What emerged from this is basically a naked oligarchic kleptocracy.

While the official mechanisms of government existed… people barely had any faith in them as the new democratic government had essentially immediately collapsed the economy and led to coups and coup attempts.

Putin stepped into this basically with the idea that over time general faith in the government could be restored with real economic gains and a strong sense of nationalism, focused around him.

Initially his strategies and tactics, while brutal, did deliver real tangible progress, as Putin is exceptionally adept at basically negotiating with the other oligarchs. Corruption was and still is the norm.

Overtime… yeah, basically now the entirety of Putin’s tactics and worldview and how the propoganda he uses domestically meets most if not all of Umberto Eco’s tenets of fascism.

One can have a fascist leader in charge or involved in many different forms of formal government, as fascism is closer to the ideology of a movement than it is to a form of government.

But now, is it a dictatorship?

Well, basically, officially, no, unofficially, yes, but with the caveat that basically the whole thing could fall apart if various oligarchs are not sufficiently placated, or if someone can basically emerge as a more competent strong man… or if the entire economy/society collapses.

Putin has proved extremely adept at keeping himself in power for the last 20 ish years, extending executive term limits, and basically for a period of time sitting back and letting Mebvedev be President for a term while Putin essentially semi-temporarily-retired to merely being the Prime Minister, then resumed as President.

tl;dr: Basically yes Putin is a fascist dictator, though there are some interesting differences with other fascist dictators.

Also please note that Trump is also a fascist, also by Umberto Eco’s tenants of fascism, and has outright stated he wants to be a dictator ‘if only for a day’. Yeah thats how that works, just one day as a dictator.

Ultimately this is why the MAGA crowd is so pro Russia and Putin. Both their leaders and movements are fascist.

vexikron, 3 months ago

For me, Trump is ultimately the last president who could possibly have enacted and globally promoted actual climate science based reforms that at least might have stood a chance at preparing America and the world a way forward through what is going to be an extremely challenging next few decades.

Instead he was an incompetent idiot criminal mobster bully who crystalized nascent fascism, religious extremism and anti intellectualism into an unstoppable political force, and in the process broke basically the brains of all of America in one way or another, utterly destroyed our reputation to the rest of the world, and has left an utterly catastrophic political situation in his aftermath, that basically only FDR could possibly hope to do any better than mitigate.

Say what you will about exact placement of other Presidents but Trump very obviously deserves the bottom spot.

The fact that having this ‘opinion’ outloud in a bar in basically most of America would get me assaulted is further proof that this collosal evil doofus is essentially the best argument against American Exceptionalism I can think of, but I am again literally likely to be assaulted for having it.

Anyway, tl:dr, we’re doomed now, thanks Trump.

vexikron, 3 months ago

You… you can’t go to a corner and relieve yourself.

Thats a misdemeanor you will likely be arrested and jailed for.

This moron has just told people to do something that is illegal, in addition to being dehumanizing on its face.

How is people pissing and shitting outside /not/ tearing down society, isnt this exactly the kind of thing that is bemoaned as a sign of society collapsing when talking about the homeless or drug addicts?

vexikron, 4 months ago

Yep, been saying this for years now, the vicious and irrational hatred against work from home employees is driven by two main factors:

1. At a systemic level, despite work from home being obviously less costly in the long run than maintaining an office space, if work from home were allowed to proliferate it basically pop the commercial real estate bubble and then basically every corrupt mayor and idiots in upper management would be shown to be corrupt idiots.
2. At a more personal level, upper and middle management people essentially get their kicks from seeing busy little worker bees near them, and they would personally have existential crisis when they realize that 90% of what they do is negging and then ommitting or misrepresenting that in actual meetings. Actual meetings which can easily take place in zoom, or often replaced with just an email.

vexikron, 4 months ago

Can someone provide me a list of SovCits that I can attempt to purchase say their cars or TVs from, with similar Treasury account paperwork that I’m waiting for the USPS to send to them?

vexikron, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

So… quite honestly this is probably a translation issue and cultural differences.

In China, throughout Chinese history, if a local government body /openly defies/ a greater authority, to the point of defying direct orders regarding the deployment of highly armed and combat capable forces… and you now have a scenario where armed forces loyal to the local government are literally right next to armed forces of the greater authority… and both official governments are claiming they have the right to do what they are doing, and the other does not…

This is functionally nearly always a situation that ends up spiralling into war, and basically the inherent assumption is that the local government should be subservient to the greater government, and they should know that what they are doing is likely to lead to armed conflict, it is likely to escalate, thus functionally when you add together the assumption that the local government should submit and is not, and the proximity of opposed armed agents of the state on both sides… basically this would be viewed as Texas declaring war on the Federal government.

We interpret the situation as, well, Texas didnt declare war because they cant actually do that legally!

In so doing we kind of forget that /thats not how civil conflicts fucking work/.

Basically put another way, if an armed conflict does start here, and then it broadens, and then 10 years later youre reading about it in a history text book…

Is the term civil war going to be used?

Or will we all agree to call it the special military and police action to quell an illegal use of force by rogue and criminal elements within the united states government?

Which of those do you think is going to more easily translate to Mandarin and Cantonese and what not?

EDIT: I am /far, faaaar/ from a fan of the current Chinese government for a great many reasons.

But, it can always be a useful exercise to read how other country’s media outlets report on your own country’s domestic affairs.

Is there outright propaganda and lies in some instances? Absolutely.

Is that happening in this case?

In my opinion, not really, no.

I personally, as an American living here my whole life, would basically agree that at the very least, what Texas is doing is done with the implied threat of, and known public support for /functionally/ starting what /basically/ amounts to a civil war, by engaging in escalating brinksmanship, seeking other allies (whats it 25 states now are waiting for Abbot to ask them to send their NatGuard to Texas), and both sides are moving combat capable chess pieces on the board in highly public ways.

Sure its not technically a declaration of war or secession, but uh, thats because /technically/ those things are impossible, even though they realistically are not.

My only possible actual quibble here would basically be that eh probably most Americans wouldn’t view it as a war or secession attempt until shooting starts and a formal declaration of ‘we are forming confederacy 2, this time so we can shot hispanic migrants and form a theocracy instead of uphold slavery of blacks’.

Which… again. A declaration is about /intent/, not necessarily precisely timed with action toward that intent.

Basically, at best, this is a nearly totally unprecedented situation in US History, basically totally unprecedented in a century.

Most Americans suffer from massive latent, unconscious American Exceptionalism across the political spectrum, assuming kinds of status quo type norms that simply are not actually evidenced by both history in general of societies around the world, as well as literally our own.

There are of course many issues where I think generally, the modern culture of China suffers from its own kinds of blinders… but not on this kind of an issue.

Even in this thread we have a comment of basically “yeah right, they wouldnt win in the long run” which both denies the proximal possibility of a civil conflict, but also admits that it could happen, but that itd be /dumb/ if it happened.

As if wars have never been fought for reasons one or even both sides think are dumb, or wars have never been fought when it seems very likely one side would lose.

Remember when nearly everyone thought Russia would never invade Ukraine because it would be dumb, and then he did, and then nearly everyone thought Ukraine would basically be steamrolled, and it wasn’t?

vexikron, 4 months ago

These are some good quotes here, and I realize this is slightly off topic but:

The whole thing with Aloy having peach fuzz.

I just… I still cannot get over that.

How… how is it even possible that a great number of people who ostensibly clamored for more realistic graphics… screamed and cried about peach fuzz on a young woman.

The… seemingly the only possible explanation is that they had simply never actually seen a girl or womans face up close.

It still just shocks me that that outburst was even a thing that could possibly happen.

Like, I am an autistic and often socially awkward guy, a video gamer through and through since the 90s.

But I’ve had female platonic friends my whole life, and girlfriends.

And I know that girls/women, -shock horror- even many young guys and young men have peach fuzz!

Fucking baffles me still to this day.

vexikron, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Because no one knows anything whatsoever about actual anarchist political theory.

Largely due to it being heavily suppressed and propagandized against by States, capitalist or ‘Communist’, and their adherents.

Anarchy as thought of by the wide and vast majority of people is simply a state of chaos and violence with no clear rulers.

What Anarchy actually is is fairly simple.

Root words derive from Greek.

An- Prefix: Without

Archon: Tyrant/Cruel and Ruthless Ruler/Undefiable Authority

Non insane Anarchists are always critics of the state, corporate structures of organizing the work place, most forms of organized religion, oppressive social norms and anything that creates and maintains any kind of hierarchy in society that results in oppression, impoverishment or cruelty to any particular group of people for illegitimate reasons.

Anarchy is essentially very similar in many ways to communism as Marx envisioned it, in that it is an idealized, as yet not perfectly defined goal of a just, egalitarian and democratic society that heavily emphasizes people being adequately represented economically in their daily lives as workers, as opposed to the standard liberal capitalist model where your boss essentially has authoritarian power over you in the workplace.

Both Marxism and Anarchism are highly critical of the profit motive and the ability of a very small number of people to own all or much of the capital (means of production such as factories) of a society, for very lengthy and detailed reasons.

A very common misunderstanding is what is truly meant by ‘private property’: most people unfamiliar with Marxism or Anarchism believe that Marxists and Anarchists believe that no one should be allowed to singly, individually own /anything/.

This is false. While many different adherents have different precise definitions, generally speaking private possessions are just fine until they get to the point of owning something directly and singly that has a massive impact on the lives of others should you choose to unilateraly use your ‘property rights’ in a way that is beneficial to you personally, but harmful to a large number of other people.

Further, Marxists and Anarchists both generally agree that ‘property rights’ as we currently conceive of them really only functionally exist for the rich and powerful, and are enforced via the power of the state.

Anarchism significantly differs from many later Marxist derived theories such as Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism that generally emphasize that in order to actually achieve an ideal, non capitalist society, one must create a massive state structure (or subvert an existing one) and place all power to reorganize a capitalist economy into a class of totalitarian economic organizers and planners, and that during this process the state is entirely justified in basically any means of crushing dissent it deems necessary.

This is of course heinous to Anarchists, who view a totalitarian state as essentially criminal.

What modern Anarchists, who are, again, not insane, usually support are working both within and outside of existing norms and government structures to meaningfully improve peoples lives amd expand their rights:

Mutual Aid: Direct Involvement in you local community to feed the hungry, house the unhoused, provide aid to the sick and displaced.

Advocacy: Doing what you can to promote ideas and views that will be beneficial to the masses, or to protect at risk minorities, both within existing formal societal structures like governments and businesses, and also within society generally.

Many modern Anarchists are also very concerned about the power if states and corporations to abuse the environment and curtail freedom of expression.

Anarchy also has another useful definition in the context of a world of nation-states:

Anarchy is that same common understanding of a world without rules and chaos, but the realization that this simply describes our current world given the history of actions of and between nation states, who often engage in many harmful acts against other nation-states and their populations, and rarely actually follow any rules or norms which are supposed, but i actuality rarely do, govern affairs between states. States will often do whatever they believe they can get away with that will benefit themselves, even if it means massively harming another state or group of people.

Finally, if you want to also be a modern technologically savvy anarchist, aka a cyberpunk, you can realize that the advent of computer and digital technology means there no longer exist any actually valid reasons, in very many cases, to actually pay for software, and that you should be an advocate of open source software.

So, in summary, Anarchy is not a state of chaos, without rules.

It is a very complex and nuanced political theory of advocacy for a more equitable and more just society.

No serious Anarchist believes that the world would be better if everyone was free to rum around and do literally whatever they want on an individual scale.

What exact kind of society do they propose?

Well unfortunately that differs wildly from Anarchist to Anarchist, but again, as with how Marxist socialism is but a /process/ of transforming from a capitalist society into an as of yet not perfectly defined communism, Anarchism is a /process/ and /method of analysis/ of how to transform into a better society for everyone.

vexikron, 5 months ago

Meanwhile, they will still be pursuing exemption from… you know, any kind of actual effective oversight, inspection and or regulation from the relevant government agency.

For the exact same model of plane.

fortune.com/…/boeing-737-max-safety-exemption-cra…

We live in Clown World.

vexikron, 5 months ago

Hi, American here.

American domestic politics is absolutely fucked right now.

The Republican Party does not really even have any policy proposals for serious issues at the Federal level.

They spent years saying ‘Obamacare bad’, saying they could do healthcare better. Basically it is a decade later and they have no plan, not even a proposal.

Taxes? We still have morons like DeSantis basically saying ‘I dunno, maybe a flat tax?’ to applause during stump speeches and debates. The flat tax proposal is absolutely insane for a large number of reasons, but the Republican base eats it up.

Look, there are something like 50 million + Americans that believe in all or most of the QAnon conspiracy theories, that believe God himself appointed Trump as President.

Trump stacked the Supreme Court.

The Republicans have functionally made abortion illegal in about half the country.

Meanwhile the economy is /apparently/ recovering, though the prices of basically everything you need to routinely pay for have risen fairly dramatically while wages have remained basically stagnant. Wealth inequality has spiralled to obscene levels, rent has basically doubled in about half a decade.

As I write this, I believe that polls of Biden v Trump are still showing Trump ahead.

Even if Trump does not win, and even if the MAGA QAnon types do not do a bunch of terrorism (again), they still exist, and are hopelessly living in basically an alternate reality where anything that goes against their worldview is fake, a conspiracy, of the Devil.

It was about 3 years ago now that I told my friend group that the QAnon problem was so serious that we would need some kind of analogous concept to the de-Nazification program as was implemented after WW2 in West Germany to deal with it. They either laughed at or ignored me. None of those people are my friends any more.

We are fucked.

The only thing that motivates most Republican voters is hatred. Any politician who says Trans people bad, Critical Race Theory bad, Immigrants bad, Homeless People bad, anything like that receives applause from the audience.

And I write this /as a homeless person/ who will almost certainly not be able to vote in the upcoming election. I will be /lucky/ if I can even find and qualify for an actual apartment after basically a bunch of crimes that happened to me in the course of last year caused me serious physical injury and the loss of all of my possessions, ruined my credit score, placed my in incredible debt, lost me my job and my ability to do any other job until my physical injuries are healed, which I simply have to handle myself, while homeless, because the cost of engaging with American healthcare system to handle my problems now would be sufficient to outright purchase a modest home (outright) less than a decade ago.

Meanwhile, Trump has outright stated he would like to implement basically concentration camps for the homeless. He has stated he wants to eliminate the vermin leftists. He is very concerned with the purity of the blood of the nation, and has outright stated he will be a dictator.

And he is currently leading in the polls.

Again, this country is fucked. So, sorry Europeans, I would love to be able to assuage your fears, and become an activist or something.

Maybe send me some of your healthcare and I’ll get right on it.

Or maybe I am extremely tired, have no hope for this broken country, and could use the services of someone who can smuggle me into Canada or something.

vexikron, 5 months ago

Please stop making me look into his dead corporate demon eyes…

vexikron, 5 months ago

As someone has had their accounts shadow banned across of wide swaths of reddit, despite being one of its first users… good fucking riddance.

vexikron, 5 months ago

Pretty misleading title.

It is known why the rivers are running orange. It is because the permafrost is thawing.

Sure, the exact, specific process causing the oxidation is being debated by scientists, but … the reason is because the permafrost is thawing.

Anyway, what this nearly certainly means is that the artic has already blown past the feared warming tipping point and is now releasing methane, which is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

This article should be focusing on how this likely indicates that climate change will intensify faster than commonly understood by the general public.

But instead it diverts from this.

vexikron, 5 months ago

If a mad-cow-like disease jumped the barrier to humans and began spreading through Americans, the main problem in eradicating it would be that basically no one would be able to tell the difference from the average ‘Enthusiastic’ Republican Voter and someone whose brain is melting due to an actual pathogen.

vexikron, 5 months ago

Yeah hah, they are largely not even in the race.

They are still able to sell SUVs and basically at this point road legal monster trucks to a consumer base that still cannot grasp the concept that they could do 99% of what they use a car for with a sedan or hatchback, and that 1% of the time just rent a uhaul… they could do that and save tons of money on gas with the greater fuel efficiency.

But American car owners are not exactly known for making rational decisions or being good drivers.

Much more important to flaunt status and lifestyle with a car.

Much more important.

vexikron, 5 months ago

I am still waiting for the inevitable country music song about a broken hearted cowboy whose self driving car leaves him for another man.

vexikron, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

It is the year 2038.

Adam Jensen, formerly a conspiracy busting mercenary badass, sits in a run down motel room in Hell’s Kitchen, New York.

He didn’t check in with much baggage, excepting a decade of extreme emotional and physical trauma. After he threw in the towel, decided to /really/ retire, he figured he would be able to live off of occasional PI work, and hell, maybe just crawling through some vent shafts until he got somewhere with a hidden cache he could sell to some idiot on the street, or just look for an ATM to … reroute funds to his account through.

Lying on a bed that squeaks everytime he shifts his massive, nearly 400 pound augmented body in a vain attempt to find a position that allows him to drift into sleep… he decides maybe a drink will help.

He sits up. Creak. He yawns as he reaches toward the night stand table, cluttered with credsticks, EMP grenades, a pistol, and some strange looking prototype for a dual purpose, wall mountable, but also throwable explosive.

LAM? Was that the acronym they went with? Not important in the long run, just a souvenir from his last and final corporate espionage contract.

He blinks a few times and waits for his once bleeding edge, but now ancient occular implants to resolve his last remaining bottle of cognac.

As he reaches to take a pull, straight from the bottle… darkness. Moments later his vision of the cluttered nightstand table is replaced by a 600 x 480 jpeg, blown up to encompass the entirety of his approximately 8K total field of view and resolution.

It is an image… of text. Very low resolution… Papyrus font. It states that his occular implants will no longer be receiving any software updates, and that his implants are now out of warranty, and non compliant with a recently passed consumer safety law, and as such must be shut down for his protection.

Startled by the darkness, then abrupt disclaimer, then darkness again, Jensen fumbles while reaching for his drink. How… how is there an audio message thanking him for his purchase of the wrong model of occular implants… playing through his infolink? Shouldnt those sub systems be firewalled?

This is the last thought that ever passes through Jensen’s mind.

In blindness, as the wrong corporate sound file played through the space between his ears, Jensen never realized he had knocked the prototype LAM off of the nightstand, which armed itself, beeped several times, and then exploded.

-=====-

Downstairs, a 3 year old Sandra Renton screams when one of her father’s hotel rooms explodes, triggering fire suppression systems before the power goes out.

She stumbles out of the lobby out on to the street. A minute later her exasperated father, crying out for Sandra, finds her outside bawling. He embraces her and thanks God that she is alright.

While he was reaching down to grab his traumatized daughter, he noticed she was standing in a pile of … broken glass?

Embracing his only child close to his heart, he looks up at the front entrance to the motel lobby.

It takes him a few moments to breathe deeply, more slowly, and eventually calm down enough to realize what has occured: The letters ‘H’, ‘i’, and ‘l’ were knocked off the wall by the explosion of Jensen’s suite, leaving the neon sign advertising the name of the hotel to now read only as ‘ton’. Sandra just happened to come to be standing in the debris field.

“What a shame,” he sighs … “what a shame.”

-{====}-

Author’s notes:

Sure, sure, you’ve heard about Chekov’s gun…

… but what about Jensen’s Lightweight Attack Munition?

=P

vexikron, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

Grant Cardone is a Scientologist who more or less runs a variety of real estate scams to enrich himself and other prominent Scientologists.

That being said, I would not be surprised if we end up with 50 year mortgages, but 100 seems absolutely insane to me as just… most people do not live that long.

Renting clothes? Honestly, this wouldnt surprise me either.

Its kind of a perfect scam actually: Set up the terms and conditions such that if there is any damage to the clothes, you have to pay for their repair or replacement, and then also offer clothing rental insurance for an extra fee, just in case!

Pay a bunch of instagram and tiktok influencers to rep various fashions and the clothing rental company, and of course manufacture all the clothes in sweatshops in the global south and charge something like 10 to 1000 times the variable cost of making any particular clothing item to the global north, but then rent the article of clothing for what 1/3 of the that number, per week.

Works much better if you can make certain clothing items /only/ rentable and not outright purchasable via basically coordinating with existing brands, exclusivity works to get gamers to shell out stupid amounts of money for basically unique cosmetics, why wouldnt it work here?

People bought gamer girl bath water, Republicans have destroyed public education, scrolling insta or tik tok all the time is basically known to cause various mental disorders but people so it because its addictive like a drug…

… yes i absolutely believe American Gen Zers would fall for this, and probably a good number of Millenials too

Hooray Capitalism!

Anyway, I think Cardone is saying stuff like this to try to posture as a concerned citizen, meanwhile, if I am not mistaken, I am fairly sure he is facing legal trouble relating to basically running a real estate flavored ponzi scheme. So I mean he is a real estate guy rofl, and I think his general concern is valid… its nearly certainly just him doing his own PR.