I was just highlighting the juxtaposition in length and depth between the two comments by dropping a dumb meme one level deeper.

I know, I get the meme. I just took it as inspiration for another wordy, serious comment, which I now realise continued the trend. I suppose the apt follow-up would have been some even shorter quip like “OK Boomer”. Instead, you had to make a serious reply of your own and break the chain. Thanks, Obama.

I genuinely value your post.

And I value your genuine response and explanation. We hope together.

Absurdist humour is one of my coping mechanisms for exactly these kinds of topics

That I can get behind. When confronted with the absurdity of our great ambitions and worries in face of our own insignificance, what else can we do but make memes?

What better way to bear dark times than to make light of them?

When life is serious enough, you don’t need to be.

Live. Laugh. Shitpost.

I get the meme, but it’s kinda dumb. This is a website where you’re free to just not read my comment, if you don’t wanna engage with the topic, not a captive audience like a retail employee.

Because limited liability corporations were created to avert liability from individuals. His firm is liable, but no single individual within it.

Not even the ones making the executive decisions, despite their near-monarchic power. I guess since they’re appointed by a board of directors, it’s something like an electoral monarchy, except the board isn’t democratically elected so it’s a plutocracy by proxy. The ultimate culprit would be - and this is a chorus you’ve probably heard a thousand times on here - the shareholders, and going after them is hard. Particularly when the shareholders are themselves corporations…

But the CEO is the pin focusing shareholder intent down into decisions and ultimately action. If they were effectively held responsible for their decisions, it would at least provide some counterbalance to the shareholders’ demands. It could also solve the “shareholders are corporations” issue, since you could make the CEOs of those companies liable for demanding illegal measures from companies they control.

Of course, such a drastic change would be hard to actually push through, as things stand, since it would inhibit (illegal) profit and growth and “the economy” is a sacred cow. It’s still worth pushing for, in my opinion, but building awareness and support takes patience and tact to avoid pushing people into political apathy.

The alternative I could see (and would prefer, but suspect to be even less attainable) is to dismantle the stock and capital system entirely. What you’d replace it with is a whole separate debate I won’t cover in this comment. Drastic systemic change is difficult to plan and enact, and building and maintaining the new system is difficult in the face of insecurities, old habits, unforeseen challenges that it may not yet have developed effective ways to deal with and generally all the growing pains that come with new things.

They’re not mutually exclusive, and the first may be a step on the road to the second. Either way, public support is key, and that is rarely won quickly.

I can’t even write a two-sentence comment in 30s without overthinking. I do like to use formatting, but that doesn’t make it quicker…

One more thing, the Israelis should be forced to use their ground forces if an invasion of Iran occurs.

Absolutely. The prospect of US soldiers dying for Zionist supremacy is despicable.

I can’t wait to read that headline and puke.

Edit: Aaaaaand here it is 🤮

I suspect an offense against the USA would be easy to pull off.

I suspect nothing in war is ever easy, and something the size of the US comes with certain operational challenges. Establishing air superiority would be difficult, for instance, and without it, transporting troops, supplies or equipment over longer distances is difficult. Consider the difficulties Putin has in Ukraine, and then scale that up to US proportions.

The low standards of ICE and the nature of their operation would allow just about any organized actor to have a free hand in the US, if they chose to do so.

Covert operations? Probably. Asymmetrical warfare? Possibly.

Full-scale assault, with the objective to take and hold key administrative centers to force concessions? Hardly.

Nobody said they had to be morally integer…

I think the issue is that offense is harder than defense. A defender generally has the home advantage in terms of logistics, familiarity with the area and political will. The difference this makes is hard to estimate, and even harder so if you’re not even aware of it. Combined with delusions of grandeur, this is a recipe for underestimating the enemy.

And call me a cynic, but I suspect neither Cadet Bone Spurs nor Major “Warrior Ethos” “Signal Chat” “American Crusade” Boozeth are entirely qualified to make high-level military judgements.

(Neither is my armchair general ass whose only education in the matter is some MilHist blogs and articles, but at least I’m not an actual general charged to actually make them.)

For Putin, I’m not sure. I’m disinclined to believe he’s just ignorant about the tenacity a people under attack can develop, given Russian history, but I can only make unqualified guesses.

Either way, as you say, I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end, because a blunt and rusty axe still hurts, and they don’t seem concerned about where they swing it and who’s in the way.

Normalise it while they’re young, so they fight it less when they grow up

Open source wasn’t ever perfect, but whatever cracks in there were are being blown a mile wide by these goddamn slop factories.

This is the perpetual issue, not just with AI: Any system will have flaws and weaknesses, but often, they can generally be papered over with some good will and patience…

Until selfish, immoral assholes come and ruin it for everyone.

From teenagers using the playground to smoke and bury their cigs in the sand, so now parents with small children can’t use it any more, over companies exploiting legal loopholes to AI slop drowning volunteers in obnoxious bullshit: Most individual people might be decent, but a single turd is all it takes to ruin the punch bowl.

The post accurately copies the article’s headline without editorialising.

The article itself is shit though.

I feel like we ought to expand that traditional quote about the last fish being caught, the last tree being cut and all: When the last emotion is commodified, you will realise that you can’t buy happiness.

a super giga 1000€ license for more than 16 Core CPUs

Year of the Linux Desktop! Any day now… any day… huffs copium

I heard one guy talk about the importance of cable shielding and connector material and shit once, but the ones I actually know just talk about the other hardware (speakers, mixing pults, lots of terms I couldn’t recite).

Presumably because most end users are in deep with the “if you do nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about” crowd

I agree with other comments that this is probably an Executive issue. Decision-makers operating with missing information can make misinformed decisions. Whether or not end users actually are in that crowd is less relevant than whether the people making such decisions think the users are in that crowd.

In a game-theory framing, it’s a game with incomplete information. What you assume about others, including what you assume about their assumptions, influences your decisions. The sheer amount of players makes it a lot harder to model or predict.

A corrupt government can also be bought off by the companies to not fuck with things so that they at least remain functional.

…for whose definition of functional? Because any additional overhead from having to bribe the government would inevitably impact customers. And while they’re at it, they might as well come up with more ways to be anti-consumer and the bribed government won’t stop them.

They might also just bend over to please their dictator instead of buying him off, so it’s not even a given thay they will keep him from interfering

I get your point about the current government situation though. I’m just not convinced replacing a corrupt private company with another not-yet-quite-as-corrupt private company from a different country would improve things in the long run.

Using a Matrix room for our family, it has some built-in video call service (I think it’s Jitsi?) that works great for regular family rounds. It has its hiccups too, but nothing we can’t deal with so far.

Is it worse than private companies leveraging their dominance and effective monopoly to impose demands on all who depend on the critical infrastructure they provide, sidestepping all legislative processes and accountability to the public?

Besides, a corrupt government can just as well abuse regulatory powers to impose its will on private companies, since it doesn’t have to observe due process. A sane government, however, will have less power to force a private company to do business it doesn’t want to.

Privatisation is no protection against corruption, but a hurdle for public oversight. There are sectors where that is acceptable and the flexibility it provides may be worthwhile, but infrastructure isn’t one of them.

Yeah, this smells a lot like Texas Sharpshooting. Figure out what people use, stuff Copilot in there then proudly present the target that you drew after hitting something.

I bet they’re gonna need money to stem that influx, and I’m worried where they’ll find it.