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Comment by wil421 | Hacker News Reader

The year is 2030. After the AI bot wars, FaceBook and Google have been crippled. They let AI automation control their content and it was deleted after OpenAI GPT10 discovered vulnerabilities in automated copyright strikes.

Taco Bell won the franchise war and is the only restaurant remaining.

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> Taco Bell won the franchise war and is the only restaurant remaining.

When I saw that movie when I was small, I thought that was literally Taco Bell, McDonald's, and Burger King, et al fighting with tanks, etc. Taco Bell emerged victorious after a bloody struggle.

Taco Bell and Johnny Silverhand won after nuking ~~Arasaka~~ KFC Tower.

Because it was

Could be.

In SnowCrash, I think there were some subplots talking about the fighting was somewhat real between franchises.

And you could become a citizen of a franchise state.

I could see being a citizen of CosaNostra Pizza.

I’d make a pretty good deliverator.

This is the first time I have considered that it wasn’t them blowing up each other’s franchises.

I will believe ehat i want to believe

I am okay with this timeline. At least it has better conversation topics than most of our current timeline.

Talk to trust and safety teams, should never run out of topics that make you question reality.

That's the thing, the fake reality makes more sense than even the real unreal things.

Life imitates art, but it sucks at it.

I would much rather live in Sir Humphrey Appleby's dystopia than whatever this is.

This is where headcanon [1] can be a lot of fun. Just accept that they really did fight a war. It's not like it doesn't particularly fit the milieu...

[1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/words-were-watching...

I'm pretty sure my idea was literally a mash-up of Phantom 2040 "resource wars" with Demolition man "franchise wars."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_2040

> It is the year 2040, all environmental disasters and the economic Resource Wars from the early 21st century have decimated the fragile ecosystem balance of an Earth once teeming with life.

The first part of this episode is near identical to my mental picture of the "franchise wars:"

https://youtu.be/Kg8bPDGmhnU?si=MhzsBy83h8yTi6Ux&t=59

I'm surprised how easy it was for me to figure this out and find confirmation.

For those that need more context

From the movie Demolition Man https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlcDHlK_RoY

It's been along time since I read it, but IIRC Jennifer Government has that. Fast food chains lobbing missiles at each other.

Every year it becomes clearer that Idiocracy was indeed a documentary.

I mean, we already have YouTube channels and tiktok content that are about the same as the TV show "ass" shown in the movie.

"America's funniest home videos" got dumbed down to "AFV" and the content was mostly "ow, my balls!". They even added a warning to the viewers to submit "wows, not ows".

Although to be fair,some of that happened before Idiocracy came out.

With the public money used for sports stadiums, that element of the movie to have government sports teams is slowly coming true also.

If you search YouTube for "fail army" there is clearly a whole ad supported business model for revenue from something that is about the same as "ow, my balls!"

This is basically https://chive.tv

How are college sports teams not government sports teams?

that's a good point. They are tightly integrated into the college whose charter is to educate. whereas a pro team will take anyone for the express purpose of the performing the sport well.

Further, colleges receive public money but are not free to attend for most students. And I am not talking about "free" from the students perspective, I mean most would not be permitted to enroll if significant tuition dollars were not deposited (unlike public schools, for instance). Also, plenty of colleges are private but have NCAA teams.

in May 2021 the number 1 clip on twitch was just someone's ass

Sort of. They got the outcomes pretty close, but the movie was based on a premise of eugenics and equating poverty with low intelligence.

Weird, when I saw it, it was equating poverty with low access to education and corresponding outcomes.

More like high access to media and consumerism.

The intro of the movie makes it pretty clear that their premise is "IQ is heritable, and stupid people have more kids." It's not a coincidence that the "high IQ" couple is portrayed as wealthy and the "low IQ" people are shown as poor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TCsR_oSP2Q

Thank you. It's astonishing to me how few people remember the text of this movie -- it is so clearly saying dumb people are breeding, smart people are not.

It seems the dumb interpretation of the movie is spreading faster than the correct and literal one.

The movie was based on the (indisputable?) fact that intelligence is heritable- but not Eugenics, which takes that a step further and advocates for people deciding which other people are inferior and superior and organizing society around that. One could argue that the movie tries to make a case for eugenics, but it didn’t directly do so. I think the movie could also be seen as looking at culture instead of genetics, and also assuming that is passed down from parents.

I agree that it does wrongly depict poverty as a major indicator of intelligence.

For better or worse, "eugenics" at this point is basically a cultural repulsion field surrounding most of practical aspects of genetics. You dare to even suggest there are measurable genetic differences between people, and someone will shout "eugenics", rounding any conversation down to "yeah nazis said the same thing".

I suspect your idea of “practical aspects of genetics” includes ideas about how people different from you shouldn’t be allowed reproduce, and very little about things like researching the function of a newly discovered microbial enzyme.

Not really. It does, however, include ideas such as "perhaps we should learn to correct genetic diseases directly in the reproductive cells", which is a rounding error away from someone saying something like you just did.

No. In the movie, President Camacho recognized the smart guy was smart and wanted him to help because he was smart. We don't have leaders with that kind of wisdom and good intentions.

We need a leader like President Camacho!

I find myself surprised that I agree.

When I watched the movie I laughed and thought it all ridiculous. I've since been shown that having well-intentioned, self-aware, cooperative people in government is probably more important than their intelligence.

Maybe he was stupid to the point of just being naive.

> No. In the movie, President Camacho recognized the smart guy was smart and wanted him to help because he was smart. We don't have leaders with that kind of wisdom and good intentions.

Also, Joe seemed genuinely interested in helping everyone, and didn't seem to neglect the needs of significant portions of the population to achieve some ideological goal or another.

Maybe there's such a thing as being too smart to have power.

To be fair Camacho was setting up Not Sure to be the fall guy. I don't think he really thought Not Sure could fix things.

That being said, it is a society who elected the smartest guy in the world president, and then when a smarter guy came along elected him as the successor.

Sure, but this is a Demolition Man reference

In Idiocracy the masses are aware that things are not as good as they once were, they recognize and value competent people, and then voluntarily agree to put them in power so that things may be fixed.

IMO that is a depiction of some kind of meritocratic utopia - exactly the opposite of what we have, on all accounts mentioned above.

There is something subtly wrong with the world as presented in that "documentary" in general it is that somebody has to keep the lights on, the machines running, that is, there is too much working infrastructure for the citizens ability level. I suspect the big corporations maintain a hidden educated population and are happy to run the world from the shadows.

Now honestly it is just a goofy movie premise, and we should not look too far into it, but sometimes it is fun to go full nerd.

It could be that many people just died in between and there's a lot of remaining operational equipment that past smart people built. Costco is massive.

Except that it has a happy ending, which is so rare in real world situations involving politics and power.

> Taco Bell won the franchise war and is the only restaurant remaining.

Foe those who don't know - which included myself until about 30 seconds ago - this is a reference to the 1993 film Demolition Man.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlcDHlK_RoY

A Taco Bell can be constructed in one day (sans pouring the concrete pad). They know how to capitalize.

There’s a payday loan biz that has taken over a former Taco Bell site in Hamilton, Ontario. It’s a bizarre look as the detached building still features all the weird faux-Mexican motifs of the former tenant. It’s also one of the first things seen when entering the city via the most significant gateway from Toronto.

Like old pizza hut buildings. Everyone knows.

Pizza Hut outside the US

AKA, Uncle Enzo's CosoNostra Pizza Inc.

Snow Crash was another take on this whole slide to <is there even a bottom?>.

Indeed, in the version I saw, they said "Pizza Hut" but you could see it was badly dubbed. Only much later I learned it was originally "Taco Bell".

Taco Bell in NZ. It was the first time I'd heard of it, though, and the movie is still probably the source of most of my knowledge of it.

There's at least 15 in London, UK.

I was there for the Pizza War in San Rafael.

https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2011/02/04/pizza-war-leaves-mor...

Demolition Man (movie) joke... but the AI bot wars stuff makes it still relevant to the conversation so this is both funny and cautionary / discussion worthy material.

Taco bell has a wiki btw: https://tacobell.fandom.com/wiki/Taco_Bell_Wiki

We are indeed in an era where AI is "learning" from AI generated content fueling a positive feedback loop of shitty content.

Ok, how /do/ the three seashells work?

2 are bidets, 1 is a drier.

As somebody in the Seattle area, I have to hope that Taco Time Northwest wins the franchise wars, not its sub par competition.

That’s hilarious, I just happened to watch Demolition Man yesterday.

The 10th remake of Demolition Man in 2090 is going to wild

2029...2028...2027...

The President of the United States is a Tamagotchi.

but don't forget that even after the fall of civilisation, there will still be hope in the form of the probe bearing a vial of Elon Musk's semen to Alpha Centari

Elon is so nuts I can’t decide of this is a joke or something he actually did.

Crazy times we live in.

...there are now three seashells on every toilet (for some reason).

You don't know about the seashells? (muffled laughter)

You don’t know how to use the three seashells? lol

I'd like to think no one knows how the seashells work and the real joke is everyone just makes fun of people for not knowing (the writer didn't even know what they did and refuses to say anything other than how they came into the story)

Huh? I thought that was canon. Was that actually just a head fiction?

No they played that one pretty straight. You were supposed to be just as confused as MC. If they wanted you to think anything else, they would have given a knowing wink.

I've purposely put three seashells in many public restrooms

... and the only kind of music that exists are jingles and showtunes

Lmao cursing in public is arrestable.

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