daseiner1

think of the children!

did he find his PR agent on Upwork or does he just think we're all morons?

duh. why is this always phrased as if the populace is unaccountable for the very existence of these elites? why is it always assumed that these unaccountable elites are better held in check by the farce of democracy than a proud genuine elite in place of the ignoble “””elite”””?

the people get what they deserve. if democracy was a functional system of government then by its own underlying assumptions the citizenry right now would be shooting, bombing, & stabbing these so-called elites. But we are held in subjugation as a result of our own fealty. It is a choice.

democracies past, present, and future inevitably crumble as the need to cater to the demos grows greater and greater with every generation of voters.

i know this is a contrivance but nevertheless: we don't consult the entire hospital how to treat my heart condition yet we accept on face value that obeying the vagaries of the hoi polloi is the best way to decide who controls the levers of power in civil society.

when the ruling principles are growth, consumption, and profit, the ability to invent money tends to be quite appealing.

Indeed. It is a blind force of nature.

I don't believe we disagree.

All of the boogeymen you mentioned are strands of a singular issue, a singular phenomenon.

meaningfully, this is equivalent to the parent commenter. "technology"

I loathe the "pop critique" employment of the phrase, but this is definitionally late-stage capitalism.

obviously capitalism is named as such because it is founded upon the concept of (private) capital. capital serves to lower margins and increase profitability. it has been remarkably successful and has immensely raised QoL for virtually the planet's entire population. we are now reckoning with its inevitable consequences. manpower is unreliable. it gets sick. it has children. it has eccentricities. it is fundamentally unpredictable. Capital seeks efficiency and reliability. What percentage of the population is capable of building data centers? Of engineering massive scale LLMs?

What happens when Capital no longer needs labor?

Would you elaborate? Because my understanding is that Apple has offered outstanding support for older devices in terms of iOS support for quite old devices.

“””innovation”””

true inflection point of the already prolonged withering away and inevitable death of one of America’s great art forms.

yes i’m aware of the proud film traditions of france, italy, england, & japan (among others). nevertheless the paradigms of popular film are uniquely homegrown.

netflix is not in the film business. they are in the streaming business.

yet another example of the rape aka “enshittification” of culture. why share an experience together as a public in front of the silver screen? much easier to sit alone on our fucking couches while we doomscroll and dick around.

shameful.

beyond irony that you pose as some tech optimist while also mentioning “western collapse” and then speak about a uniquely American pessimism, a nation that is presently under the thumb of a government that does not respect the rule of law and actively manipulates capital/big business.

and you cannot simply hand-wave away the massive acceleration of the surveillance state and characterize it as a tool of the “institutional parties”

last sentence in your first paragraph has nothing to do with the current state of the internet and certainly not AI. first sentence? turns out governments can still get away with pretty much anything and propaganda is easier than ever.

would you say that you’re feeling sort of… “spacey”?

i’m confident that this phenomenon is accelerated in “internet culture” but this is how all trends function, whether flare-cut jeans or beanie babies

the article explicitly states that this original Superman #1 is the highest graded copy of all-time

it’s valuable for the same reason the mona lisa is valuable. it’s iconic, it is a singular object, it is one of a kind, it is a stable investment vehicle. they ain’t making more of them.

ok great, you made it all the way to the second article before you found something you thought you could pull a misleading quote from. Said quote is, appropriately enough, from a woman in the administration whose job is to provide "cover" for her own agency.

and you not-so-gracefully just elide key facts in the same article like: "the agents were not invited inside the building, did not have a warrant, and were armed with guns while walking into the school with children and teachers present"

&

"the woman [...] is a prekindergarten teacher at the school"

even if you think this is someone who ought to be deported, there are many less violent, less traumatic, and far more dignified ways to go about it. Or would you like to endorse masked men with military-grade equipment storming into daycares to arrest women who work with children there?

citizens shooting other citizens is radically different than the federal government lighting legal protections on fire and then pissing on the ashes.

wholly disingenuous to compare the two.

but yours is the standard misdirect on anything "Chicago" so I'm confident being disingenuous was intentional.

Yup immigration was arguably the concrete issue of the election and these were the campaign promises. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together knew that this is what mass deportation would look like.

And "the economy" is so frequently conflated with the stock market.

the outsize harms of gambling, financial ruin that is highly individualized, highly destructive, and particularly devastating. there are obviously significant public health costs from fast food, but its destruction does not present the same way.

vice != money. meticulous study lags behind facts on the ground. perhaps vice is super-charged today, and policy influencers are more akin to journalists.

(giving extreme benefit of the doubt, here)

Good video on this:

https://youtu.be/XZvXWVztJoY?si=to8qYcXuBT2xAaIz

Same power law in the alcohol industry.

The Sicilian Mafia (La Cosa Nostra) refers exclusively to the mafia on the island of Sicily, not the Mob which traces its lineage back to Sicilian immigrants.

It's being said because the Five Families was erroneously conflated with Cosa Nostra in the original press conference by one of the representatives of law enforcement.

"quantity has a quality all its own"

of course. i'm confident slowing down near a school is pretty intuitive for the vast majority of drivers, though.

if the kid could successfully modify the scanned value of physical barcodes a) that would be quite the feat and b) that would absolutely be showing up a bunch of big names

the sign says the hours for the reduced speed limit or, more commonly in my experience, has a light that activates during school hours.

Most large cities I've lived in, general traffic enforcement essentially only exists on that month's/quarter's designated ticket-writing day. i.e., when highway patrol and city police just write speeding tickets all day to juice revenue