Doctorow was a guest on Adam Conovers Factually, which is where I first heard his Enshitification. I think it was Adams best podcast to date, def worth the YouTube search and subsequent upvote
SoylentBlake
joined 2 years ago
Fun fact;
In war zones rates of depression and anxiety drop down to statistically zero.
There's no time for ennui, to much shit is going on that you can admit you have no control over and every decision you make could potentially mean life and death for anyone around you.
People find their purpose. It's just that it's usually "survive", and might develop into "revenge".
We have a living constitution, a living body of law. Current laws have been bought and paid for, just like judges, representatives, senators...
The deviation from where we started to where we are was a process of the living and still is for today's legislators, or more accurately, today's lobbyists who actually craft the laws and have them at the rest in case the Overton window moves to the point they're feasible.
2008 financial crisis ripped the last vaneer off.
The rich won't be allowed to lose. The whole system is bullshit. You can do everything right, get sick cuz fuknature,, have to sell everything off for medicine and still die, younger than you should, in debt and penniless. It's not even necessary, the Cruelty is the point. That's capitalism. It's about control, and capitalists need to be looked at like they have a mental illness. Most our jobs are bullshit and don't matter. The national debt doesn't matter. Money isn't real, it's a vehicle for resource allocation, not a store of value, but try getting someone not ready to hear that to even think about our social systems as something mutable and not organic or ordained. Nope. Society was designed, by people, and it's working exactly as it's intended, which is, fucking great for them and fuck everyone else.
At the end of the day, your physical body has had just one goal. Survive. Everything I have to do to achieve that end is justified by existence itself. Building a system that puts itself in the way of people simply surviving is building a system to fail. When it comes to politics, and by that I mean, do-whatever-you-want-as-long-as-it-doesn't-hurt-someone-else and then policies, and for policy I just ask "is this the best we can do?"
I don't think I see the best we can do anywhere.
I keep seeing report after report that Gen Z keeps falling for internet scams at an alarmingly high rate
...which, I mean, idk, maaaybe?
Media literacy and scam discernment, I feel like we as millennials grew up alongside the rise of disinformation and the greater Enshitification of the internet, like this is our wheelhouse.
I remember icq, yahoo chat rooms, Napster and limewire, playing MUDS and ADOM, then digg, myspace. I remember when the Internet was fun, now, it's just advertisers. I quit Facebook 7 years ago. I quit reddit with the API dick punch. I've been advertised to so much in my life that if I see a movie trailer it makes me not want to see it.
The internet can be great. Getting knowledge off it is amazing. I personal feel like the library of Congress should be made available online for free and all this knowledge thats hiding behind pay gates needs to be visited by the freedom fairy. I hope I can help facilitate this in my lifetime.
With media, I can only speak for myself, but I quit watching news in 2008. Ill read my news and not have some talking head attempt to emotionally manipulate me while they leave out key facts that don't fit their narrative, thanks. Televised news has been more detrimental to us as a whole, imo.
My bullshit meter is simple. If whom or whatever is saying something that makes it an us vs them issue, dividing the people up, then they're wrong. Almost universally. If your answer is only found down around the fallen, you aren't bringing an answer, yr bringing an excuse to violence.
Real leadership, real progress, lifts up those it encounters. The rising tide is supposed to lift all ships. Cept in this dystopic reality, motherfuckers chained everyone's ships to the dock and the rising tide just overcame and sank them. Rich get richer, poor get poorer, until the poor get even.
I'm dismayed we have to keep repeating this pattern. America had the same problems 100 years ago. We've had an entire century to do something about it, but fucking NOPE. An entire century wasted in my opinion. Better tech is cool, but if it doesn't improve the lives of us all, than it fails the reasoning for tools existing in the first place, which is to relieve society if the many necessary hours of labor.
3shades and toner = 4parts
DNA = GATC = 4parts
If you plan on actually living in your house, and not pulling out any equity, property value rising had a negative effect on you in that your taxes rise.
For most people adding a couple hundred to a few thousand dollar bill on them - for effectively no reason - is a big deal. Some consider it a hostile action, and I'm in no position to argue them.
Hey looky that, humanities been here before. Back in the olden days they used to have problems with air quality around factories too, just like you're saying, because that's what it is.
The robber barons were able to put up smokestacks, sometimes hundreds of feet high, so the town wouldn't be buried and blackened under coal ash. Simple elegant solution, besides not polluting in the first place, I guess.
Regardless, the hypothetical problem would exist today with blowers on cars yet those people seem to manage just fine. None of this is any kind of stretch, so I mean, it kind of feels like you're throwing a disingenuous argument over on my side, like astroturfing for the police union trying to protect their main source of income (which, at least in my city, theyvr been caught red-handed doing, more than once)
It's a thought.
Not a very helpful one but it is one option.
Seriously, I can see commuters or shoppers being banned from driving downtown in big cities, and I don't even think it's a terrible idea. Have to stop at a park and ride and take a train or tram in. Which would allow the roads to be reduced to a single lane making room for public seating, food trucks, fountains/statues, stages, squares, greenery and other park features put in in the torn up lanes. Making it the kind of place people actually WANT to be in. Only have emergency services, delivery and tradesmen on the road.
It can take continuous readings you know.
And idk why it'd shut off on the highway. Don't drink and drive. Just about everybody agrees that's the move, I'm not alone in that sentiment.
This is already tried and true, non invasive tech. It just takes skin on the wheel, throughout the entire drive.
I don't understand the push back, seriously. Enlighten me. I'm all ears.
When Musk cut off Ukraine, the Pentagon informed him that they were immediately purchasing a minor controlling stake in the, currently, private company. Service to Ukraine was restored the next day.
That's how "capitalism" works apparently.
I also assume that's why NVidia did it's sudden about face and fell right in line when the generals threatened to own them the next day.
It's all just rich people getting reminded they're only rich, or alive, because the government allows them to be.
Physical votes need to be paired with digital votes so the two can corroborate each other. The paper tickets should be gps tagged, signed for at all times, and remotely monitored, their location backed up in the cloud.
Ensure the numbers are correct with a clear path to find discrepancies.
It's too easy for a dozen hundred crates to end up in the bottom of a river. Every step needs to guarded against humans doing humanity.
Distribution and logistics are an obvious area AI could/should take over. We already relinquish scrutiny to the "algorithm".
But that might actually be beneficial to humanity, so don't hold your breath.