This is true and has led to my new system for evaluating economic systems, what does it do with antisocial people.

Capitalism is interesting in that it actually has a plan for them. Let them be greedy little fucks and the system works for a while. Then they fuck everything up and the system collapses, either in a minor correction every couple of years or into fascism.

I would love for something like socialism or communism to work, but there’s this 1% that would pick the trees clean to better their own lot.

I don’t have any answer, but I have come to the conclusion that every economic and social system should only be considered viable if there’s a reasonable and compelling solution for what to do with the guy that wants to pick the fruit tree clean.

I remember after getting pepper sprayed in DC at a protest against W’s Iraq war being told, “we need more and better democrats, vote for better ones in the primary and then whoever wins the primary in the general”

I’ve been doing that for over 2 decades now. Nothing has gotten better, everything has gotten worse, the party is effectively openly corrupt and openly controlled opposition.

I remember the gut punch in the lead up to 2020 when Bernie Sanders was winning primaries and the entire party decided to coalesce around Biden, all the other centrist candidates dropped out and threw their support behind him so he could win a bunch of primaries in states that would go on to vote Republican in the general election. But it was enough, the party was able to knee cap a better candidate and get Biden in office.

I remember thinking then that we had not pulled the country back from the edge of disaster, we had merely pressed pause. That a Biden administration wouldn’t do the things necessary to prevent another trump. Four years later I get to watch as a lawless paramilitary kills people in an American city that’s effectively under siege by the federal government while king trump is somehow back in the White House.

I’ll probably still vote for the Dems in the elections because it’s the best tactical move, but I’ve found it’s a terrible strategic move. The party is a failure, it is completely captured and currently aligned with fascism. They are sending me pleas to donate to their fight fund while their members cross the aisle to vote to give the ICE more money, more power, more funding.

The Democratic Party will not save us, they show us again and again they have no interest in that.

There’s supposedly an allied Panther Party but the link doesn’t go anywhere at the moment

https://www.thebpp.us/new-page

According to Wikipedia, on paper yes but in practice the duty to retreat has been upheld in case law.

Even if you have a jurisdiction with rock solid castle doctrine, using that as a defense for shooting at law enforcement is a perilous legal strategy.

Right but if everyone stays peaceful then the de facto martial law won’t become declared martial law.

And this is clearly beneficial because of all these benefits of being under de facto martial law instead of declared martial law like

• hmm
• well let’s see
• there should probably be some kind of benefits here

Not convinced yet? Well you see there’s also a host of benefits you get from quietly obeying and surrendering your rights like

• getting shot by unaccountable federal officers
• having your door kicked in for exercising your rights to free speech
• emboldening the fascists by showing there’s nothing you are willing to do to defend yourself

If everyone stays peaceful, surely the jackbooted thugs who delight in hurting and killing citizens and immigrants alike will… continue doing that.

My spouse has this exact same thing, the thing that worked for them is OCD therapy.

OCD therapy is a combination of cognitive behavioral therapy, exposure therapy, and occupational therapy (which despite the name is more just about strategies to use for practical things like going to the store, out to a cafe, etc)

It hasn’t been easy but they’ve been keeping at it and it’s really helped them in a way nothing else has.

There are very few problems so large that they can’t be solved, but that doesn’t mean the solutions aren’t big and scary themselves. It’s easy to say “go get therapy” but I know that the reality of doing so is difficult. I’ve seen it now first hand how hard it is, but it’s worth it.

The phone call to discuss whether or not they can help is free, NOCD

Take care of yourself, you deserve it.

This is why people get confused, because they think authoritarianism is some strong man saying “you can’t do this, you can’t do that”

There’s a quote about how authoritarianism isnt someone saying “you can’t” but instead it’s someone saying “you may”

• You may ignore this law
• You may jail these people
• You may disregard due process

That’s the real danger, when rights and law are replaced with the whims and favor of a despot.

Not completely useless it allowed the republicans to have a talking point that the democrats were obstructing for no reason.

Conceptually at least, if you never get hit, your premiums paid for the repairs of other people that did.

That’s the idea, no one knows if they will get in an auto accident. Most people cant absorb the cost of the ramifications. Instead of every person saving the full amount to replace their car, pay for hospital stays, make someone else whole (which is a ton of money out of the economy and you know for sure a lot of people wouldn’t be responsible enough to do that) we recognize that the number of people exposed to being in an accident is less than the number of people that will be in an accident.

Everyone pays into the pool, if someone has an accident they get to take more out than they put in by design.

That’s where your money goes if you never get in an accident. Insurance companies also make a profit by managing that pool of money, and they are incentivized to only insure good drivers or collect more money from bad drivers (which is why rates go up if you get in an accident)

The alternative is that everyone starts their own savings account, one that would almost definitely cost more money, and the number of people that would just not save anything is probably pretty high because they would know that they can’t realistically save up enough.

I’m a software engineer that is also deeply uninterested in chasing shiny new things. I think another factor is that tech that I did care about has somewhat stalled out.

I’ve had iPhones since a I think the iPhone 4. I’m on the iPhone 11 which released back in 2019, I only really upgraded because my iPhone 8s battery was crapping out.

There’s just nothing exciting about these newer devices, same form factor, same OS, same basic functionality. And in a similar fashion, anything new is stuff I don’t really give a shit about. Oh it can do some kind of ai thing I don’t want, no thanks.

I’ve tried to see it as a positive. I have lots of stuff that I’ve filled my life up with, things that are meaningful to me. I think that’s what took up the space I used to fill with reading about and getting excited about this new gadget or that one. Now I’m excited to go see my niece’s Christmas recital or bake cookies with my wife to take to a friends of the library event.

Doesn’t hurt that every company seems to be in a non stop contest to see how little they can give the consumer for the maximum price while installing as much revenue generating spyware as possible.

I’ll second godot.

One of the hard things when getting started is trying to cobble together all the tools you need, and godot packages good enough solutions for everything you need to get started.

It’s very approachable and the docs are pretty incredible. The docs cover a huge range of information, there are step by step tutorials and all the reference information you need. The thing I was surprised by was how much else they had, there’s an entire section of vector and matrix math and it’s all from the point of view of game dev so it’s just what you need to know.

You don’t have to read it all upfront, but it’s really nice to have a resource you can go back to when you start wanting to dig a bit deeper and have this amazing resource freely available and written specifically for the engine you are using.

It’s also frustrating that they let a seat be stolen.

McConnell invents a rule out of whole cloth and blocks an appointment.

The Dems could have played hard ball, they could have gone with the line that the senate was fulfilling its role of advising and consenting by not holding a vote. They want it to be read as a rejection, make them hold a vote, say that no vote means they are fine with it.

Republicans exceed their powers every time they have them to reshape this country to their vision. Democrats refuse to use the full scope of their power to accomplish anything.

Repeat ad nauseam.

I would also be in the target audience I think.

I’m a software engineer, been one for 20+ years. Built my own PCs before.

I’m just not super interested in doing it anymore. A reasonably priced steam box that just works out of the box without any troubleshooting and is a common enough hardware profile for developers to put in the effort to make work so I don’t have to burn the precious hours of my life fixing stupid bullshit to play a video game, yes, take my money.

I have been into AI Safety since before chat gpt.

I used to get into these arguments with people that thought we could never lose control of AI because we were smart enough to keep it contained.

The rise of LLMs have effectively neutered that argument since being even remotely interesting was enough for a vast swath of people to just give it root access to the internet and fall all over themselves inventing competing protocols to empower it to do stuff without our supervision.

Jokes on MAGA then they don’t even want that stuff for their in group.

It’s a bunch of poor people voting to let the wealthiest amongst us have more and more and more with nothing in return than a license to be awful and a vague sense that they are owning the libs.

Executive orders shouldn’t have the ability to make law or ignore laws. The legislative branch passes the laws and the executive branch is supposed to faithfully execute them.

An executive order is meant to lay out how the executive departments should carry out the laws passed by the legislative branch. And if they overstep that by failing to faithfully execute the laws or creating their own laws out of executive orders, the judiciary is supposed to act as a check.

Our constitutional order seems to have completely failed. The legislative branch is in a state of permanent deadlock, except when it comes to tax breaks for the uber wealthy and defense spending. So EOs have expanded in scope and the judiciary has just shrugged and decided that the whole separation of powers and checks and balances thing isn’t worthwhile anymore.

Kash Patel looks like he’s constantly, just now, finding out that he’s gotten way too high and accidentally joined up with the Nazis and just remembered he’s a dark skinned minority named Kash Patel.

It’s gonna be a stupid fucking wearable pin of some sort. That’s why they are being so coy about it, it’s the same dumb thing that no one wants.

The reality is that google and Apple have locked up the smart phone market and extract a tax out of the tech bros. You want to sell digital goods on their platform, Google and Apple take their cut.

They all really really really want there to be some way for you to consume their LLMs without having to pay that tax. (This is the same reason meta was so keen on the metaverse before shifting to their rayban glasses)

It’ll be some dumb puck, you’ll talk to it, it’ll talk to you, maybe (but I seriously doubt this) it’ll be some kind of headset. There’s only so many form factors human beings can realistically carry around with them everywhere.

Definitely easier but I think photoshop is probably the closest.

You still needed some amount of skill, but there was also plenty of people with those skills willing to use them for free (or for a small fee)

Definitely easier now, but at least the invasion of privacy aspect has been experienced before. Seems like we didn’t really come up with anything as a society for it though.

I think the incentives will likely align to not regulating this. The thing that society would likely try to regulate is if these fakes end up blasted all over social media, but the social media companies dont want to be regulated so they are incentivized to stop that. Personal consumption, while off putting, is probably not going to rankle enough feathers to be a priority.

I suspect you end up where we are at, it exists, you can use it, you can search it out, but it doesn’t show up on the larger platforms because they are incentivized to prevent it voluntarily to avoid regulation.

The more disturbing thing that we are entering is a K shaped economy.

The consumer base of the United States has split, the wealthier part is doing better and spending more, the poorer part is doing worse and spending less. You have diverging lines like a K

One of the scariest things going forward is that the consumer base of America used to have an economic protection in that the economy depended on not crushing the consumers. With the split in the consumer base the poorer part now represents less and less of the GDP, down to near 10%. This removes the incentive to protect them and we will start seeing more and more bifurcation in the haves and the have-nots.

It remains to be seen if the have-nots will accept this, so far the American population has been pretty accepting of the slowly ratcheting person crushing machine that is late stage capitalism.