is it more that really terrible people are disproportionately likely to accumulate plutocratic wealth?
or that ordinary human inclinations like perceiving ones own rewards as deserved and “protecting what’s mine” provoke even those who accumulate great wealth accidentally to become terrible?
(inspired, of course, by scrolling on twitterx for just a few minutes.)
@GGMcBG we should all have a roadrunner pal we call Clarice.
@ouguoc I think you are right! The wikipedia images and my afternoon friend have “hairstyles” too similar I think to be coincidental.
@ouguoc i… don’t know! it, and we, were wandering around a zoo in Medellin, Columbia. it wasn’t penned, but seemed jadedly accustomed to wandering humans. i don’t know whether it’s a local bird, or something the zoo placed to mingle with the humans.
a big brown bird, eying me suspiciously.
@dpp (i didn’t actually intend to boost that, though yes, i certainly think it very suspicious.)
@dpp ( meanwhile, another boeing incident today from an airport i flew from a week ago today https://abc7news.com/united-flight-missing-panel-sfo-medford-oregon/14529741/ )
it’s not a body modification, it’s a reformity.
kids museums hit differently outside of the puritan US.
(from Parque Explora, Medellin Colombia.)
Sculpture of a naked female figure with massively oversized hands, head, and tongue.
Explanation:
Text: Animunculi Grandma, What Big Nose You Have! The human brain assigns a great quantity of its nervous circuits to the most sensible areas: hands, lips and tongue. • When any spot of your body touches an object, the sensation travels until reaching the brain. There, the space assigned for each body part is not proportional to its size but to its sensibility. Sensorial homunculi show this proportion. The same goes when it comes to movement: for the body areas with the greatest mobility, the brain assigns them more area in the motor cortex, as motor homunculi show. What if we did a model for the wolf? We would have a wolf with a big nose!
@djc I think Musk is an enthusiastic part of a plutocratic axis that is very much aligned with Putinist inclinations to constrain liberalism and make the world safe for hierarchical societies that brook little question. So actually, I disagree. I’m at least as concerned about Musk and Twitter as I am about China and TikTok.
@djc he can decide whether to permit or forbid communications for specific military operations. i’m not afraid of China invading the US. i am concerned about the overall distribution of geopolitical power, but Musk and his colleagues have in fact achieved a level of relevance their, and their interests and mine may not be well aligned.
“You and I have money. But it isn’t tidal-force money. There are meaningful gradations of money among normal human beings — the poverty line, food insecurity, a living wage, the cost of housing, student debt, retirement planning, etc. These are all vitally important, and/but they can all be grouped under a heading that we might term ‘normal-people shit.’ Public policy and govt funding, if well-administered, can have measurable, predictable impacts on normal-people-shit.” https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/the-gravitational-force-of-tech-money
i’d support a law that made it impossible for tiktok to operate as it does, as long as it was equitable and made it impossible for facebook, instagram, twitter, and youtube to operate as they do. i trust the Chinese Communist Party to act in the US public interest about as much as i trust Elon Musk to.
“In reality equity and fairness are narrowly defined, contextual notions. When we decide it’s fair to use a FICO score in order to determine an interest rate on a loan, that’s very different from using a FICO score to decide how many weeks of unemployment insurance you should receive after breaking your leg. You cannot decide that ‘FICO scores are legitimate discriminators’ as a universal rule, just as ‘diverse skin tones and genders’ is not a universal good” #CathyONeil https://mathbabe.org/2024/03/12/googles-mistake-with-gemini/
@susannah@octodon.social @xerophile sounds woke. and bad for ranchers. what is bad for today’s ranchers is bad for ‘murica forever.
it’s the freedom agenda. ht @xerophile
@LesterB99 their value proposition definitely is price based. i love them for that. but building pretend customer service that does nothing but literally play for time until the customer goes away is negative value at zero price. i'd prefer they simply not offer the channel, or offer a real one at an upcharge.
i think i’ve had my most kafkaesque customer service experience ever on a Spirit Airlines chat line. more than two hours, allegedly three humans in addition to the chatbot, but i’m disinclined to believe there were any humans in the loop at all. no comprehension, no help, now in addition to the problem we were trying to resolve we’re in danger of missing the plane. this is a brave new world where really, really, there is nobody on the other end who has any inclination or capacity to give a fuck.
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@scott whatever the physics of a brick wall is, we don't call it "friction"!
