you ask a gen-alpha-er what they want to be when they grow up and they say “i want to be canceled when i grow up so i can be famous and make a lot of money and run the government.”
"The old world is dying, and its creators are pretty quiet about it." @Atrios https://www.eschatonblog.com/2025/10/the-world-is-flat.html
somebody’s going to make an algorithmic ai-generated porn app that examines users’ scrolls and pauses like tik-tok and modifies what it generates accordingly. some strange shit gonna evolve in that ecosystem.
@admitsWrongIfProven i find it’s such an easy catastrophe to slip into.
much more dangerous than being straw manned by other people, it is so easy to fall into a practice of straw manning oneself: getting cornered into defending a simplification or caricature of ones own views.
“Let me repeat that — social media silos are fighting against web links, the foundation of the open web. They do so to ‘encourage’ content and discussions on their own platforms, noble goals a stakeholder would say, except that now these platforms are filled with politics, rage, and AI slop.” @alexelcu https://alexn.org/blog/2025/10/13/outsourced-voices-outsourced-minds/
one video is tragedy. a thousand videos is just noise.
it’s weird how inured we’ve become. reliberation day is kind of a big deal, if we don’t TACO our way out of it very quickly. do we just presume we do? how much do China’s controls on rare earths matter in either case?
if you’re talking about your political party as a “brand”, you’ve already lost the thread, if not the election.
feudalism is when you must do as the most pathetic people you encounter demand because they have the power to have you murdered.
pleasantly surprised that here in Florida my wife and i were able to get COVID boosters without new formalities, attestations of comorbidities, etc. just signed up at CVS like last year.
sometimes i think contemporary christianity is to christ like the twenty-dollar federal reserve note is to andrew jackson.
kind of fun that frog is now both a fascist-adjacent and antifascist-adjacent icon.
slippery little guy, that one!
@admitsWrongIfProven it’s a bird. it’s a plane. it’s a superuser!
how will rare-earth scarcity intersect with data center build? might it be a meaningful bottleneck?
if you oppose the administration and call them fascist, what does that make you?
we used to be forward-looking but now we are forward-fearing and obsessed by retrofutures. https://flipboard.com/@theverge/the-verge-5hobbaa8z/-/a-rJaMAFsqQxW8IiJcluZ67w%3Aa%3A43611565-%2F0
All else equal — ceteris paribus, as the economists say — if you were to just grab that expensive watch from the jewelry store counter and walk out the door, you'd be better off.
Only all else would not be equal.
Lots of data-centric political punditry is basically "grab the watch".
“we could call this a more muscular, socialism-inflected version of antitrust. Rather than (or in addition to) playing constant legal whack-a-mole against market concentration, the government steps in directly and creates the competition it wants, either through subsidies or outright state-owned firms. This antitrust model has led to by far the most effective attack on fossil fuel power in history: the rise of ultra-cheap renewable energy.” @ryanlcooper https://prospect.org/economy/2025-10-07-socialist-case-for-antitrust/