Dinosaurs are a profit center, fences are a cost center.

Sharecropping is optimistic. They’re laying the groundwork to have a larger prison population that the government can rent out to the landowners.

Can hardly believe that video is almost old enough to vote 🧓

Haven’t thought about it in years but seeing the tracert command snapped me right back to it lol.

For anyone interested in a field trip to the internet museum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXmv8quf_xM

It’s a classic ❤️

I agree. I think with a robust enough proposal, there are a lot of people with power who would be willing to get on board. Some people though… they’ve shown that they’re willing to kill huge numbers of people to maintain and expand their power, and I don’t know that that kind of powermonger can be dealt with gracefully. And I think an internet-native global democratic movement would have to be started by people with internet access, and one of its goals would have to be providing, to the best of its ability, internet access to everyone.

Genuinely, I think the “other” in this case is the extinction of the human species. It’s very scary to me that there are people like Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump are in charge of nuclear arsenals. Do I think they are going to start a nuclear war? At this point the best I can do is “hopefully not 🤞”. But the longer we roll the nuclear armageddon dice, the better our chances that we’ll eventually wipe ourselves out. And the predicament that Ukraine finds itself in currently is proof that no nation with nukes should ever give them up as long as there’s a real threat of invasion by another nation. And as technology advances and we find more efficient ways of harnessing huge amounts of energy, that arms race will only escalate. I think the only long-term solution is to find a way for all of us to disarm and find a stable way to prevent rearming, or in other words, world peace.

I think there would have to be a constitution with an enumeration of basic rights, and unfettered access to the global internet would have to be one of them. I’m leery of biometrics, for one, not everyone has eyes or fingers, and two, biometric signatures can be spoofed and if someone can spoof your biometric signatures, it’s hard to prove your identity. I think there would have to be some kind of managed citizen ID, something that can be replaced by your local government if it gets compromised.

I think direct funding would probably have to be a big component at the start, especially before the government is able to levy taxes. But capital power tends to favor itself and lead to increased inequality. The fundamental assumption of one person = one vote would have to be able to ultimately overrule the wealthy for it to be a real democracy.

I have a similar thought about 100-1000 person groups at the base level. I think the basic unit of organization would need to be geographical, for a couple of reasons: one, I think it’s important for us as humans to be able to meet and talk to your fellows (and your elected officials) in person, and two, I think a purely online bloc would be vulnerable to technological capture. Like, an attacker could MITM an entire bloc and manipulate how they vote. I think interest groups / parties / factions etc. will still happen but I wouldn’t want to organize voting around them.

Real talk: I think the end goal of the internet has to be some kind of democratic world government. The only other option is corporate capture. I don’t know how it’ll work, I don’t know how to solve the problems of ensuring privacy and fair elections or fair distribution of resources or any of that stuff that would have to be solved for, but I think some sort of global, grassroots movement that enables self-governance from the neighborhood level all the way up to global concerns is needed to prevent us from sliding further into entrenched global plutocracy.

Mine too

Yeah, but I don’t want to let The First Noel entirely off the hook. Lots of english christian songs are translations and/or centuries old adaptations and/or lyrics grafted onto previously written music, and quality varies of course but for some reason, for me, this one stands out for banality.

No song drives me into an irrational fury like “The First Noel”. It’s slow, the melody sucks and the lyrics are the laziest drivel I have ever had the displeasure of being subjected to.

The first Noel the angels did say

ok, “did say” is a little clunky but you want an easy rhyme, that I can forgive

Was to certain poor shepherds
In fields as they lay,

alright, we’ve established some context. The angels are talking to some shepherds.

In fields where they lay

Yeah we get it, they’re laying in the fields

Keeping their sheep

yes, they’re SHEPHERDS we get context

on a cold winter's night
that wa-as so deep.

The night was SO DEEP? That’s what you came up with to rhyme with sheep? A line we didn’t need because we already established that they’re fucking SHEPHERDS aaagh FUCK this song I’m not going to go through the whole thing but there are SEVERAL more verses and they all suck just as bad. How many hours of my childhood did I spend having to sit through this miserable drivel and it’s SO SLOW every time I hear it I feel like my brain is being forced to wear a too-tight necktie.

finally a use for TracerT besides seeing which IPs are connected to google (and seeing whether their connection speed is good or sucks ass)

They both refer to behaviors or attributes associated with children, but “childish” has a generally negative connotation and “childlike” has a generally positive connotation. e.g. “childish behavior” is usually something the author judges inappropriate, where “childlike wonder” is usually rendered as a positive (if often infantilizing) attribute. Similar definitions, but quite different in implication.

When the apocalypse comes I will of course let people use my stores of micro USB and VGA cables, but I’m gonna be real smug about it.

Dope. Been dreaming of a completely energy independent farm for so long, and it’s getting closer and closer to feasible :)

WTF is Roblox?

Whoever proposes a coherent Quantum Theory of Homosexuality is gonna win a fields medal.

Food is going to be harder for Americans to come by in the near future. How much harder, hard to say. I don’t think it’s panic buy time, but it’s definitely “start stockpiling dry goods” time.