if we're so much richer now, why can't we afford someone to answer the phone when we call up a business?

“The U.S. government has never entered the World Series of Poker. Nor has it gone to Vegas to bet billions [of] taxpayer funds on roulette or built a strategic Powerball ticket reserve, but it appears to be genuinely entertaining the idea of rolling the dice on Bitcoin.” @jp_koning http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2024/12/after-twelve-years-of-writing-about.html

tech titans are like that joke about self-styled "non-conformists" ostentatiously converging on the same set of "eccentricities".

LLMs everywhere! nuclear announcements within days of one another! must contribute to inaugural fund of bold new administration!

truly these are independent minds.

“Either democracy was on the ballot in November, or it wasn’t, and if it was, it makes no political, ethical or strategic sense to act as if we live in normal times.” @jbouie https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/18/opinion/democrats-trump-opposition.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare ht @jeffjarvis

or maybe not, linkedin.

weird how the we-have-to-introduce-incentives ed reform crowd has so little to say about a democratic party that hews strictly to seniority despite failure after failure by incumbent leadership.

do your kids get COVID vaccinations at their pediatricians, along with flu + other childhood vaccinations?

both here in Florida (stereotypically) but also in California, pediatricians who had every other vaccination did not have COVID, and we‘ve had to use Walgreens or CVS to get the kid a COVID shot.

weird social media person: hey, watch this. pennies fall upward!

professor of something: pennies fall downward

MAGA house member: the government is knows all about the antigravity devices and is hiding the truth

people on X: antigravity is real

people on BlueSky: i’ll never speak to those morons

people on Mastodon: here’s a cool CSS trick!

“It is a sign of how corrupt political debate has become that these patent monopolies, which are equivalent to tariffs of many thousand percent, are referred to as the “free market” in most discussions. Patent monopolies have a clear public purpose, to promote innovation, but they are nonetheless a major form of government intervention in the market.” @DeanBaker13 https://cepr.net/government-granted-patent-monopolies-lead-to-corruption-47284/

collapse, civil war, the cause of these things won't be ennui. but even as the machetes bite, they will tell themselves it was.

data has become the opiate of the professionals, inkblots only they can properly interpret, from which they weave accounts of the world in which everything is fine for everybody if only they wouldn’t change anything serious, and anything who says otherwise is objectively, mockably wrong.

i read people on bluesky describing a crisis of affluence and i tell you i don’t know what country we’re sharing.

i live in a country where the crisis is cost of living, where the burden of securing “ordinary” goods like safety, shelter, decent peers for ones kids, health care has become impossible.

people who quietly know the community they’ve joined up with is not right. but who are making good money, and feeling so fulfilled by great projects membership in that community helps get funded.

i suppose one shouldn’t be surprised to find that capital is on the side of an autocracy of capital.

“data” tells you much less than you think. the odds that you interpret it in a way that accurately addresses the question, rather than in a way that provides an answer you have some interest in, are not so great. “data” says nothing without interpretation, and we are all unreliable interpreters.

remember JD Vance?

i think events over the last week or so really put a nail in the coffin of the thesis of this one.

there will be other events like Luigi, and they will use them to crank up the surveillance and Palantir the fuck out of us. stuff our phones overhear and snitch will constitute threats of domestic terrorism, considering the status of our country at this point.

Calling and data rates may apply.

hey guys what if they’re not drones at all but actually BALLOONS?