Orcocracy [comrade/them]

Also the Washington Post actually pays its writers.

If you borrow a DVD from the library for free you don’t need to pay for whatever streaming service is holding that particular film hostage, if it’s even available at all. And if it’s a Blu-ray Disc it will have better picture quality than a compressed stream. Making copies is also very easy if you have a computer with a drive, and doesn’t require paying for a VPN to avoid facing the risks of online piracy.

I’m a foreign bad actor.

Yes, EU policy is clear. Foreign companies deliberately undercutting European business to monopolize whole sectors is only ok if they’re American, not Chinese. Amazon good, BYD bad.

Fahrenheit is what Americans feel, Celsius is what everyone else feels, and Kelvin is just Celsius +273.

AI, algorithms, and the statistics that power them are not that smart. They have no way of knowing for sure what is in your head when you hit the delete button.

Yes, the drone pilots double-tapping weddings sure are heroes.

Hang on, how did a US soldier give Donald Trump the freedom to say stupid shit? Who was going to take that freedom away, and perhaps the most bizarre part of all: why did the soldier stop them from taking that freedom away?

Is having lots more green energy not a result?

I think we can all broadly sympathize with the complaints about politicking, but this rant also includes a lot of red flags. For example, saying that you have “never had any interest” in things like “being agreeable when you disagree” suggests that this person is just another one of the big ego assholes in the department, a full-of-themselves “rockstar academic” who can’t even be bothered with basic human kindness.

Hmm, three paragraphs of about that size is pretty typical for chatGPT.

All knowledge must include trend lines, otherwise it is not knowledge. Thus spake the god of epistemology.

Comparing the most recently available GDP growth data for one year across multiple major economies : cherry picking

Wondering why data from several decades ago (during the height of rapid massive industrialization that countries tend to only ever do once in their entire history) wasn’t included : not cherry picking

Even more than it used to be. Canadian foreign policy regarding Iraq, Vietnam, and Cuba took a very different position to the US and was on the whole quite good (for a western country). But that was all decades ago. Practically speaking, Canada no longer has its own independent foreign policy.

A train that has a stop somewhere in my neighbourhood.

Yes, that’s a very good point about collapse and the natural course of capitalism being indistinguishable. Or perhaps the collapse started exactly 15 years ago (plus a week or two) and we’re still in the middle of it now? I wouldn’t be surprised if future historians picked September 2008 as the beginning of the end.

Yeah, and telling people to just pay for a VPN isn’t a great answer either - that’s just another fucking pay-forever subscription with the price rises of Netflix plus the added jank and nonsense that comes with being a copyright infringement hobbyist.

Maybe I’ll just cancel everything and do totally offline ripping of borrowed physical media from the public library, like some kind of pirate hermit.

When do only the most austere level of business with your ‘enemies’ that is called sanctions, and when you punish the poor with sanctions that is called austerity.

I have no idea if that’s bullshit or not, but this is definitely turning into a tragic bodycount measuring contest. I’m outta here.