bertiewhykovich

"Silicon Valley seems to have lost a bit of its verve since the Presidential election. The streets of San Francisco—spiritually part of the Valley—feel less crowded. Coffee-shop conversations are hushed. Everything feels a little muted, an eerie quiet broken by chants of protesters. It even seems as if there are more parking spots. Technology leaders, their employees, and those who make up the entire technology ecosystem seem to have been shaken up and shocked by the election of Donald Trump."

As loathsome as Trump is, I do look forward to having our collective nose rubbed in our collective shit.

This is moronic.

- Psychotherapy can take years to work. Three months is nothing.

- What in the fuck?

- lol yeah sedate your spouse. Careful you don't get ripped off! Mother's little helper should be cheap.

- get your prescriptions from a black-market psychiatrist. nothing could go wrong.

- has this ever worked

- It's not; it's highly addictive and very likely causes brain damage with regular use -- like every other pharmaceutical in its clade.

Shlock. The writer is satisfied with the world he inhabits, is not particularly aggrieved by the powers that be, has not been particularly failed -- and therefore takes umbrage at the suggestion that the established order might not be both benevolent and competent.

But guess what? This isn't the general experience! Most people are constantly, crushingly immiserated and failed -- a societal "failure mode," as he so charmingly terms it, has already come to pass. It's unclear, in fact, that we've ever /not/ been in a failure mode -- begging the question of /why/ things are so consistently fucked up.

> If they're all rational

I feel you, but that assumption is where this argument diverges from reality.

I recently watched "Command And Control" (http://www.commandandcontrolfilm.com) on a whim. I hadn't read up about the film before seeing it, so I understood "nuclear missile accident" to mean, presumably, almost accidentally firing a warhead -- a more-or-less standard nuclear nightmare.

This, of course, is not what happened. The Damascus Titan accident did not involve a nuclear weapon being mistakenly, but intentionally, armed. The very real fear was, instead, that the explosion of a damaged missile could accidentally detonate the warhead as well -- or, in a case only slightly better, blast it into radioactive dust.

I'd never considered the risk entailed by the simple existence -- intentional use entirely aside -- of nuclear weapons. Reading the list of (public!) broken arrow incidents is harrowing.

While there's a grain of truth to this, to insist on this generalization is to twist Stallman's meaning to suit your own purposes. It's quite clear that Stallman is, here, speaking /quite specifically/ about corporations -- inveighing against them, in fact. I am sure that he would agree that governments can engage in similar behavior, but the target of his criticism here is corporations alone. Forcing governments into the conversation is a way of derailing specific criticism of corporations.

"If corporations dominate society and write the laws, then each advance or change in technology is an opening for them to further restrict or mistreat its users."

Also, you definitely can, tongue-in-cheek, call a general statement a "law." It's not meant to be taken in a literal sense; it's meant for humorous or broadly pragmatic effect.

I very much disagree that they do nothing to promote constructive discussion. They put a fine point on the absurdities of the position mocked -- hardly unconstructive.

It's good and not at all insane that I make $100,000/year for dicking around on a computer every day. Those poors just aren't creating value.

Conveying sarcasm may not be one of yours.

God forbid those proles vote, or -- horror of horrors -- have one of the most fulfilling human experiences! They should all be disenfranchised and sterilized.

but neoliberalism is good and without any drawbacks. the unhaltered gallop of technology will have no bad consequences whatsoever.

Please just read Marx already.

I'm sympathetic to your point. But ultimately I gotta disagree with the premise of your argument -- specifically, that the misery of being a cuckold makes the use of the term "cuck" unacceptable. Much to the contrary, I think that it makes the term /suitable/ for many situations -- situations that are, in some way, emotionally analogous. I'm hesitant to make this claim unequivocally -- I can see arguing that the mechanics of the use of the term "cuck" exceed mere metaphor in objectionable ways -- but I think that the ability to speak directly to emotional reality supersedes any such argument.

For the record, I'm not defending the alt-right in any capacity. They're loathsome fascists. And that's key -- the problem is the content of their positions, not the language in which they're expressed.

Look, dude, it's not about inherent worth. Framing these discussions in such terms is a rhetorical trick to evade their actual subject matter. The real issue is that being cheated on, of losing "sexual control" over your partner (and that phrasing is another rhetorical trick, a way to disguise the real emotional structure of the desire for fidelity as, instead, some sort of patriarchal construct), is /subjectively/ devastating. It /does/ make you feel diminished as a person. It /does/ make you feel "worth less" -- which is, in fact, essentially the message semaphored by your partner deciding to seek satisfaction elsewhere than you. It is a terrible feeling to be told -- explicitly, or even more horribly, implicitly -- that you are not enough for your partner.

This isn't about sexist, fascist, or racist(???) language. It's not a fiction concocted by the far right. It's about the emotional realities of being a human being -- not some fantasy caricature.

I'm rooting against you, pal. Cheers.

Yeah man, it's crazy misogynistic to suggest that men don't like it when their wife sleeps with another man.

The linked article suggests that the models in the animation are supposed to represent 21st-century vices. That's all very well and good, but "The Garden of Earthly Delights" wasn't supposed to (and doesn't) represent 16th-century vices. Certain images from the "Hell" panel may be more historically situated, but the center panel is -- if it's about vices at all, which is not at all clear -- about more-or-less eternal human ones.

Edit: one of my favorite pieces of art derivative of "Garden" -- a reading of the music painted on one of the figures' asses. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnrICy3Bc2U

That's delightful.

The Pharcyde's video for "The Drop" was filmed entirely in reverse. They apparently worked with a linguist to work out mouth movements that would sync to the lyrics when played backwards. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=co3qMdkucM0

It's a really cool effect -- except for a few bits where objects fall upwards and the like, there's nothing too strikingly "off" about the motion in the video, but you can tell that something's up. It doesn't form an uncanny valley, though -- there's still an overarching "organic" feeling to the thing.

it was good

While a government that's "monolithic and controlling but keeps the trains running on time" is clearly a bad thing, it's not clear that the same holds for computers -- particularly for your average user. I'm not too concerned about Apple locking down my machine as long as I can get what I want to get done done -- and that doesn't involve making my tool conform to some ideology. I have more important things to worry about -- even more important infringements on personal freedom -- and I'd rather have my tool work adequately with as little pain as possible.

Ask the facts, man. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restaura...

why would it be able to?

Are you arguing that it's /ethical/ for businesses to behave in these ways, or that it's /unsurprising/ that they do so? I'm confused.

You guys really love cop-outs, huh?

As Matt Bruenig has noted, the BATNA for many workers is dire poverty. Quitting isn't that easy.

I've developed an algorithm that significantly improves any concept. The creativity barrier has been broken by my might -- the line between computers and humans shattered. The source code is below: its elegance is staggering.

    def improve_idea(idea_description):
	return '%s Also blockchain.' % idea_description

Saw this article and just ran with the title, eh? https://www.libertariannews.org/2012/11/15/meat-packing-lies...

Turns out it doesn't actually "expose the fiction of 'The Jungle.'" It cites "a 1906 report by the Bureau of Animal Industry" -- and nothing else. It then runs headlong into a classic libertarian diatribe against regulations.

And even if "The Jungle" /was/ pure fiction (instead of just fictionalize) -- readers didn't know that. And, despite their revulsion, the stockyards kept chugging along.