If school house rock was composed by a sociopath.

what if they’re a CEO?

the nature of their labor

WTYP. The most famous CEOs don’t work. They just exploit the work of others.

turning on the big Consent Manufacturing Machine

“You can GET RICH QUICK! with this ONE NEAT TRICK! if you’re willing to coughdo a huge bit of gray market work in a high risk industry for a very long timecough and then YOU’LL BE SET FOR cougha very shortcough LIFE!”

Friendly reminder that Drug Dealers Mostly Live With Their Moms and the average camgirls don’t do much better. This is a high risk, low reward industry operating in an informal economy with no labor protections that needs an enormous marketing budget in order to keep people engaged with it.

going down to the creek to dip my toes in

creek is full of industrial runoff from the giant factory upstream

walk upstream to see the factory

How Memphis became a battleground over Elon Musk’s xAI supercomputer

xAI’s central focus is a tool called Grok. It’s an AI chatbot, similar to ChatGPT, that the company flaunts as “having a sense of humor.” Musk has called it the “most fun AI in the world.” It has fewer rules than other AI chatbots and has been known for creating controversial deepfake images, such as Mickey Mouse as a Nazi and Kamala Harris in lingerie.

The primary purpose of the Memphis supercomputer is to provide compute power for Grok.

…

The cancer rate in South Memphis is four times higher than the national average, according to a ProPublica report. And a 2020 University of Memphis study found the life expectancy here is 10 years lower than other parts of the city. South Memphis also has elevated asthma rates, and the American Lung Association gave it a failing grade for air quality. Experts say this is largely due to the neighborhood’s proximity to Memphis’ industrial zone.

“How will we get by without all our financialized monopolies?!”

Idk, bro. Just keep doing what you’re doing, minus the extraordinary rents to your bloated bourgeois landlords, maybe?

The way to build third parties is by reforming the democratic system state by state to have a ranked choice system

Spending decades to tinker with the mechanics of an election system that excludes 40% of the population via its baseline construction? Seems like you’re going to keep getting the same results.

What good is Ranked Choice Voting in a state like Florida, where 1.7M people are excluded through the state’s Felony Disenfrachisement system? FFS, the state voted on an amendment to reform Felony Disenfrachisement and the legislature just cancelled it out. Gerrymandering means you’ll never see a non-conservative state senate and you’re unlikely to see more than a moderate conservative occupy the Governor’s mansion.

That’s not a FPTP problem, its a problem of targeted state-wide ethnic disenfranchisement.

glances at the current state of the UK Labour party

It’s been known to work for a bit, but its also been known to collapse right back into the old two-party dichotomy. I think the hysteria around third parties baked into every election since the Bush Era SCOTUS-powered election theft in Florida is overblown, particularly when so much of the electorate lives in one-party dominant states. But I’ve also noticed successful outsider parties - the German Greens, France’s En March, the UK Liberal Dems - seem to embrace Corporationism as quickly as any of their German Christian Democrat / French Socialist / UK Tory peers.

And then there’s always this specter of fascism floating on the edge of the political establishment. Your Alternative for Germany, your National Front, and your UKIP create this existential crisis for liberal voters, such that they’re persistently terrorized into voting the “safe” centrist candidates in while ostracizing any candidate actually running on the things they say they want.

The Ruling Elite have the effective roadmap to keep the proles in line. Continuously finance a paper tiger on the right-flank of the election cycle. Make immigration a boogeyman issue that mobilizes the reactionaries within the state to turn out in droves. Then dangle a weak liberal as a release valve - a Starmer or Biden or Macron or Olaf Schultz - that nobody particularly likes, but the liberal-leaning base are told is “electable” because they can win the support of the conservative national media.

People are bombarded with this false choice - weak liberal or strongman conservative - decade after decade, all the way around the edge of the Atlantic, until the institutions these weak liberals are supposed to support are falling apart and the strongman conservatives can easily take over.

Its a doomed system.

Like Russia does?

Israel and Russia remain close geopolitical allies.

Basically what the French did to Haiti, several centuries ago. Kill off all the native peoples and bring in a slave population to handle the manual labor.

insert dubiously sourced anecdote by anonymous IDF officer

handing my friend a screwdriver

“You can use this for simple crafts and home repairs”

Me, backing away from the screwdriver in terror

“Nice try, but I know what that is. They use that thing to build the Space Shuttle.”

Lexcorp was never portrayed as anything but an industrial powerhouse whose existence was ultimately good.

The largest international arms dealing firm that did Captain Planet Villain tier pollution, corruption, and financial scams was “ultimately good”?

Didn’t Lexcorp literally clone an army of Doomsdays?

I don’t remember this at all.

AI has looked like a scam since the Metaverse days when Facebook realized it couldn’t push those shitty headsets on people and decided to pivot.

The entire training set isn’t used in each permutation. Your keywords are building the samples based on metadata tags tied back to the original images.

If you ask for “Iron Man in a cowboy hat”, the toolset will reach for some catalog of Iron Man images and some catalog of cowboy hat images and some catalog of person-in-cowboy-hat images, when looking for a basis of comparison as it renders the image.

These would be the images attributed to the output.

The NAP was always a crock of shit. There is no real rhyme or reason to it. Just a Libertarian’s way of saying “You started it!” every time they get into a physical altercation.

Read the Manga, they say. The story is so much better, they say.

RIP the future of high end computer graphics. 1972 to 2024. You had a good run.

We’re talking about rentals, dude.

We just had a major rental catrelization scandal, by which landlords collaborated to keep vacant units prices above the clearing rate to deny their tenants anywhere cheaper to move.

Someone can afford the home you’re in.

I’ve got half a dozen units on my block that are selling above the clearing price. They’ve been vacant for years. This is speculative real estate. The only people who can afford it are the developers and investors looking to accumulate housing stock on the gamble that someone will be able to pay the markup at some point in the future.

no money spent

Well… electricity.