Abolishing history and etymology make Yanks of us all.

We are, by strict definition of the term, a first-world shithole.

The third world is simply the set of states that were unaligned during the Cold War. The term took on a secondary implication of poverty largely because of American foreign policy. Failure to implement neoliberal market reforms marked a country out as “poor”, while embrace of those reforms would result in your country being spotlighted as “growing” and its people as “enriched”.

But its all just marketing. While Americans threw billions into the economic sinkhole of Pinochet’s Chile and Park’s Korea and Diem’s Vietnam, countries like Burkina Faso and Yugoslavia and Iraq raced ahead of their peers by triangulating a path between the Great Powers while embracing local economic development instead of fixating on a debt-laden export market expansion.

It’s relatively easy to forgive debt that’s targeting people with virtually no ability to repay it. You’re not losing money simply because you’ve stopped sending out collections calls and notices to people who have nothing to give you. The fees total appears to have reached this level precisely because so few people were paying it.

a jury had just found him not guilty of the charges that had landed him in the notoriously brutal Harrisburg jail to begin with. After all that time inside, it felt especially insulting for the county to hound him to pay for his own confinement even following his acquittal.

…

“The longer you sat in jail, the more debt you incurred, the more debt your family incurred. People sit there pretrial for one year, two years. It’s so wrong,”

Outright sadistic to set bonds your suspect can’t afford, then charge them for incarceration even after acquittal. These are very nakedly predatory fines, designed to keep certain people in poverty.

Justin Douglas, the Democratic commissioner who scored a shock upset win in 2023 on an uncommon platform of reforming the Dauphin County jail, and who championed the recent debt forgiveness, says that the county was spending about as much, if not more, on collecting those jail fees as it was taking in.

“This is fake debt to begin with, in that we’re never going to recoup $66 million, and it’s comical to think we would,” Douglas told Bolts.

The entire nut of the problem. It’s merely a collections racket. The system exists to do what it does, which is to hound people released from prison into perpetuity.

It’s all very normal when you recognize how much of our institutional structure is corrupted by profit-seeking.

Its no different than a police officer taking a bribe to let you out of a speeding ticket. Or a customs official demanding a kick-back to let a ship unload its cargo. Or a mafia goon shaking down a local storefront for “protection” money. Just institutionalized so there’s no risk of being punished.

My version of this meme would be the prof begging the students to actually read the book he/she picked out that is free or cheap so that they are prepared for class and the students rolling their eyes and instead just going to chatgpt or chegg…

Waiting for the meme, in another five or ten years, when students are bemoaning how the subscription fee to ChatGPT For Grad Students keeps going up.

But that’s not as controversial.

It IS controversial. Its just controversial for the same chuds who demand the right to throw on brown-face and call it cosplay. As soon as a beer company starts releasing their label in Spanish or putting a foreign flag on a product or otherwise identify with the wrong kind of foreigner, a big segment of the population loses its mind.

When I was growing up in the 80s and some frat-bro types ran around town dressed like the Three Amigos while swilling beers and fumbling their Spanish, parents and teachers would call it “tacky” and “annoying” and “juvenile”.

Now, in the 20s, the children of those frat-bros puts on the same outfit and does the same stupid shit. But their peers are the ones rolling their eyes and telling them that they don’t look cool, while the parents clap and take pictures and get off on a romanticized youth lived vicariously through their frat-bro kids.

So the frat-bros become resentful. They go home, pull out their crayons, and make up a naked brown man to give them permission to behave miserably. And then they go on podcasts and make Instagram reels explaining how - um, aktuly - if you don’t think the tourist-trap Spirit Halloween tier get-up I’m wearing on Cinco-De-Drinko to celebrate getting wasted is cool, you’re the real racists.

Then Budwiser releases an “Authentic Mexican Logger” and the same frat-bros lose their fucking minds because their favorite beer company just Went Woke.

And much harder to replace you with someone unfamiliar with the problem.

What you can end up with is a lot of new hires queued up for the firing line. The “bottom 5%” is, initially, the people in the office who are currently in a slump. But then you bring on a load of fresh new hires who have little experience and a lot of pressure. They burn out fast and become the next “bottom 5%”.

Meanwhile, the more politically and technically savvy learn to survive by creating make-work tasks that look good on performance metrics but do little for the firm as a whole. Their superiors approve, because a team that is constantly appearing busy is more important than a team that’s producing anything of value. So you end up with these little entrenched departmental fiefs, dedicated to making themselves irreplaceable at the expense of the company as a whole.

There’s a ton written on the Sears collapse in the early 00s, where this exact dynamic played out. Managers turned against one another, because stack ranking mattered more than inter-department cohesion or bottom line figures. The company went from a network of high end retailers to a shitty outlet stores over the course of a decade.

Its most aggressive at the higher tiers, because promotions are a tool of employee retention and “flattening” the management stack is a good way of pushing out the experienced, expensive older employees. You’ll also see a lot more outsourcing of department rolls, as C-levels opt for lowest-bidder contractors you can hire/fire inside a business cycle than big teams of veteran staffers who sit on the payroll thick or thin. That means fewer mid-level managers, as the actual process of team management is sent overseas or subcontracted out to temporary management firms.

McDonald Douglas and Yahoo both executed on this strategy back in the 90s to great effect. Stock valuations boomed, because they were able to create the illusion of cost cutting without impacting quarterly revenue. All it cost them was mountains of technical debt. And then nothing bad happened to either company.

Great for creating a lot of churn and quick-fix make-work. Rather than deploying a single comprehensive solution to a persistent problem, just take credit for fixing the symptoms over and over and over again.

Old enough to remember when you could get to the “end of Twitter”, because you’d swiped through all the active posts of the day.

I’m old enough to remember Nintendo suing GameGenie for making the test codes on their games more broadly accessible. And Apple suing indie firms that made 3rd party peripherals for their devices. Don’t forget Microsoft’s unholy war on Netscape Navigator, as they deliberately tried to sabotage the popular third party web browser from working via various Microsoft updates. Hell, I think you can find case law in the 1920s on Ford Motor Company fighting spare parts manufacturers and trying to box them out of the industry. Corporate dinosaurs fighting to keep startups from interfacing with their products is a tale as old as time.

Historically, Facebook/Google/Twitter/et al were focused on integrating with common systems, because they were the underdogs struggling against firms like Microsoft and Comcast who were trying to maintain their Walled Garden. Now they’re kings of the hill, pushing competition off their doorstep.

Its sleazy and toxic and ultimately bad for the industry as a whole. But its nothing new.

Schools, hospitals, and aid convoys that are hijacked and used by Hamas

The “human shields” rhetoric is traditionally used as a reason why you can’t target a militant, not a reason why you can kill a civilian.

Israel has inverted the narrative, both by asserting that a dozen dead Palestinians are justified if one Hamas militant is killed, and by asserting that anyone in proximity to a Hamas militant is a collaborator.

The end result is a free-fire zone, wherein nobody an Israeli bomb or hit squad targets is exempt from the status of “military target”. This is a legal claim that Israel makes independent of international legal courts, and has resulted in the Israeli government being repeatedly sanctioned and threatened with prosecution by those same courts.

So no, they are not

valid military targets under international law

Just the contrary. The IDF is implicated in war crimes by engaging in these rampant and lawless slaughters.

Who decides about objectivity?

In principle, you don’t need anyone to decide. The facts speak for themselves.

In practice, people get the overwhelming majority of their information third-hand. So the people who decide on objective reality are the people who manage the media infrastructure that provides information of the outside world to their audience.

As audiences become more fractured and information streams more selective (particularly in political media), the different viewpoints provided by various news outlets and propaganda firms can create the illusion of multiple competing objective realities.

But lying and denial and selective reporting don’t change reality. Eventually, the reporting begins to produce contradictions - images and statements that don’t line up with one another, because they are so busy trying to reframe a momentary narrative or shape a shifting popular opinion. That dissonance is a big warning sign of an illusion at play.

Some might argue that calling what happens in Gaza a genocide might be hate speach against Israel

Pax­ton Wins Major Case Defend­ing Texas’s Anti-Boy­cott-of-Israel Law

“Texas’s anti-boycott law is both constitutional and, unfortunately, increasingly necessary as the radical left becomes increasingly hostile and antagonistic toward Israel,” said Attorney General Paxton. “Though some wish to get rid of the law and see Israel fail, the State of Texas will remain firm in our commitment to stand with Israel by refusing to do business with companies that boycott the only democratic nation in the Middle East. In this case, I’m pleased to see the court recognize that the plaintiff lacked any standing to bring this challenge. Thus, our important law remains in effect, and I will continue to defend it relentlessly.”

There’s a fundamental Americanized understanding of censorship as de facto BAD. So in order to justify doing what is very obviously a form of censorship, we don’t establish a justifiable and transparent process for censoring content. We just redefine the thing we’re doing as “Not Censorship”.

At the same time, with so much of social media in the hands of a tiny minority of mega-advertisers, the debate is pointless. We don’t get to decide what is or is not censured. The advertisers do. Smears against ethnic groups or religious movements or people of a particular gender or persuasion are only prohibited when they interfere with the distribution of marketing materials.

Now that advertisers have sufficiently A/B tested their marketing material, there’s no reason to explicitly prohibit bigoted content because you can simply cloister particular communities into atomized walled gardens of advertising media.

I can sell Bud Light Fuck The Trans cans to the evangelical chuds, I can sell Bud Light Israel Did Nothing Wrong to Zionists, and I can sell Bud Light Communism Will Win to the Tankies. Everyone can have their own boutique Bud Light experience and sales of piss beer can keep going up forever.

as if the majority of people enjoy their jobs?

The enshittification of employment isn’t necessary. And having a role in how your society functions is necessary for any kind of democratic control of the economy. You can’t just be a consumer, on the outside looking in.

Automating away drudgery is generally good for an economy. Automating away control is what sucks.

As if our benevolent oligarchs will suddenly give us even the smallest chance of getting some kind of basic income?

The structures of basic income are already in place. We have social security. We have pensions. We have annuities. The struggle is in if and how we continue to fund them.

Since Reagan, the answer to funding basic income schemes has been to displace the cost from higher income earners to younger workers. Now that we’ve drained that well, there’s definitely a push to simply dissolve these systems entirely.

But it’s hardly a given, any more than the Reagan Era was some historical inevitability. Americans can change course if enough of them can unify around an opposition.

No idea why this is getting downvoted. You can argue over the exact practicality of the current iteration of AI, but this is a proven good take on automation generally speaking

Nobody should be doing this, but okay.

I have to build one of these in my garage before the Chinese do it.