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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • Honestly? I agree.

    But you also have to pick and choose a battle. The christofacists have pretty much the entirety of the news media behind them. That is why people globally insist “nobody is resisting” because… those protests never get any air time. And it is nothing new. Look how fast the news media was to condemn Trayvon Martin (and the many others like him) as violent gangbanging thugs while completely ignoring the lunatic who stalked and murdered him.

    Look at Minnesota. The people being murdered are poets and nurses. And that is building up outrage to the point that even the news media can’t run a smear campaign fast enough to stop (localized) general strikes.

    Contrast that with gunning down people who are screaming “wildcats” and shooting back. It becomes “both sides are bad” and we roll in the military to make sure there is no more unrest.


  • The Black Panthers (in their various incarnations) are an armed organization that actively uses the threat of gun violence to keep The Enemy at bay. That is literally a terrorist organization.

    Does that mean they don’t do good? Of course not. Just like plenty of organized crime groups have historically been the only people looking out for the community.

    But it is very much a balancing act to control public opinion so that people support and defend their local gunmen rather than turn them in so that they can stop living in terror. The Troubles in Ireland are a “great” example of how rapidly this can shift once a cold war goes hot, as it were.

    So no. This is only a “contradiction” if you don’t understand that words have meaning and that meaning isn’t based on how happy you are.




  • … that is essentially what ICE is. A bunch of racists with guns who want to shoot people.

    Guess what? They don’t shoot the people you want them to.

    And a state run militia is literally a civil war and will result in the army getting called in to put them down. And you can bet the brave men and women of the us armed forces will have no problem murdering and raping people without the 12 hour flight to get there.

    Orgs like The Black Panthers have always walked a very fine line. Yes, they are technically a terrorist organization by most (modern) definitions of the term. But they ALSO put way more effort into winning over The People than anything else so the only way to really root them out is for the government to get their Tulsa on.

    And considering basically the entire news media is complicit with the christofacists at this point… it won’t take much to turn public opinion and decide that “Yeah. Chicago really IS a lawless land that is worse than Ghaza and everyone there needs to be rescued. Send in the marines”








  • Eh. Some stuff does make sense to centralize.

    Like, the concept of a thin client (what these basically are “close enough” to) is a really good one. They drastically simplify security and costs for corporate environments. And, even in the before times, it might genuinely make sense to just pay for a month/hundred hours of GFN if you wanted to play the latest AAA game rather than upgrading your five year old computer that handles everything else you play perfectly.

    The bigger issue being that it now increasingly makes sense to pay for years/thousands of hours of GFN because of how broken the everything is. And the vultures (like Amazon and nVidia) smell the decay.

    And… I didn’t want to crap on the other person too much but I do think p2p is why so many people think this can’t work. There is a big difference between streaming from your computer over starbucks wifi and connecting to a major data center. And there are also arguments for power and ecological impact but that becomes a MUCH bigger mess full of bad actors and incomplete comparisons.






  • Sort of.

    Yes, the nobility and the royals basically had comparable lifespans to those today.

    The average peasant? Wikipedia so grain of salt, but it lines up with much of what I have seen over the years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy.

    Life Expectancy at Birth (LEB) in the Bronze age is believed to be around 24. Now, this is going to be skewed because we are generally finding the sites of battles (easier to find 20 corpses than 1…). But, at the same time, LEB in the medieval period (30-33) is going to be skewed by most records caring a lot more about the nobility than some rando on a farm.

    LEB has 100% gone up as wars become less common and medicine becomes much more effective and plentiful. And I’ll admit I was exaggerating for comedic effect here. But also… not that much.

    Because maybe you DO have good odds of living to your late 50s if you make it to your early 40s… the average is low for a reason and it isn’t JUST infant death. It is working hard to survive day to day and being incredibly vulnerable to crop yields (whether starving or being sent to war because said nobility got hungry/bored). And when you are seeking knowledge from those more experienced around the village… they are gonna skew a lot younger than Lord Farquad’s uncle.



  • Can we not pretend the problem is solely performance based? People keep doing this with generative AI and it keeps resulting in “oh shit, ghibli AI is so awesome”.

    Especially since… can you watch a twitch stream? Congrats, you can stream a desktop. Even back with Stadia it was very much viable to play games like AssCreed over streaming and have a very comparable experience to it being local. And stuff like Geforce Now actually work REALLY well.

    The issue shouldn’t be “can you make this perform well enough I want to use it”. It should be about ownership and the implication for… everything if all “personal computers” exist solely in a data center and all documents exist solely in The Cloud and so forth. Preservation of anything becomes nigh impossible and you suddenly have to pay a monthly fee to ever see your kid’s pictures again.


  • No. It really hasn’t.

    Much of the historic (so not recent) idolation of the elderly (even when “the elderly” meant folk in their 30s and 40s…) was specifically about the pursuit of knowledge and self betterment. It was knowing how to make your spears fly farther or how to properly rotate the crops in the field and so forth.

    Fast forward and The Rich would outright buy philosophers for the prestige of being the patron of someone so intelligent and influential. Which continued on to the arts and so forth.

    Hell, not too long ago it was “work hard so you can get into a good school and make something of yourself”.

    Now? it is outright vilification of “intellectuals” and people who think “Too long, didn’t read” is an insult rather than a condemnation of their own attention spans.

    Or, to roll way back: it is people saying “Fuck you old man. I don’t need your sharp pointy sticks. I am gonna go punch that tiger until it turns into chicken”.