So it means we all get to be Spartacus.

Note that Disney and Universal pirate other people’s stuff whenever they want.

Note also that all the Generative AI services are very protective of their big cistern of web-crawled data, say when China borrows it for DeepSeek.

Content, content everywhere and not a drop of principle.

You should never feel bad for laziness. In fact the notion of laziness or sloth is a device by industrial authorities to press more work out of an already beleaguered labor force.¹

We’ve seen how it goes during the 2020 epidemic lockdown and furlough: most people couldn’t couch potato for a week and turned to hobbies, enough of which were monetizable enough to cause the great resignation and give us a moment of elevated ground-floor wages. The rest of us suffer from avolition, a symptom of major depression (or a number of other potential diagnoses).

Industrialists (and churches and civil officials) fail to recognize that the drive for profit to upper management and shareholders has made a lot of work environments toxic. Most of us who work are overworked, underpaid, and poorly treated by management, if not also dealing with bully coworkers, pollution from industry without adequate PPE, safety hazards and oppressive work conditions. Our capitalist masters could treat workers well, and even would see a productivity surge worth the additional cost, and yet they still crunch in the video game industry, and overtask rather than running a high-morale clerical pool with slight redundancy (where the task list is always short).

I was lazy enough in my career as a victim of major depression to sleep for about nine months (getting up only to eat or excrete), I am a pro at couch potatoing. Granted, it’s not good for me to go without some contact outside, but I’ll happily do it. In the meantime, when I was forced to work in late 1980s clerical pool conditions, it drove me to suicide, and typical conditions are even worse today.

Laziness is a product of slave drivers or mental health disorders. If you’re feeling too tired to get work done, it means it’s time to take a break. Don’t worry, if you’re mentally fit, you’ll be on task again.

¹ Though my sin nun explained the cardinal sin of Sloth as avolition specifically to engage in the work your faith calls for (e.g. feeding the poor, housing the stranger and the transient, healing the sick, etc.) If you have energy to engage in costly signalling and praying loudly in public, but don’t mind the unfortunate, then you’re engaging in the cardinal sin – according to a cloistered nun I called for tech support.

I’m getting a paywall or adblock block or something. Anyone have a less problematic link to the article?

BMW and VW are the same beasts they were when they were backers of NSDAP in Germany.

Between the VW emissions cheating and BMW’s subscription car features, it seems their attitude towards commerce has not changed a jot.

Thought about this before. I’d build out the high-speed internet structure to encompass all the populated parts of the world (omitting coverage across large swaths of open sea) and provide free, no-questions-asked WiFi internet service to absolutely everyone.

(Yes, a lot of places don’t have devices, but parallel programs already exist to get people enabled on cheap devices)

The obstruction would be legal battles with current stakeholders that have regional monopolies and are very addicted to making odious profit. (Looking at you, Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, etc.)

Then let’s see Microsoft do this with full transparency and keep a publicly accessible list of forbidden words. Then evidence this is a general policy should be plain.

If your oath against genocide has any exceptions, it’s not an oath against genocide.

So long as one person is in danger from genocide, we all are in danger from genocide.

The evidence before the court is incontrovertible. There’s no need for the jury to retire.

It’s why I emphasize how I am crazy with Pink Floyd quotes. Bars in the window. Truly gone fishing.

Also BMW was a major sponsor if NSDAP when the Communists were considering nationalizing private wealth.

All the hate and cynicism directed at Bavarian Motor Works can never be enough.

I’ve worked hard to keep these kinds of men out of my personal life, to keep them away from me, out of my goddamn sight… It’s time for us to start getting revenge on the nerds.

And there’s the rub. I was there, and we still have the nerd-to-nazi pipeline pumping vast numbers of boys into the alt-right. And to this day, no-one wants to deal with them.

Curiously, Japan is entirely dissatisfied with herbivore men who just want to be left alone in their life with their waifu, but that doesn’t produce the next batch of cheap labor and soldiers for industrialists to exploit.

Yes, I’m bitter, and righteously so. Treat our kids better; acknowledge they have sexuality. Teach consent and human intercourse in public school. (We’re not going to do these things. We hold great contempt for our fifteen-year olds, whether men or women, and just can’t help ourselves.)

cringe = cringeworthy for anyone who needs an easy search-and-replace

In the 1980s, being a nerd meant being a target for bullies, and we didn’t fare too well. The nerd hierarchy (in which the tech nerds looked down on Trekkies and Furries) was rather brutal, and informs why the furry / otherkin moral panic is mixed in with the trans moral panic.

Eventually, every company needed an MIS and nerds showed they were useful after all. This is not the good ending.

A parallel problem came from young people having libidos that no-one was allowed to acknowledge. We were all incels before the term, and they tried to teach me math when my brain was telling me I needed to rut. Even today, society disregards horny teens, creating a wide pathway to the Alt-Right (Immortan Joe’s Warboys) who respect only Alpha Males. Our Christian-centric sex-negative culture fuels the young-men-to-Nazi pipeline.

I don’t have a solution for it. The common response to horny-teens-gone-white-supremacists is to say yeah, fuck those guys in total contempt, so they’re going to continue to be an available and eager force of militants and voters for any charismatic strongman. They may go Herbivore (like Japanese men) once Generative AI porn gets good.

This is something I observed regarding Trump in his first term, here this guy is allegedly super rich and now leader of the free world, and he still thinks he’s a total loser, hence his own inability to tolerate criticism, and obsession on harming enemies and bullying people.

He has to fuck other people’s wives and make John Kennedy Jr. eat McDonalds because even being President isn’t enough assertion of dominance to make him feel on top.

I have a tender self esteem, myself, and have deep-running neural pathways that will drive me nearly to self harm when I mess something up (e.g. drop my coffee, or burn dinner, or thoroughly lose my wallet). I have these structures of rational self-assessment so that when I calm down I can see I’m actually alright and have some sweet talents, and friends find me useful, and when not even that, at least lovable.

Trump with all his money and power doesn’t have that, and people like me can see Trump feels like a total loser propped up by hollow victories, even as POTUS, which is a fucking scary place to be. This is why cabinet meetings are a round-robin ritual of telling Trump how huge he is.

As for the tech bros, they succeeded in their careers which is exactly what we are taught manly men are supposed to do and still feel hollow (which is common when you fixate only on your career). They didn’t have that (possibly essential) experience where they collapse into despair as a young person and realize they need personal integrity or spirituality to climb out. (For me it was a moment of rational self-assessment and finding I was not wanting after all; that my depression and self hatred were based on delusions.)

As for Musk, his bio on Behind the Bastards suggests it’s really difficult for someone not to emerge from his upbringing without turning into a Disney / Marvel supervillain.

Thiel has his own backstory and obsession, and is perpetually feeling Death (his own mortality) chuffing hyperborean chills on the back of his neck.

So yes, these guys are desperate to cling to power, _because wealth and political transactional power are the only power they’ve ever known, hence J. D. Vance’s obsession on forcing women into natality which is likely to turn into Lebensborn style breeding programs (which inspired Atwood to write A Handmaid’s Tale. ) They are terrified of equality because then they’ll just be eccentric, antisocial dorks.

(I am an eccentric, antisocial dork, with few things to offer other than listening skills, peer psychology, computer nerding and moral philosophy, and in a world where we’re not all overwhelmed with bad news, that is more than enough to find friends, family and crew. But it takes some personal introspection and willingness to practice soft power to learn this.)

If they were able to step away from power, or we took it from them and forced them into peer group support, they’d eventually discover that they don’t need to be captains of industry (or James Bond supervillains) to be accepted and loved (and consequently, fed and homed by the community).

And when they’ve given you their all
Some stagger and fall, after all it’s not easy
Banging your heart against some mad bugger’s wall

Now that the US has actual concentration camps and actual Nacht und Nebel disappearances, not to mention arrests of judges and political enemies, we have a lot of folk who have been promoted from silent bystander to collaborator or complicit in the imminent holocaust.

The next step for the regime is to decide imprisonment of the undesirables is too expensive and we should proceed to evacuation (id est, mass execution).

The complicit category includes every elected or appointed official that continues to cooperate with the current government without obstructing procedure until the facilities are closed and prisoners set free, including those on foreign soil. Democrats included.

Um, has there ever been a time Sony, the rootkit DRM company has not called for state intervention to enforce IP laws regarding Sony holdings? (All the while Sony pirates anyone else’s stuff.)

This is like the news that Comcast objects to municipal areas opening up Comcast monopoly regions to new ISPs. Sony is almost as bas as Nintendo when it comes to their franchises.

You’re not alone in your sentiment. The whole thought experiment of p-zombies and the notion of qualia comes from a desire to assume human beings should be given a special position, but in that case, a sentient is who we decide it is, the way Sophia the Robot is a citizen of Saudi Arabia (even though she’s simpler than GPT-2 (unless they’ve upgraded her and I missed the news.)

But it will raise a question when we do come across a non-human intelligence. It was a question raised in both the Blade Runner movies, what happens when we create synthetic intelligence that is as bright as human, or even brighter? If we’re still capitalist, assuredly the companies that made them will not be eager to let them have rights.

Obviously machines and life forms as sophisticated as we are are not merely the sum of our parts, but the same can be said about most other macro-sized life on this planet, and we’re glad to assert they are not sentient the way we are.

What aggravates me is not that we’re just thinking meat but with all our brilliance we’re approaching multiple imminent great filters and seem not to be able to muster the collective will to try and navigate them. Even when we recognize that our behavior is going to end us, we don’t organize to change it.

An alarming number of Hollywood screenwriters believe consciousness (sapience, self awareness, etc.) is a measurable thing or a switch we can flip.

At best consciousness is a sorites paradox. At worst, it doesn’t exist and while meat brains can engage in sophisticated cognitive processes, we’re still indistinguishable from p-zombies.

I think the latter is more likely, and will reveal itself when AGI (or genetically engineered smart animals) can chat and assemble flat furniture as well as humans can.

(On mobile. Will add definition links later.) << Done!

Here to add that this is my problem too, and I have a therapist… that I talk to by phone once every 2-3 weeks (Here in the states psychotherapy openings are impacted so anyone who doesn’t have super-good insurance is on the wayside) and she’s more of a CBT coach.

I’m trying to figure out why anyone is alarmed that I want to head to the check-out lane, given our society elected the party that regards us all as expendable, and very much wants there to be fewer Americans and more elbow room for the MAGAs.

As I’m likely to be elevated on the list of priority persons to get the CECOT treatment, I still need to arrange for a rapid exit strategy for when ICE stormtroopers blast down my apartment door. Kennedy Jr. has some serious beef with us ASD folk, and as someone who is on a fixed income (though I’ve had jobs and even have written poetry) am exactly the sort that he wants to purge.

For the moment, I am currently living for a cat and a dog. I regard them as persons and can’t trust anyone else to. And so am very reluctant to re-home them until I cannot support them any longer. I might be living so as to not traumatize my wife (we’re separated) but lately I seem to be more of an obligation and a burden. It didn’t help she went to a family Easter event to which I was uninvited. I spent the day alone.

What I don’t understand is why elected officials claim that people like me are a burden to the state are distressed by the notion that we might want to self-dispose (This is, or rather was, my only country, my only society) Indeed, the US suicide rate has soared since the Trump era began in 2016. We’re higher than Japan now, and gaining on Russia.

I don’t think it’s that anyone actually cares about me, I’m an abomination, like The Outsider in HP Lovecraft’s story of the same name. They just don’t want to process the cadaver and meager legacy I would leave.

Anyway, I go off and on suicide watch, but in these times, we’re all expendable, and sooner or later going to be removed from the new MAGA society to be stuffed into a megaprison gulag. I’ve been told by 77 million American voters they don’t want me around. I don’t understand the drama if I immolate myself in front of a state building. Is this not what they want?

PS: Wife and family are considering giving me ECT, the same stuff that Hemmingway and David Foster Wallace tried before they decided it didn’t work.