Why bother hiding them when they can just convince everyone to carry them around. Social engineering has always been so much easier than nefarious hacking. We humans are incredible simple and predictable creatures.

Flattening landscapes, destroying vegetation and building massive dirt runways to land this monstrosity? Burning massive amounts of jet fuel to transport 1 or 2 blades at a time? Very renewable indeed.

This idea is stupid on so many levels, like Solar Freaking Roadways. I’m excited to see how many people will immediately jump onboard with this lunacy.

And for fuck’s sakes, have they never heard of blimps? There are already companies trying to use them for transporting oversized cargo like this that have been running for decades. Advantages over this: They don’t need runways and can access more remote areas directly. They can act as sky-cranes, hovering in place to facilitate the assembly of these megastructures if needed. If this was as desperate a need as they’re trying to imply that it is, they would already be trying to use them to transport and assemble huge blades at scale. The reality is, this is just not necessary.

Because onshore wind turbines are already perfectly efficient and productive at the sizes we already make them at. We don’t need some mega-monster-turbines to move forward, we just need lots more of the current ones, thanks.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Oppressors are control freaks and imagine they can completely control the reaction to every action. But there is always an undercurrent of change. It may not be visible, but that doesn’t mean change isn’t happening, that resistance isn’t growing. And eventually, given enough pressure, it will erupt like a volcano. Vive la revolution.

As someone who lives near a major international border, I also run into this problem, but I’m also fucking confused why this is even a problem. The phone has a fucking GPS built in. It knows exactly where it is at all times. There is no excuse for this except greedy providers and cowardly regulators.

If I am standing on my country’s soil, using an unmodified cellphone, within a reasonable margin of error, I should pay my country’s local rates. Full stop. That should be a legal obligation. If telecom providers want to bake that into their roaming agreements with international and specialty providers like that, so they must accept my calls and bill me accordingly, fine. If they want to make the phone refuse to connect to the roaming tower at all and force it to connect to a lower strength local tower, also fine. If because of technical reasons or interference they really cannot do that so that it would just lose service altogether, maybe a popup saying that my national connection has been lost and asking if I want to start roaming, rather than a text saying “Heads up! You’re roaming suddenly and we can charge you whatever we want now!”

It’s not that fucking hard. Make. It. Make. Sense.

Yeah we used to just call this “shopping online”

Think longer term. How did the stage get set for this outcome? How could someone like Trump get elected in a healthy and properly functioning democracy? This is a consequence that was decades in the making, at least. Maybe being “realistic” about what we think we can achieve is what got us into this mess. Maybe we need to start questioning this “reality”, because it doesn’t seem to be working out very well for us. Maybe wishing for something better is our only hope. Or maybe it’s the first step to something actually better.

It doesn’t matter if it’s $100 and $99, or $100 and $0.01, my point is there are more than those two options. There are in fact a nearly infinite variety of options. You just have to decide that you want a third option. Stop picking between two bad options if you don’t want bad options.

Picking the less worst option over the actual worst option are both roads that lead to the same place, one is a little longer and has better scenery, but the destination you end up at is the same either way.

Picking either one means you’re going the wrong direction entirely.

They are effectively equal. Kang is not better than Kodos and Kodos is not better than Kang. That’s the point. Having two choices is not enough when they are both working for the billionaires, not for you. The details of which billionaires they’re working for, and what specifically they will do to make your life hell, is frankly pretty much irrelevant and debating whether one choice is going to cause slightly less suffering than the other is like starving people fighting over scraps in a garbage can. Demand better. Do better.

They’re leaking again.

I honestly hope he does get a Nobel Peace Prize. It will be the final nail in the coffin for any credibility the award had left after Obama getting one killed its credibility in the first place. I’d appreciate the undeniable clarity of knowing it is utterly irredeemable without doubt, that it is an utter joke of an award and probably always has been. There is still a tiny sliver of doubt in my mind that it could still be redeemed somehow and used to honor people who actually contribute to world peace. But once Trump wins it, I’ll never have to worry about whether it is worthy of any attention ever again.

Yeah, but that was because in those days most people were actually illiterate, which in recent history we considered a bad thing and tried to avoid, but it seems to be making a comeback unfortunately.

(Nothing against audiobooks specifically, you gotta do what you gotta do, just suggesting the decline in literacy in general is worrisome)

I will not apologise for my idealism in hoping he wasn’t, but I can admit when I’m wrong, and I was wrong about Carney. He is a snake.

Lock her up in a psych ward and throw away the key.

It’s not hypocritical if you are providing affordable housing for someone.

Despite the kneejerk hate towards landlords lately, which is largely justified due to the extreme levels of rent-seeking behavior evident in today’s completely unaffordable rental market, affordable rental housing is actually a legitimate market and there needs to be availability to meet that demand. Renting on its own is not a crime. Some people even prefer it. It can provide significantly more flexibility and less responsibility, stress and hassle, at a lower monthly cost than home ownership IF (and ONLY IF) you have a good landlord, either because they choose to be or because the laws require them to be, which is not so much the case with most of the laws.

So for me those are the dividing lines. If you are not:

• A slumlord providing “affordable” rental housing by leaving your tenants in unsafe, unsanitary, and unmaintained properties.
• Demanding luxury-priced rents for an extremely modest property with no features that can be considered a luxury and no intention of maintaining anything to luxurious standards.

Then maybe it’s not hypocritical. And I don’t mean just taking the highest price you can find on rentfaster and posting your property for that price because “that’s what the market price is” I mean actually thinking about whether that price you’re asking is actually affordable for real human beings living in your area.

Basically, if you treat your tenants like actual human beings with the understanding they may be struggling to get by, trying to raise a family, working as much as they can even when work is not reliable, and dealing with all life throws at them, and you don’t treat these things as immediately evictable offenses like a battleaxe over their head just waiting to drop, then yes, you absolutely can argue for a cause like affordable housing for everyone – because you are helping provide it.

If, after contributing to legitimate maintenance expenses and reserves, you are making a tiny profit, barely breaking even or even losing money renting, good. If you are treating it as a cash cow that funds your entire life, fuck you.

Liked and subscribed. Godspeed, you little ferret you.

So the author’s argument is that youth have just gone to gig work instead of traditional jobs. OK, maybe true, but first of all, this is not a good thing on its own either. And secondly, we have to consider why gig work even exists, aside from being a fresh new way to exploit workers and deny them the traditional protections of the labor market. Because there is a specific reason gig work exists right at this very transitional moment in the workforce, and I’ll give you a spoiler: It exists because of AI.

AI is going to do the same thing to gig work that gig work has already done to traditional youth employment. It represents the transitional step from traditional human labor to full automation. That’s part of the reason companies are using gig work in the first place. It makes it really easy to treat workers as instantly and transparently interchangable in an extremely efficient and flexible way. And they are going to start interchanging them not just with other gig workers, but AI drones – self driving cars, drones, and other machine infrastructure as it gets developed and matures. The flexibility allows them to absorb the impact of any issues with the technology by instantly falling back to more “human gigs” when needed, but whenever the technology becomes successful, the human jobs will just instantly evaporate as quickly as the technology can roll out, and not a single thought will ever be spared for the millions of gig working humans waiting for their phone to buzz for the next gig that will never come while looking at bills that are never going to get paid. That’s literally the goal that gig work exists to enable, it’s fundamentally designed for the AI endgame, it’s inevitably going to leave millions of people suddenly and quietly unemployed and unemployable without warning or even any official notification when it’s happening, and it’s coming sooner than we think.

The cruelty, racism, and sexism is the point. It’s not an accident.

Their blog thing https://whtwnd.com/about

Just in time for fascism to spread around the world! His great-grandfather would be so proud.

… if he weren’t, y’know, dead.