He believed that a tired brain is a sloppy brain

Really funny that it has to be couched in personal belief like this. What a strange fellow, he thinks being tired impacts performance! As opposed to. You know. A think anyone who’s been tired should intuitively understand.

Is it naive to think M.A.D. is still effective deterrence?

Seen it described as the world’s largest “lossy compression” program. A fan fic author was able to get one of the chatbots to spit out a piece they wrote almost twenty years ago, word for word, by feeding in the first paragraph.

It just spits out the next most likely text.

So since there’s doubtless millions of versions of this exact conversation playing out for real between couples and tinder matches, this is what the program selects as the most likely response. It’s actually really easy to get negative responses out of it, you just have to feed it the beginning of a negative interaction that already exists online.

No, I don’t think so. Just that there’s inter-state turmoil brewing. How it plays out is anybody’s guess.

Nah, Minnesota doesn’t have anything to do with it. (er, that i’m aware of…)

The river’s mostly fed by snowmelt from Rocky Mountains in Colorado. Major source of water for Navada, Southern California, and Arizona. Water output has been in decline for a few decades and if trends continue (see “Climate Change”), water usage is gonna become a major point of contention between all involved parties.

But the Civil Rights Act did eventually pass - the rage never quite boiled over because it got channeled into realizing something. Even if it was kinda the bare minimum and did nothing to address all the violent state repression that precipitated it, there was at least a clear legal victory that let people feel some relief.

Where is that relief for this? All I see is the pressure getting ratcheted up for a few years, the circle of people who don’t feel precarity constricts faster. And when the Dems eventually take office, they’ll put the funding back in place^[1]. Pretend like ICE is different now. The usual song and dance. Pressure will get notched down, but nothing is done to fully abate it – let alone deal with the stress fractures.

Yes, this isn’t The Thing that kicks off a big decisive Event in the history books. But its also hard not to see it as a threshold of some sort. There is almost certainly not going to be a direct, legal challenge to federal power… but maybe we see a scattered, piecemeal decoupling. Some states start to develop a trajectory that, in time, becomes increasingly unrelated to that of the overall federal government. Not out of a conscious choice, but simply by necessity and circumstance.

Been idly wondering if I was gonna see the United States balkanize in my lifetime. Didn’t think it would start this decade…

(by the way, keep an eye Colorado River water rights)

I remember the situation with regard to the technical intelligentsia several decades ago. At that time the technical intelligentsia was numerically small, but there was much to do and every engineer, technician and intellectual found his opportunity. That is why the technical intelligentsia was the least revolutionary class. Now, however, there is a super­abundance of technical intellectuals, and their mentality has changed very sharply. The skilled man, who would formerly never listen to revolutionary talk, is now greatly interested in it.

Recently I was dining with the Royal Society, our great English scientific society. The President’s speech was a speech for social planning and scientific control. Thirty years ago, they would not have listened to what I say to them now. Today, the man at the head of the Royal Society holds revolutionary views, and insists on the scientific reorganisation of human society. Your class-war propaganda has not kept pace with these facts. Mentality changes.

goddamit, yet another tally in the “modern US is where Britain was a century ago” column

Honestly… I never finished it. Made it through the first coupla chapters for a high school class, and I bullshitted my way through the rest of the group discussion. From what I gathered, I had read more of it than most of the other students.

Right at the beginning of the book, it says most of the surveillance state is pointed at government employees and that it doesn’t matter too much what the average workers say and think. But for some reason, nobody responds well when I remind them of that.

CHIPs act under Trump

CHIPs act was Biden

Sorry if I’m misunderstanding, but are you suggesting that it’s Bourgeois propaganda to recognize and talk about the similarities between political parties in the United States?

I kinda think the general population is and has been apathetic long before we had an internet to post on. We’re screaming into the void and/or doing collective journal entries, depending on how bleakly you want to frame this. In so far as political posting online matters, it’s as a way of affirming to one another that, no, we’re not crazy just for noticing the contradictions or having a historical memory longer than a single year.

uh. fuck, it is

Your choice is the blatant trashfire Natzi Headline Blogger or the subtle two-faced Natzi Headline Blogger.

^{pay no attention to the federated blogging websites}

ah, yep, that’s it, you win the prize

the prize is I am so much more tired after seeing that than I was before

You gotta start small with Yankees.

Tell them The Lorax isn’t only about trees, challenge them to figure it out on their own.