FriendOfDeSoto

I guess something’s gotta give because when it comes to finishing their prey they are playfully underwhelming.

I think you’re paranoid.

The estimates vary a bit but you can say a significant portion of the people fired in the tech sector lost their jobs for financial reasons, not AI as is often purported. The tech sector over hired a lot during the pandy and that meant they’re correcting that. And the investment into so-called AI are so big they need to save somewhere else, i.e. overhead.

I can imagine such a scenario as well because we are humans and we would do dumb shit like that.

FTL can mean different things. It could be the Trekkian warping space around you. It could be the Galactican jump to somewhere else. Or a portal. Or something else. Which tech it will be will matter. And different to most sci-fi, there could be more than one way if indeed c can be smashed.

The problem with space is that it isn’t completely empty and stuff in it moves like evil landmines. You don’t want to warp into a moon or jump inside an asteroid belt. Which means you will need this sort of highway or scenic spot system of space that is actually confirmed empty so travel along the route doesn’t blow you up or jumping doesn’t mean you accidentally end up in a black hole. In my mind, that would prohibit the use of the technology inside a star system because there are two many moving parts to consider and keep track of. So you need to take a year-long sub-LTS access ramp to reach the highway at the edge of the solar system before you can move safely faster than a flash. The same is true for the resource rich destination.

That’s why I can also imagine a scenario where having the technology might not be as impactful as we fear and thus not lead to war. The infrastructure would have to be so massive to make this work, it isn’t an immediate advantage to have it. More of a burden really, provided the economy still roughly works as it does today. And if we have the tech to reach the edge of our solar system in a shuttle bus service kind of way, we will be already enlarging our resource pool with stuff we find inside our solar system in an early Expansian kind of way. Better ROI on that than stuff from further away.

One of the funniest videos of politicians that I’ve seen recently was a casual meetup of Poland’s PM Donald Tusk and the then incoming Hungarian PM Magyar. He had just defeated Viktor Orban, Putin’s fifth column in the EU and authoritarian asshole of the year. Magyar introduces one of his ministers to Tusk. I don’t remember which ministry but her name is also Orban. Tusk is ever so briefly taken aback by the mention of that name, which Magyar realizes and quickly adds: “No relation.” They giggle at the mixup and Tusk just fires off nonchalantly something like: “Well, my name is Donald.” They laugh and move on.

Citations needed

There was a time in the early 2000s when good old Google search was so good, it got you your results in record time. One query and a couple of clicks. And then they realized they could sell more ads if your search took just a couple of queries longer. Every query was a chance to sell more ads. And the results got worse.

Personally, I don’t use a search engine that spits out so-called AI results. I manage the old-fashioned way because I’m old. But the principle to give you shittier results to get you to rephrase your search and thus multiply ad sale opportunities surely applies here as well.

I’m sorry if you had to chew on this for a month and I’m even more sorry to tell you that your reply makes no sense to me.

The sliding scales of inviting all the people you want to have there and avoiding people getting pissed off if they don’t get an invite (or similar political reasons) are only limited by the financial means available.

100 is a relatively easy target to reach for most people. Family and friends and their +1’s and children gets you there pretty quick.

Don’t forget the klick. Most of them are not buying that either.

The people in all the countries that have no problem counting off another dozen past twelve don’t always do that though. If you meet your friend at 15:00 most people will revert to “at 3” in their language. And they might “go to bed at 11.” Economy of language and context clues. So colloquially the am/pm crowd and the 24h folks aren’t far apart at all.

And any person claiming that it’s too difficult to add or subtract twelve from at maximum a low two-digit integer ought to have their passport revoked.

There are also canals that aren’t this shallow. As summer lasts on average five minutes, anybody falling into one is more likely to wear thick layers of clothes, which is a problem when they’re getting wet. Most British people are also probably under the influence when they fall into a canal. Or children. And you can drown in a puddle.

English contains a veritable shitload of loanwords as well.

But you’re not wrong when you think they’re trying to be cool. You’ll hear this most often in hiphop, which started in English and not every language lends itself to rap. So they throw in an f-bomb here or there. Imitation is the highest form of flattery type stuff.

Also, English is the most commonly learned foreign language on this planet. A lot of contemporary music genres came out of North America. I would say internet culture is most pervasive in English as well. A lot of tech jargon becomes English loanwords in other languages. There are reasons beyond wanting to sound cool as well.

I take solace in the fact that there must be minute traces of my own piss in there as well.

You have just landed on the only angle that could get me to watch a movie about bitcoin: macabre schadenfreude.

Isn’t that a premium model then?

What you are describing sounds an awful lot like collapse to me. Your slavery South comparison is missing that a lot of what they produced was exported to places where at least officially slavery was banned. So that model is propped up in one location by areas with purchasing power from the general public elsewhere. The thought experiment was what if everywhere was the slavery South, in which case the economy will no longer be sustainable.

Apps that run entirely on ads will probably not make enough money so premium or freemium is where they go. If they have no ads in their app, they probably also have no money to buy ads on YouTube.

It’s not in the billionaire’s interest for us plebs to have no money at all. A lot of their interests are funded by us. Paying for power, food, iPhones, clothes, cars, holidays etc. So if they have it all and we have none, the economy will collapse, people will barter with vape juice and booze, and the billionaires will realize they cannot eat money.

When the economy collapses the question of who will pay taxes is a secondary problem. The primary one will be to rebuild the state and a new currency and then they’ll look at the tax code.

See you next Monday at the planet naming mocking society.

Of all the foods available in the world, you thought of a lemon? Allow your imagination to eat some ice cream. Or a strawberry. But a lemon?