Scientists intrigued why idiots thinking it’s intriguing that there are rocks floating around in space.

Capitalism prevailed during the rise of the internet but correlation is not causation.

Rockets were sent into space and capitalists would surely love to claim that achievement too, unfortunately it was first fascists followed by communists with the capitalists getting the bronze medal. Should we now decide that space flight is fascist-communist? No. Only scientists and engineers know how to do that. Why didn’t Genghis Khan invent the internet? He didn’t have enough capitalists, surely that was the problem.

We can claim anything we like and also retract any statement except when a user claims to be 14. That person remains at age 14 for all time. Is this the logic? What about all the ‘damage’ that was done before they discovered the underage user? Somebody should look into that, they might find themselves face to face with a 51 year old who takes a prescription stimulant every day.

Rest in piss

Got banned from the stims community after satirically commenting ‘I’m 14 and what is this?’

The moderator demanded that I submit identity documents. I pointed out that the account was twelve years old but they couldn’t back down at this point. I think they were trying to do a good job and were at least active but it was another nail in the coffin. In theory, an unpaid mod could be more objective because there’s no profit motive but the reality is that many are ideologically biased or dumb or controlling and none of them are trained. That any single individual wants to be in charge of the narrative is suspicious. Scale that ambition up to hundreds of thousands or millions of people it’s a red flag. Reddit is completely cooked these days, I haven’t returned since finding Lemmy.

You could make the same argument about almost anything that is created under our present economic system, it’s void of content. I paid my gas bill so now I can tell my friends that I’m responsible for North Sea gas extraction. People imbibe Joe Rogan’s billionaire koolaid and forget where all this stuff we take for granted comes from.

Capitalism has lifted billions of people out of poverty and that is a minor miracle. Now it is eating itself like an ouroboros. People are upset and it’s not a good time to defend big capital, ask TPUSA and United Health.

Why does nobody consider the plight of the humble billionaires?

Musk be shitting brix

You could make the argument that nothing can be achieved without being able to dedicate the time required. That was the miracle of the agricultural revolution, we could do something with our time other than gather food. If you said ‘we got the internet thanks to farmers’ that would be indisputable, everything flowed from that. I don’t see why an internet couldn’t emerge in other economic contexts because internet technology depends on physics and those laws transcend any and all economic systems. We already know this because almost every jurisdiction has the internet.

The influence of capitalism on the internet has been a mixed bag. e-commerce: good. App ecosystem: ranging from good to addiction health crisis. Walled gardens and enshitification: bad. Misinformation and radicalisation of political groups: dire, potentially an existential threat.

I feel like we need a rap battle to decide this. We already have the name of our first collaborative album: High Octane Terraforming, featuring Gucci Sweats Planet. Eventually there will be beef with accusations about Gucci Sweats Planet’s environmental credentials.

Civic duty is tough one when you can barely afford rent but all you see on your IG feed is wealthy people blasting off to space and driving Lambo’s, however unrealistic that is. I listened to a pod on voting reform and their thesis was that the US system can be traced back to 1215 and the Magna Carta, when English feudal rule ended and the eventual emergence of first past the post voting. The English exported that shit all over the world.

I believe that switching to a proportional representation system is an essential component of the solution to the current situation. It’s completely insane to have the current level of wealth inequality and concentration of power in the hands of so few. We need some way of voicing our dissent other than the way Luigi and whoever offed Kirk have used.

We got internet thanks to scientists and engineers. No amount of capitalists, politicians, managers or business people can create an internet. They say ‘here’s some money to make stuff’ and that’s the limit of their involvement.

Perhaps climate change is a more appropriate description for our lived experience, I’m open to a well reasoned argument. We don’t have to go far to see practical examples of the effect of greenhouse gases, with Venus at 500C average surface temperature due to CO2 atmosphere or consider xkcd’s temperature timeline with the insanely vertiginous ascent during the last two hundo years. My proposals:

• Spicy Climate Change
• Sport Utility Environment
• Sweaty Ecological Catastrophe
• Gucci Sweats Planet

Forgot what we were talking about. Department of war. Listening to Sarah Paine on YT, clearly there have been and still are many Americans trying to do the right thing but that isn’t what grabs the headlines. The political landscape in general is getting ugly. Far right populists are emerging in Europe and these incels have been emboldened by the facist turn in America. Convenient for the billionaire class and their stooges.

At least it is accurate. The Americans are a warlike nation founded on a genocide. Orwell wrote extensively on the power of words to change a narrative and the way we feel, it is insidious and very common in the world of politics and business in a way that it is absolutely uncommon in the world of science where only the truth matters. The oil industry convinced us that we ought to soften Global Warming to the more benign Climate Change for no other reason than it makes them look less culpable. Hilarious that trump would choose this thing to tell us the truth. Gotta start someplace I guess.

Xi and Putin discussing organ transplants and immorality

You hate to see it

The obfuscated nature of compiled code does an incredible amount of heavy lifting on behalf of shareholders. Imagine a world where x-ray specs suddenly revealed source code. The flight to open solutions would be irresistible. Windows is hot garbage but it clings to its market share like a limpet, through the magic of closed source, occupying space like a flabby tumour. It doesn’t care if it kills the host because the top priority is growth and an unassailable market share. That’s the magic of capitalism.

The consequences so far have been a warm feeling on hearing the news but I’m starting to doubt that feeling. Shawty, are they playing me like a fiddle?

Much later in my career I came to appreciate the beauty of this system and the link with hexadecimal. I had to debug a network transmitted CRC that was endian flipped and in that process learned that in the Galois Field of two, 1+1=0 which feels delightfully nonsensical to a luddite.

I remember being puzzled by this and many other numbers that kept cropping up. 32, 64, 128, 256, 1024, 2048… Why do programmers and electronic engineers hate round numbers? The other set of numbers that was mysterious was timber and sheet materials. They cut them to 1220 x 2440mm and thicknesses of 18 and 25mm. Are programmers and the timber merchants part of some diabolical conspiracy?

It’s the business model that shareholders love and seems to be fairly ubiquitous. Eventually these corporations undergo trial by anti trust as their influence becomes increasingly toxic e.g. Google. The concentration of power into the hands of a few people is a problem with large hierarchies generally, ordinary people end up doing whacky stuff on the whim of someone that you never meet or know in any meaningful way.