Since now four seems possible, this timeline means we’ll probably lose one of the liberal justices as well for an even 5 picks, and a 7-2 court.

Oh, for sure. Their souls are so black that Anish Kapoor has exclusive rights.

But I wonder sometimes - if they are too stupid to not understand that money isn’t happiness, does it matter? If they wake up every day in that bed of money thinking, “Oh, I’m so glad. Integrity is for those woke morons. Their tears were the perfect seasoning for my caviar, creme fraiche and blini breakfast. Truly I made all the right choices, and was chosen by God,” then does it make a difference?

I know we’re probably not even putting them in a metal box in this lifetime, but dream with me for a moment: If somehow we were able to impose a punishment on them that included the duty to feel shame, we’d probably need to teach them what shame is before they could even serve their time.

Well, which self-fulfilling prophecy should we make?

Article from 2024.

It would be nice if mainstream media reported on this thing that we already know, though, so I appreciate the reminder.

Fox News has never, from its earliest inception, been anything except explicit right wing propaganda. It’s a shame that anyone dirties their brain by watching it.

A Rolling Stone article about Fox News’s rise from 2011 is still the most complete and methodical explanation for how it started:

First, they bought an audience:

In the normal course of business, cable outfits like Time Warner pay content providers like CNN or MTV for the right to air their programs. But Murdoch turned the business model on its head. He didn’t just give Fox News away – he paid the cable companies to air it. To get Fox News into 25 million homes, Murdoch paid cable companies as much as $20 a subscriber. “Murdoch’s offer shocked the industry,” writes biographer Neil Chenoweth. “He was prepared to shell out half a billion dollars just to buy a news voice.” Even before it took to the air, Fox News was guaranteed access to a mass audience, bought and paid for. Ailes hailed Murdoch’s “nerve,” adding, “This is capitalism and one of the things that made this country great.”

Then they filtered every person in the organization to ensure right-wing bias:

Ailes then embarked on a purge of existing staffers at Fox News. “There was a litmus test,” recalled Joe Peyronnin, whom Ailes displaced as head of the network. “He was going to figure out who was liberal or conservative when he came in, and try to get rid of the liberals.” […] If staffers had worked at one of the major news networks, Ailes would force them to defend working at a place like CBS – which he spat out as “the Communist Broadcast System.” To replace the veterans he fired, Ailes brought in droves of inexperienced up-and-comers – enabling him to weave his own political biases into the network’s DNA. To oversee the young newsroom, he recruited John Moody, a conservative veteran of Time. […] the Chairman gave Moody explicit ideological marching orders. “One of the problems we have to work on here together when we start this network is that most journalists are liberals,” Ailes told Moody. “And we’ve got to fight that.” Reporters understood that a right-wing bias was hard-wired into what they did from the start.

And starting 2000, they were directly putting their finger on altering the outcome of elections:

But it was the election of George W. Bush in 2000 that revealed the true power of Fox News as a political machine. According to a study of voting patterns by the University of California, Fox News shifted roughly 200,000 ballots to Bush in areas where voters had access to the network. But Ailes, ever the political operative, didn’t leave the outcome to anything as dicey as the popular vote. The man he tapped to head the network’s “decision desk” on election night – the consultant responsible for calling states for either Gore or Bush – was none other than John Prescott Ellis, Bush’s first cousin. […] On Election Day, Ellis was in constant contact with Bush himself. After midnight, when a wave of late numbers showed Bush with a narrow lead, Ellis jumped on the data to declare Bush the winner – even though Florida was still rated too close to call by the vote-tracking consortium used by all the networks. Hume announced Fox’s call for Bush at 2:16 a.m. – a move that spurred every other network to follow suit, and led to bush wins headlines in the morning papers. […] “We’ll never know whether Bush won the election in Florida or not,” says Dan Rather, who was anchoring the election coverage for CBS that night. “But when you reach these kinds of situations, the ability to control the narrative becomes critical. Led by Fox, the narrative began to be that Bush had won the election.”

Since then, it’s gotten many orders of magnitude worse of course. But as they shift the Overton window rightward, their propaganda also becomes “normal,” and barely worth reporting (which accelerates the shift further, and so on).

Good point. Though even when Woz was involved, he was overruled by one of the model tech narcissists, Jobs. But at least he was in the room.

I think we’ve just created an unregulated system that almost perfectly incentivizes and reinforces evil, so eventually evil is what we get.

Free market capitalism can only serve good with a tight collar and very short leash held by healthy democracy. Maybe it was a bad idea spending 40 years removing and making all leashes and collars for capitalism illegal, and handing the collar and leash to capitalism to put on democracy. But what do I know.

All good, thanks for the suggestion!

I went through something similar and am trying to recall, I think I did look and it was past the time period. I should have tried. It’s +2 years now for me.

Edit: Words.

But it would be fantastic for a company to offer a translation layer so you can check off the types of stocks you don’t want to support, and it would customize an “index” to your ethical values by starting with a regular index and removing non-compliant companies.

The metaphor meant that, as Trump continues to injure his own supporters, reminding them that he is behaving as a dictator may eventually stop them from resolving cognitive dissonance by being defensive and instead by blaming the culprit. Basically, every time you lead the horse to water is a new opportunity to drink, increasing in urgency over time.

But by all means, help those who want to be helped first.

If the horse won’t drink, you just keep leading it to water until it eventually gets thirsty.

Yeah, the article cites that as a control, but it’s not at all surprising since “humanity by survey consensus” is accurate to how LLM weighting trained on random human outputs works.

It’s impressive up to a point, but you wouldn’t exactly want your answers to complex math operations or other specialized areas to track layperson human survey responses.

It’s outright nefarious how Fox News carefully manages their viewers’ human empathy to evil ends.

For example: When democrats or leftists propose government that helps oppressed people or the poor, objectively good things, Fox will hammer on it being an infringement of freedom, brow-beating viewers with pseudo-intellectualism to shut down any moral objections. At the same time, when we have Trump being the absolute worst human in existence and doing awful things to viewers’ literal neighbors or even families, Fox will distract with this missing old lady story (Guthrie?) which is a wholly worthless subject of national attention, but expresses their viewers’ remaining empathy and makes the viewers feel like “good” people.

On net, the viewers feel simulated on both “intellectual” and “emotional” levels, but it’s perversely always to lead them to contravene their instincts to be good people.

Management: “No, that doesn’t work, because employees spend so much time doing the actual work that they lack the vision to know what’s good for them. Luckily for them I am not distracted by actual work so I have the vision to save them by making them use AI.”

Is the interview only two questions and answers for anyone else?

This is very helpful, thanks!

We mostly play Super Mario Party and tried Jamboree as well on Switch. I haven’t really played other ones even though I lived through those prior generations. So maybe I’m just an irredeemable grumpy buzzkill.

Disabling bonus stars is a good point. For the difficulty, not sure if that would work well: The problem is some of the players are inevitably casuals, so increasing the difficulty just means the very narrow part of the game that isn’t as random - the mini-games - becomes not fun for them. And the Monopoly-style turn-based board play takes sooooo long, you can’t really strategize where to go.

I really do think a Mario Party game with only mini-games so everyone plays all the time would be incredible. But again, maybe I’m just describing Warioware…

I’ve seen that, so yeah, I get it. But I’ve also see the game award bonus stars or other random finger-on-the-scale benefits to the player in the lead, which can be even more demoralizing to those that lose. I don’t think it’s Mario Kart rubber band mechanics, unfortunately.

A related question: What is the least random Mario Party? We often end up playing this when friends come over since I guess I’m the only one who feels like it’s too random for anyone to meaningfully “win.”

Not to rain on anyone’s parade or anything, I’m glad you all and others have fun with it, I just would like to see if there’s a version that’s more like it’s a game of skill than chance.

Or maybe I just want WarioWare…