Just for the record, I support Palestine action. I condemn the genocide being perpetrated on the Palestinian people by the state of Israel.

Potatoes get plenty of recognition and always have.

America is not a monolith. Signal’s developers are very much aware of the risks of operating there and probably already have several escape plans given recent developments. I also think five-eyes probably has access but getting it might be computationally expensive.

If we decide to ban smartphones from schools we should ban them from work too. I’m supposed to be writing an article right now and instead I’m here. Then we should ban them from streets so that people have to pay attention to where they are going and the things going on around them. At that point we’d have something like functioning human beings again instead of mindless zombies. We could still have terminals for plugging into the Machine but our time with it should be regulated (like it already is with research clusters) so that we don’t waste energy. There, the whole problem is solved and all it takes is a global butlerian jihad.

Could you please finish your manifesto? I want to know what happens at the end. Do we mass shoot all the boomers?

Yeah every new technological solution has its associated ecological cost. Some are better than others. Guess which ones are the most profitable.

There’s something called the Kuznets environmental curve that explains this pretty intuitively. It’s an optimistic forecast that I only buy when I’m in a good mood.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuznets_curve

Fully agree there. This administration has to be removed from office. While there’s still a congress to do this. What I’m worried about now is a Reichstag fire event that will allow them to enact emergency legislation that will put the Patriot Act to shame. I watched the USA collectively lose its mind in 2001; it wouldn’t take much to do that again.

I only have one minor pushback. I read The Art of the Deal back in 2016. And having not read Mein Kampf, I can safely say it is no Mein Kampf. When it’s not totally incoherent it reads like a puff piece in a tabloid rag. So I guess I’m just less afraid of Trump than I am of a Hitler-class demagogue, but that says nothing about the MAGA movement as a whole. You don’t need intelligence to be a figurehead for a fascist coup.

I think it’s time for a general strike. There are rumblings of a reinvigorated labor movement, so for the first time since the 1970s I think it’s within the realm of possibility.

Yeah ok so he’s not as bad as late Hitler.

Here’s my most optimistic take for Americans. This guy is not as bad as Hitler. He’s out to scam the world, not conquer it militarily. So that’s a plus, for now. If his successor is Vance then the invasion of Canada and Mexico might actually happen.

So now we’ll have a whole plethora of social networks for everyone to isolate into their own bubbles essentially because our global leadership is comprised of children who can’t play nicely with each other. Sounds good, sign me up for TurkmeniNet.

The fungi take over for a few hundred thousand years, tops. There are some global climate swings during this period but eventually the balance is restored and the next set of animals asserts hegemony. Just because this is the first mass extinction caused by animals (arguably) doesn’t mean it won’t play out like the others.

I love how you’re getting downvoted. Kind of says it all

Ok, I’ll bite. I tried Ubuntu a few months ago. Logging into Eduroam was a bit of a process, but eventually I figured it out and it worked. Then one day the internet didn’t work and I had no idea why. Something to do with the network drivers. Then I was trying to use OpenOffice (or LibreOffice? The one that came with the OS), and I use Zotero for references. The Zotero plugin had a bunch of glitches that made me not trust it. The Internet (back on Windows) assured me that it worked fine, but it was way glitchier than the Windows version.

The bottom line is that I just need this stuff to work because I don’t have time to debug. I love the idea though; maybe I was using the wrong distro.

They’re remilitarizing, just like everyone else. Another completely pointless and avoidable cycle of violence, just like the last time.

It will even agree that AIs shouldn’t controlled by oligarchic tech monopolies and should instead be distributed freely and fairly for the public good, but the international system of nation states competing against each other militarily and economically prevents this. But maybe it will agree to the opposite of that too, I didn’t try asking.

It’s unfortunate that we’ve configured our world like this, with rival nation states and militaries vying for supremacy. In reality, the conflict is between humans and militarism. Militarism will kill us all, in one way or another.

And people who should be in power also tend to get assassinated.

We had an economic plan for this almost a century ago. It was called the “euthenasia of the rentier class” advocated by john Maynard Keynes. I guess we didn’t expect the rentier to also control the financial system.

Then they become martyrs for their group.

I hope you’re right but I’m less optimistic about courts.