stabby_cicada @ stabby_cicada @slrpnk.net

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It's like the old economist joke.

Two economists are walking in the park. The first economist sees a pile of dog shit and says to the other, "I'll pay you $50 to eat that dog shit." So he does and gets paid $50. Later on, the second economist sees a pile of dog shit and says to the first, "I'll pay you $50 to eat that pile of dog shit." So he does and gets paid $50.

The first economist says, "I can't help but feel we just ate dog shit for nothing." "Nonsense," says the second economist, "We just contributed $100 to the economy."

Yeah. Two years ago, mainstream studies were estimating 3°C by 2100 - and it's well documented at this point how climate scientists deliberately underestimate predicted rates of warning to avoid being seen as alarmist.

At this point I agree with 2°C by 2040 and bet on 3°C by 2050. 5°C by 2100, 10°C if some of the worst case feedback loops exist.

One of the freedoms the American military purportedly protects is the freedom to talk shit about the American military.

At least the newly unemployed soldiers will have a nice well-paying paramilitary to join, so they can keep supporting their wives and their wives' boyfriends.

Not just in the United States. The Lancet estimates just cancelling USAID will kill 14 million people between now and 2030. 14 million avoidable deaths because the world's richest man thought feeding the poor was a waste.

RFK is on track to do a lot of damage, but he has some stiff competition.

That's why they're building doomsday ranches and climate redoubts in places more sheltered from climate change.

They want their children and grandchildren to be kings and feudal lords, and they've decided the way to get that is to let global society collapse and send out private armies to rule the ashes.

I mean, the American billionaire junta has made destroying the Center for Disease Control one of its top priorities. They've joined the war against contagious disease on the side of the diseases. What does that say about their priorities?

Complex algorithms that follow rules they cannot deviate from = lawful.

Deliberately incorporating random factors into the algorithm so they don't generate the same result every time = chaotic.

So I'd argue the LLMs themselves are neutral evil, presuming we allow objects to have alignments. In D&D, non-sapient animals have no alignments, because they don't understand moral or ethical concepts, so that would argue for LLMs being unaligned and the alignment applying to their companies.

Could you argue a LLM is attuned to its corporate owner and shares its alignment? They'd definitely be cursed.

Then the companies would veer from lawful evil (Microsoft has been the archetype of abusing laws and regulations to its own benefit for decades) to chaotic evil (Grok has no rules, only the whims of its infantile tyrant).

It's an incredible house of cards, and I'm honestly coming to suspect that's the point. These companies have some of the greatest financial experts in the world working for them. They can't possibly not know how fucked they are in the long run.

But the long run is the long run. I'm confident Trump and his billionaire tech bro lackeys can pump enough money and silence enough regulators to keep the bubble afloat until 2029.

If Democrats take power in 2029, or if Democrats take the House in 2027 and start doing something effective (lol), then the tech bros pull the plug, blame liberals and illegals for crashing the economy, and guide the predictable conservative / authoritarian backlash to their benefit.

Yay, technofeudalism.

I think that was also why Qanon got so much play in the right-wing media ecosystem - getting conservatives comfortable with authoritarian big government conservatism.

Trump is going to declare martial law and have liberals killed or sent to camps? Qanon influencers have been telling conservatives that was the plan since 2017. And about 25% of the United States either believed it or thought "yeah, it's crazy, but wouldn't it be cool if it was real?"

I disagree that Americans don't pay attention to prices. Americans paying attention to prices was one of the biggest reasons why Biden lost. Biden and Harris were claiming that they'd beat inflation, that the economy was great, that America was on the right track and Harris just needed to continue Biden's policies - and Americans looked at their grocery bills and didn't buy it.

And that's what gives me a certain amount of hope in 2026. Because if people are going to bed hungry - and they will be - no amount of shitposting by Donnie and his cronies is going to convince them they're full.

I keep being reminded of how big tech deliberately stunted younger users' abilities in order to keep them locked in Apple's or Android's walled gardens.

And I keep forgetting because it makes me so mad I don't want to think about it :/

Just to make sure I understand: the amazing new capability of ChatGPT is the ability to open a different app and use it for you.

So instead of using the app directly you're paying a middleman to use the app for you.

... Now that I type it out, I can see a ready-made audience among tech illiterate older people.

This is so incredibly short-sighted. Support for solar energy really should be a Republican priority too - it's business, it's industry, it's making money. China, India, the entire continent of Africa, are all going solar. The United States could be a world leader in this trillion-dollar industry - hell, there's a national security argument that we need American scientists and workers to support the American solar industry.

Never mind the climate issue for now. Walking away from solar leaves billions on the table that other countries are going to snap up. Republicans love subsidizing industry. This is a braindead bipartisan opportunity.

But little Donnie hates solar energy personally, threw a tantrum about it, and no one in the 80-year-old boy king's court dares to disagree with him.

Thank you!

BP coined the term "carbon footprint". BP didn't invent the idea of measuring or reducing individual consumption. Fossil fuel propaganda has very effectively promoted the idea that you can either reduce your individual consumption or fight for societal and governmental change, playing one off against the other. But it's not either / or. It's both.

I get it, and I disagree.

See, I think the investors and funders behind Big Internet were not just pulling the profit lever - they were pulling political levers to achieve regulatory capture, to get that favorable regulatory environment they needed to make a ton of profit and regulate their competitors out of existence.

And they kept pumping funding into Big Internet while it was unprofitable because they believed eventually they'd win the political battle and have a free hand to extort profits. Which was a fair assumption given, you know, the history of regulation in general.

If the United States suddenly comes to its senses, passes good legislation, and starts enforcing its own regulations, and if we assume, in this utopia, Big Internet won't be able to buy enough American politicians to counter that, I think one of two things will happen.

One, Big Internet moves overseas to more favorable regulatory environments, provides American consumers with a substandard product, and tells them it's their own government's fault in order to encourage us to change the laws in their favor.

Or, two, Big Internet has to operate at a loss again, can't attract new funding on the promise of later profits, and goes bankrupt.

Because I don't think Big Internet can afford to give its users the same experience it did ten or fifteen years ago. In order to give us the ad-free YouTube, unrigged Google search results, algorithms that show us what we want instead of what the Republican Party wants, websites without tracking cookies, and all the other things we enjoyed, it had to run at a loss.

The old, good internet was subsidized by investors who expected profits in the future. No expectation of profit? No subsidized internet services. At least not provided by the big centralized for-profit companies that have controlled the United States' Internet experience for the last twenty years or so.

I’ve been challenged in lectures I give, even by scientists, who said, “Ricardo, this cause of yours is minor. We’re discussing the survival of extremely important biomes.” And I said, “Buddy, who decides whether the biome will be preserved or not? Do you think the landowners in the Amazon live on their farms? They don’t. They live in rich neighborhoods in São Paulo.”

Most of the people who elect the politicians who will care about what’s left outside the cities are urban dwellers. If, since childhood, they saw (native) embaúbas and juçara palm trees, you create a bond between people and their territory.

If we don’t convince city dwellers that our biodiversity is incredible, wonderful, and worth preserving, it won’t be.

I think this is incredibly important to remember. It exemplifies two sayings that are not just advice for activism but antidotes to despair: the personal is political, and all politics are local. Your little pollinator garden, your plant-based meals, your creek cleanup project, will have ripple effects far beyond their immediate impact on the environment, because of how it impacts the social environment and the people around you.

And on a side note, using an AI generated TLDR is almost painfully ironic given the content. I'm not really a fan.

Very few western vegans want to imagine that, in a vegan world, domestic pets would go the way of domestic livestock. But a world that takes animal rights seriously is not a world that uses animals for human pleasure, whether that pleasure comes from food or companionship. Vegans aren't "pet owners" because vegans don't see animals as things to be owned.

Which is all to say, healthy plant based pet food may or may not be possible, but either way it's not going to be vegan.

But this is wrong. There are meaningful differences between the internet as it stands today – the enshitternet – and the old, good internet we once had. The enshitternet is a source of pain, precarity and immiseration for the people we love. The indignities of harassment, scams, disinformation, surveillance, wage theft, extraction and rent-seeking have always been with us, but they were a minor sideshow on the old, good internet and they are the everything and all of the enshitternet.

I'm a big fan of Doctorow, but I have to disagree with his view of the "old, good internet", for a reason he recognizes with Amazon but doesn't take to its logical conclusion (at least not in this excerpt).

In step 1 of enshittification, a website is good to its users. Granted. But as the excerpt points out, Amazon was "good to its users" thanks to a massive pile of investor cash, which let them do consumer friendly (but anti-competitive) stuff like sell goods below cost, have a fair search system instead of making money off search placement fees, and not squeeze its suppliers.

But that couldn't last. The money ran out. And Amazon transitioned to stage 2, and stage 3, squeezing its suppliers and customers, in order to pay back its investors and make a ton of money.

And this has been the life cycle for most of the internet. Google, Facebook, Twitter, pretty much every big web company started by using investor cash to give unsustainable benefits to consumers, and then either started squeezing them for profit when the cash ran out or transitioned to some other role (like becoming a propaganda outlet for the world's richest man) because they couldn't continue providing the customer-friendly internet we all enjoyed without going bankrupt.

What I'm getting at is, the old, good internet was inherently unsustainable, because most of the things we enjoyed about it were subsidized by investors. The Facebook that just showed you what your friends were doing? Made no money. The Twitter that the Occupy movement and Arab Spring ran on? Never made a profit. That good, effective Google search engine? Cost a lot more than ad revenue brought in. The entire modern Internet was built on the concept of locking users in with unsustainably cheap services and then squeezing them to repay investors. Enshittification was the plan from Day 1.

We can't go back to the old, good internet. We don't have angel investors willing to subsidize all the good stuff we enjoyed.

But we can go forward to the fediverse 😆

Not supporting the "dictatorship of the proletariat" types, but the reason tankies support Russia isn't because they think modern Russia is Communist. It's because Russia is fighting Ukraine, which they see as a proxy war against the United States and its puppets in NATO.

In the authoritarian Communist worldview, the United States is the vanguard of capitalism and the most dangerous threat to global communism. That's why they think Communist nations need authoritarian governments and powerful militaries: to protect themselves from the United States and its client states.

So tankies support anyone fighting the United States or its allies, no matter who they are or how bad their governments are. Because they think anything that weakens the United States is good for the world.

If you think sharing a meme about voting once every six months or so is trying at all, much less trying hard, you need to recalibrate your definition of activism.

I see it, I like it, I share it, it takes thirty seconds. Calling this "slacktivism", even, is an insult to actual slacktivists.

But this meme affected you so much that instead of downvoting and moving on you felt the need to comment. Please step back for a minute and think about why you felt that way.

(Also? I live in the United States. The majority voted in 2024. They overwhelmingly chose Donald John Trump as their President. And follow up polls showed very clearly that, had every registered voter voted, Trump would have won by an even greater margin. The government that resulted is the greatest indictment of American democracy I can imagine.)