the special effects are really impressive, it’s worth checking out

You are looking for a Great Man of history to pin this on. You’d rather believe someone nefarious is in charge and pulling the strings from an ocean away, than to see this for what it is; an empire with no real conscious oversight. A pile of self-interested businessmen, politicians, and militarists doing whatever they can to line their pockets, profits above all else.

The US has, per capita, the largest prison population and, outright, the biggest military on the planet. If there’s a road to ‘unfreedom’, we traveled down it a long time ago.

You’d rather believe Trump is result of foreign interference, that our own institutions would never result in this without being sullied from outside. It’s fan fic, it’s Cold War nonsense.

Trump is the consequence of our political systems, of our spiteful culture, of our economics that promises success and leaves people sick, broken, and in debt. So what if the Russians had a few hundred Facebook posts? That “seed” would not have taken if the soil weren’t already fertile. Frankly, I don’t think it made a difference. We were barrelling toward Trump with or without the oh so spooky slavs typing on a keyboard.

On the one hand, you can read it as a parody of late 20th century life - like, haha imagine a caveman clocking into work

but on the other hand, Flinstones and its far future counterpart Jestsons kinda suggest an inability to imagine anything different. Automobile-ized suburban development frequently gets presented an the human ‘default’. As though we just default to this, rather than it being one of many ways cities and society could be organized.

Living, growing, changing cells are pretty damn dissimilar to static circuitry. Neural networks are based on an oversimplified model of neuron cells. The model ignores the fact neurons are constantly growing, shifting, and breaking connections with one another, and flat out does not consider structures and interactions within the cells.

Metaphysics is not required to make the observation that computer programmes are magnitudes less complex than a brain.

The trouble with phrases like ‘neural structures’ and ‘language parsing’ is that these descriptions still play into the “AI” narrative that’s been used to oversell large language models.

Fundamentally, these are statistical weights randomly wired up to other statistical weights, tested and pruned against a huge database. That isn’t language parsing, it’s still just brute-force calculation. The understanding comes from us, from people assigning linguistic meaning to patterns in binary.

You’re getting surveillance regardless of walkablity. Amazon is happy enough to hand Ring camera footage over to authorities no questions asked.

You worship the stock market and private property like a golden calf.

All hardware becomes legacy hardware in time. Even if we assume they’re eventually able to deliver on all those great big shiny promises, I’d rather not have to schedule an outpatient surgery just to keep up on emails. Pocket touchscreens being practically mandatory is bad enough…

work customer service long enough and being intolerable starts to be appealing

Squidward is churlish and often over-reacts when his personal time is intruded upon. Maybe his neighbors don’t recognize when they’re being intrusive, but they do value Squidward’s company. It took drastic conditions for him to realize he values their company as well.

And there certainly wasn’t a neighborhood where your highway on-ramp currently is.

Yeah yeah, you see the individual and not the historical pattern.

Isn’t it funny that the US keeps doing this? The presidents are incidental, flitting in and out of office with the whim of the public. But the conflicts? Those last. Nuclear rockets parked in Yugoslavia one century, flooding Ukraine with weapons the next. You know children in Vietnam are, to this day, born with napalm induced complications?

Doesn’t this all ring a little too familiar to you? Do you think maybe our grandparents had cute little nicknames for Khrushchev, comparing him to Hitler, when they were our age?

Amazing, a century latter the blame is still squarely placed on Russia. Those people must not be capable of self-determination, am I right my good Cold Warrior? Good thing we had this stockpile of depleted uranium, by jingo! So what if it leaches into the groundwater? Canadian mining firms have been poisoning Ukrainian groundwater for decades now! What’s a little rare-earth-elements between allies, amiright?

They outlawed starting a conversation in Russian. It was criminal for a business not first say something in Ukrainian. Like, imagine if Arizona tried to pass a law that criminalized conducting business in Spanish.

Induced demand – the production of weapons necessitates the use of weapons in order to keep shares from crashing. Like a shoe factory regularly changing the design and fashion to keep from flooding the market, blood is spilled to keep the 401Ks safe.

Welcome to the Second Cold War, you’ve been here along.

Big cats, wolves, eagles, and uncomfortable caricatures of people. Heaven forbid a school ever choose, like, a local frog or hedgehog or whatever for a mascot.

That’s the interesting thing about empire, it’s self similar. A whole class of people may grow up geographically in or near the core, but their experience of life has more in common with someone in the semi- or outer periphery in terms of access to necessities or stability of life.

Eeyp. If you remembered the stuff that isn’t memorable, you’d run out of memory.

electrocuting an elephant to death, and for no better reason than tabloid advertising, kind of stands out in the historical record

that’s not to say Edison was PURE EVIL, just that I always remember the elephant alongside the more humanizing factoids. [Once, he asked a math student to find the volume of a lightbulb. The student started doing all kinds of caliper measurements and geometry calculations. Edison just filled the bulb with sand and tipped it out into a measuring cup]