forgetfreeman

DCs have a tendency to destabilize the local grid and drive up grid rates and have ridiculous water consumption requirements, both largely externalized to the surrounding community, so it's more a matter of basic self-defense than any notional populist agenda.

You're right, nor am I attempting to. I'm merely pointing out the kazoo-music-and-a-propeller-beanie slapstick levels of comedy that manifest when the tech industry writ large attempts to argue for online privacy with a straight face.

Individuals who genuinely care about privacy are absolutely mythical in the tech industry. If they were commonplace Google would find themselves under continuous seige by a combination of protestors and bizarrely well-funded FOSS projects aimed at every business niche they inhabit. Doubly true for Meta. Bitching online about proposed legislation while private industry maintains exquisitely detailed records of every aspect of your existence is at best performative.

Whaaaaat?? In a world where brick and mortar retail has been almost completely replaced by Amazon and a handful of mega big-box retailers there's a market for people going through literally all of the steps required to shop local retail (including spending money)....to end up having purchased nothing? Are y'all on drugs??

What??

Thank you for clarifying your position.

We are in violent agreement in all but this: I refuse to reward the Democratic party for putting a gun to my head. If they as a political organization are willing to literally risk our democracy when the alternative is assembling reforms that clearly address the imbalances in our society then we can all burn together because I refuse to continue to reward their brinksmanship.

"My pushback is that now is not the time for both-sides-ism"

Of course, and that line of reasoning has consistently failed at the polls since it was deployed as a readguard attempt to bolster Clinton's failed presidential campaign. Like, how many times does the DNC have to stick a fork in this particular outlet before it becomes transparent that this line of rhetoric simply doesn't produce the desired results?

Not only is it absolutely time, it is well and truly past time to underline the functionally identical economic policies of both parties, how the economic turmoil this causes drives identity politics and political division in this country, with a clear eye towards bringing an end to all of that through any means available.

I'ma keep it creamy with you, both parties have had the kind of political majority required to clamp down on the corporatization of our society, and neither have so much as paid lip service to doing so. You want to be mad at the current administration by all means there's fertile ground, but don't waste anyone's time blaming them for a situation that's been decades in the making with both major political parties pushing in tandem to realize it.

Jesus. That might be the most succinctly brutal movie review I've ever seen. quietly scratches Madam Web off the to-do list

Tl;dr: Not sure why you're catching downvotes here, you aren't wrong.

True Story:

~25 years ago, well before ubiquitous mass shooting events or the now weekly local road rage incidents, I went for a ride early one Sunday morning. With the sun barely up, the air was crisp without being chilly even at speed, and the local roadways were empty. The two most common stressors while riding being the weather and other drivers this was shaping up to be something special. The kind of borderline tantric riding conditions you daydream about but only encounter once or twice a year if you live in a busy metro area.

So imagine my irritation when this blissful communion of man and machine was rudely interrupted by a Bentley running a red light. Dude blew through the red and pulled 3/4 into my lane before he noticed me and slammed on the brakes, leaving me about 8/10ths of a second to juke a full lane width to get around him. Not only was this the only car in sight in any direction but literally the only other vehicle I'd encountered on the road this morning and this dickhead has just made a passable attempt at killing me.

Now I'm not one to hide my light under a bushel so of course I gave the driver the finger on my way past. I noted the driver appeared to be in his late 70s, had his similarly elderly wife in the passenger seat, and a very young girl in a lovely church dress in the back seat. It's amazing the amount of detail you can capture in a split second while riding an industrial grade adrenaline dump, but I digress. This dude had absolutely earned some flavor of response and given I wasn't prepared to get into a fist fight with a guy old enough to be my grandfather I figured the least aggressive option that conveyed my total disgust at his driving skills would get the job done.

My miscalculation here was in discounting the psychology of the kind of geriatric upper middle class white guy that drives his family to early church services in a Bentley. In hindsight I'm guessing it had been several decades since that guy had caught any flavor of static off of literally anyone and had grown so unaccustomed to getting called on his shit that when it finally happened dude divided by zero.

At the time I was also ignorant of the performance characteristics of a 4 door Bentley sedan. Having mistook it for your garden variety land yacht I exited the interaction at a sedate 20mph over the speed limit confident that was sufficient to get me over the horizon with no further hassles. So you can imagine my surprise when I checked my mirrors and saw this guy power slide through another red light and charge me from behind at something like 3x the posted speed limit. The chase that followed was deeply stupid in ways usually reserved for action movie scripts. This guy just would not let it go. I dragged him through 6 red lights, two neighborhoods, and a mall parking lot before finally cutting through a pedestrian greenway to lose him. I ended up stashing my bike and riding gear behind a service shed in a local park and hiked home, returning hours later to retrieve my ride.

To this day this encounter haunts me a little. I can't say for certain what would have happened if either or both of us had been armed but the potential was certainly there. These days I frequently take back roads to avoid a section of the local highway due to how frequently folks are getting shot in traffic through there, and you couldn't pay me to ride a motorcycle anywhere within a 50 mile radius of any major metro area. Y'all be safe out there, shit's crazy.

Lok 1k miles worth of equivalent tire wear, but you got me curious and it looks like a set of z-rated motorcycle tires is about $700 these days so not off by much.

If it isn't a blatant cry for attention can it really be considered a midlife crisis car?

Eh, you ride a bike long enough and you're more or less forced into this level of hostility toward the drivers around you.

Cute, but you haven't really lived until you've ripped an apocalyptic burnout in front of the dude that's been tailgating you for the last N miles. Trading ~1k worth of tire wear for coating the front of their car with rock chips and molten asphalt is a damn good deal.

Odds are excellent they cant hear it. If they can hear it they either absolutely do not care or find it mildly irritating and blame it on the nearest 1500 owner.

I look forward to your nomination for Secretary of Education since you appear to have a handle on something trained professionals on two continents backed by billion dollar industries have failed to master.

"I was just following orders" is not, and has never been, a credible defense of unethical behavior.

Anecdote < Data. Studies consistently show declines in every trackable metric associated with education when computational devices are introduced to the process. Until actual data is presented that contradicts these findings there's no grounds for rational debate.

Fair, but when presented with a situation where one side of an argument has evidence and the other has baseless assertions the choice is rather plain.

Educational outcomes tank when computers are introduced to classrooms. It absolutely follows that AI as a tutoring application is bad for society.

https://fortune.com/2026/03/14/america-math-and-reading-scor...

Your average 5 year old will also gleefully attempt to eat an entire gallon of ice cream in one sitting so make of that what you will.

The industry hype mill and it's attendant horde of touts are working overtime to make sure the dude that mows my lawn is up to date on AI, so I'm not sure how you're going to advance the argument that anyone routinely posting to the epicenter of the AI hype typhoon is some how poorly informed on the topic.

"The ship has sailed."

Then torpedo the damn thing and set fire to the shipyard that built it. Nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, about the predatory nature of Big Tech is inevitable or required for society to function. Suggesting we all just accept it is ridiculous, especially when we can trivially get rid of it with nothing more complicated than applying life-altering punitive damages to the C-suite, board, and majority shareholders.

It's not silly, it's just the most convenient and broadly relatable failure mode. I mean, I could compile a 20 bullet point copypasta detailing everything from prompt injection to exfiltration of sensitive data as-a-feature but if touts are willing to stoop to ignoring all of that while arguing obvious reductio ad absurdum at face value there appears to be little point at tilting that windmill. The Bullshit Asymmetry Principle is definitely winning here.

Probably when it stops agreeing with me when I tell it that industrial quantities of garlic salt are an acceptable substitution for coco powder in a chocolate mousse recipe...

"reflexive anti AI luddite attitude"

That's awfully reductive there, champ. Most critiques of AI are based on some combination of observed failings of the technology, observed failings of the tech industry writ large, and healthy skepticism in the face of Yet Another Tech Industry Hype Typhoon. Anyway, the burden of proof isn't on skeptics, it's on the technology and it's proponents, so let's see some receipts before we agree to squander limited public resources on unproven systems yeah?

"AI-based tutoring is going to raise the average level of education and literacy in the world"

Without exception every claim made to date about tech boosting educational outcomes has been provably false. As in, adding tech to the education process results in measurably less education, and this finding seems to track across all age cohorts. Furthermore, unless parents have significant education credentials they aren't qualified to make informed decisions on what's best for their kids in this context.

That's inaccurate, orbital periods are a thing at least for moons. It's one of those things you'd have to spend a year or two piloting an Orca to notice though.

If your primary mode of transportation is a bicycle and you're cheering shit that annoys and (critically) distracts motorists you might have a death wish.

While there are certainly more examples than either of us can count of shitty half-baked codebases claiming quality code has never existed is pretty wild. With humans it's at least something to be aspired to and occasionally even accomplished.