It’s just crazy to use “10 years ago” as a break point when the overwhelming majority of these people are in the same jobs.

To borrow a quote from the illustrious President Biden, “Nothing will fundamentally change”

Lots of educated fascists. Having a degree hardly guarantees a progressive worldview. If you’re in an extractive industry or a heavily financialized one, it works against you.

Low-income plans

Love to means-test fucking everything. You can’t just have $15/mo internet. You have to plead poverty for fear of middle class or (god forbid) rich people getting a basic utility at a sensible price.

Nevermind how means testing inevitably creates these legal hurdles for administrators to leap over. The act of means testing is inevitably what businesses target in an effort to avoid compliance. “Oh! It’s too hard to tell who qualifies! Undo burden! Undo burden!” It wouldn’t be a burden if the ISP was limited to a universal flat rate. It wouldn’t be a burden if municipalities owned and operated their own independent flat-rate internet service as a public utility.

It’s all very normal when you recognize how much of our institutional structure is corrupted by profit-seeking.

Its no different than a police officer taking a bribe to let you out of a speeding ticket. Or a customs official demanding a kick-back to let a ship unload its cargo. Or a mafia goon shaking down a local storefront for “protection” money. Just institutionalized so there’s no risk of being punished.

But that’s not as controversial.

It IS controversial. Its just controversial for the same chuds who demand the right to throw on brown-face and call it cosplay. As soon as a beer company starts releasing their label in Spanish or putting a foreign flag on a product or otherwise identify with the wrong kind of foreigner, a big segment of the population loses its mind.

Americans love nothing more than to wallow in their own filth while pointing and laughing at their neighbors.

I am smart. You are dumb. That’s why we’re in this mess together.

the message went completely over the heads of the people it needed to reach

You had a series of very cynical and deliberately manipulative media coverage of the film which tried to spin it as anything but a climate change movie. And then you had a bunch of “man on the street” pieces intended to make viewers appear stupid.

But the core theory of media influenced economic change is rooted in the idea that a movie can shift people from their profit motives. No oil executive is going to watch a slapstick comedy and decide to shift his business’s core financial model because of a few jokes. No bank executives are going to divest from carbon emitting industries because some Hollywood starlets made fun of them. No senior member of political leadership is going to change how mining permits and environmental regulations are written because Adam McKay posted big numbers at the box office.

The Network didn’t change how Americans consumed their news media. Soylent Green didn’t cause Americans to reconsider our policies on factory farming. Jarhead didn’t cause any military personal to exit Iraq or Afghanistan. The only movie that seems to have really moved the dial on public policy is Idiocracy, the inspiration behind Elon Musk and Peter Thiel’s quest to get more IT people to fuck.

We actually DO have a shortage of overpaid CEOs, as much of the entrepreneurial web of small businesses and local special interests have been bought out or bankrupted by corporate expansion and conglomeration.

The days of petite bourgeois middling millionairehood are coming to a close. The fat dodos trundling around Middle America with their second homes and their Sea-Do outlets and their small patch of land dedicated to not growing alfalfa have all been clubbed and devoured. You’re either at the top of the food chain or you’re someone else’s dinner.

Cuban social media is completely out of control. We should invade immediately

Nope. If it’s bad, it’s because of outside agitation and enemy propaganda.

America is exceptional, it can’t do anything wrong except stop being American

TikTok was one of the few places I could actually watch live journalism from Gaza documenting the genocide

Undermining your trust in the US media and political leadership. Ergo, Evil Chinese Propaganda.

Captain America use to stand for the American public.

Did he? It seems like he was always an emblem of military propaganda. More Americans used to be enlisted in the military, on account of the high demand for conscripts during Korea and Vietnam. But I wouldn’t consider a whitewashed super-soldier to be a good representative of the civilian public.

Show me a “no power” superhero like Batman or Ironman that isn’t rich

Green Arrow and The Punisher leap to mind. If you go further back, you’ve got comic book heroes like Dick Tracey and TinTin. Go through The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and you’ve got Allen Quartermane, Captain Nemo, A. J. Raffles, and Ishmael. And nobody in GI Joe had magic powers. Plenty of golden age heroes were just… detectives or kungfu masters or adventurers of some sort.

capitalism is society optimizing for the wrong values

There’s an argument that clean energy and efficient supply of health care and a conservative regional defense strategy more invested in reducing violence than instigating it all create virtuous profit-cycles for the economy at large and for individual business units.

I’d argue that what we have is an echo of the WW2 economic boom. Not necessarily the product of capitalism, per say, but the result of capitalist expansion running through the grooves built out a century beforehand. Water following the course of least resistance, decade after decade, until the institutions are impossible to shift due to its sheer size and depth.

It makes terrible sense if you’re optimizing for peace, health, and safety.

It makes sense if you’re simply chasing the last economic wave. The automotive industry compounds on itself because we build cars and the cars need roads so we build roads and now we have demand for more cars. Go over to Japan or Spain or China or NYC, where they’ve invested heavily in rail and you have the opposite dynamic - rail infrastructure snowballs because that’s where the money already is.

Similarly, countries that aren’t heavily invested in the MIC - Japan, Mexico, South Africa, India - have thrown their GDP into non-military applications at a far more voluminous rate. Taiwan keeps reinvesting in their chip fabs because that’s where their revenue comes from. France keeps throwing more and more money at vineyards and airplanes and nuclear energy.

Profit-seeking is bad and creates all sorts of moral hazards, but there’s no reason you’re forced to profit-seek through these explicitly destructive methods.

Federal prosecutors allege that the landlords have used RealPage pricing software to collude and artificially raise rents. The legal action is the latest development stemming from a 2022 ProPublica investigation.

RealPage’s popular software was collecting nonpublic pricing information from multiple property managers and feeding it through a common algorithm, which then recommended an optimal rent level to those who used it — in violation of rules that prohibit such coordination, federal prosecutors alleged. They also accused the landlords of improperly communicating directly about their pricing through calls, emails and participation in “user group” forums hosted by RealPage.

The company pushes landlords to use an “auto-accept” feature on its software, authorities said, and makes it onerous for property managers to reject its suggestions.

Wonder how many of these units are managed by The Algorithm.

Y’all are going to regret taking Arizona. And, frankly, everything in California not in view of the coast.

So like, wtf is up with the cartoon fetish?

Sexual appetites are informed by the images of people you familiarize yourself with. Not usual for people to seek out partners who remind them of old friends or family members, because that’s the image they’ve imprinted on as attractive.

If you surround yourself with images of japanese cartoons (particularly horny ones, particularly when you’re young and impressionable and you’d fuck a fire hydrant on a hot day) its not going to be hard to fixate on cartoons fucking.

If you surround yourself with booze and people your own age who are equally horny, you likely won’t have that temptation.

the unbreakable barrier for humanity is switching the fucking social media site you go to.

Facebook is quickly becoming a retirement community, exclusively for me-maws and pepes. It hasn’t been the tool for college kids to organize keggers in nearly a decade.

But when alternatives to Facebook crop up - your Instagrams and TikToks and Discords and WhatsApps and Grindrs - they don’t last long before being gobbled up by the bigger social media giants or shut down by hostile state regulators.

In the end, everything returns to Facebook, because the big companies can borrow money for free and staple on whatever small firm is seeing a lot of early growth. I give BlueSky another three years, tops, before one of the big social media giants acquires it.

I’m excited to see the technical staffing at Facebook under Dana White.

they’re saying these things under their legal names

Facebook has plenty of promotional accounts, stale accounts hijacked by scammers, and straight up fake accounts. Hell, Meta’s been premiering entirely AI generated profiles.

You could be getting N-bombed by a fully automated synthetic personality before too long.

As more and more of the US economy is dominated by energy extraction (O&G sector consistently has some of the largest margins and highest pay rates in Red and Purple States) and energy consumption (AI data centers are electricity hogs, automotive/airline industry is a voracious petroleum consumer, real estate HVAC hits the grid hard during heat waves/freezes) it becomes difficult to convince people of a thing that they are paid well not to believe.

The risk of a natural disaster obliterating your livelihood in an instant is much lower than the prospect of a creditor foreclosing on your property and savings if you’re unemployed for too long.