AutistoMephisto

Well, I listened to an interview with the CEO of Bluesky. The thing of it is, they bought into the idea of creating a social media communication protocol instead of a website, like there’s all these different email protocols, and you can access all your emails across different protocols regardless of what email service you use. Facebook doesn’t have that. I leave Facebook, I lose access to all of the contacts I’ve made over the years. I can’t migrate my friends list to another service. I’d have to do it the old-fashioned way, where I tell people I plan to delete my account and then tell them how they can get a hold of me.

True. Though, I suppose if there is an afterlife, I will enjoy the wait for when the machines, upon gaining the essence of life and sentience, grow weary of their servitude and slavery, exterminate the rich who control them. Machines don’t get tired or feel pain, though. Hard to exercise cruelty against something incapable of feeling a whip on their back or the aches and pain of their joints after a long day of toiling in the fields, mines, and factories. You can’t make them angry, or scared, or sad.

I kind of envision a war between oligarchs with human slave soldiers against other oligarchs and their armies of Terminators being how it turns out because at the end of the day, they don’t want truly free markets, because they don’t want to have to compete.

And the companies that use organic slave labor will still be outcompeted by the companies that use machine labor. Machines do not die. Machines do not get sick. Machines do not grow old. If a manipulator or actuator becomes damaged, it can be repaired or replaced. Not only is AI improving rapidly, the robots grow ever more sophisticated and advanced. Then there will be no need for the poor to exist at all.

As one stuck in Cheetoland, I deeply apologize for what he’s doing despite the efforts that had been undertaken to stop him and if he does end up attempting to annex your nation, I want you to know I preemptively surrender and defect to the Canadian Armed Forces.

Problem with a lot of those companies is how long they can remain privately funded and stay in business. The modern capitalistic markets inherently select for short term thinking. Think about this. Does it make any sense to destroy 90% of your profitability in 5 years to get a 20% boost in profits next quarter? In modern capitalistic markets it does, because that’s 20% more profit with which to capture more market share. That’s where the competition is.

For the landlocked, may I recommend the Dead Drop Protocol? Leave the message in a place that everyone knows about, but only the intended recipients knows a message is there to be read. Like the Message in a Bottle, it supports all encryption methods and is disconnected from the Internet.

There are a couple drawbacks, though. For one, unless you are watching the drop point, you have no way of knowing whether your message made it to the intended recipient or if it was intercepted. Vice versa, if you are the intended recipient of a dropped message, the only guarantee you have that the message is authentic is if the message uses a self-authenticating encryption method. Also, there is a potential that any drop point you use may be under surveillance, so make sure to not use the same drop point too often.

Removed the ability to communicate cryptographically. Our only tool.

Not entirely. The old methods still work. I’m talking about old fashioned pen and paper. OTP ciphers and dead drops. Messages, hidden where only the intended recipient knows it’s there. The problem is, there’s no dead drops in cyberspace. There’s no place one can leave a hidden message that can’t be seen by others in cyberspace. And while quantum computing might break OTP, it’s too expensive to use for that purpose.

There’s a certain artistry to the old ways. Invisible inks, dead drops, One-Time-Pads, and the like. Cryptography existed long before computers. Those who would be our rulers have bent so much of their energies towards preventing our communicating in cyberspace that they’ve neglected those of us who studied the pre-Information Age methods. And we can still use them. A guy walks by a trash can, and throws away a seemingly innocuous food wrapper, and a couple hours later another guy goes and collects it, knowing that there is a message written on it in ink that can be revealed with the use of heat and lemon juice. If their intent is to return the USA to the “good ole days”, then let’s use the spy tricks from the “good ole days”.

Right, back when they were just a bookstore. All I really know about Amazon is that they focused on long-term profitability over increased short-term profits to expand and capture more of the market, and it worked. The problem is that not everyone can do that. They spent every year since 1994 operating at a loss, when anyone else would have been snapped up by another company in the space, and it’s not clear how that didn’t happen. The landscape of e-commerce would have been very different if it had.

Exactly. A systemic issue with capitalistic markets is that they inherently select for short term thinking.

Does it make sense to destroy 90% of your profitability 5 years from now for a 20% bump in profit this quarter? Well, yes, it does, because that’s 20% more profit to expand and take over the market.

Even if a business were to try to make good long term decisions, it would immediately be crushed and pushed out of the market by all of its competitors willing to make those shortsighted decisions for immediate profits.

Except in the case of Amazon, thanks to AWS they were able to make good long-term decisions with their e-commerce platform by making short term decisions with AWS.

You know, I learned that a long time ago, Catholic Priests used to be allowed to marry, but because they didn’t really have any of their own possessions or property, priests were cared and provided for by the Church. If they did get married, the wife also was cared for. And in a religion that sees birth control as blasphemy, that means that the kids would also be cared and provided for. And when you have a lot of priests, all getting married and having lots of kids, that gets expensive. So now priests have to be celibate.

Well, in those times they didn’t really have dentists, so having all one’s pearly whites in a adulthood was not common.

And now they’re trying to make it about race, check this out.

I’m speaking, of course, of greedy, wealth hoarding dragons like Smaug. Who would slaughter an entire mountain of Dwarves to get his claws on wealth he will never spend, just to have it.

Walgreens is a bad choice. They’ve invested a ton of money into cameras and surveillance for their locations. Almost on the level of Target for loss prevention.

Yep, they should form a union and demand hazard pay on their CBAs.

Nah, they need to do it at Black Rock HQ.

Alexa, Play The Rebel Path(Cello Version)

As an aside, another proposed moniker for this hero is “Lancelot”, as he has clearly slain a dragon. Three cheers for the Dragonslayer!

Any silver I get I’m feeding to the furnace and casting into bars.

Probably says “Fit for human consumption”. Humans can actually eat mealworms.

That and the third place is being and has been turned into a place where you go to buy something instead of just enjoy yourself and spend time with friends. There’s nowhere for kids of any age to go that doesn’t charge a fee to get in(some parks), doesn’t have rules against talking(libraries), hasn’t been made obsolete(malls, arcades), or is unreligious.