Was very confused, because I thought this was Rodger Sterling from Mad Men for a minute.

You need to pretend you live in a democracy or the administrators will take away the illusion.

He will be exempt. The areas that he lives in and the things that he does will not be tagged as “criminal” on the data system that he has the contract to administer.

That’s always how these systems work. You don’t worry about getting dragged into the Saudi Consulate and bonesawed to death by intelligence officers when you’re MBS, because you’re the boss and the guy getting bonesawed is your employee.

For the same reason, you don’t worry about getting spied on when you’re the one who owns and operates the big surveillance infrastructure because it exists for your benefit.

“How will we get by without all our financialized monopolies?!”

Idk, bro. Just keep doing what you’re doing, minus the extraordinary rents to your bloated bourgeois landlords, maybe?

The way to build third parties is by reforming the democratic system state by state to have a ranked choice system

Spending decades to tinker with the mechanics of an election system that excludes 40% of the population via its baseline construction? Seems like you’re going to keep getting the same results.

What good is Ranked Choice Voting in a state like Florida, where 1.7M people are excluded through the state’s Felony Disenfrachisement system? FFS, the state voted on an amendment to reform Felony Disenfrachisement and the legislature just cancelled it out. Gerrymandering means you’ll never see a non-conservative state senate and you’re unlikely to see more than a moderate conservative occupy the Governor’s mansion.

That’s not a FPTP problem, its a problem of targeted state-wide ethnic disenfranchisement.

glances at the current state of the UK Labour party

It’s been known to work for a bit, but its also been known to collapse right back into the old two-party dichotomy. I think the hysteria around third parties baked into every election since the Bush Era SCOTUS-powered election theft in Florida is overblown, particularly when so much of the electorate lives in one-party dominant states. But I’ve also noticed successful outsider parties - the German Greens, France’s En March, the UK Liberal Dems - seem to embrace Corporationism as quickly as any of their German Christian Democrat / French Socialist / UK Tory peers.

And then there’s always this specter of fascism floating on the edge of the political establishment. Your Alternative for Germany, your National Front, and your UKIP create this existential crisis for liberal voters, such that they’re persistently terrorized into voting the “safe” centrist candidates in while ostracizing any candidate actually running on the things they say they want.

The Ruling Elite have the effective roadmap to keep the proles in line. Continuously finance a paper tiger on the right-flank of the election cycle. Make immigration a boogeyman issue that mobilizes the reactionaries within the state to turn out in droves. Then dangle a weak liberal as a release valve - a Starmer or Biden or Macron or Olaf Schultz - that nobody particularly likes, but the liberal-leaning base are told is “electable” because they can win the support of the conservative national media.

People are bombarded with this false choice - weak liberal or strongman conservative - decade after decade, all the way around the edge of the Atlantic, until the institutions these weak liberals are supposed to support are falling apart and the strongman conservatives can easily take over.

Its a doomed system.

Like Russia does?

Israel and Russia remain close geopolitical allies.

Basically what the French did to Haiti, several centuries ago. Kill off all the native peoples and bring in a slave population to handle the manual labor.

insert dubiously sourced anecdote by anonymous IDF officer

handing my friend a screwdriver

“You can use this for simple crafts and home repairs”

Me, backing away from the screwdriver in terror

“Nice try, but I know what that is. They use that thing to build the Space Shuttle.”

Lexcorp was never portrayed as anything but an industrial powerhouse whose existence was ultimately good.

The largest international arms dealing firm that did Captain Planet Villain tier pollution, corruption, and financial scams was “ultimately good”?

Didn’t Lexcorp literally clone an army of Doomsdays?

I don’t remember this at all.

AI has looked like a scam since the Metaverse days when Facebook realized it couldn’t push those shitty headsets on people and decided to pivot.

The entire training set isn’t used in each permutation. Your keywords are building the samples based on metadata tags tied back to the original images.

If you ask for “Iron Man in a cowboy hat”, the toolset will reach for some catalog of Iron Man images and some catalog of cowboy hat images and some catalog of person-in-cowboy-hat images, when looking for a basis of comparison as it renders the image.

These would be the images attributed to the output.

Texas inmates are being ‘cooked to death’ in extreme heat, complaint alleges

With the threat of another hot summer ahead, advocates asked a federal judge to declare 100-degree-plus conditions in uncooled Texas facilities unconstitutional.

…

The filing came from four nonprofit organizations who are joining a lawsuit originally filed last August by Bernie Tiede, an inmate who suffered a medical crisis after being housed in a Huntsville cell that reached temperatures exceeding 110 degrees. Tiede, a well-known offender whose 1996 murder of a wealthy widow inspired the film “Bernie,” was moved to an air-conditioned cell following a court order but he’s not guaranteed to stay there this year.

Concentration Camps.

stop playing nice.

What’s your next move, hot shot?

RIP the future of high end computer graphics. 1972 to 2024. You had a good run.

I’m old enough to remember when Glenn Beck and Eric Erikson had hour long programs on CNN.

They were more than happy to mainline all sorts of bullshit, from “Iraq has WMDs” lies under Bush to Don Lemon’s insistence that a black hole from the LHC had eaten Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. MSNBC hyped “Lab Leak” theory around the COVID epidemic and has spent decades carrying water for the IDF.

Don’t give these people a pass just because they’re not taking money directly from Rupert Murdoch. Cable News is full of reactionaries and nitwits.

It’s like saying “Republican party working directly with Fox News, Breitbart, and OANN to spread disinformation”

Can’t be true. That’s just liberals being partisan. Fox is Fair and Balanced. It says do right there on the Chyron.

We’re talking about rentals, dude.

We just had a major rental catrelization scandal, by which landlords collaborated to keep vacant units prices above the clearing rate to deny their tenants anywhere cheaper to move.

Someone can afford the home you’re in.

I’ve got half a dozen units on my block that are selling above the clearing price. They’ve been vacant for years. This is speculative real estate. The only people who can afford it are the developers and investors looking to accumulate housing stock on the gamble that someone will be able to pay the markup at some point in the future.