no different than taking a bunch of books you bought second-hand and throwing them into a blender.

They didn’t buy the books. They took them without permission.

I found a free port of Civilization (unciv) on the phone and immediately lost like 3 hours. That shit is dangerous. There are better phone games, but there’s certainly a lot of slop.

I just tried “Language Drops” and it was… interesting. It didn’t place me at the right level, so I got a very beginner lesson when I’m closer to intermediate (but definitely not fluent). I’m not sure I liked matching the pictures- the picture for “thank you” could mean different things depending on how you interpret the person’s face and body language- and then I hit the end of the free content for the day. It didn’t get to different tenses or even whole sentences- just basic vocabulary and no verbs. Maybe it ramps up quickly?

They will accept any negative sum game, they will ruin their own livelihoods and their own lives, if only it helps sad little kings of sad little hills.

I’m reminded of that book about Authoritarian Personality Types. They did like a model UN / Civilization game kind of thing, where the players represented different countries and could make decisions about policy, war, and so on. There were two groups. Unknown to the players, the people running this experiment put all the people who scored high for authoritarian personality in one group, and everyone else in the other group.

The group with low authoritarian personality scores? Basically everything was fine. They solved the ozone layer crisis. They were solving world hunger. One guy tried to be a dick and the rest of the group brought him in line.

The high authoritarian guys? Nuclear apocalypse. They made them sit in the dark for five minutes to think about what they’d done, and let them have a do-over. They still did a shit job. Petty squabbling. Stealing. Out of control climate crisis.

I don’t think there’s an ethical way to do this in real life, but I do think if you just didn’t allow people with that kind of personality to have any real power, we’d all be much better off.

It’s also possible i mangled the story because I rewrote it here from memory, but I believe it was in this book: https://theauthoritarians.org/

Oh yeah. Cars are bad on like every metric.

Socially they isolate people. You don’t interact with anyone when you’re driving except to get angry. The micro interactions you have on the train matter. Seeing people that aren’t just like you, also annoyed that the train is delayed, or just having a nice time with their kids, matters. More than makes up for when other people are annoying.

Economically they hurt. It’s much harder to just pop into an interesting looking shop when you’re cruising along at 40mph. All the space dedicated to parking could be used for other stuff- housing, commerce, communal space, whatever.

They make spaces less safe. Other than the direct impact (no pun intended) of people getting hit by cars, or crashing into stuff, a space that has steady foot traffic is generally safer. If everyone was in their car instead, you’d probably be alone on foot with no one to help if something happened.

They’re bad for the environment. Air pollution, micro plastics, whatever.

Drunk driving is way more dangerous than drunk “riding the train”.

The more non-car options are built out, the better it will be for people who need to drive for whatever reason.

Cars culture is trash and if we ever escape from it, it’s going to take years.

Ed Zitron wrote a blog post I’ve been thinking about, where he said that a lot of decisions are made by “business idiots” now. People that don’t really use or understand the product, and don’t really understand the users or their needs. It’s an interesting read, even though the guy is rather verbose: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

I see what you did there and I’m not going to fully fall for it.

I feel like trump could completely destroy the economy and cause the US to split apart and fall into ruin, and people would still think the Republicans are “good for the economy”

I guess it’s like the difference between a parasite that doesn’t kill the host, and one that does. The current breed looks like it’s going to kill the host.

I canceled my subscription. In part because fuck using AI to hurt labor, but also unemployment. Capitalists want us to spend spend spend, but they don’t want to give us any money to spend.

You can do non-monogamy without cheating. I know many people who do so.

There was a thread about cheating the other day and someone posted that they think cheating is… How did they put it… binary? Like there are social groups where everyone cheats and its normal, and then there are non overlapping groups where no one cheats.

Ah, I found it: https://lemm.ee/comment/20529741

I don’t think I know anyone who cheats in relationships.

If you can’t tell people are working productively remotely, you have no business being a manager.

This reminds me of the new vector for malware that targets “vibe coders”. LLMs tend to hallucinate libraries that don’t exist. Like, it’ll tell you to add, install, and use jjj_image_proc or whatever. The vibe coder will then get an error like “that library doesn’t exist” and "can’t call jjj_image_proc.process()`.

But you, a malicious user, could go and create a library named jjj_image_proc and give it a function named process. Vibe coders will then pull down and run your arbitrary code, and that’s kind of game over for them.

You’d just need to find some commonly hallucinated library names

Betterment offers 4%, insured up to $2m. I think you can go higher with a refer-a-friend , but that program might be over.

That’s a good point. I think that’s why most financial advice recommends a mixed portfolio. Index funds that follow the market, but also like bonds and safer things.

If I luck into seven figures of money, I think I’d hire a professional to give advice. Or at least do a lot of research.

You can get 4% from a high yield savings account. That’s insured. That’s still $360,000 a year (taxed as income). You don’t need to expose yourself to a lot of markets and “down years” . I mean, if the us government collapses and insured accounts are lost we all have bigger problems.

At 2.5mm you’d still be fine at 4%. Six figure salary for doing jack squat.

Of course, not everyone can budget and they might burn into their principle. But, like, don’t do that. 🤷

If I had $9 million dollars I would be done. That’s line a six figure annual salary if you put it in the safest of safe investments.

Rich people suck

I don’t think I know anyone who’s cheated. But I also hang out with a lot of polyamorous people, where cheating is possible but I feel like is less common.

Huh. I don’t think I know anyone who cheats so I guess I got lucky. Your post is plausible