Reminds me of an old joke.

Would people cut trees down if they could scream?

Omg, yes, absolutely. That would be the only way to shut them up.

Epstein didn’t keep a low profile. He was everywhere, taking pictures and glad-handing other plutocrats and showing up at events.

Like, if anyone is on your short list, I would think it would be Elon Musk. Musk’s initial gambit was throwing a bunch of keggers at Stanford to make friends with the prior generation’s Silicon Valley failkids. That’s how he met Thiel and got into Paypal, made his first billion, and became an ahem Angel Investor for all sorts of glamour projects.

this was a CIA Mossad operation that got out of hand stupid and sloppy

Pretty much the history of intelligence services in a nutshell.

the rich pedophiles really REALLY started liking the setup

I do kinda wonder what the final shoe to drop was. But my money is more on Epstein extorting more money/freedom than his handlers believed he was entitled to.

The fact that Trump took over in 2017 and Epstein was arrested/murdered a few years later suggests - to me, at least - that he maybe called up his old friend and started making a few too many insistent demands. And it occurred to Trump (or someone in his immediate vicinity) that it would be easier to just arrest this guy and wack him than keep paying him off forever.

Opus 4.6 is genuinely pretty decent at programming now if you give it a good backbone to build off of.

Soup from a Stone.

Amazed they didn’t ask for 5-10 years of experience in AI coding.

we applauded nixon for making inroads with china.

YMMV. The John Birchers hated that shit.

the volume of such posts surged from just under 2,000 per day to more than 6,000

I refuse to believe Twitter only had 2,000 anti-islamic posts a day.

And decoupling only started to really happen last year.

We began decoupling when we took a militant policy against immigration. You can take that back to Clinton in the 90s or all the way back to Eisenhower in the 50s. But we’ve been adopting strains of isolationism straight back to the final days of WW2.

You could describe the Cold War as an enormous globalized decoupling event, which we tentatively recoiled from a few times before collapsing back into it.

assigns them a score if a citizen walks on the sidewalk correctly

Funny story about Jaywalking

The automobile lobby in the US took up the cause of labeling and scorning jaywalkers in the 1910s and early 1920s. In 1912, for instance, Popular Mechanics magazine reported that the term was current in Kansas City: “The city pedestrian who cares not for traffic regulations at street corners, but strays all over the street, crossing in the middle of the block, or attempting to save time by choosing a diagonal route across a street intersection instead of adhering to the regular crossing, is designated as a ‘jay walker,’ in Kansas City.”

In 1915, when New York City’s police commissioner Arthur Woods sought to apply the word “jaywalker” to anyone who crossed the street at mid-block, the New York Times protested, calling it “highly opprobrious” and “a truly shocking name.”

Originally in the US, the legal rule was that “all persons have an equal right in the highway, and that in exercising the right each shall take due care not to injure other users of the way”. In time, however, streets became the province of vehicular traffic, both practically and legally.

Anyway, enjoy your hyper-criminalized car culture hellscape while making spooky fingers about Evil Foreign Country.

You were not born when the decoupling began. You will not live to see it end.

I suppose the plan was to decouple the world from the dollar all the time.

I mean, depends on who you ask. But there’s definitely been a deliberately effort from within the Silicon Valley wing of the economy to force people into using Cryptocurrency as a legally-compulsory dollar alternative.

laughing from my desk job at a Fortune 500 O&G company

Eh. Depending on where those parts were sourced…

What, no Microslop?

No way this runs on Windows. It’s Linux or bust.

They trained a tiny patch of neurons to respond to low-voltage electric impulses. The cells don’t know they’re playing Doom. They don’t have any kind of social context or even video feedback.

Imagine if I stuck you in a sensory deprivation chamber, handed you an NES controller, and asked you to hit the buttons. Then, periodically, I said “Yes” or “No” based on the buttons you pressed. And when I pulled you out of the tube at the end of an hour, I told you “the yes and no messages were intended to encourage you to correctly navigate Mario through the first level of the original game.” What if, instead of Mario, I’d been telling you how to play Street Fighter?

It doesn’t matter if its Doom. They likely picked Doom because the I/O is so rudimentary that you can install the game on practically anything. The cellular matter has no idea what it’s doing beyond the “Yes/No” signaling.

I mean, I wish that were actually true.

One of the bleakest turns of the post-war Eastern Bloc was the speed at which they re-incorporated ex-Nazi officers into the Stasi. I’d have to dig it up, but there’s a whole line about a German describing his career as roughly “First I worked for the monarchy to suppress fascism, then I worked for the fascists to suppress communism, then I worked for the communists to suppress capitalism, and now that the communists lost I’m old enough to retire.”

Built to Fail: The story of 21st century consumer technology.

That’s the one.

“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”

Wind is a highly cost-efficient and abundant form of electricity generation.

And Communism Doesn’t Work

Ergo, the Communist Chinese could have never built wind farms.

QED