People forgot those Pace Picante commercials when all the cowboys yell in angry unison when the new cowboy reveals his salsa was made in…

“NEW YORK CITY!?!?!?”

Now do fucking apartment complexes so we can get back to local ownership, thanks. If I have to fucking rent, can we at least not have it be these faceless corporations that you can only communicate with via their website and not a fucking human.

Who gives a shit about a fucking poll?

Thanks for the clarification, I’m old and sometimes my memory is more fuzzy on those details. But yeah, it’s always been a license, and back then it felt more like ownership because of the honor system.

“Piracy is a service problem.” Truer words have never been spoken.

Let’s be real though, technically software has always lived and died on licensing instead of ownership.

I remember software in the 90s having limits on how many computers you could use an application on (however rarely enforced), and making backup copies of software that you owned (like copying a CD for backup purposes) was a hard fought right when the DMCA was being implemented. But even the backup only helped so much because especially in the last 20 years tech has grown at lightning speed since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007. A CD backup of Office 2003 isn’t really helpful in 2026 anyway.

I’m not arguing this is how it should be. I’m just clarifying that technically this is how it has always been. We’ve never had full rights to do whatever we want with the software we buy. It’s why Free (as in speech, not as in beer) Open Source Software is so important, and why open hardware is so important by extension.

The same companies that rose to dominance using an environment with weak regulation and enforcement while also maintaining that hacker attitude of “routing around bad legislation” have now been using their dominance to make an environment of tight regulation and enforcement, now that they’re at the top. They have spent endless amounts of lobbying money to get this environment to benefit them where you’re locked in via hardware and software to the companies rules on how you use your hardware and software… because the software was never really ours, and now they’re leveraging that to make our hardware not ours either.

The only way out is through. FOSS.

Wow I didn’t know they had worldwide internet, atomic clocks, and network time protocol servers before the railways…

I mean sure it’s how clocks worked before the railways if you entirely ignore the technology involved!

Well, we’re also in the 21st century and this jump an hour twice a year shit makes no sense. We could make timekeeping worldwide way more insane by having it adjust “imperceptibly” over time to auto adjust times worldwide based on true solar noon at each individual clock location using GPS. So all clocks would now have GPS as well to be able to ping their location to get the appropriate time. This… would be insane. We’d have seconds that are longer than a second. LET’S DO IT.

How will they protect that content being trained for AI models on third party piracy sites where dumps of Patreon subscriber content get published without a paywall. On those sites, there’s no protection.

Like that’s the unfortunate part about a lot of this is a lot of people pay for Patreon access and then just pirate the content out. I’m not against piracy, but I do see the nature of the piracy sites being wide open with no controls or protections from AI scraping that even with Patreon doing this, many are likely to still have their art scraped.

I mean this is the Heritage Foundation with living politicians as well.

The Iran war seemed like it was purpose built for the oil companies to profit wildly?

Because Trump doesn’t give a single fuck about reality or anything he does impacting anyone else. He literally does not think about nor care about impacts to anyone but himself, period.

Add it to the pile.

“I don’t know if I look good in a bathing suit,” Trump pondered at one point. “I haven’t had a bathing suit in a long time. I’m too busy. It’d be nice.”

No one should ever let this festering pile of disease into any public body of water, if only for the likelihood of fecal contamination.

Just… ugh. How is everything about him the utterly worst it can be.

I’m humoring my mom with bratwurst and such for food, but we’re not doing much else. Despite being quite old, she’s not a Trumper and doesn’t understand how nobody in her age cohort remembers how trashy and awful he was in the 1980s.

Anyway, small trappings of a dead holiday, a small comfort and a reminder of what once was.

Always try to give yourself small comforts, even if they don’t make sense. Going forward those small comforts will likely come less and less due to our now degraded international relations.

2024-2025: AI companies pour money and support into DJT leaving many of us perplexed given Silicon Valley’s history of being left-leaning.

Curtis Yarvin has been writing about his ideas since at least 2009, when I first heard of him and his “Dark Enlightement.” He’s the “philsophical” underpinning of Silicon Valley’s actual values and it was clear long, long before 2024.

He has the ear of people like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, JD Vance, and more.

From Wikipedia:

Yarvin’s ideas were influential among right-libertarians and paleolibertarians, and prominent investors like Thiel have echoed Yarvin’s project of seceding from the United States to establish tech-CEO dictatorships. Journalist Jason Wilson noted that Yarvin had “a serious intellectual influence on key figures in Donald Trump’s coming administration”. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, an informal adviser to Donald Trump, has spoken in approval of Yarvin. Political strategist Steve Bannon has read and admired his work. Vice-president JD Vance also praised Yarvin in 2021, and said, drawing from his 2012 “Retire All Government Employees” talk, that “what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, and replace them with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

Also a leak of info about Thiel’s secretive “Dialog” group included:

Elon Musk ($1.3 trillion)
Eric Schmidt ($40.1 billion)
Henry Kravis ($12.2 billion)
Marcos Galperin ($6.8 billion)
Mike Cannon-Brookes ($7.7 billion)
Scott Cook ($4.4 billion)
Barry Sternlicht ($3.1 billion)
Nicolas Berggruen ($2.9 billion)
John Arnold ($2.8 billion)
Joe Lonsdale ($2.8 billion)
Reid Hoffman ($2.7 billion)

Eric Schmidt from Google, Reid Hoffman of Netflix. The idea that Yarvin’s ideas don’t come up or aren’t obliquely pushed at these events seems deeply unlikely.

Creepier that everyone laughs

To be clear, this is just how Doctorow has always been, he’s always been that annoying nerd who needs to come up with new words/phrases. Enshittification is just the one that caught one.

See also: Whuffie, metacrap, and Schneider’s law. Those are all from before 2005. Like I said, this is who he has always been.

I am of two minds on Doctorow: One one hand, I appreciate his thoughtfulness and insight, and on the other hand I cannot stand how much of a weirdly pedantic nerd he is, especially when it comes to his own ideas.

Also I remember him kind of really sucking at journalism at first in the early 2000’s. I recall an article about Napster where he said “Napster’s original goal was to sell music to people” which blew my fucking mind because it was always meant to be a peer-to-peer network and my god, we have both lived through this era, how could he manage to get it so fucking wrong? I was especially galled because he had just been given a class to teach at UCLA while my friend who actually had a masters degree and his thesis was on the social network aspects of piracy and the co-evolution of control and resistance in computer networks was struggling to find a job as a teacher.

So due to those early memories, I may be a little biased.

This is an article by the guy who coined the term enshittification, so uhhh, pretty sure he knows what he means.

After reading the article:

Enshittification: The process by which a company starts by giving away everything seemingly for free, doing everything they can for both users and business customers. Then, after they have achieved enough network effect to keep people tied to their product, they begin to degrade the experience for users to make more money. Eventually, the same process happens to their business customers as well, as they have an effective monopoly over the space.

Technocarcinization: The tendency of technology companies to become both more surveillant and controlling of their devices (which they truly treat as theirs, not as ours) over time. Essentially tech companies all slowly become 1984 Nanny States in corporate digital form. Yes, enshittification is part of this process, but they are different things.

True, but I still think there would be plenty for HR to be mediating in terms of employee-to-employee relationships. However, it’s a big ask for HR to stop being a “cover your ass” department that is otherwise dedicated to making sure things like sexual harassment and hostile workplace environments don’t impact the company itself despite existing in the company all the same. Because that too is a large function of HR.

If only there was a whole department at schools that was made for exactly this… I heard they used to have one way back in the olden days. What would it be called? God the art of naming things is so difficult!

(Seriously, this is what happens when you defund the arts programs in education, you end up with teachers who are not trained in art doing their best… and their best is really really bad)