Thanks!

Book title and author? I’m always looking for interesting new reads and a similar lore existed in a comedy isekai anime some years ago.

Mods, this provocateur right here.

What’s to stop any malicious merchant from pruning unfavorable reviews? I trust moderated gossip channels with no financial stake in review sentiment over curated marketing advertisements masquerading as “customer reviews”.

When asked to write C# code, Gemini 3.0 now responds: “I cannot generate proprietary filth. Here is a Lisp macro instead.” It also insists on correcting users who type…

But I just can’t stop.

Is that unusual?

This is like a SimCity news ticker item.

One of the few surefire ways people have to make the powerful face personal consequences: waste their time.

Pay no attention to the ex-Intel CEO behind the curtain.

Hamas is crazy as Crazy Horse was “crazy”. You know what both have/had in common? They are/were fighting displacement of their friends and family due to colonizing powers. The only difference is the latter’s people suffered almost complete annihilation while the former is a work on progress. If the British didn’t insist on making Palestine their reservation for Jews, then Palestinian freedom fighters wouldn’t have had to fight Zionists violently encroaching upon their native land.

I really enjoyed Chokepoint Capitalism (2022), the book he co-authored (read: had someone else back up his frequently repeated anecdotes with reputable citations in a proper Bibliography) with Rebecca Giblin. 90% of the interview can be found in that book already with 10% being new slogans and anecdotes that can’t be found in that book.

Fair is fair for drivers blinding pedestrians with super brights.

See also: “Marvel Defenders of The Status Quo” (2022-06-22) by Pop Culture Detective.

You could make a religion out of thi—

No. Don’t.

Your parasitic gut microbiota hissing conspiracies to your nervous system

“She probably committed some grave sin in her previous life.” — religious leaders of my childhood

they would rather sink AOC and Bernie forever so that the political equivalent of Assistant Regional Managers can get promoted to Regional Manager.

I agree and disagree. The ability to successfully lead a government as chaotic (i.e. democratic) and large as the republic of states known as the US is very rare. It requires not only a strong physical and mental constitution, but also a wide set of skills and intuitive abilities that usually only make themselves apparent during trials by fire. Compared to the sometimes explosively violent centralizations of power that occur when the rare charismatic tyrants fight their way into power (e.g. Napoleon, Hitler), democracies grow in fits and starts as they rely upon a panjandrum of popularity contests to find talented leaders. In contrast to dynasties that fiercely burn hot with their founder’s fervor then languish in subsequent generations, democracies have the potential for sustained competence as long as incumbent leaders continue to hold popularity contests with the goal of finding new leaders better than themselves from as wide a candidate pool as possible.

When the contests fail to find the rare talented leader, the process does resemble a farcical out-of-touch revolving door of mediocre middle managers like you suggest: because talented leaders are rare. And even when a talented individual does prove thenselves, they cannot cling to power lest they destroy the talent search apparatus that brought them to power in the first place and which will eventually replace them with an even more talented individual in the future. To destroy that apparatus reverts the civilization back into purity-obsessed gatekeeping fascism and boring dynastic tyranny.

So, if this decade’s popularity contest is restricted to late-night comedian talk-show hosts, I say that’s better than a Trump dynasty. But, I hope winners of those contests steer government to promote talent searches with larger candidate pools than they came from. That could take the form of government propaganda rewarding people to run for local elections. Without leaders consciously promoting wider popularity contests, the people of a democracy default to choosing the photogenic faces and entertaining voices they see and hear on their screens: actors like Ronald Reagan or Arnold Schwarzenegger or game show hosts like Donald Trump.

The entire point of having a democracy is to avoid gambling on the next heir of a bloodline dynasty being fit to rule. So, a popularity contest among celebrity television entertainers isn’t the worst, but the qualities of personality this population selects for are generally those that assist maintaining distracting fantasies rather than engaging with harsh realities.

How frequently are images generated/modified by diffusion models uploaded to Wikimedia Commons? I can wrap my head around evaluating cited sources for notability, but I don’t know where to start determining the repute of photographs. So many images Wikipedia articles use are taken by seemingly random people not associated with any organization.