Meta: “We’re getting into VR, it’s the next big thing.”

VR Market Crashes

Meta: “Well, no sweat, we can just pivot to NFTs”

NFT Market Crashes

Meta: “Shit, damn. Okay, we can just migrate all our efforts to AI. That’s booming right now.”

AI Market Tilts Alarmingly

Meta: “Fuck! Fuck! We should… uh… Fossil Fuels! We should do Fossil Fuels! That’s always a safe bet.”

This is an antedote to a bad policy, not a good policy.

A good policy would be “Rent Freeze, until we can figure out what’s going on” followed by “Rent Control as statewide policy, since you fuckers want a cartel so badly”

the law prevents him from actually issuing the arrest warrant

But it didn’t prevent him from campaigning on issuing the arrest warrant.

Like, hey, I get it. We got a rent freeze and a tripling of the city’s public housing budget. We got free city buses on more frequent schedules. $26M towards three big city-owned grocery stores. A voucher plan for public childcare, along with plans to expand city childcare amenities and services.

“Why aren’t you ordering ultra-Zionist Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch to arrest a visiting dignitary operating with diplomatic immunity?” seems kinda trivial and foolish by comparison. Why didn’t Zohran replace Jessica Tisch when he took office? Idfk. But this seems like the kind of move a man who came to office on a wave of populist economic energy doesn’t have high on his list of to-dos.

his own Republican Party

You shouldn’t be allowed to say it’s your own party when they boot you from office in the primary.

with a net worth below $100 million

Far fewer than you’d think, once hyperinflation kicks in.

You’ll be lucky if you can buy gum for less than $100M at the rate we’re climbing.

I’ve been called every name and accused of every crime under the sun.

I honestly don’t see how those two are related

They’re both (ostensibly) oligarchs and political insiders dictating the operation of mass media.

Sure, the links are there

I mean, we had Joe Biden force the sale of TikTok to a cartel of Silicon Valley fascists based on some spurious links to Chinese communism. If you can get from “Tankie TikTok Post” -> “President Xi Jinping undermined US electoral security” and enshrine that belief in federal communication policies, I don’t think “Shitty Piefed Dev” -> “Ghislaine Maxwell” is that big of a joke.

Double, extra, plus, too, you need to keep in mind how much influence Steve Bannon had back in 2016, largely by organizing and deploying white nationalists out of 4chan and the grosser corners of Reddit. And Bannon was bosom buddies with Epstein.

Also, apparently, Jeffery Epstein was a big Quora power user.

Can confirm. I believe I’m explicitly on their blocklist.

Isn’t it funny how all the software developed by turbolibs, like Piefed and Tesseract, end up with hidden control mechanisms from developers who think they know better than everyone else?

Same folks that complain endlessly about Far-Left censorship and militant authoritarianism, no less.

I wonder how many of the developers on these projects are spill-over from the reactionary shitholes of Reddit.

To do anything else would be Woke, Soy, and - absolutely worst of all - Gay.

re you sure they’re digitizing Book By the Yard quality material?

They were more than happy to gobble up Reddit posts and Twitter farts and the worst of 4chan. You don’t need to ingest Ulysses exclusively to train a system.

Doing anything physical, especially at scale, is slow and expensive.

Which is why you get people paid pennies an hour to break the physical copies down and feed them into scanners.

would guess a good portion of these books, perhaps an outright majority, have simply never been digitized.

Possibly not. But that’s a sign it isn’t great literature or coveted texts.

having fingers in the pot is “cornering the market”?

Elon’s a partner in a domestic AI cartel, which operates with the support of the US government.

More just the part of Alaska where I work most of the daylight hours and get my reading in before bed.

physical copies don’t require electricity

Good luck reading by candle light.

Almost all these books were either headed to the dump or the recycling center.

My wife works at a law firm that contracts with “Books By The Yard”, which provides books purely for office aesthetics. For a few hundred bucks you can plaster a bookshelf full of material nobody will ever read, because they’re such a commodity.

It’s so crazy to see people ingesting this news from the conspiracy-brain perspective of “The AI companies are stealing all the knowledge!” without recognizing the more pressing reality of decade upon decade of publisher overproduction, resulting in a total devaluing of physical media for its academic importance.

Imagine going into hysterics because a warehouse full of shitty airport books went up in smoke, like it’s the Library of Alexandra that just burned down.

It’s been flogged as an existential crisis for decades past relevance. So it has become a Boogeyman, in the same way Terrorism lost any semblance of relevancy by the '10s, but keeps getting flogged into the modern day.

He’s got his finger in virtually every major AI pot. And his Boring Company has big footed proper HSR for decades

Has there ever actually been a crime wave?

70-90 was a real serious rise and fall of assaults, burglaries, car thefts, etc.

We’ve had some minor waves during the opium epidemic and the big unemployment waves of '01, '08, '14, and '21.

Or lead in the gasoline that makes people crazy

Lead exposure, the different drug epidemics, big spikes in unemployment. They all contribute.

That said, we also had White Collar crime waves. And these tended to predate the street level crime waves, as the crimes contributed to the conditions of the later.

Nobody in political leadership really talks about the White Collar waves, though.