Just your daily reminder that the President of the United States is a delusional narcissist with the emotional development of a toddler.

With historically accurate cyclops, scylla, charybdis, sirens and ghost of Agamemnon…

So much little man energy…

It’s as if some notable proportion of humanity suddenly switched to eating nothing but vaguely food-shaped plastic, then a study concluded that that might have negative effects nutritionally.

No shit?

It doesn’t get much more performative than that.

I’m not sure which half of that is worse really - the staggering number they’ve murdered in the last three years or the fact that it was only necessary to go back 17 more years to get a comparable number.

Yes - they’re murdering at a faster rate now, and that is utterly evil, but really they were just murdering at a somewhat slower rate before, and it’s been utterly evil all along.

My favorite capsule description of (The Adventures of) Buckaroo Banzai (Across the Eighth Dimension) is “A stupid movie for smart people.”

It was actually my number 1 for a long, but somehow, over the years, Repo Man just crept up the list until it took its place.

Repo Man (1984)

Honorable mentions:

• Buckaroo Banzai (1984)
• Megamind (2010)
• Tremors (1990)
• The Fifth Element (1997)

The thing with the data centers is that the goal is entirely different from anything we’ve been told.

The key is that Google is implementing a system that allows people to get the information they’re after directly from them rather than clicking theough to a website. That’s undermining ad revenue, which not only threatens the existence of the websites but threatens Google’s existing ad-based business model.

So it can only be the case that they’re pivoting to a new business model.

And the key to that is the data centers.

Their goal, I grow more certain nearly every day, is to effectively privatize the internet by driving independent sites out of business, so that they (and their handful of more or less equally wealthy and powerful competitors) become the only source for all of that data they’ve already stolen.

Yeah - there’s a fairly significant game of The Emperor’s New Clothes going on, as the new set of impossibly wealthy assholes insist on pretending they’re not impossibly wealthy assholes and instead try to force society into accommodating them, apparently entirely unaware of the simple fact that all they’re doing is hastening the demise of the civilization that birthed them and on which they’re little more than grossly destructive parasites.

And that’s not an opinion - either mine or anyone else’s. It’s a simple fact that’s been borne out by history over and over throughout the ages, and will be again, no matter how many comforting lies people tell themselves and each other.

The US is truly a kakistocracy.

I’ve never even quite understood what it is that people are thinking about when they refer to “the meaning of life.” I mean - I know the definition - I know what the phrase is intended to communicate. I just don’t get what it is that people actually expect.

I don’t think I ever even considered the idea of life having some sort of intrinsic meaning until I was old enough to start getting into philosophy and discovered that not only do people believe that life has some intrinsic meaning, but that it’s such a common belief that there’s a sort of reflexive negative view of anyone who doesn’t share that belief.

In spite of that, I saw and still see no reason to believe that life has intrinsic meaning (either empirically, logically or even psychologically) and more than enough reason to believe that it does not.

Now none of that’s to say that my life is meaningless. It’s stuffed full of meaning. It’s just that all of that meaning is things I’ve found and adopted - none of it’s intrinsic, nor does it need to be.

And I still don’t really understand why anyone believes that it does need to be intrinsic. How is all of the meaning they’re free to find and adopt not enough?

For whatever any of that’s worth…

Piefed by default auto-subscribes accounts to a curated set of communities, auto-hides downvoted content and downvoted posters, attaches icons to accounts to mark those that have beyond a particular threshold of downvotes and entirely blocks links to a curated set of sites because Rimu deemed them to be unacceptable.

The only saving grace is that at this point those (anti-)features are generally toggleable at least at the admin level, but that’s thanks to wjs018.

I dunno. I just noticed it as it was happening.

Try it and see.

It takes all of about a minute to sign up for an instance and it doesn’t cost anything, so there’s no reason not to do it. If you like it, great and if you don’t, you’re not out anything.

For the record I actually prefer KBin/MBin - they just have a better interface than Lemmy. But KBin was a one-man effort and when the guy running it burnt out, it soet of fell by the wayside. MBin is a fork that was meant to be a more open project, but the guy who was mostly responsible for it is a bit of a twat and mostly used it to pimp Monero, so it never quite caught on like it should have.

You might also sign up for an instance or two on piefed. The guy who’s mostly responsible for that is also a bit of a twat, but he’s had some good help and some people pushing back against his tyrannically censorious tendencies, so it’s pretty decent.

The only way you’re ever really going to know what you think about any of them is to try them out for yourself. And there’s literally no reason not to.

Slurp gobble.

That’s part of why I’ve generally been putting quotation marks around the word “corporation.”

It’s not meaningless though, because the underlying structure will likely remain essentially the same as it was when it was merely a corporation. And the relationship between the “government” and its “citizens” will have evolved from a relationship between a business and its customers/clients, and will undoubtedly retain some aspects of that. Most notably, the whole concept of public servants will vanish. Instead, the “government” will offer some specific services to potential citizens-as-customers, who can take them or leave them. Or, additionally or possibly even alternatively, the “government” will demand specific things of citizens-as-employees who will have the “choice” of following their demands or seeking employment-as-citizenship elsewhere.

In either event (or any other - this can’t possibly be an exhaustive list), the basic dynamic between “government” and “citizen” will be notably different from any of the ones we’ve seen before (though likely broadly most similar to feudalism).

Really fucked up that you just watched a video illustrating the gap between western characterizations of a rival country and the reality in that country and completely failed to get the broader point.

Maintaining a large private army would be expensive and time consuming.

So is maintaining a large workforce and infrastructure, but they do that as a matter of course. And already, there are corporations with operating budgets larger than some countries. That’s only going to become more the case with time.

What stops another corporation with a private army from coming in and robbing them of everything they have?

The same things that generally stop countries from doing it to each other - insufficient forces and/or unacceptable losses and/or a preference for stability and/or established alliances and/or any of countless other considerations.

This isn’t rocket science. Realpolitik is a fairly straightforward thing.

Where is the corporation getting their funding from?

From the sale of goods and/or services.

Duh.

Someone’s got to be paying them.

Yes. Consumers of whatever goods and/or services they provide.

Duh.

So, they are using a sovereign currency created by a government using a central banking system chartered with the government.

Or more likely not.

Here’s just one quick idea - accept local currency with a handling fee sufficient to cover any potential losses on exchange (which are unlikely, since at that point their currency will likely be harder than about any government’s), and advertise a discount for the use of their private currency, accompanied by the offer of free and automatic currency exchange with an account at the corporate bank.

So you promote your currency, avoid the hassle of dealing with competing currencies and gain new bank accounts, all at the same time.

And that’s just one idea, off the top of my head.

All other considerations aside “Thiel-backed” guarantees all by itself that it’s technofascist bullshit explicitly intended to benrfit the oligarchs at the expense of everyone else.