#rant
Biden pardoning Hunter is not a good look but is hardly unprecedented, even compared to not-Trump POTUS pardons of recent history. Unlike Trump he didn't interfere in any way in the DOJ prosecutions, even of Hunter when it went out of normal bounds for what he was accused of doing. Neither the MSM nor Republicans ever gave him any credit for that, in some cases saying it was a head fake for supposed political prosecution of Trump (stupidity I know). It was certainly true that the only reason why Hunter got that focus was because he was Joe's son. I don't exactly feel sorry for him because he also got lots of lucrative positions over his life solely for that reason too. So it sort of balanced that out. So summary: not a good look, not unprecedented or even out of bounds of POTUS pardons of the last several decades to say nothing for Trump's pardons, and we have way bigger fish to fry on the autocracy/kakistocracy which MSM will use this to now ignore because they suck. #uspoli #rant
Even the most generous interpretation of the tariff saber rattling is really bad. "He's just doing that to get a better negotiating position." Umm, we have treaties in place delineating these things. The current one being tweaks to NAFTA called USMCA which *Trump 1.0* negotiated. Blowing up treaties willy nilly just makes them not even worth the effort/paper they are printed on which everyone takes note of. That is *the best case scenario* about what Trump is doing with this 25-50% across the board tariff announcement today. It's all down hill from there, into the depths of pocket lining for him and Musk. I bring up Musk specifically because the auto manufacture least affected by this is if it is implemented, you guessed it, Tesla. It is a 100% probability that is intentional. #uspoli #trump #ElonMusk #rant
I have a lot of very small running/hiking/fitness podcasts in my queue. I have one less now. One of them, which I won't Streisand Effect, is by a guy who claims to be apolitical generally that had a supposedly apolitical guest on. When asked about the election he started going off on "both sides are crap" (ugh) so "didn't vote for either" (ugh). Then went into examples of crappiness like "Democrats (didn't use that word) calling people names and looking down on them" (umm...okay) and "prejudices against people based on sexual orientation, race, gender" (okay maybe looking up), such as "You are discriminated against nowadays if you are a straight white guy and told to feel bad about yourself..." (vomit). Host just "mhmmm along". So that's a giant unsubscribe to me. I'm had almost started mentioning it to others since the guy seems nice enough. Indulging in that sort of bullshit though is a deal breaker for me. Just a reminder to me how we don't live in a shared reality any longer and things are irrevocably broken in this country. Maybe the guest just has economic anxiety or something, he did mention the price of groceries...(sarcasm). #uspoli #rant
I know we can only marginally mitigate these modern day robber barons stealing more of our our the world's resources and powers under Trump. I just ask that we call them the villains that they are when the shit hits the fan rather than blame whichever minorities they point to instead. #rant
Being born in the mid-70s I grew up when society was way more homophobic than now. I am familiar with all the scaremongering about gays in locker rooms/bathrooms if we were accepted as normal members of society instead of pariahs back then. Even though they saber rattled about gays needing separate bathrooms/locker rooms they never actually did it. The speed with which Republicans have pushed these anti-trans bathroom bills and the equivocation of everyone, including Democratic law makers, is deeply disappointing and disturbing. Bishop Niemöller's poem has never been more poignant than it is now. Gay people throwing trans people under the bus should already see the warning signs that we are going to be the next people put through the wringer. We can't let these bigoted assholes steamroll us on this stuff. #lgbt #uspoli #rant
Thinking to the 1st Gilded Age (late-19th century) versus the 2nd Gilded Age (now), the robber barons have different names and industries but are just as big of megalomaniacs as then. They will point to the technological advances and say, "See I did that," when the industries could/would have done that without individuals owning more wealth than some countries. The first time around it blew up in their faces and it probably will this time too. Many people despised them then but enough of them bought into their "gods of industry" hero worship that we mostly remember them fondly for the mythology but for them none of these modern things would exist rather than disgusted that they used and abused so many for so long to hoard so much from so many. Oh they built some museums and colleges, well all is forgiven or something. The modern day robber barons aren't even doing that except as a mechanism to concentrate further money and power into their own pockets. I guess from that perspective they are even more pathological this time around. Maybe we can revile them like we do Bernie Madoff this time around instead too. How about we try that starting today rather than waiting for them to exact more destruction, sorry disruption, on everyone. #rant #BillionairesShouldNotExist
I know I beat up on a very specific Silicon Valley Tech Bro Billionaire a lot, so let me spread the love around. Sam Altman, the AI and Crypto grifter recently annointed a demigod by the press and investors who promises that his company is about to generate self aware general AI that will magically solve the "boiling oceans" level of energy requirements AI needs to improve somehow. Yeah, fuck that guy too. Over the course of the latest two FOMO waves these sociopaths have tried to create, first crypto, and now AI, they are completely reversing the insufficient progress we've made on climate change mitigation, among the other crimes against humanity with their cavalier efforts on both fronts. Worship them? I revile them. (h/t image from Dorian Taylor doriantaylor.com ) #ai #SamAltman #SiliconValley #BillionairesShouldNotExist #rant
Related to the end of my previous post. It's not that LLMs have no use. It's that everyone I know that likes them seems to forget about their error rates and how easily their hallucinations "sound right" but are so very wrong. It's even worse behavior than copy/pasting shit out of Stackoverflow or whatever the first search result out of AltaVista was in the early internet days. At least there there was some hope of auditing/correction at some point. None here. #media #ai #rant #chatgpt
Seeing the historical universal human response to spread disinformation faster than accurate information, if it is sexy enough, and how fast it accelerated with each new media technology wave, except TV because of the startup cost, it's shocking we didn't foresee that the information ratio of the internet was going to go to pot this quickly. It's in an exponential decay phase with the enshittified algorithms, social media networks, and hallucinating Generative AI garbage firehoses. #media #ai #rant
The thing that had me pissed off the most about this situation last night was the balance of SCOTUS now. The balance of SCOTUS has been my top voting issue since 2002. It has been a right leaning court my entire life. Ever since 2004 it has grown to the point where by objective metrics it is at least the furthest right leaning court since the beginning of the 20th century. It's possible to be the furthest right leaning court in the history of the United States. Yes, even further right than the Taney Court that gave us the Dred Scott decision. You think the decisions in recent years have been fucked up, buckle up. It's about to get way worse and if you are middle aged like me probably will be the rest of our lives. Now that Republicans have the Senate and the White House the two oldest conservative justices: Thomas and Alito, will probably be replaced with some 30-something far right ideologue sycophants. Think someone like Aileen Cannon, on the supreme court. They will sit there for the next 30-40 years. If you think that's bad, the 70 year old Sotomayor could easily have a health condition in the next 4 years requiring her replacement. The balance will get even further out of whack. I had hope that I could out live the tenure of all Trump justices even if there was little chance I'd be able to live long enough to see some of the worst decisions the SCOTUS has ever had: Citizens United, Dobbs, the one that gave near absolute immunity to Presidents as long as they say they are "acting as president" etc. There is no way for that to happen now. I'd have to literally live to be well into my 90s for that to even have a chance of happening now. And just barely a chance since the structural fucked uppedness of our system of government and the mental fucked uppedness of my fellow Americans too is going in a very bad direction. Which means there is a better than coin flip chance that these far right justices will be replaced with even further right justices over the coming decades. I'm angry not despondent generally because things change, elections happen, etc. But on this issue I am because short of a revolution overthrowing the government there is no way this will change in my lifetime, and I have to make peace with that fucked up reality. #uspoli #SCOTUS #rant
My first impulse when a MAGA/Trumpist type (who I've since blocked) scolded me about having no introspection about "my candidate" was to start asking about how much introspection they had in 2020 or to start up about the relative fitness of both candidates. That's just more of what I did 9 years now with exactly zero minds changed. That was one of the big reasons behind deciding to excise these people from my life. I'm spending hours and hours trying to do "the bridge" thing, bring concrete facts to have a basis of discussion around which we can talk about our opinions, working to see their point of view to some extent and try to have them see mine. In return for all that effort I get whataboutisms at best or taunting and an ever more extreme version of MAGA being embraced ever more tightly. There is no point in any of that. In general my default position has been that keeping the peace and staying measured is being the bigger man. It still is in most circumstances. But sometimes taking a stand for principles and pushing back is being the bigger man. Sometimes just walking away from people who have crossed the line and continue to do so gleefully is being the bigger man. "You are just hurting yourself by cutting friends/and family out." If I was doing this capriciously or over trifling things perhaps. This is not capricious, I've wrestled with this shit for years, and it is over very serious things which have gotten ever more grave over the last year. It was only once we crossed a threshold that is so far above what I can tolerate that I've chosen to do this. Cutting these people out and saying my piece rather than holding my peace is actually helping myself not hurting myself. #uspoli #rant
I've been trying to explain this to Trump voting friends/family for years. I'm done with the explaining mode. I'm in holding grudges mode now. Since the ramifications will be felt for decades by me and my LGBT friends, you can assume the grudge against you will be as well. Forgive? Maybe, yes just maybe. Forget? Never. Fuck you. #uspoli #rant #lgbt
My follows on Mastodon/AP fediverse: "Bluesky is so stupid. Neener. Neener."
My follows on Bluesky: "Mastodon is so stupid. Neener. Neener."
Lets keep our eye on making federated/decentralized systems the norm again. Let's try to avoid internecine battles. #fediverse #bluesky #rant
To the shock of literally no one even remotely paying attention to what this AI beast that the Silicon Valley techbros are unleashing on the world, mostly to detriment of anyone/everything except their wallets in the short term #ai #rant
AI overwhelmingly prefers white and male job candidates in new test of resume-screening bias
I used Google for the first time since Gemini was integrated. The Gemini result was idiotic. The search results below were useless. DDG results led to obviously LLM generated crap sites. I’m at the point now I jump right to Wikipedia to look something up and stop there. #rant #ai #enshittifacation
WaPo already lost 8% of its subscribers. Good! One person laments about funding good journalism ending if subscribers cancel. They aren't reliably doing good journalism any more and haven't for years. I agree I am concerned about it, why I started subscribing after 2016 election. But they went to shit over recent years. I'm sending my subscription money to people doing much better work more reliably and hopefully with more employee ownership like 404 Media, Flaming Hydra, and individual writer's newsletters (not through Nazi bar Substack though). #rant #media #uspoli #BrokenPost npr.org/2024/10/28/nx-s1-51684…
I'm on Facebook a bit more nowadays. Doing some friend list maintenance I clicked on some of the profiles of die hard Republican connections that when I last looked years ago were not die hard-MAGA. I bring up them bringing non-MAGA but still die hard Republicans because while I didn't expect to have shared reality with MAGA Republicans I did expect to have radically different opinions but a shared reality with non-MAGA Republicans. Apparently that isn't even assured any longer. Their view of the world and mine are so far apart it puts Mirror Universe Star Trek episodes to shame. It is well beyond difference of opinions. We aren't even sharing a reality with any overlapping Venn diagrams except for the names of the two POTUS candidates. There was no golden time when realities overlapped completely. If this level of reality disconnect isn't the worst in modern times it is at least bad enough to make major conflict unavoidable, especially as it gets worse at the hands of people like Murdochs, Musk, purveyors of LLM AI systems, etc. Not good people. #uspoli #rant