UnderpantsWeevil

@ UnderpantsWeevil @lemmy.world

Posts

209
Comments

14326
Joined

3 yr. ago

8h ago

Let Trump cook...
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UnderpantsWeevil @lemmy.world 8h ago
LintCoin's value is through the roof, though. You'd be a fool not to hand them all your boring old American dollars.
And don't even get me started on TulipCoin.

10h ago

TIL the USSR re-criminalised homosexuality

1930s USSR was super gay.

It took decades of reactionary influencing and organizing to turn the Eastern Bloc into a horrifying ultra-nationalist paleoconservative hell hole.

We've seen similar patterns in West Africa, Latin America, and the Pacific Rim.

10h ago

Nobody knows how the whole system works

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UnderpantsWeevil @lemmy.world 10h ago

Idk if I'd call it a "strength". Feels more like a weakness.

But sure. This is the reason bureaucracies exist. Knowledge accrual, organization of specialties, long term investment planning, and distribution of surplus... as critical today as it was 8,000 years ago.

10h ago

What's preventing a General Strike in the United States?

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UnderpantsWeevil @lemmy.world 10h ago

Lack of worker solidarity

In theory, the problem of "two paychecks" is solved (at least in part) by working people seizing certain critical means of production for the purposes of mutual aid. So, grocers strike not by closing the front doors but by shutting down the cash registers and handing out food for free. Landlord admins strike by refusing to collect rents. Teachers strike not by refusing to teach but by refusing to grade. Etc.

And if everyone knows this arrangement will be in effect, they can act together as a bargaining unit to threaten the control of the landlord class.

But if they aren't in close communication, because the public forms of media are censored and strictly controlled, then individuals can't express solidarity prior to the strike. And if they aren't in alignment, then you end up with the same "haves" and "have-nots" reproduced across the striking cohort, creating contradictions that landlords can exploit. And if they can't repeat this experiment of communication, trust building, strike, reap concessions, then they can't build momentum of numbers or expand the demands.

Hopefully that is beginning to change

I haven't seen much to suggest it has. Perhaps the soul is willing, but the body public remains weak and emaciated. We still don't have avenues of communication independent of the capitalist class. We haven't built trust between industrial sectors. There's little we can point to that's been successful, much less reproducible.

I just hope its not too late.

It's never "too late". All that changes is the players and the stakes at play.

But whatever comes next, you'd be foolish to believe you'll see both the beginning of it and the end. You'll be lucky to know what you're in the middle of.

10h ago

US man issues challenge to disprove his claim of having world’s smallest penis to raise micropenis awareness

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UnderpantsWeevil @lemmy.world 10h ago

Idk. If he's just going to be the Colmes to Tate's Hannity...

Any time I see a UK or US publisher run its "Look at these weirdos" segment, its typically as a prelude to do something incredibly gross. Like the time Tucker Carlson tried to convince a bunch of young men to take testosterone and sun their assholes.

11h ago

Democratic Leaders Face Backlash Over 'Cowardly' Responses to Trump War on Iran

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UnderpantsWeevil @lemmy.world 11h ago

Be careful putting all your hope on this campaign

No no. She's an outside long shot on a good day. I've seen the polls. But the Iran War puts some of her most popular issues at the forefront of the race.

If you look at the cross tabs, Basically, Biss voters split between Kat and Fine as second choice, and all Fine voters break to Biss, and all Kat voters also break to Biss.

With some enormous undecides floating in the wind. It's absolutely Biss's race to lose. But as Fine gets more money and support to challenge Kat and Biss, she's defining herself more strictly as a pro-Hasbara candidate. And she's doing it in a race where Israel is a highly polarizing issue.

If this were typical times and typical campaigns, i’d say Kats done and Biss is going to win this. However, key issue I identified early: this is a poll of “likely voters”.

Like with Mamdani, a big turnout spike would favor the more progressive primary challengers simply because the high profile issues favor Kat's campaign.

But also, it's Chicago Politics and that shit's cutthroat. Rahm Emanuel could jump out from behind a bush and just stab a bunch of candidates, idfk.

11h ago

Nobody knows how the whole system works

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UnderpantsWeevil @lemmy.world 11h ago

Those telephone systems still work because someone knows how each part works.

I'm more than confident that - if you actually went down to AT&T HQ and really dug into the weeds - you'd find blind spots in the network created by people leaving the company and failing to back-fill their expertise. Or people who incorrectly documented this or that, forcing their coworkers to rediscover the error the hard way.

I think we do underestimate how many systems are patched over, lost in the weeds, or fully reinvented (by accident or as a necessary replacement) because somebody in the chain of knowledge was never retained or properly replaced.

I would be very dubious of the theory that anyone at AT&T could recreate their system network from the 1980s, without relying on all the modernizations and digitized efficiencies, for instance. No way in hell they could reproduce the system from the 1940s, because all that old hardware (nevermind the personal) has been rendered obsolete ages ago. But I'm sure there are still lines in the ground that were laid decades ago that are still in use. Possibly lines that they've totally lost track of and simply know exist because the system hasn't failed yet.

11h ago

Nobody knows how the whole system works

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UnderpantsWeevil @lemmy.world 11h ago

I remember talking to Brendan Gregg about how he conducted technical interviews, back when we both worked at Netflix. He told me that he was interested in identifying the limits of a candidate’s knowledge, and how they reacted when they reached that limit. So, he’d keep asking deeper questions about their area of knowledge until they reached a point where they didn’t know anymore. And then he’d see whether they would actually admit “I don’t know the answer to that”, or whether they would bluff. He knew that nobody understood the system all of the way down.

I think this is the nut of building out a skilled development team. You need different people at different levels who know their area of expertise well and who are willing to admit where it ends, such that they can reach out to the next guy to step in and assist.

But also, you need the Full Code Stack as it were. Or, at least, you need a way to know where your blind spots are and understand the limit of your capacity. Otherwise, you run the risk of an "innovator" asking why they can't just dump canola oil into their gas tank or how come you can't just use hydrogen instead of helium for your balloon. And worse - plowing ahead because nobody outside of their cubicle stepped in to stop them.

You run the risk of destroying a lot of your own hard work - and possibly a lot of other people's hard work - because you didn't realize your own limits or know where to go to exceed them.

11h ago

Microsoft gets tired of “Microslop,” bans the word on its Discord, then locks the server after backlash

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UnderpantsWeevil @lemmy.world 11h ago

You'd never even know other countries have the ability to use Markov Chains.

11h ago

Let Trump cook...

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UnderpantsWeevil @lemmy.world 11h ago

I think some people look at this arrangement and say "This is unsustainable, the cards have to come down at some point", because it is a fucking stupid way to run an economy.

But, like... the money keeps flowing. And it keeps flowing because the Fed and the Treasury are implicitly backstopping the malinvestment. And their pockets are functionally endless.

I wish you could just roll your eyes and make these abhorrent economic decisions stop. But I'm afraid these people might legit die trillionaires without a regret in the world (other than failing to solve Immortality Science with an LLM), because we've stacked the economic deck so high up in their favor.

11h ago

Democratic Leaders Face Backlash Over 'Cowardly' Responses to Trump War on Iran

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UnderpantsWeevil @lemmy.world 11h ago

I mean they are litterally breaking a momentum for a blue wave which has never ever been at the scale this one the potential for.

Every sitting Democrat is lining up to pull an Andrew Cuomo when most races are lucky to have someone like Curtis Sliwa on the other side of the ballot line.

At least the primaries aren't over yet. This might be what candidates like Talarico and Abughazaleh need to squeeze over the line... so they can join a rump minority of progressives in a legislature that's green lighting another $50B to bomb Cuba in 2027.

11h ago

Democratic Leaders Face Backlash Over 'Cowardly' Responses to Trump War on Iran

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UnderpantsWeevil @lemmy.world 11h ago

"Don't blame me, I voted for Kudos".

It's crazy to see a Congo Line of (D) Senators go on cable news and announce "I love our President's war in Iran, I just wish he'd asked us nicely first", as videos and pictures trickle in of whole schools being massacred and neighborhood hospitals flattened.

The same folks who were screaming "This never would have happened under Harris" a month ago have come out pledging unswerving allegiance to the Israeli flag over the weekend.

11h ago

Microsoft gets tired of “Microslop,” bans the word on its Discord, then locks the server after backlash

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UnderpantsWeevil @lemmy.world 11h ago

Who else would even join except bots?

11h ago

Microsoft gets tired of “Microslop,” bans the word on its Discord, then locks the server after backlash

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UnderpantsWeevil @lemmy.world 11h ago

Love how every social media site is becoming more and more like /r/Conservative.

11h ago

US man issues challenge to disprove his claim of having world’s smallest penis to raise micropenis awareness

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UnderpantsWeevil @lemmy.world 11h ago

It was amazing how open about the whole thing he was.

Influencers gonna influence. My man found his niche and he's cashing in on it.

11h ago

US man issues challenge to disprove his claim of having world’s smallest penis to raise micropenis awareness

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UnderpantsWeevil @lemmy.world 11h ago

The guardian what are you doing bb

Click-bait farming.

11h ago

Let Trump cook...

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UnderpantsWeevil @lemmy.world 11h ago

Which means now our tax dollars won’t just be used for data centers, they’ll be used for power plants too.

Sure... maybe...

Part of the problem with power plant construction is that our production capacity is largely maxed out. If you want a new gas power plant, you go on a waiting list that's two years long (conservatively). Wind and Solar production are also at their domestic limit. Nuclear continues to be a pipe dream.

And, again, it cannot be overstressed that turning on a data center means a net-negative cash flow. These facilities cost more to operate than they earn, even under a ludicrously generous state contract. Why would you want to power them on these terms?

11h ago

Let Trump cook...

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UnderpantsWeevil @lemmy.world 11h ago

You gotta at least give yourself a full Friedman Unit.

12h ago

Let Trump cook...

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UnderpantsWeevil @lemmy.world 12h ago

We’re still only 3 days into this war.

The second big Iran-Israel conflict in less than a year.

And yet this is already manifesting right now in real life as we debate it on the internet.

Ah yes. A total nosedive of 0.30%.

This is the Uno-Reverse "Why you complaining when the DOW is over 50,000!" line. Any token sell-off gets reported on like it's Black Friday.

Because Trump does not have control over the interest rates.

He's lining up his pick to replace Powell as we speak.

12h ago

Trump’s Orwellian Board of Peace Consists Entirely of Human Rights Abusers

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UnderpantsWeevil @lemmy.world 12h ago

Yeah I mean, pretty obvious this is all just kind of a sick joke to him and his handlers. All of it.

It's not merely a joke. This is a real and functional international cartel. Trump's doing The Five Families shit on a global stage. All of these members cooperate with the US military and proliferate US technologies. All of them profit off the exploitation of captured human labor. All of them are ravenously hungry for fossil fuels. All of them want to encroach on their neighbors' borders.

The point is to destabilize America

It's to destabilize local power structures within the domestic polity and consolidate more authority through the chief executive. An easier feat in a small country like Hungary or Argentina or Israel or Azerbaijan than the mega-states of India, Indonesia, the US, or Pakistan. But by cartelizing military and surveillance powers, this new Rogue UN can leverage (at least the appearance of) cooperation to bring whatever's left of the democratic interior under a new kind of martial law.

The truth is that even if the Iranian people do what they’re supposed to do, and topple the remaining pieces of the regime, the Oligarch who will replace Khamenei had already been selected long before bombs started dropping on Saturday.

Reza Pahlavi is a useful idiot who can operate as a "legitimate" figurehead in the country. But he's not going to be in charge, any more than Abdel Fattah el-Sisi runs Egypt or Ahmed al-Sharaa runs Syria or King Abdullah II runs Jordan. He'll be on the end of a US/Israeli leash.