A gratuity is just a postdated bribe, and everybody including the Supreme Court knows it.

I’m roundaboutly reminded of one of my favorite novels - Greener Than You Think, by Ward Moore.

It’s a science fiction story about the end of the world that was written in the late 40s. The proximate cause of the end is all of the landmasses of Earth being smothered by a gigantic and very aggressive strain of Bermuda grass, but the real cause is the utter and complete failure, due to ignorance, greed, selfishness, short-sightedness, incompetence, arrogance and so on, of every attempt to combat it.

Well damn.

No - I very deliberately used round peg in the square hole, initially just to avoid the cliche, but the more I thought about it, the more I liked it.

Conservatives pound on round/natural/organic/smooth pegs to try to force them into square/artificial/contrived/rigid holes.

I liked it anyway…

In all seriousness, I sort of pity conservatives.

They’re sort of like the one kid in kindergarten who could never manage to figure out which plastic peg went in which hole and would just get frustrated and throw things. Except that they never grew out of it. Here they are, twenty or thirty or sixty years later, still unable to grasp the simple fact that the world just is what it is and the round peg isn’t going to go in the square hole no matter how much you pound on it, and still angry over it, as if it’s some sort of vast conspiracy rather than just the fact that they’re fucking morons.

That has to be an unpleasant way to live.

Of course, they’re such vile and loathsome and destructive assholes that my pity is short-lived, but still…

Just another step toward making used-to-be-Twitter a safe space for cowardly fascists.

This is actually true.

Most notably to me, the ability to sift through and collate enormous amounts of data has led to surprising things like diagnosing diabetes through retinal scans.

But those sorts of things, beneficial and impressive though they might be, remain at the fringe of AI research for the simple reason that those sorts of uses are too niche to provide the revenue stream that all of the bubble-building corporate parasites demand. Their focus is on the AI-as-a-substitute-for-real-intelligence aspect (and increasingly “AI” as just a meaningless marketing buzzword), since that’s where the money is. And unfortunately but not coincidentally, that’s where most of the public attention is too.

And yet again it cynically amuses me that AI has become “artificial” intelligence in the sense of “fake.”

It’s a shabby substitute for real intelligence, used by people who don’t possess any of their own to impress other people who don’t possess any of their own.

Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me.

No - piracy, since it always carries at least some amount of difficulty and risk, is easy to compete against. And in fact, paid services, including Netflix, have proven that over and over. All it takes is to offer dependable convenience and quality and to treat customers well. People are always willing to pay a reasonable price for that.

The problem is that piracy becomes difficult to compete against when, as Netflix is currently doing, you shift from a business model of providing good service under fair terms for a reasonable price to a business model of providing crappy service under onerous terms for too much money, because the greedy, selfish, short-sighted sacks of shit at the top want to make even more obscene amounts of money. That’s the point at which piracy gains enough of an advantage to outweigh its difficulties and risks.

And when that’s the case, it’s pretty obvious what the real problem is.

No surprise there.

There was never even the slightest chance that that balloon could pass through US airspace unobserved, and China possesses FAR more effective, secure and difficult-at-best methods with which to spy. So very obviously, it was intended to be discovered. And presuming that to be the case, the important bit then was the reaction its discovery would trigger.

So it was safe to presume from the start (as I did) that some significant part of the social media noise about it was simple astroturfing explicitly intended solely to further whatever response whoever wanted.