Rottcodd

Of course the story we’ve come up with has started to unravel. It was essentially destined to, just as all the past stories we’ve come up with have. We’re just the tiniest little splash in the tiniest little pan way off in some obscure corner of a reality that is vast and complex beyond comprehension.

To think that we can understand the nature of the universe, much less that we already do, is and always has been startlingly obviously ludicrous.

Seriously - how can anybody fail to recognize that Trump is profoundly mentally ill?

Back Porch is my favorite.

Boll Weevil is great too.

And so on…

On a nearly daily basis now, I’m reminded that a significant number of the people who make up the power structure in the US are in fact profoundly mentally ill.

One can only hope that we serve as an object lesson for future civilizations - whatever you do, don’t let psychopaths run free.

But it will make a handful of psychopaths rich, and that’s the only thing that matters now.

Jet Set Radio Future, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Need for Speed ProStreet, Torchlight II, Paper Mario, Freelancer, Uncharted Waters: New Horizons, GTA San Andreas & Vice City, Front Mission 1 & 3, Metal Max Returns…

It doesn’t matter what the posted speed limit might be - in traffic, the correct speed to drive is the same speed as the majority of the cars around you.

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I’m pretty much always aware that we’re governed by what really amounts to a self-reinforcing network of amoral psychopaths, but there are still times when that fact is driven home especially forcefully.

She looks like she just stopped growing up at about 14, and all she’s done since then is age. Poorly.

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I hadn’t thought about it before, but on reflection, I do too. And I wouldn’t be surprised if most people do.

Exaggerated a bit for effect, it would me more or less:

There = thehr

Their = thayr

They’re = thay-r

“There” is just simple and straightforward with a pure short ‘e’ sound and no particular stresses.

“Their” has more of a long ‘a’ than a short ‘e’ sound, and a bit of stress on the vowel sound.

“They’re” also has more of a long ‘a’ sound and it’s pronounced just a fraction longer than in “their”, and there’s a very slight pause between the vowel sound and the ‘r’.

Huh… learn something new every day.

Decentralization isn’t an ideal - it’s a fact. It’s the reality of the fediverse.

That was a rhetorical question.

Ah well… I didn’t have much hope that it’d work.

That’s literally the point of the federated decentralization, so people can be allowed to make their own decisions…

This is not quite accurate, and it neatly illustrates the problem.

“Allowed,” in this context, is incoherent. There can be no “allowed” unless there’s some authority empowered to, and mechanisms by which to, allow this or disallow that.

The literal point of decentralization is to move entirely away from institutionalized, hierarchical authority by arranging things so that it can neither be claimed nor exercised in the first place.

And one problem is that people tend to drag their authoritarian habits of thought along with them.

Okay - let’s pretend that everyone on this thread agrees that X is what “we” should do.

Then what?

Of course they did. That’s the next step in the perpetual war assembly line.

The entire thread and the entire concept underlying it and all the other threads in which people yammer on and on about what “we” should do plainly miss the most crucial part of the fact that the fediverse is decentralized - it’s not just that you don’t have the power to decide what “we” should do, but that the power to decide what “we” should do does not and can not exist at all.

For fucks sake - which part of “decentralized” do you people not understand?

IMO, many (most?) people quite simply don’t think about things. They just have some dogmatic positions they’ve taken for some reasons, and they regurgitate them as necessary.

And that’s a lot of the reason that they so often and so brazenly misinterpret things other people say. They’re not actually reading to comprehend - they’re reading just to get enough of a feel for it to classify it, so that they’ll have some (potentially quite wrong) idea of which bit of rhetoric to trot out in response to it.

They’re broader examples of enshittification.

Doctorow used the term specifically to refer to social media, but in a broader sense, virtually all companies are subject to it if they’re successful enough.

What’s going on behind the scenes, always, is that the company shifts primary focus from establishing/growing a customer base to making money with which to pay executive salaries and shareholder dividends. That becomes the all-consuming goal, and everything else is secondary.

So, for example, any advantage there might once have been in value vs. cost vanishes, since one of the fundamental strategies for maximizing revenue is to offer the least possible value for the highest possible price.

If anything, with things like streaming and ride-sharing, it was more certainly the case not only that they’d do that, but that they’d do it relatively quickly, since they didn’t even have to experiment to find the specific levels of poor service and high price that people were willing to tolerate, since the industries they displaced had already found them.