If he wants to name it after something he loves, he could name it ApartheidOS, EmeraldMineOS, ApartheidEmeraldMineOS, etc. The possibilities are endless.

Realistically, he would call it ElonOS, hire a bunch of shitty systems programmers to cobble together a bullshit operating system mostly comprised of code stolen from other open source projects, insist that it be written in python because “python is critical to AI,” talk about how the OS integrates with AI seamlessly while having no actual AI in it at all, sell it with a tiered subscription that locked basic functionality, like being able to use the file system, behind a paywall, and then quickly abandon the project and fire everyone involved, having made no real money from the venture but still referring to it as a “triumph of engineering.”

A lot of people forget how overwhelmingly, insanely popular Musk was with way too online nerds. He was reddit’s golden child for years. Part of this is that whenever Disney started releasing the Marvel movies, beginning with Iron Man, Musk was front and center as the core inspiration for Tony Stark (yes, I’m serious, the director and Robert Downey Jr. basically went on record as saying as much) and he fucking milked that shit. It’s also important to understand that for a time he was seen as a forward looking entrepreneur whose business was “going to help save the planet by making electric cars so popular that every car manufacturer would switch to electric vehicle production to keep up.” If Musk was a genius at one thing, it was manipulating public perception of himself and his enterprises. It took years of him being a thin-skinned weirdo and massive corporate tool to undo the amount of positive sentiment he’d built for himself and Tesla.

It’s also how we got snap packages and apartheid, and I’m not even sure which of those is worse. (yes, I’m joking)

Edging is not a new thing, really. You’ve probably just never encountered the concept. Edging is the practice of bringing yourself to the edge of orgasm before backing away. The idea is that when you do finally orgasm it’s been “built up to” by the earlier edging so you get a better climax.

I think cultures can definitely be rated by and advance in the category of how well the people living in it are treated

See, a conversation like this has to be based on a shared set of foundational premises, and those premises can be fairly complex and couched in their own assumptions. My argument is that you can’t describe a culture utilizing the same kind of language that you would, say, a tech tree, where you would need a formal system of writing before you get the printing press, or combustion rockets before the warp drive. That’s not to say that you can’t describe a society or compare its faults and merits, but you can’t really couch that in the language of “advancement.” Advancement is iteration or demonstrative improvement on previous forms, and while the idea of a cultural endpoint is, admittedly, a common feature of materialist philosophical traditions (Marx, for example, believed Capitalism was a stage of economic and social development preceding communism), to argue that it’s inevitable is to argue for something of which we have no real material evidence. Progressive or liberal societies can gradually slip into fascism just as easily as fascist societies can gradually become progressive and tolerant, and there’s nothing that guarantees a clear relationship between societal virtues and technological acumen. Star Trek itself shows a number of very old, very powerful and technologically advanced expansionist empires, like the Romulans or the Dominion, living alongside the more tolerant Federation.

The Prime Directive is a form of paternalist condescension by a civilization (or, more accurately, by writers) with a myopic view of culture. Technology can advance, but cultures can only change. “Advancement” is not something a civilization does. And a scientifically advanced civilization can do horrible things with technology they themselves have made just as much as another culture can be given technology and not immediately wipe themselves out with it.

sufficating

suffocating

I find the movies conceptually interesting because there aren’t many movies in which humans are just explicitly the bad guys, or in terms of the most recent one just a supporting entity that exists on the periphery of the story. Avatar kinda does that, too, but the Avatar movies are also puddle deep genre fiction and the “of the Apes” movies are at least structurally and narratively competent.

From a narrative standpoint, Spider-Man’s entire thing is thematically tied to the idea that “no good deed goes unpunished.” Peter Parker’s academic, professional, and social life all pay a price to enable his crime fighting. Spider-Man 2 does a good job of portraying that. After he stops the train that was about to crash in his fight with Doc Ock, he gets lifted up, arms outstretched, looking like a crucified Jesus. He suffers for the sake of others. It’s honestly a nice contrast to people like Tony Stark for whom being a billionaire playboy superhero has historically (if not in the Marvel movies) been depicted as coming with a fairly comfortable life. Well, at least ignoring the part of his backstory where he went homeless because of his alcoholism. But that was in the eighties, I think.

However, getting an MBA isn’t going to change you from one type of person to the other.

Sure, an MBA is sort of useless. Management is largely based around personality. And you can’t really teach personality. It’s the same way for a lot of professions, like teaching, actually. In fact, I’d say the management pool should be drawn from people who were accomplished high school teachers. There’s a lot of crossover there in terms of organization, planning, and dealing with a bunch of people who all hate the work you make them do.

Dog, we’re all engineers. And the worst business leaders I’ve ever worked with directly were good engineers before they got promoted into positions of management (or started their own terrible business, as the case might be) in which they had no business being because the skill requirements for engineering are not automatically transferable to managing people. It’s called the Peter Principle, and there’s some real truth to it.

I want to see engineers run companies that make things

I see you’ve never worked with engineers.

Thompson rightly concludes that the American dream is already dead by the 70s.

Important context for that is that the novel is a famous, and relatively early, meditation on the failures of the 1960s counterculture movement and the intense, if ultimately unfocused vision for a better future for the nation that was central to it.

And it’s a great line for the gun lobby. In a lot of ways, the NRA and gun manufacturers would prefer a Biden victory because gun sales spike when Democratic presidents get elected, as gun-nuts are certain every time it happens that this is the time, for real, that they’re “coming for our guns.” In other words, people panic buy rifles because they think a federal ban is coming. But the reality is that Dems will never push through sweeping anti-gun legislation because there are so many pro-2FA democrats out there that doing so would be ludicrously difficult and monumentally unpopular.

This is the main thing that happened, I think. I met some old friends recently I hadn’t seen in a while and it’s wild how differently we engage with the internet. My main source of interaction is on a laptop, and even then a non-trivial amount of my web interaction is purely via the terminal. Of all of my friends, one of them had a PC, and they don’t use it. Their engagement with the internet is purely on mobile devices. I was dumbfounded. Like…how do you do stuff on a phone. I hate phones. They’re so much worse than a good keyboard. But I also hate the current version of the internet and they seem to love it.

And that, I think, is the core difference. It’s not that the phones took over, it’s that the keyboard died for the average user. A keyboard allows a complex degree of engagement that is difficult, if not truly impossible, to match on a device meant for short bursts of canned responses and auto-complete suggestions. It forces individually brief, but ultimately continuous pre-programmed engagement.

And that’s the entirety of the modern internet. It’s why tiktok is so popular. It’s why youtube shoves Shorts down your throat when you visit. It’s why Twitter took off. It’s also why a website like reddit, that was based initially around the kind of engagement I like, is so hard to monetize and why the attempts at dumbing it down and strangling it of anything that isn’t that same kind of superficial engagement (and by God are they trying) is so difficult for the website’s leadership: because all the other places that are more profitable than it are designed to do that from the jump, and they have to superimpose that strategy onto a content aggregator whose main attraction was a robust, nested comment system.

I keep thinking about what was, for me, the Golden Age of the internet. I know it’s different for everyone, but from around, I guess, 2009 to 2017 I was online a lot. And a lot of what the internet was and how it operated and the ideas there, especially on reddit, were so formative to who I am. And I keep feeling like I never appreciated it or really thought about how vibrant and interesting it was while it was like that. It feels like when you’re a kid and you see a wave for the first time, and it’s building and building and it seems like it’ll be building forever, getting bigger and bigger, but then suddenly it collapses under its own weight and is gone as if it were never there, and after the fact you just wish you’d appreciated it for the wonder it was in that moment. Part of it’s just getting older and the general feeling of nostalgia that comes with age, but sometimes that nostalgia is justified.

things in your things that you don’t want, didn’t ask for and are struggling to extract.

We have a word for these. It’s called “parasites.”

My favorite was the Chapo Traphouse subreddit because the image in this post describes the hosts and their relationship with their fans. Whenever the subreddit got banned and the hosts heard about it their response was “good, that was the right choice. We fully support the admins here and their banning of that subreddit.” The reddit fans were so salty.

Under the Dome has always been super interesting to me because Brian K. Vaughn is one of the best comic book writers of all time and a consistent criticism of UTD is how bad the writing is. I know he didn’t write many of the episodes, though, but I also wonder how his episodes rank in comparison with the others.

Anything related to a DND live play I’m going to assume will be immediately toxic by virtue of what I understand about DND’s fanbase. I love Dimension20 and I like Critical Role but I’m going to assume every other fan of the show is an insufferable idiot.