Whitey On The Moon is from 1970.

If there were no suckers, there would be no money, no winnings to motivate the insiders. It requires exploitation in order to “function.”

The next step will be stratifying the insiders. Big bettors, people who hear things and think they know things, suckered by a tiny cadre of the innermost circle. Maybe that’s happened already.

Eventually, of course, there will be motivation to spread falsehoods to change the odds in the insider’s favor. Or to outright direct history to take advantage of long odds.

Edit: Oops, my prediction may be behind the curve here. That was fast.

Seems like an appropriate companion piece:

The 49MB Web Page

I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And then you wonder why every sane tech person has an adblocker installed on systems of all their loved ones.

I guess I must have seen that here in the Fedi.

As early as 2016, some observers suggested that the president was a Russian pawn, an instrument to end American hegemony, to ruin America’s ability to project its influence into the world.

It’s funny how absolutely nothing that’s happened since then contradicts the idea.

Let us also recall his remarks concerning the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi :

“You’re mentioning someone that was extremely controversial. A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about,” he said. “Whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen.”

Like so many criticisms of others he offers, it would be perfectly applicable to himself.

“Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people.”

When we say every accusation is a confession, by golly, we mean every accusation.

This is a great story to illuminate the large number of problems that could be addressed by decent public transit, better options for walking and biking, etc.

deleted by creator

I think a post like this would be more useful with some kind of geographic hint in the title:

[Hawaii, USA] Wahiawa dam failure expected! Haleiwa, Wahiawa: Get to higher ground now!

Of course, best of all would be to post it to a Hawaii community, but I don’t know if there is one.

I spent a couple of years doing phone support (for a Windows program, in the internet-by-modem days), and we had a paper manual that we spent a lot of effort on. I’m not sure it helped too many people. We didn’t have a way of measuring, though. We had no idea how many people were blundering through things on their own, how many people set things up on their own with the manual’s help, or how many people were chucking the whole product in a closet and forgetting about it.

Sure, some callers definitely felt it was a waste of time to learn how to work things; they just wanted their things to work. They wanted their things to serve them, instead of the other way around, and I can’t even argue with that philosophy.

But most callers just didn’t have the technical experience to make sense of any documentation we could write. Some didn’t know what the desktop computer they used every day even looked like, didn’t know which of the metal-and-plastic boxes around their desk was “the computer.” They didn’t know the difference between a floppy drive and a hard drive, and they’d argue with us about it. “I don’t have a floppy drive, my drive takes those hard disks.” No manual or knowledge base article was going to help these folks, no matter how much effort we made.

I don’t think it’s strictly about “moral high ground.” If you’re willing to do anything to win, then if you do win, the winner will be a person who is willing to do anything.

Is the Umbrella Corporation logo on her shirt relevant to anything?

“This technology” is, as used here, industrial scale lying which was made possible through industrial scale theft.

We can re-phrase the question: “Why is the right jumping headlong into industrial scale lies and crime, while the left loses ground on this front?”

An answer suggests itself to me.

It occurred to me recently that someone is trying to distract us from one kind of child abuse by performing a different kind of child abuse. Arguably faster, louder, harder, a million times worse in every way.

Q: So do you have any hobbies?

A: Well lately I’ve really gotten interested in routing VGA through unusual items!

Q: Ooooh, that’s so hot right now

She went to the place she wanted to go, with her guests and her security detail, and she got the food she wanted to eat. She had the chance to eat it.

Somehow even this write-up. which is not particularly sympathetic to her, is framing this as a kind of affront, a consequence, a humiliation. But she pretty much got what she came for, didn’t she? She’s facing no practical consequences at all. She lost a little face, maybe. This was a public declaration that people don’t like her, don’t like what priorities she’s chosen to serve.

Maybe we wouldn’t be in this pickle we’re in, if this kind of getting-through-to-the-isolated-elites happened more often. If we didn’t have isolated elites in the first place.

If you don’t like it, I’m sorry

…as Jesus himself so famously said, of course.

How many of our all-time favorite games even have photo-realistic graphics? Is this just the logical outgrowth, an endpoint, of a generation-long strategy to accomplish a goal that nobody really wants?

[X] I’m in this picture and I don’t like it

You whiners are losing sight of the big-picture, important stuff, like the unmitigated scandal where Hunter Biden once received a drink on the house.