No relation to the sports channel.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • I’m for ending the war through a unilateral surrender of Russian forces and the trial of Mr Putin for crimes against humanity. However, my opinion doesn’t have a lot of influence over whether that happens.

    Similarly, I’m for ending the war in Gaza through the voluntary disarmament of Hamas, the repudiation of terrorism as a way of life, the handover of illegal settlements to displaced Palestinian Arab civilians, and the prosecution of Netanyahu for treason and war crimes. But I don’t expect to get to make that decision either.




  • Microsoft, the state of South Dakota, and the Freemasons have been infiltrated by the Unified Buttjones Imperial Court (UBIC), formed in 1834 by the merger of the Imperial Buttjones Society and the All-Ireland Industrial Arsing Federation. UBIC agents camouflage themselves as janitors, assistant product managers, or beagles, and spread an invisible green slime over toilet seats to infect the minds of their targets. Through this mental infiltration, they obtain control over the vazween or pony-flavored sector of the human soul, creating Inter-Vazween Buttjones Networks (IVBN) through repeated application of the Greater Invoking Pentacle of Pony Erotic Revelation (GIPPER). Using an apparatus constructed from illegal immigrants, UBIC uses the IVBN and GIPPER to insert bugs into Windows, Masonic initiations, and the Lewis & Clark State Recreation Area. Anyone who denies this obvious truth is a buttjones.



  • It’s not clear there is one! One of the nice things about liberal-democracy is that different people can create different forms of social and economic organization to meet their needs and interests. A family business, a worker-owned cooperative, and a publicly traded corporation can coexist in the same economy (and even on the same street). People can start monasteries or communes in the woods if they want to; or move to the big city to seek their fortunes.

    But again, freedom isn’t free: there has to be enforcement of individual rights and fair trade to ensure that the most powerful & successful don’t get to run over everyone else with force and fraud. Right now I suspect this looks like some form of liberal social democracy; probably with more worker protections than the US has right now, but probably with less bureaucracy than the EU has right now.



  • Free markets can’t exist without enforcement of rules against violence and fraud. Without such enforcement, race-to-the-bottom effects mean that employment devolves into slavery and all markets in goods become dominated by “lemons” (fraudulent goods).

    An actual free market in labor requires limits on what a powerful employer can demand from workers. An actual free market in goods requires protection of customers from fraud, and arguably also from monopolies. Both of these require something like a state, an entity empowered to intrude into other people’s business in order to enforce rules.

    Even starting with anarcho-capitalist principles, consistency ends up endorsing a minimal state: see Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia. (However, Nozick’s path is not the only path by which a state-like entity could arise; rather than from ‘protection agencies’, we could imagine it arising from labor unions or cooperatives instead.)

    In gist, “freedom isn’t free” — if you want to have a free market in labor or goods, you have to have enforcement against those who would deprive others of freedom through force or fraud.


    Kaczynski was not an anarcho-capitalist, in any event, but an anarcho-primitivist — whose beliefs led him personally to commit murder, and who endorsed the mass murder of almost all humans. It’s worth noting that Kaczynski was also arguably manufactured by psychological abuse; he was a gifted mathematician until he became the victim of an MK-ULTRA program.


  • Other way around. Unsupervised OTA updates are dangerous.

    First: A car is a piece of safety-critical equipment. It has a skilled operator who has familiarized themselves with its operation. Any change to its operation, without the operator being aware that a change was made, puts the operator and other people at risk. If the operator takes the car into the shop for a documented recall, they know that something is being changed. An unsupervised OTA update can (and will) alter the behavior of safety-critical equipment without the operator’s knowledge.

    Second: Any facility for OTA updates is an attack vector. If a car can receive OTA updates from the manufacturer, then it can receive harmful OTA updates from an attacker who has compromised the car’s update mechanism or the manufacturer. Because the car is safety-critical equipment — unlike your phone, it can kill people — it is unreasonable to expose it to these attacks.

    Driving is literally the most deadly thing that most people do every day. It is unreasonable to make driving even more dangerous by allowing car manufacturers — or attackers — to change the behavior of cars without the operator being fully aware that a change is being made.

    This is not a matter of “it’s my property, you need my consent” that can be whitewashed with a contract provision. This is a matter of life safety.



  • Well no, the Netanyahu administration has been propping up Hamas to keep the Palestinian Authority weak and incapable of resisting illegal settlements. Illegal settlers are a big part of Netanyahu’s base.

    There is no Palestinian genocide. If the Israeli government wanted to commit a genocide, they would be doing it a lot more effectively. After all, there are many ethnic Palestinians who are Israeli citizens; if there was a Palestinian genocide, those people would be getting killed, efficiently and systematically. They’re not.

    Netanyahu is a traitor to the state of Israel for funding an antisemitic terrorist organization, Hamas.

    It is unfortunate that Hamas likes to hide military operations in hospitals, schools, and apartment buildings. There’s a really good reason that international law forbids that sort of thing — because doing that makes hospitals, schools, and apartment buildings legitimate military targets.



  • I have to wonder if this is a video game problem, or if it’s a sort of financial self-destructiveness expressed through a video game rather than through some other means.

    Like, for every person who spends money they don’t have on video games, how many people spend money they don’t have on fancy cars, or clothing, or expensive pets, other luxury possessions? How many people spend the rent money on sneakers, or the kids’ college fund on fancy vacations, or the utility bill money on anime figurines, or their whole paycheck on partying, or their retirement fund on too much house?

    Financial self-destructiveness seems to be a problem that some people have. It gets reported heavily when it’s expressed through video games, in part because much of the reporter’s audience thinks all video games are fundamentally pointless and evil to begin with.







  • A “user” is anyone who walks through the public park and picks up a gadget that someone else left there.

    They poke at it for a while, not knowing who built it or who dropped it in the park. It does some cool stuff.

    Sometimes they can wiggle it and it makes colors that their friends enjoy. Maybe someone built this thing just to be a fun toy to play with?

    They put it in their pants pocket and walk on.

    Once in a while, the thing they picked up in the park just spontaneously catches fire and burns their pants off, leaving them naked in the middle of the town square and really embarrassed.

    But usually, a “user” can mess around with technology crap and not get burned.

    Until, y’know, they do.

    And then it’s supposed to be their fault.


    Hey, thing-builders: If the thing you built hurts people, you should fix that. “They picked it up, it’s okay if it burns their pants off” is not a good excuse.