My kids use Duolingo for extra training of languages they are learning in school, so this crapification hits close to home.
Any tips on current non-crap resources? Since they learn the rules and structure in school it’s the repetition of usage in a fun way that I am aiming for.
I followed the 2008 crash in some detail and as far as I remember it the pension funds and little towns in Norway that got swept away in the financial avalanche were not known before the crash. Then the surviving banks were allowed to rebuild their balance sheets by both government largess and fleecing their customers. And in the euro zone there was the whole euro crisis as spill over effects hit the banks and French and German banks were saved by fleecing Mediterranean EU countries, payed for by destruction of their economies. Which had some nasty political effects like the direct inheritors of Mussolini’s party now running Italy.
I don’t think we can know even the direct knock-on effects of the crash without knowing what financial institutes and pension funds has gambled on the line going up.
Anyway I expect the oligopolies to receive government support and fleece the rest of the economy. They can probably jack up prices at least 10-15% every year without CEOs going to their IT department and saying “fuck it, teach me Linux, we are switching, this is just to expensive”.
I saw in passing a claim that investors (or rather gamblers) are fleeing the dollar for safer assets such as “gold and Bitcoin”.
Gold might be true, the ancient relic is up against the dollar, but Bitcoin!? Someone tell me that isn’t true and it’s just coinfondlers trying to hype it, in order to steer stupid capital their way.
Meta claims they have approval. No comments from regulators in sight, no actual decision quoted.
It’s not necessarily false, but it does come from the lie and break laws industry, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it is a lie.
It really looks like it’s on an awful trajectory.
In my teens I read about how Leo Szilard took a train out of Germany the day after the Nazis took power. Passed the border before border checks had time to come into force. Seemed obvious then, now I am all to aware of the problems of such a “simple” plan and the ties that binds you, not least family. And of course not knowing in advance how bad it will be, until after. And not knowing if you jump from the ashes and land in the fire, lots of countries are on the same trajectory but further back. Fascism is yet again the choice, the owners choice in the face of climate change.
I’m rambling and it’s late. Sympathies and solidarity.
At least it is a place with bears. Everyone knows that bears love libertarians.
If I recall Asimov correctly The Caves of Steel was human killed because mistaken for robot.
Robots of Dawn was robot killed because weird sex hangups (don’t fuck the robot).
The Naked Sun I think is the one you are thinking about were robot killed human. Because reprogrammed to think human is robot or something like that.
In all cases the cop can eliminate all other options, and what remains blah blah. (Also does an inordinate amount of interstellar politics for a cop.)
In “Die, rich asshole, die” the plot will instead be that as the show goes on it turns out that everyone who has interacted with the victim has a motive, including the people on the other side of the planet he yells slurs at. Since they (for a pittance) operate the heavy machinery in his home that killed him, from a completely separate jurisdiction, the story takes a turn towards international relations. However, our protagonist gets a leak from a robot operator that anyone who knows the password can operate the robot if they know the password. All the robots are shipped with the password “password”.
Armed with this knowledge our protagonist goes to the hacker of bright hair colours and indeterminate gender. The hacker first laughs at the protagonist for not knowing the password in the first place - it was in a post that went viral on Tumblr - and then accesses the robot. It turns out that not only did everyone have a motive, everyone was trying to kill him using the robot. One was poisoning the coffee, another one the cocaine. One was trying to electrocute him in the pool, on getting the chandelier to fall on him and so on.
Finally, the hacker helps our protagonist to trace the IP of the person that operated the robot when it strangled the rich asshole. Turns out it was someone accessing robots for fun to pretend they had come to life. The rich, high, somewhat poisoned, victim fell for it and got horny. He begged to be strangled a bit and unfortunately the person controlling the robot complied, not understanding the strength of the robot. It was an accident after all.
Our protagonist pours a whiskey, looks into the camera and says that you got to know that both you and your partner know what you are doing if you engage in strangulation. Also, don’t be an asshole.
Next on your favourite murder show: rich asshole strangled by robot butler.
It’s easy to read it as first and fourth “world” but it’s actually first and fourth “word”. But the first and fourth word of what? Mein Kampf? The 18 words?
Sharing the suffering multiples the suffering.
Who in specific do you see voting for the next Dem who did not vote for Kamala?
Some of the 19 million 2020 Biden voters who didn’t vote in 2024? Maybe some of the 5-6 million they lost one the issue of aiding and arming a genocide in Gaza?
No, going more Nazi must be the way. Much wise, much centrist. Much exhausting.
The investors read “11x, the company’s, revenue is 10 million” but what they missed was that the correct reading was “11 x [the company’s revenue] is 10 million”, so the actual revenue is less than a million. Easy mistake to make! Better luck next time investors!
Yeah, the exclusion of the dismal science got a chuckle out of me.
Ok, that makes sense.
I was somehow under the impression that the main wild cat money to real money exchange was to USD, on account of the media about such exchanges. The rest followed.
Something I have been pondering is why when going after Bitcoin from crimes (ransom or stolen) they don’t just declare the individual “coins” stemming from illegal proceedings and that when they show up the “coins” will be confiscated and the holders investigated for money laundering. They have a serial number of sorts, right?
It should decrease the trade value of the “coins”, might even have the added benefit of scaring people of from the scam currencies. Ay, there might be the rub, for in this modern world of ours suppressing financial “innovations” is treated as worse than scams.
So I was right that it was a Jabra. :)
I think you are right to treat it like a fanzine, do it for the hell of it. That is the fun way.
I believe I read somewhere that Wikimedia was some time ago (a decade ago? who knows and no point in trying to search for the article) exploring the idea of a human curated search engine. Perhaps an idea who’s time has come.
Chatbots are coming for the traditional jobs of gurus, astrologers and tarot-readers.
Pondering where we are heading, I think the tech monopolies will get larger. The companies in a monopolistic position can raise the prices, right now officially because they have added new shiny AI functions nobody wants. After the crash they will raise prices to recoup losses. Microsoft is already rising prices across the board.
The companies that makes their products worse and more expensive and can’t recoup losses through monopoly, well they crash and/ or are bought up. The result is a more monopolistic tech sector, leading to more monopoly rents, worse wages etc.
When I was younger and more idealistically hopeful, I would have added that this would give incentives for switching to FOSS. These days I just think the now even stronger monopolies will work even harder to co-opt or squeeze out any competition.
And he is brave enough to say that:
There is a sensible compromise somewhere between the Biden/Harris immigration bill that would have got rid of due process for suspected illegal immigrants and the Trump policy of just throwing dark people into vans for shipment to slave labour camps.
Genocide is just sensible bipartisanship.
Trans people are not people.
Much centrist, much sensible. Much surprise he is getting into race science. It the centre (defined as the middle ground of Attila and Mussolini) moves, the principled centrist must move with it.