One of the post-collapse Soviet Bloc’s biggest exports was “fashion models”.

Sex trafficking young, thin, blonde girls out of Bulgaria and Poland and Ukraine and Russia was a big part of Jeffery Epstein’s job and a lucrative inroad to people like Les Wexner and Jean-Luc Brunel.

For natives in these regions, there’s no need to use AI to generate what your economy was already churning out in droves.

Capitalist Mysticism at its finest.

That’s the story that gets told. But in an economy in which technology is increasingly designed to be hostile to the public, this appears to be a case of them doing exactly what they intended.

I think there’s a real possibility that Palantir’s capacities are heavily overstated. Historically, the real hazard presented by these panopticons is False Positives. Hobbling your nation’s ability to do any kind of productive enterprise because you’ve surrounded yourself with the illusion of threatening behavior.

But even in this scenario, you’re still left with the evil/stupid conundrum. If your MPs are just getting paid off to make excuses, insisting that they lack understanding misses the point. They vote the same way even if they do.

Fuck you, I do what I want

And you will be heckled accordingly

Only if you eat it in the closet

Are hot dogs gay?

Hot dogs, brauts, really any kind of sausage. Also zucchini, carrots, you better believe egg plants are right out.

No more muffellata munching for me

definitely not successful because they are smart.

I mean, “smart” is a relative term. They were smart enough to find the money hose and latch onto it. But the skills necessary to schmooze $250M out of a creditor are fundamentally different than the skills necessary to manage a workforce or meet the terms of the contract.

You can call it the Peter Principle or the Principle-Agent Problem or any number of other business short-hands for “skills mismatch”. The bottom line is that “meritocracy” in a capitalist system boils down to rent-seeking effectiveness. That’s the skill set that is rewarded. And it produces legions of people who train and compete for the opportunity to maximize rent-seeking returns.

This guy fumbled the ball in a spectacular fashion. But I have no doubt he’ll get back on his horse and find another pool of labor to extract wealth from. Because, if he’s a CEO, he’s honed the skills needed to do exactly that.

What we get to mock him for is his failure, not his decision. If he’d retrieved a useful answer from the ChatGPT answer lottery, or the courts had been stacked with his friends such that any answer he pulled was considered the right one, he’d be hailed as a business genius on the front page of the WSJ rather than scoffed at in the back pages of 404media.

The CEO will be fine at the end of the day.

The workers are going to get fucked, though.

No, no. That’s normal. If it was weird, they’d have circled it in red.

a minister who was waxing lyrical about the benefits of AI and was asked something basic like about hallucinations or something and they literally never heard of them

“I don’t know about this thing that runs counter to my policy. I’ve never heard of it. I’ll have to look into it.”

Pretty standard politician-speech for “Sit down and shut up, I don’t want to talk about this”.

Maybe the minister sincerely hadn’t heard of AI hallucinations. Or maybe they were just being coy. Either way, the new information isn’t going to shape their decision because they’re not governing based on information provided by the general public. They’ve got a coterie of lobbyists and partisan insiders who have already made the choice on their behalf.

Damn. The security (theater) obsessed Far-Right Labour government wouldn’t be kicking the barn door open to a foreign government’s mass surveillance company for any kind of insidious reason, you think?

“The last battle humans fight on all of Earth will be at a big hill called Tel Megiddo just west of Afula” is one hell of a bold claim, though.

Ceramics mostly

She set up a forum, and by all accounts it was pretty decent.

No doubt. I’m not casting dispersion on her. But men screaming “Why won’t anyone fuck me?!” today, having trampled over a woman with the exact same complaint is deeply ironic.

When you get under the hood of a lot of modern incel culture (particularly, but not exclusively, male incel culture) the underlying complaint tends isn’t inceldom nearly so much as it is that porn stars won’t fuck them (for free) and people with anime anatomy aren’t real.

That’s so far afield of the original desire for romantic companionship that made up the seed of the community. And it is driven, in large part, by the commoditization of romance through the same Big Tech and digital marketing companies that promote porn and other unrealistic expectations of beauty.

You were not part of the discussion

Clearly I am now.

where the fuck do you get off thinking that our district supports these programs materially and that a teacher recommendation was sufficient enough to place in the non-segregated TAG program.

Because its exhaustively well-documented.

I can’t emphasize this enough. Fuck you

Seems like your kid is in a healthy and loving household.

Pretty Guy: Does basically nothing and women fall all over him

Nice Guy: Becomes a phrenologist in response

Always worth remembering that the OG Incel was a woman blogging about how desperate she was to lose her virginity.

Unless you’re straight up trying to con someone, everyone thinks they know what they’re talking about. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be talking.

There’s a social element to a lot of this. People want to be seen and included, so they try to add what they think they know. And, outside of an academic setting (or a really boneheaded remark that’s easy to refute with a simple Google/Wikipedia search), who bothers to check this shit?

preclude a discussion on child needs

They indict the system precisely because of how it distributes resources for the children of Haves and Have-Nots.

Our child was referred by a teacher

“I was told that my kid isn’t like other kids” is always the bait at the end of these hooks. You’re not segregating, you’re elevating.

No real need to look back and ask why the broader structural issues of class size, teacher experience, and class room hours aren’t addressed holistically. Maybe the kids you left behind just don’t need those resources like your precious little muffin does.

Idk if I’d even call it “intellectual” so much as “smug”. You find this all over. People self-sort into cliches. And then they get high on their own supply, insisting everyone outside their group is inferior.

You’ll find it over in the Joe Rogan-verse, among the TradCaths, in every ethnic enclave from Cuban expats to the Taiwanese Diaspora. As common among Marxists as Fascists. As common among Americans as Iranians. As common in the board rooms as the barber shops.

Broadly speaking - and particularly as people get older - we develop this entrenched worldview that results from accumulations of vast amounts of personal and peripheral information.