You’re way too optimistic.

I’m putting my money on Mr. Burns, A Post Electric Play.

2001

I believe we didn’t invade Iraq until 2003.

Although, curiously enough, Iran helped us do it.

Doubly ironic, given that Bush Sr was so instrumental in beefing up the Iraqi military ten years before the '91 invasion… for the purpose of invading its neighbors. (https://archive.is/HwX3A)

What is it about hardline reactionary Islamic governments getting baited by American neoconservatives to spin around, show us their backs, and point to the spot a knife would sink in most deeply?

I’d love to see how Microsoft is gonna convince those cheap fucks that this is the correct path forward

I suspect we’re going to see some kind of sweeping compatibility issues in the next few years. Possibly a really ugly virus rips through the business community to scare people into switching.

What are u even discussing about guys…

Doomerism

I guess you’ll just need to convert to proprietary cloud services

Turns out the plan was to kill a bunch of people you hate.

Twelve years ago, when XP released, there was legitimately a decision to be made what with nine distinct versions of the OS available. That still hasn’t stopped even in the modern day. So I could see people discussing exactly which version of Win10/11 they needed and then recommending others based on their experience.

But it’s sort of like the BMW that comes with a subscription to heated seats and ABS. Like, why would you subject yourselves to this kind of abuse in an OS?

“How likely are you to recommend putting your hand up to the elbow in this wood chipper?”

Like, if you’re in the business of building PCs? I definitely understand swapping build tips with friends and colleagues. Even strictly within the “No Linux Allowed” space, there’s no shortage of online tutorials and consultants recommending this or that version of Microsoft.

But Win10 is going away and Win11 is so fucking bad…

an open conspiracy is still a conspiracy.

US military hegemony isn’t a conspiracy, it’s a popular public policy

NDAA authorizing almost a trillion dollars to the military industrial complex

Congress authorizes it. I guess you could just put “Congress” on the list. Or maybe “The Pentagon”.

Hundreds of thousands of civilians have died by US bombing in the last fifty years.

With Iran, Syria, and Yemen you could probably get to 100k in one or two years.

Nevermind our airstrikes across Latin America, the various African states, and our collaborations with Israel in Gaza.

Hell, the US can take credit for quite a few kills in Ukraine thanks to our long standing policy of playing both ends against the middle.

But you don’t get all that out of “The NDAA exists”. We’ve been passing NDAAs since The Korean War without hitting this level of mass slaughter.

That’s just the marketing cycle.

Is marketing a grift? I mean, kinda. But you’ll get marketing on good games and bad alike.

Nobody seemed to mind the endless marketing for Expedition 33 or Eldin Ring or Stardew Valley or Minecraft.

I don’t think “pernicious” would describe the NDAA, no.

I mean, some of them are vague to the point of being banal. The NDAA is just the bi-annual Congressional requirement to reauthorize US military operations abroad.

Why would anyone have that marked out as a conspiracy theory on the level of MK Ultra or Operation Northwoods? No reason you’d recognize the acronym as such.

Like the man himself or the whole assassination conspiracy theory thing?

Plenty of compelling evidence to believe Kennedy was murdered at the order of ex-CIA Director Allen Dulles. Even if you don’t want to go all the way down that rabbit hole, though, there’s even more evidence to suspect Kennedy’s secret service fucked up on the job - both in the planning of the parade and in the initial response to gunfire. The “magic bullet” thesis has a number of much more believable counter-explanations, not the least being Kennedy’s security detail firing blindly from inside the car and hitting the President by mistake.

Also, very deep CIA and mafia connections specifically running through New Orleans in the 1960s, such that letting Lee Harvey Oswald spill his guts would be bad for mission security, even if he had just been a lone gunman.

However you slice the Kennedy assassination, there’s plenty of big blind spots in the story where speculation runs rampant. And those blind spots are almost certainly the result of embarrassed/implicated state officials involved in some level of cover-up.

shit like MK Ultra actually and provably happened

The downwind implications of MK Ultra get incredibly muddy. It’s one thing to say “the US government was experimenting with psychedelics” and quite another to claim “The Manson Murders were orchestrated as a domestic terrorist event intended to crush the hippie movement in California and elect Ronald Reagan.”

You could say the same about the Gulf of Tonkin. Was this an American Navy vessel crew that fucked up by accident? Or a deliberate false flag intended to bring the US into Vietnam?

Bohemian Grove is another one you can take extremely deep. It gets brought up alongside Comet Ping Pong Pizza in the “elites are eating babies to stay young forever” conspiracies.

Part of the problem with this list is that you can take any item on it and flip it like a coin to get “mundane rational accusations of impropriety” on one side and “wildly speculative deep lore of a fascist puppeteer regime controlling the country” on the other.

This is the famous “Loo With A View” taken from a high end restaurant in Paris, incidentally.

Peak Shitpost. A++. Would expect to see it reposted again.

Putting on my D.A.R.E. T-shirt and clutching my state issued copy of the Ten Commandments and snapping an Amazon Ring Camera on my front door, so I help the state identify any of those nasty, America hating Antifa I’ve been hearing so much about.

I’m helping!

LintCoin’s value is through the roof, though. You’d be a fool not to hand them all your boring old American dollars.

And don’t even get me started on TulipCoin.

I think some people look at this arrangement and say “This is unsustainable, the cards have to come down at some point”, because it is a fucking stupid way to run an economy.

But, like… the money keeps flowing. And it keeps flowing because the Fed and the Treasury are implicitly backstopping the malinvestment. And their pockets are functionally endless.

I wish you could just roll your eyes and make these abhorrent economic decisions stop. But I’m afraid these people might legit die trillionaires without a regret in the world (other than failing to solve Immortality Science with an LLM), because we’ve stacked the economic deck so high up in their favor.

Which means now our tax dollars won’t just be used for data centers, they’ll be used for power plants too.

Sure… maybe…

Part of the problem with power plant construction is that our production capacity is largely maxed out. If you want a new gas power plant, you go on a waiting list that’s two years long (conservatively). Wind and Solar production are also at their domestic limit. Nuclear continues to be a pipe dream.

And, again, it cannot be overstressed that turning on a data center means a net-negative cash flow. These facilities cost more to operate than they earn, even under a ludicrously generous state contract. Why would you want to power them on these terms?

You gotta at least give yourself a full Friedman Unit.