I remember this was very closely Trump’s response to the COVID-19 outbreak. _No, we’re fine. It’s not happening."
Then John Hopkins said The virus is infectious within the community
And Trump had a tantrum while Dr. Fauci said “time to wear masks. Cloth ones if you don’t have an n95”
And Trump ordered all the PPE seized to be given to his friends.
Does anyone else remember this?
My management tricks (which came from being managed) included calling for a 90 minute meeting if I needed 45 minutes, and bring snacks.
Oh and when someone finishes an all day job in half a day, let them goof off for the rest of the day.
But then I believed that whole happy workers are maximally productive workers thing that, well, every serious management study reports.
Courtesy of XKCD, long before we have to contend with unfriendly AI (we have committees of AI-techs working on this problem already) we’ll have to contend with someone like Musk or Bezos determined to own everything and capable of creating an AI-controlled army of killer robots.
We’re not sure how rogue AI is going to manifest. We are sure rogue power-seeking humans exist all the time, and positions of power are commonly filled by them. (That’s the primary argument for election by sortition, or by lottery.)
We’ve just shown in November that Americans can be made to elect a literal Hitler, knowing what he intends to do. And even though the Democrats made some mistakes, they did run a solid campaign. Their losses in the battleground states were by razor thin margins.
One factor is the giant far-right propaganda machine.
The other, as noted by the boring British economist guy (looking… Richard J. Murphy) is that too many people live in precarity for the status quo party (the neoliberal party in whatever country – Democrats here in US, Labor in UK) to draw voters. Essentially, when you’re going to starve under King Log, then King Heron starts looking good.
And we saw this in the elections near November 2024, far-right parties were advancing in the EU. They started going the other way after Trump and MAGA were in power in the US, mask-off and painting a ghastly picture of what a King Heron reign looks like.
The cure for the latter is to go way progressive (e.g. FDR’s New Deal). In this case, go far more progressive than the likes of AOC or Bernie Sanders are offering (the rest of the Democratic party doesn’t like them much).
But the cure for the former is unknown. Not known to me, anyway, and not discussed even on far left media (e.g. Breadtube) possibly because they don’t have answers either. Mind control does work, even if it’s not as beamy and instant as it is in sci-fi. And if we can’t counter it, we’ll have to discover through suffering and death why we don’t use it. And that assumes we have time before one of the other imminent great filters proves unnavigable.
As a kid I knew something was off (I didn’t have the language to call it something) because I couldn’t answer T/F and multiple choice questions honestly due to nuance. I often knew the answer the teacher was expecting but to answer it according to that assessment felt intellectually dishonest.
My wife and I separated shortly after Trump won, November 2024.
I’m still in the same psychotic break. (She and I are still trying to work things out.)
WTF world?
Whatever made that crater was an ELE. Bigger than Chicxulub.
We have plenty of great filters to navigate:
We end war, or we die.
We restore the atmosphere and rebuild global ecology, or we die.
We end stratified society and power disparity, or we die.
Where are all the aliens? Fermi asked. The first question is, how do we navigate our way to becoming a space-faring, world colonizing species, ourselves? It’s turning out to be pretty difficult for the common hominid.
It ain’t me! It ain’t me!
I ain’t no president’s son
We still need to have that conversation, specifically the influence of the massive propaganda machine that control nearly half the media-watching eyeballs (viewership).
We’ve seen our own relatives get radicalized, to no end that serves the public (or their social relationships). So what do we do to counter this wealth fueled monster?
Another descriptive term is wagging the dog (referring to the tail having disproportionate leverage over the beast) which is a (not uncommon) presidential tactic of taking a serious military action in order to distract from other scandals.
News media, including classic liberal media will allow other stories to die to report on attacks or invasions (or when you can get it, attacks on the US by foreign units).
George W.Bush used this method, but also blitzing the public with countless scandals. (George H. W. Bush did too) So Trump’s kitchen cabinet was likely informed by history when considering becoming Bibi’s personal B.
We may have to revise our education system so that it’s not connected to our credential system.
There’s a story about Einstein teaching physics and letting the kids who didn’t want to be there leave and do something else with the time. The ones who remained were quite attentive.
There are multiple models for teaching that do something similar, let kids approach a subject when they’re ready. Yes, they goof off a lot early on, but eventually even STEM and literature call to them, and they pass equivalency exams in their late teens.
In the meantime even when I was in high school in the 1980s, our system was created to sort kids into sports stars that might become college players, STEM kids that might become scientists and engineers, and House Hufflepuff (common laborers).
The education system has only gotten progressively worse since then, as its budget increases have not kept up with inflation. And then there’s the whole effort to insert evangelist Christianity (+ American Exceptionalism + Conservativism–Capitalism) into public school.
And to this day, we still use the lecture / lab / test model that excludes a lot of alternative comprehension and learning models. We’re not looking to teach kids, rather we’re looking to harvest the geniuses, and turn the others into bonded laborers and soldiers for billionaire vanity projects.
What is curious to me is why billionaires don’t start massive civil projects that would get their bronze statue in every state park?
Musk had several opportunities, except he then had to figure out a way to monetize it so it profited him.
For me, seeing corruption and inequality lead to major depression, but I figured out early I didn’t want to cause harm.
What hit hard is learning deception and exploitation is baked into the system.
The… Crowmistress? Queen of Corvids?
From the witching community, you’d have pretty good luck befriending the local murder of crows with cheap bread. Upgrade the bread as the shinies they bring you improve.
According to the meme, pretty soon you’re a Batman villain.
France revolted violently for less… and again after Charlie X started stripping away the Napoleonic rights.
The problem is, it’s plausible they are ice, and in the US hoodlums gathering near a van before pulling a heist are rarer than unmarked ICE guys waiting to acquire a target, so if this isn’t a movie set, they’re most likely ICE.
If they are this obvious, I’d see if I could get a flash mob of civilians with phone cameras.
Either they move, or if action goes down, there’s going to be a big protest soon.
Also we’ll know who they took.
Someone should meme this up as a bunch of dudes about to get jumped by Spiderman.
That is a good assessment. Yes.
In fact, the race between capitalist interests to bypass safety and get operational AGI soonest is entirely about getting that power to be able to use it to hold everyone else hostage.