According to the latest quarterly earnings, there has been increase in user engagement. However, I also read somewhere that 15% of engagements are from bots. My suspicion is that, in spite of the tiny minuscule amount of fake users posing as genuine, these bots create inflammatory comments to trigger and drive real users into responding more and thereby inflate user engagement and algorithms. These small amount of bots create a snowball effect of increasing user participation. So, in essence, the level of user engagement is fake and inflated.

Spez knows what he’s doing. He is talking to the tech bros to get ideas on how to amass power and now he’s one of them billionaires.

He’s kinda okay as Bond imo. My preference is Pierce Brosnan simply because I grew up with his Bond version (and Brosnan’s good looks perfectly fits the suave clean image of Bond for most people).

Although, the more purist fans who read the book prefer Craig. Fans of the books think Craig as the gritty Bond, as envisioned by Ian Fleming, suits the actor’s looks.

Socialise the cost, privatise the profit.

My suspicion is that the clock accelerated significantly because of climate change. Even if we don’t nuke each other, climate change is a slow burn, self-inflicted destruction by humans. Either way, both scenarios lead to a hot extinction.

wonder how much of it is just “shit is clearly bad… Let’s please just try something different and see if it helps.”

It’s kinda both from how I see things. When Bernie wasn’t given a chance by the DNC in the primaries in 2016, the Bernie supporters flocked to vote Trump. The Sanders to Trump pipeline is real. Slavoj Zizek made a great point that people want someone outside of the neoliberal status quo, and Americans got that, but with Trump. Americans are kind of at the crossroads of what they really want.

.ml users tend to be Marxist-Leninists (hence .ml), so when they complain that someone is not “left enough”, it’s a code to mean is that the person is not a Marxist-Leninist/communist who wants to instigate an armed revolution, overthrow the system, and then seize the means of production. The thing is, many Americans could distinguish the difference between communists and socialists. Even the Fox news survey showed most young people support socialism, while only few support communism. I imagine ML clutched their pearls as hard as the conservatives upon learning of the survey.

I’m not trying to defend Obama, especially I abhor his drone warfare, but politics is known to be cut throat, and politicians are beholden to campaign donations. Election campaigning is an expensive endeavour, and those who could throw more money have increased likelihood of winning. There are exceptions to the rule of course, and sometimes those who spent less still wins, but the candidate increases his/her chances of winning by having more campaign funds.

With all that said, this means playing ball with the campaign donors and their lackeys, or else they will gang up on you. Obama is all too aware of this. Consider that Lena Khan’s aggressive FTC investigations under Biden on tech giants pissed off the oligarchs. Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos threw their weights on supporting Trump and now we are here. Apparently, Obama told Bernie in 2016 that he “can’t be the president and be the good guy”.

What is required is someone who is not afraid dip their hands into the mud and throw some, without being in the mud pit itself. People villainise Machiavellianism for good reasons, but evil don’t play by the rules and evil never sleeps. Why still be nice if they already stabbed you? You definitely need to be Machiavellian when the situation requires it. We had that with the Roosevelts, and the fact that they were already wealthy insulated them from being beholden to the whims of campaign donations of the oligarchs and their attack dogs, made them have more free reign to pursue actually more progressive policies. Some people say JB Pritzker has those qualities-- an already wealthy politician willing to be Machiavellian to pursue progressive policies, although I don’t know much about the man to warrant the observation.

Edit: JB not Joseph Pritzker

it was the blunt realization of how effective republicans were using racism to distract from wealth inequality.

Definitely. I notice my colleagues, who are kind of on the right, are more animated and vibrant talking about culture wars. Not once I have heard them talk about wealth inequality. I mentioned it in another post that it’s easier to stoke angry emotions towards one another.

I was confused by the thumbnail. I thought it was a guy kissing some amorphous thing and I can’t make out (pun intended) where his lips are.

In more objective fields such as STEM, the Nobel prizes are genuine. The only outlier is the peace prize for more obvious reasons.

Evoking xenophobia elicits a stronger emotional response than pin pointing the root cause of the problem, which is oligarchy. People are distracted by culture wars.

Some on the left became turncoats (I’m talking to you British Labour).

Government: We have a budget deficit and we’re going to raise the retirement age.

The left: Don’t raise the retirement age and tax the rich!

Government: No.

Also government: Why is the far right on the rise?

Bit like Japan I suppose. Both regions have relatively low wealth inequality in contrast to other countries. Both have publicly accessible welfare systems. Both look for steady economic growth than getting high on raging steroidal economic growth that the US is obsessed with. Both have pretty good rule of law and human rights. Depending on where you are in the EU, some member states have a comparable toxic work culture as Japan. Both also whine about immigration despite the declining population.

I semi-joke about the latter but countries less obsessed with steroidal capitalist growth have a better quality of life. We may not have tech giants like Amazon and Facebook, but at least we don’t have tech bros buying out politicians to dictate policies.

I just had a mental image in my head of Hitler being furious after finding out that a Jewish employee he deems as “one of the good ones” is sent to the concentration camp. I can imagine the race against time by Hitler himself to save his employee before being locked in to the gas chamber.

Unfortunately, carbon capture is useless if we’re still burning fossil fuels for power, heat, and transport.

Carbon capture is actively harmful when used as an excuse to build new fossil fuel power plants.

Yeah, it’s a blank check to just produce more CO2.

Recession will happen in 2029 to celebrate the anniversary of the Great Depression.

Tesla Armor

That’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time.

The devs are probably from the future and are giving us hints what will happen by calling the armour of techno-fascists, “Tesla”.

Musk has kompromats on board of directors and shareholders.

Also companies are realizing that when people are broke they stop buying luxury stuff and only buy essentials.

Last time I heard, broad consumer spending decreased but luxury spending is going strong. Increased luxury good demands along with AI bubble is what keeps the US economy out of full blown recession thus far. And as we know, those bubble might pop.