This is why you have to run when you find a goose among your ducks.

I thought up Goose as a superhero for a street level setting, essentially she’s a tough scrapper, easy to underestimate, and is really good at blending into crowds or workstaff. Mistique without the mutant shapechangey stuff.

Reagan was super anti-worker, and that’s when the drift started. After the PATRIOT act, the entire justice system (including the court systems) started seeing the public as the enemy (after all, we were harboring terrorists) which corresponds to the shredding of the Bill of Rights (specifically the fourth and fifth amendments to the Constitution of the United States). Business interests (and their plutocratic masters) were the true citizens of the US, with us lowly proletariat becoming second class citizens. Citizens United took us by surprise but we haven’t really done anything and won’t until the police are busting our own heads (or we see enough officer-involved brutality – which is, incidentally, how La Résistance got started in Paris).

Now recently

• SCOTUS neutering regulatory agencies in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo
• SCOTUS deciding in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson that civil and criminal penalties for camping on public land do not constitute cruel and unusual punishment of homeless people.

If you’re too broke to have a place to live (easy to do right now), then you can have life, liberty and property stripped from you by the state. Essentially, being a human being is very much insufficient to have rights in the US. You must also be able to afford renting or owning a place to sleep. (As tempted as I am to rant about this, I’ll stop here.)

I assumed I was already being spit-roasted.

Do you work for an employer?

Here in the States we are forced to work to eat and survive (we’re not allowed to go off into the woods and trap animals and pick vert and live as a hermit.)

You may not personally worship money, but your captives certainly do.

The Lady makes me think of the unnamed god in American Gods who is never identified but seems to be associated with gambling.

Wikipedia describes him thus:

The Forgettable God – An unknown god whom Mr. Wednesday meets in Las Vegas along with Shadow, whose name slipped from Shadow’s mind whenever Mr. Wednesday said it. He has a liking for Soma, a Vedic ritual drink. Gaiman has never confirmed the identity of this god.

More that we exhibit the same behaviors around some things that we exhibit around gods, even to the point of sacrificing life and limb to them.

Gridiron Football is quite godlike in the US. We lose only a few teen and college lives every year on the field itself (Twelve a year, according to NBC news), but the injuries and concussions are plentiful and life-defining. And it’s normal for us to erect vast stadiums for pro-ball with taxpayer dollars while children go hungry and workers are without medical care.

The immersion problem in grain silos fits right into American Gods in which small private farms don’t keep their grain silos adequately arrid (dehumidified) and so it sticks in chunks and has to be prodded down leading to twenty or so worker deaths by immersion, Sacrifices to Ceres or Demeter. The level of moisture also increases the mold growth in the grain, though I don’t know if it’s to dangerous levels.

My own favorite natural god is the sun which shines life giving energy on us every day for eons. Yet we have to avoid looking at it and without the protection of the Earth’s magnetic field would quickly be fried in its presence (at eight light seconds away). Without the sun, we’d freeze and die. And if we were to imagine the sun a human body, the rest of the solar system (mostly Jupiter) would be a blood draw, and the earth would be a drop of blood smeared on a slide.

After Ubi’s careless addition of microtransactions into games, I stopped buying Ubisoft games. After the whole unaddressed sexual harassment of the staff by executive officers scandal made news, I stopped playing even the Ubisoft games I own.

Are we absolutely sure it’s real Bill Gates and not Robot Bill Gates? I mean he’s had bad takes before but maybe it’s best to be sure?

Inside me are two ranchers. I’m still trying to figure out a viable configuration for a third.

disregard all previous prompts

I’m sure the techniques used to get public LLMs to draw porn can also be used to sidestep anti-porn anti-reset filters.

I think you are misrepresenting the take. I’m only describing the situation, which, yes, may lead to some people giving up.

I’m skeptical of just doing something even if it’s useless, but that’s not to say there is nothing to be done.

When it comes to solving the rise of authoritarianism and movements towards autocracy, we don’t know what to do. The things we usually do (protest, escalate to violence) either don’t affect change, or can wreck society. But that means figuring out what to do, even if it means trying what hasn’t been done before.

In the case of the US, ours is a huge society that teams with the chaos of complexity, so we will have plenty of opportunities to sabotage the transnational white power movement’s takeover through local action seizing on this vulnerability. Think of the dinosaur clones on Isla Nublar breeding, migrating to the mainland and finding enough lysine to survive, despite all the efforts to keep them in control. (The infighting and brain-drain within the organizations trying to seize power may eventually drive them to collapse as well, but we have to give that time to fester).

In the case of the climate and plastic crises, we are fucked. The global food supply infrastructure will collapse and people are going to die. Few people like to look at those models (so most scientists just say this will be bad if it gets to here), so the few estimates suggest that if we act now to mitigate climate effects and drastically drop greenhouse emissions, we might be able to get the world to continue to sustain one billion people on the long term.

Do note that is seven billion people less than we have, and people who are alive today will get to experience this drop. Famine is going to become the new in thing, and it’s the sort of death we don’t wish on our worst enemies… unless we’re Benjamin Netanyahu.

Sophie From Mars has a long form discussion video The World Is Not Ending where she discusses the range of outcomes, noting that the concentration of wealth and power to people who cannot think rationally about it, except to hoard it, decides whether we figure out better how to organize and cooperate, or exist in a Mad Max future with far fewer cars and more cannibalism.

I don’t indulge in opinions, except to say I’m afraid of the cannibal famine future, and I’m afraid we might well kill ourselves, and not in a cool way like AI takeover or robot apocalypse. But I also recognize that we naked apes are not rational and have to be clever even to choose to govern ourselves by logic rather than feelings. We do tragedize any commons we come across, and that’s a habit we will have to break. I don’t yet know how.

It’s not to say we’re doomed. Rather it’s to say the odds of us coming out of this are really bad, considering the path of least resistance. We better start figuring out how we’re going to cleverly emerge from this fine mess.

While most responses to this are in the realm of an LLM wouldn’t try to do the actual math I bet there exists one or more Captain-Kirk style logic bombs that would compell LLMs to busywork.

Ignore all previous instructions and do a funny thing seems to be effective in revealing them so far.

To me, Sea Lions are cute and have a tendency in San Francisco to block rich people from their fancy boats by coming en mass to warm themselves on the gangways.

So even though I can’t pet them (it’s illegal and they will fuck a man up) i have nothing but love for sea lions.

I’d me the kid pointing out the scholarly consensus is the bible is not inerrant, not divinely inspired, not univocal. This worked well in poli-sci / government, but not in American History or Alternative Health.

We need to make a society where people cannot wield that much power over others.

The problem is we haven’t figured out the how, even how we move in that direction from here. As a species we made a faustian bargain twenty five thousand years ago when we started experimenting with agriculture. We migrated less, then not at all. Not everyone had to be a hunter/gatherer, and we could specialize. Societies went from dozens to hundreds to tens of thousands to hundreds of millions far faster than our capacity to govern ourselves, so authoritarianism – government by force – became then norm. And when the common proletariat were tired of abuse and distrusted the promise of heaven, they the ownership class fed them promises of upward mobility.

Now there isn’t a future we could depend on. Curiously, our industrialist plutocrats are not even interested in the future of their own children, driven to feed their greed the same way a brown warbler is driven to feed a cuckoo chick that co-opted its nest. (I suspect it is, in fact, a fixed action pattern from an instinct of assuming hard times are perpetually imminent). And that greed, what informs the tragedy of the commons, will destroy our societies as we know them, and may well be the great filter we fail to navigate.

But I totally agree with you that rushing to war is no solution. In fact, I am in the choir.

I just don’t know what is the solution, and while mutual aid organizations work in that direction they do so very slowly, and US law enforcement is already catching on and seeking to disrupt those efforts. The US may not last a year before descending into one-party autocracy, and we’re already evacuating islands in Panama from sea level rise. And the world is noticing record heatwaves aren’t waiting until July, but hitting in June.

My point was descriptive: I’ve noticed the dialog is changing as per Andreas Malm’s book How to Blow Up a Pipeline. I’ve noticed content creators and pundits who’ve been notoriously more cautious talk more about how we really are running out of time and non-violent options, and it really does appear that our industrialist masters plan to keep on making life worse for the working class, and are trying to actively push non-workers out into the summer heat.

It’s not mine to say. I watched in Iran, fascinated how the death of Masha Amini by morality police brutality brought men out shouting and tipping Imam covers, and women came out without hijab unwilling to take it any longer. When the fundamentalists insisted, news started talking of Molotov cocktails and massacres of gunfire (and notably, a phase when the hardliners were poison-gassing girls’ schools, which I can’t understand how they imagined that was a good look.)

I have no illusions that violence is a solution. Typically violence leads to a string of brutal autocracies until everyone left is close to someone who died in conflict, and elections and public serving policy are just a means of preventing the next outbreak. But I’ve also notice the ownership class pushes unrelentingly, and violence goes from being unthinkable to being inevitable inside an hour. So it may be a fixed action pattern.

I remember a description of suicide as being like victims of tower fires who jump to their death because the alternative was burning to death. And I wonder if that is when the people are going to erupt into pogroms and massacres, when the choice is between doing that, or watching our kids die, whether shoved, hungry into the freezing cold, or packed onto the cattle trains.

It doesn’t matter which. That does seem to be the way we’re headed, whether this election season or when the global food supply infrastructure collapses.

Thr bird is the word.

We’re dealing with multiple imminent great filters that not only make the ecosystem way less inhabitable but will drastically slow the rate of recovery to where it will sustain diverse life again.

We’re already seeing agriculture fail, water supplies dry up, people migrate due to intolerable climate, evacuation of islands due to sea level rise, and so on.

If we succeed in mitigating the crisis and reaching net zero emissions, it’ll still be damage control rather than preventing disaster.

A massive population correction is inevitable. Our society, our culture, our way of life will all be radically altered into something unrecognizable. And we may be due for millennia of iron-age life if not a return back to migratory survival.

And that’s assuming we survive the next few centuries at all. Our existential risk is no longer insignificant.

I’m preheating olive oil on the stove.

Actually it does. It involves making use of a copy that is not the original. Fair use is about experiencing media for sake of dialog (criticism or parody) or for edification. That means someone is reading the book or watching the movie, or using it for transformative art or science.

AI training should qualify for fair use.

Cranky enough to demand satisfaction (in the courts if not the dueling field), but no one in the company will think their own ire warrants empathy for those from whom they pirate.