Who doesn’t love Farscape?

Rachel Bloom, banger

Darling Meet Me Under the Cum Tree

like in the old days of illegal wiretapping when throughout the conversation one would randomly say “bomb”, “arson”, “nuke” etc.

What they’re doing is laudable. But these boats are tiny compared with what the Cubans need to survive.

These appear to have arrived before the US tightened the blockage in earnest. Their plan was for a 2 GW combined installation, of which this represents maybe 1%.

Traditionally, these pilot programs operate as a marketing program rather than an educational program.

You’re going to see a class of students enter the system with enormous supplemental aid and resources. The AI will be included but largely incidental. The students will be cherry-picked for media optics, rather than randomly selected from within the school district. Tons of paid professionals will write long-winded hagiographies about the affordability and effectiveness of the program. Some Ivy League University or Fortune 500 business will make a big show of admitting the most charismatic and saleable student graduates.

Then the program will be rolled out to the rest of the country as quickly and sloppily as possible. AI will be jammed down people’s throats. You’ll get an earful about stupid idiot parents hysterically complaining about their dumb baby children, because they’re afraid of The Terminator movies. This will be book-ended with Steven Pinker and Bill Gates calmly explaining how AI turns dumbies into geniuses. A string of movies and TV shows will be released about kids getting AI education and becoming too smart (and time traveling or getting magic powers or some other silly bullshit).

The YIMBY coalition of very informed TV nerds will be assembled to scream at anyone who doesn’t like AI. If you don’t like AI you’re Ableist or a Bigot or Not Serious About Education. Meanwhile, we’ll get an earful about how certain migrants and POCs are incapable of learning from AI because of their inferior genes. School districts will be told to either adopt AI or lose their funding / get taken over by the state / federal agencies. National media will be saturated with “AI is normal” media content until people stop resisting.

And all of this will culminate in more school privatization, more public education defunding, and more militant policing of young people. Because that’s always been the real end goal.

No. They learned that distance learning was an excellent tool for busting unions and commoditizing education.

Thankfully solar and other supplies are being given to Cuba in large quantities

That’s news to me. Was just listening to a podcast interviewing a local Cuban journalist, suggesting help was not - in fact - on the way.

Incidentally, Belly of the Beast does some excellent domestic Cuban coverage. But everything they are reporting suggests these supplies have not been forthcoming, on account of the military blockade of the island. Like, you cannot sail ships into and out of the major harbors (shy of outright smuggling or armed escort).

Much like with the Gaza Blockade, there are ongoing efforts to build political pressure by assembling relief and directing it at the island. There’s no reason to believe it will actually arrive.

Liberals are hyper exposed to the latter and sheltered from the former.

Check the Cuba coverage right now. We’re getting wall to wall #SOSCuba tier hysterics, while the devestation of the blockade and the threat of a military invasion goes fully unreported.

Survivorship Bias. The boomers alive today are the ones that weren’t killed by wars, pollution, and poverty

This is actually your fault, btw

Boomers haven’t been a voting majority in over a decade. JD Vance is a Vice President by, of, and for millennials.

Classic Authoritarian Log Flume

Seems like you don’t really need to fork the system until someone applies DOB field in a meaningful way.

Even in such a situation, I would suspect the short-term solution is simply a patch or crack to neuter the functionality that the DOB field is supposed to implement. A full fork seems unnecessary, even counterproductive, since it would define your OS as meaningfully distinct (and noticeably out of compliance) with a standard installation.

What’s being described right now is just an optional date-of-birth field.

The timing is dogshit.

Like getting handed a grenade pin and told “It’s a fucking pin! It’s harmless, what are you worried about?”

I heard the big banks were trying something similar shortly before the '08 crash. And the Enron/Worldcomm crew right before 9/11.

Certainly possible they’ve got an exit strategy lined up. But the problem is that they’re always just a little too greedy and too high on their own supply. During the '14 mini-recession, reinflating the bubble economy was a bipartisan goal. After the '20 COVID crash, there was broad consensus in cranking open the money hose and flooding the economy with cheap cash. '08, '14, and '20 set a big historical precedent for the “We’ll never let you fail” policies of the federal government. And so we’ve diluted a lot of the short term pain of economic contraction into the longer term pains of currency inflation.

The enormous devastation to real physical capital all across these Mid-Eastern theocracies, combined with the socio-economic pressures of Climate Change induced heat waves, can and will push certain regions of the globe to a breaking point. At some point, you just don’t have anything to spend all those excess dollars on.

I don’t begrudge rich people going to rich people prison, because the point of prison is to remove dangerous people from society not to torture them in a cage. I do begrudge poor people going to poor people prison, because it seems as though these prisons exist as a means of extracting cheap labor from poor and PoC populations. Or outright abusing them - mentally, physically, and sexually - because this kind of brutality generates political rewards.

fines don’t count anymore, only hard time

I mean, you’re assuming this survives one of the eight million appeals the Facebook legal team is going to throw at it.

But yes, by the time it works itself all the way up and down the appellate courts, I wouldn’t expect this $1.5T company to experience any legal penalties in excess of a few million dollars.

Janeway was the best starship captain as a kid

Definitely feels generational. I’ve got a friend who is a Janeway diehard. But she didn’t really get into it until Voyager.

Picard will always be my captain of choice, but that might have its roots in watching the show as a little kid with my very bald father whom my mom teasingly referred to as “The Captain” when the show was on.

😏