Maybe I’m a bot who has been monitoring your entertainment traffic specifically to incept this shit onto your monitor.

Or maybe I just got through a Fast and Furious rewatch and had Vin Diesel’s “This is Brazil!” lodged in my brain, but opted for this picture because it isn’t just him in a wife-beater yelling at Dwayne Johnson.

The tech that the sociopaths built is an addictive control machine.

LLMs are not addictive control machines. Social media engagement farming and native advertising/propaganda machines are addictive control machines. We consistently get the marketing functions fudged up with the utility of the thing itself. Like blaming violence on video games or talking about addictive qualities of children’s cartoons.

I don’t care whether the person selling the cigarettes to my kid has read Fanon and volunteers at the homeless center

Cigarettes are actually a great example of engineered addiction. Historically, tobacco products had a mild addicting affect resulting from their short-term immediate stimulative benefits combined with the reliance on nicotine. But it wasn’t until the boom in marketing of the 1920s followed by the industrial scale experimentation of the formula in the 1940s that the addictive nature of the product surged.

The end result was an enormous increase in per-capita consumption, leaping from 54 cigarettes per person per year in 1900 to 4,345 cigarettes per person per year in 1963.

The quantitative surge in consumption radically changed the health consequences of cigarette use.

You could do similar analysis on everything from alcohol consumption to LSD. From TV to TikTok. At some point you have to draw a line between the utilitarian value of the thing versus the mass market distribution and profit-driven consumption behaviors. Otherwise, you just end up with 1920s Prohibition and a thriving black market that undercuts the policies you intended.

And then you get Joe Kennedy. Is that what you want for your country? More Kennedys?

16 percent of Americans think AI will have a positive impact

Going to need this group cross-referenced with the percentage of Americans who enjoy CSAM.

Man who has lost nine fingers: “I’ve reversed course and I will not lose another nine fingers”.

I blame Afonso Henriques, pictured below

When the server came to take the drink order my date lean in close and whisper to my ear “only get a mixer” as she pressed two small bottles into my hand and then winked at me.

Marriage Material

Women in movies: “Going to do a full blown date prep montage, complete with song and dance number, where I transform from mousy librarian to runway model over the course of 15 minutes. Come out cool as a cucumber and charming as a prince.”

Women in real life: “Going to throw on a top and some jeans, half watch a Netflix special about serial killers while I curl my hair, then down a mug of hard liquor to build up the courage to look a guy I’ve got a crush on straight in the eyes. Try to make it through dinner without mumbling, burping, or mentioning that I’m on my period.”

angry Linux noises

The analogy presumes you want cops to have free access to your home

40% of Cops

Making weed illegal created a causa belli for an uncountable number of police stops and searches.

The biggest barrier to Internet access is simply having a device with an Internet connection. Everything after that is a question of configuration.

What I’d consider the bigger fallout from this decision is the need to check the identity of people over 16. This is a backdoor method of imposing Internet ID on the entire population.

the same politicians pushing it are exempt

Because they’re all over 16?

“We told people with a debilitating speech condition to get off the government dole and work a fucking job”

Mozart and Carlos Mencia trigger the same parts of the ear canal.

My man has an incredible figure

I see you’re problem. You’re using the old Fordist mode of economic growth, wherein you employ people at an income level such that they can buy the products they produce. Then you grow your capital stock by reallocating the labor surplus into new undeveloped areas of the country. That model of growth went out of fashion in the 80s.

Post Volcker-Shock, we adopted a strategy of indebting unaligned countries in exchange for modern technological improvements, then harvesting their natural resources at a functional loss to finance the USD denominated debts they struggled to pay back. Then we could effectively export dollars for cheap imports and allow Americans to buy them with money laundered through government contracts, grants, and Fed credit expansion.

But after COVID, we’re on to an even more revolutionary approach to profitability. We don’t need consumers. We don’t need to develop capital in foreign territories. We just do a direct 1:1 exchange of B2B SaaS services and American Dollars with the corporate oligarchs. Now people don’t need to buy anything, because governments buy everything. And if you’re friendly with the government, you get a slice. And if you’re not, you get shoved off a cliff.

The degree to which the O&G industry has co-opted the Republican Party cannot be understated. This only really took root under Ford, when guys like Bush and Cheney were promoted into the upper echelons of the political leadership while in the midst of converting historically Dixiecrat Gulf Coast states to the Republican Party.

Democrats were late to the party, having more heavily aligned with the NY-based Finance Sector and CA-based global shipping magnets. It’s been the outsized demand for energy in Silicon Valley that has really collapsed the Green-ish Democrats into O&G by way of Obama/Trump/Biden Era rapidly escalating demands for electricity. And even then, Dems are consistently in favor of generic economic growth while Republicans are hyper-fixated on O&G growth exclusively.

The Emperor pitted two historic rival houses against one another, with the expectation that they’d annihilate themselves and leave room for upstarts to take their place. The Bene Jesuits had seen this cycle play out before and knew it would preserve the Emperor’s power at the expense of the advancement of the society as a whole. So, they backchanneled a breeding program between Atreides and Harkonen - on the Atreides side via Lady Jessica and Duke Leto, on the Harkonen side between Feyd-Rautha and Margot Fenring - to yield the prophesied optimal off-spring, the Kwisatz Hadarach.

But all of this ran afoul of a third agency, the Planetologists of Dune, who believed the planet’s perpetual condition of spice harvest was undermining what could be a new kind of Eden for domestic development and liberation. Their efforts to irrigate Arakus at the expense of the global galactic trade (catalyzed by Lady Jessica’s unlicensed male hier) was what ultimately undermined both the Emperor’s political schemes and the Bene Jesuits’ breeding program.

In the end, the primary antagonists of the Dune series are the environmentalists, fighting a guerrilla war against a Galactic Oil & Gas Industry.

Rubbing this on my back while drinking a tall glass of Dew Crimes