The GOP has been looking for a truly empty vessel without standards to run their caucuses for decades, and each time they get a little closer. They may have succeeded at the worst possible moment with Johnson.

You might be right, but I think the question is, “does my commitment to the cult outweigh my commitment to self and empirical reality?”

I think like in any other cult that fleeces its members, the answer for many is, “yes.”

Actually a really nice question, lets me think of how to make things better rather than just complain.

1. Implement ranked choice voting across all elections. Undo all gerrymanders and make intentional gerrymander a criminal offense not protected by legislative immunity

2. Pass immediate media/content law package, including laws limiting media ownership, limiting social media reinforcement algorithms, deep & persistent AI content watermarking and anti-disinformation rules, anti-propaganda laws, and content labeling for entertainment/opinion versus news programming.

3. Pass public option healthcare of some type and set hard limits on our of pocket yearly healthcare expenses for private insurance at livable levels.

4. Pass wealth and profit reform laws to set a CEO-to-lowest-paid-employee distribution ratio for all profit beyond $1m yearly net profit, and tax rates and wealth caps to discourage grotesque wealth accumulation (TBD, but let’s say if you have more than $1b, most personal income will be taxed or business income redistributed to workers).

5. Initiate global democracy reforms with all of the non-authoritarian governments and come up with global steps to counteract right-wing propaganda (primarily from Putin), revitalize democracy, and reverse the negative effects of globalization on the public to legitimately answer authoritarian populism.

Bonus:

Government reset: Publicly and immediately prosecute the law-breaking currently happening and reestablish rule of law, undo basically every action of Trump.

Reform immigration and law enforcement: cut DHS and ICE to the bone and rebuild into an immigration support system. De-militarize local and state law enforcement and retrain every single cop to actually serve and protect. Support with laws requiring mandatory reporting of police brutality or law-breaking, with criminal penalties for failing to do so.

Anti-enshittification laws: Saas business models heavily regulated, laws that limit companies’ ability to data mine and exploit, laws that grant personal ownership of attention (i.e., your attention is not a public resource companies can freely mine with ads), stronger monopoly enforcement to prevent thr terminal stages of enshittified platforms, require giving users the option of staying on prior software and T&C versions.

Worker protection laws: Codify union rights into new laws and incentives for unionization, with anti-corruption package to reduce chance of capture.

Reform Congress to re-establish proportional representation. (Too much here. BMaybe go unicameral, expand house, expand Senate - all constitutional amendments but hey, why not.)

Easy-peezy.

This is a helpful. This sounds like a way, even if I’m still in the “hmmm, yes, I recognize some of those words” stage. Maybe I’ll look for a detailed guide.

I admit, though, the details of how to do this are pretty hard to imagine for me - networking and tunneling seems very technical. Before I can jump off the Plex enshittification train, I just want a way to share my media with tech-illiterate family without complex setup on their end.

Sorry to hit you with a random question, but since I’m in a similar situation: are you using Tailscale to remote stream to your parents, or how do you get that working seamlessly with Jellyfin?

I’m a Plex Pass user and we cannot opt out on Roku devices. On Android I was able to roll back the app, since we can sideload old versions and turn off updates.

There’s a new Plex UI that they pushed to Android a few months ago that breaks everything, removes options and customizability, requires extra unintuitive actions to get to any self-hosted libraries, and pushes Plex’s Live TV and other junk into prominent UI positions, as I assume the investors and MBAs demanded.

It was released and universally criticized. So Plex’s team thought long and hard about that user feedback - ok, ok, sorry, I couldn’t make it without laughing. They changed nothing and pushed forward and now it hit Roku, with no way to decline or roll back.

How long ago? Because it looks the MBAs are in charge now.

“Pie fights”

Sorry, I thought the joke was implicit in your question, but the analog to “Lemmites” is “Piefites” which I think is just fine because say it out loud.

To be honest, the poster is “SPU,” so this is probably 90% to promote the site. (Not that I really care that much in this case, I like South Park and think episodes that have Muhammad in them should still be available despite religious extremists being upset.)

Or more specifically, we are ashamed when we can’t afford things we need. We are saturated by right-wing propaganda that says if you don’t succeed, it’s your fault. So, like abuse victims, we internalize the shame of what is done to us.

It’s a message tailored so we don’t question the rich, and as an added benefit to them, trains the poor to not seek government systemic solutions to the inequality that creates their poverty.

I hear these justifications a lot, but the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises.

The value of the archival data that can be affected by deleting or editing is almost entirely only user-accessed value. Reddit isn’t harmed at all from the edits. It primarily needs active regular users to improve its stock value. Alternatively, it can sell archival data for AI training.

Editing old comments removes neither value source from Reddit. You moved away from it so deprived it of both the material value of new comments and the statistical value of being an active user. Reddit also assuredly has saved data from before the API issue and can likely spot and clean the mass edits to sell the data from training purposes.

Conversely, the value to users and society is high. So many solutions to problems that are gone forever. The Internet is decaying already and it gets harder to find useful information, and those leaving decided to just burn down a library of Alexandria.

It’s their - and your - right, sure. They’re by definition done on comments the user owns. But this is just punching desperate Internet users in the face hoping it gives Reddit a bloody nose.

Yeah, this post started as a reassurance that Tailscale wouldn’t enshittify. But it turned out to just be an argument about how to avoid enshittification that boiled down to two principles:

1. You shouldn’t make your product worse because it’ll eventually harm the company; and
2. Founders are magic and need to never turn over control of the company to others (be it new CEOs or VC) to resist enshittification.

Both are partially right and partially wrong.

For #1: Yes, making your product worse eventually harms the company. No, you can’t expect CEOs to accept that as a reason to not make their product worse because even if it harms the company, short-term incentives that lead to enshittification are eventually going to become irresistible. His comment about reaching “zen” with leveled growth and profit will never stop VCs from calling in demands and favors.

For #2: Yes, founders typically “get it” more than their VC- or failure-initiated replacements. No, that doesn’t mean founders are uniquely resistant to enshittification. This is your point too, and it’s why I don’t believe this person - they lose credibility here because they don’t acknowledge they aren’t special. Every tech bro out there thinks they’ve cracked the code to permanent tech hegemony. That exceptionalist thinking turns into enshittification, since the product-worsening or overcharging is easier to justify as temporary/necessary/not-a-big-deal (until it isn’t).

And all of this doesn’t explain why Tailscale specifically gets immunity if the principles are true.

So interesting post, and a lot more self-awareness than most founders which is still a little reassuring, but a lot of warning signs too.

Edit: clarity

I think civilization is probably just ending after these last few generations, frankly.

Probably for the best…

Don’t forget to bathe in raw sewage.

Yes, I opt out. The point of the scan is to (1) build a thorough database (although DOGE probably already did that, we just haven’t found out yet), and (2) to accustom you to your identity not belonging to you.

The second point is the real point of opting out - as soon as nearly nobody opts out, and they’ve made headway on a database, it will no longer be optional. Opting out in that sense is the only vote you’re going to get to cast against it.

I mean, I know it’s a meme, so what. But before getting the pitchforks out: does anyone have a link to Henry Cavill saying this? Just curious.

I searched and it’s all memes and reaction videos. Maybe true, maybe true but sarcastic, or maybe false. My guess is it has all the making of a quote that nobody fact checks because it’s too good for engagement.

The Xitter post cheering the speech caught my attention, so I clicked through to the X user, “iAnonPatriot” and just have to say, wow.

It starts off with his bio image being literal hands goatse’ing through the virtual Matrix grid, and it only gets worse from that level of basic. Just a red-pill Nazi fever dream in feed form. 610K followers.

Videos of protestors getting abused are his favorite, apparently. One top one is police firing gas into apparently peaceful protestors. The protestor kicks it back, walks back and is just standing there doing nothing threatening, and then apparently gets shot with a rubber(?) bullet and lies motionless for a moment before someone picks him up and he walks off. The caption this guy gave is “HOLY SH*T Perfect shot… 🤣🤣🤣”. Anti-LGBTQ posts feature as well. General concentrated bile into a convenient feed.

So I guess this “influencer” is what Gen Z is getting fed by algorithms and told is normal day-in and day-out?

I suppose my post came off demeaning, but whether you’re homeless and excluded from access to basic human necessities, or a white collar office worker who is having a very bad digestive moment, there are defensible reasons why this may happen. That said, where there’s a choice: I think pooping in the unpopulated far corner of the subway platform is preferable if at all possible. That’s just like, my opinion, man.