If you want to go back in time and prevent the Holocaust specifically, your time would be better well spent killing Henry Ford or Arthur de Gobineau or Martin Luther. Mass murder of Jews in Europe had been common place for centuries. It was a sentiment the Nazis capitalized on, not one they invented.

Similarly, if you wanted to deter shape of European politics that lead to the World Wars, temporal assassination of Bismark or Napoleon III would be far more effective. Those battle lines had been drawn well in advance of 1932.

Homelander jerking off on top of a skyscraper.

They won’t because they’re controlled opposition. A release valve for people to flock to when the GOP grows too difficult to render palatable to the public at-large. Dem Leadership simply waits to absorb discontent. They don’t function as an organized party.

The only role they do fill is to cast dispersion on any kind of third-party coalition building.

there should really be more pushback on them rebranding LLMs as AI.

That’s because the target of the language is the know-nothing speculative investor class. The distinction doesn’t matter to us because we’re not being sold a service, we’re being packaged as a product.

The increasingly-impossible-to-opt-out-of nature of LLMs/AIs illustrates as much. We’re getting force-fed a “free” service that’s fundamentally worse than what came before it, because its an extractive service.

the things it gets wrong are significant enough that no sane individual should rely on anything that AI is involved with making/running

The fundamental use-cases for AI are almost never customer oriented, either. You don’t see these tools deployed to reduce wait times or improve authentication or approve access, because the people who deploy them don’t actually trust them to do positive scope client interactions. What you see them doing is robo-calls, front-line customer service, claims denials, and (in the bleakest use cases) military targeting operations. Instances where efficiencies of scale accrue to the operator and an error/problems rebounds to the target of the service rather than the vendor.

People are effectively getting wowed by a glorified ELIZA chat bot.

An ELIZA chatbot that double-processes your credit card and then keeps denying you a refund when you manually catch and report it.

“Oh but I couldn’t do anything about it!” is the modern Democratic battle cry.

Just look at the fucking Gaza Genocide. Biden dithers for 13 months on a deal that’s nearly identical to the one Trump inevitably prompted. Trump immediately gets what he wants by putting the slightest pressure on Netanyahu, because he recognizes that this conflict is holding up initiatives his party wants (namely Saudi recognition of Israel into the Middle Eastern trading cartels).

All those people screaming about how “Trump Will Be Worse! You stupid Palestinian Midwesterners deserve the genocide your families will get for not supporting Haris!” and the bombs stop the day Trump takes office. How are these people going to respond to the next Democrat who runs for office, I wonder?

You can argue with a philosopher over that. But certain historical events can be over-determined, with enough causal factors prompting them that a given outcome is functionally inevitable.

UBI is one way to do it, but even direct provision is fine.

UBI is inefficient in a monopoly controlled distribution system, because monopolists will raise prices to absorb the UBI rather than expanding capacity to meet the economic demand. The appeal of direct provisioning is the elimination of waste. You don’t have production targeted to the maximal price point, you have it targeted to the social demand.

Not many millionaires are going to go down to the depot every month and get their government-issued bag of rice, even if they could if they wanted.

One of the first rules of being a millionaire is to never spend a penny more than you need to. Idk if they’ll go down themselves, but you can guarantee every one of their staff and contracting crew will be pulling out their allotment just so the boss doesn’t have to cover this as an expense.

Even within existing capitalist societies, we can provide for the basics of life for everyone.

The fundamental problem with capitalist structures of society is that people in it are going to pursue passive income wherever they can. Staples, being a socially necessary good, are an excellent source of passive income because they’ve got inelastic demand. You can keep raising the prices on these goods and people won’t stop buying them. Middlemen and speculators thrive in this kind of economic environment, unless regulators or public brokers exist to cap their profit-seeking.

Eggs are expensive because consolidated industrial farming has given us a denser population of birds vulnerable to increasingly virulent strains of bird flu.

We can have “cheap” eggs again if we (a) reduce our dependence on these enormous, unhygienic factory farms, (b) invest more on preventative care for farm animals, and © focus on a distribution chain that pursues individual human demand rather than maximal market price.

Obviously Trump won’t deliver on any of that. But cheap abundant foodstuffs aren’t beyond our capacity as a domestic economy. Its just that exorbitantly priced staples fulfill an investor demand rather than a consumer demand.

The attitude is the product of material conditions. This isn’t some question of individualist choice but of systematic control.

A great deal of the modernization of finance and policy enforcement has been about pre-enforcement. You get your IRS money taken out before it hits your paycheck. You don’t speed in a neighborhood with speed bumps because it immediately fucks up your car. Your ability to access your office space or bank account or the electricity/water that goes into your home even the ability to turn on newer models of car is predicated on a permission slip that a third party can disable with a button click.

On the flip side, so much of our daily life is alienated from the other people that make our standard of living possible. I don’t know who works at my grocery store, much less who actually picks my fruit or bakes my bread or slaughters my beef. I don’t know who provides me with electricity or water. I don’t know who is on the other side of the teller window when it comes time to cash a check or pull out cash.

Participation is mandatory because the interfaces that allow us to interact with one another are gate-kept by remote and indifferent agents. Opting out of these systems is difficult and expensive. Reaching out to people to engage in collective action is onerous and awkward.

governments really don’t want people to understand they have that nuclear option and will do anything to prevent people from organizing for it.

Government administrators keep a short lease on their direct reports and underlings. Private sector administrators do, too. Organizing the people with their hands closest to the levers of power is incredibly difficult, while administrative replacement of these higher ranking bureaucrats is trivially easy.

At some level, what the Trump Admin is currently doing cuts so deep that he may actually sever his ability to impose his will on remote offices and local bureaucracies. If enough high ranking FBI admins or DOJ lawyers walk off the job, it just becomes impossible to command branches in far-flung states and territories.

But when he’s got guys like Peter Thiel and Jamie Damion in his back pocket, it may not matter. The ability to instantly fire, bankrupt, or imprison people anywhere in the country has a powerful chilling effect. The only people it doesn’t immediately threaten are the folks who have already lost too much and the folks who have managed to remove themselves from the domestic system entirely.

None of this is to say we shouldn’t organize and oppose this shit. But go in with eyes wide open. Don’t naively assume raw numbers matter in the face of a heavily automated administrative state.

That’s not intentional. It just happens when you run through a revolving door really fast.

You have to remember that Ryan Reynolds is 7’3"

Tried this trick. Almost immediately lost 40% of my charge capacity. Would not attempt again.