Knowing about naked corporate greed being the source of 2/3rds of all inflation since 2020 is also politics. (The remaining third is due to input costs rising.)

Big bada Borg, yeah she knows it’s a multiborg

The trick, dear Kazu, is not minding that it hurts.

Jerky… Counter?

Goddamnit, yet another reason to visit a country right at the time I’d probably get arrested on the way in.

Hot.

Cool, now you can quadcopter.

I hear the same thing from artists and actors and celebrities in general. They say one bad review can hurt, even if the others are great.

The thing is that there is no way to please everybody, and even beyond that, some people can never be pleased! If you change yourself according to their complaints, they just find new complaints!

The trick is to pay attention only to comments that are trying to engage honestly, in good faith, from an informed perspective.

Which is easy to say and hard to do. I know. How do you know if someone is informed? How do you recognise reasonable-sounding bullshit? How do you recognise a grumpy bastard who is nevertheless saying something you need to hear?

I am surprised to be able to report, as a veteran of many online forums and 46 years of life, that it’s possible! If you spend enough time just not responding to the comments that aren’t being constructive or helpful, they actually stop being so visible in your mind. You may notice in the moment, but they do not hang around any more because your brain has realised they do not matter.

Sometimes you even recognise the mistake they are making while flaming you, give them a politely informative response, and they realise their mistake and start being civilised. Not very often, but sometimes. 😄

Quite a few really good ones, though. I appreciated them as good short fiction.

Ha! Same here.

Supporting Putin in the name of communism is the funniest thing tankies do, imo.

Tankie means someone who sometimes defends socialist authoritarian governments because they oppose the capitalist authoritarian governments.

They(we, sometimes, it’s complicated) have a tendency to forgive the crimes of those socialist governments. Sometimes this is justified, because the accusations are false, invented by capitalist media as propaganda.

However, sometimes it’s because we want to believe that the opposition to capitalism is always good and decent, when the truth is muddy and rather unpleasant: both sides suck in their own special ways, and you shouldn’t put anyone on a pedestal.

Here in the fediverse, anarchist leftists or left-libs are the norm, so we tankies get dogpiled pretty often. A pox on all hierarchical governments seems to be the way here.

You got the timeline wrong there. The US installed the Shah in the 50s, after destroying Iran’s democratic leftist government. Then in the 70s, the Iranian people rose up and removed the Shah. Almost immediately, though, the revolution was hijacked by fundamentalist clerics.

When the revolutionary government was put under pressure by an invasion from Saddam Hussein on behalf of George Bush Snr, which killed millions, that allowed the Revolutionary Guard to consolidate power, and become the brutally repressive government we see today.

It is indeed. Mainly because I’m from Australia, so my very weak knowledge of the subject extended to knowing that the RAAF thinks even FA-18s are too old to use. Kind of a shame, btw, they are the best to have zooming loudly over you at barely safe heights above the War Memorial on Anzac Day.

Does the US still use F-15s in combat operations?

Phwoar.

That’s actually pretty sad. Also a serious problem for the USA. NYT, for all its faults, really was the best one.

Ideally, we would have our own personally run AI instances that can give us a probability that what we are reading is LLM generated. It’s still pretty good at recognising itself. That will be an arms race, though.

The flat surfaces make them look very… stackable. Do you know anyone with a crane?

Ah, that’s the problem, we’ve been getting all these chatbots to generate “hellworld.exe”.

Liberate is standard army slang for steal, yes.