Sway

Stupid is as stupid does.

It’s like someone took a bunch of Republican grievance talking points and tossed it into a big nonsensical word salad of fear mongering.

Listening to him is to hear the sound of dementia.

Acting normal for 3 minutes would be a record for Trump.

Yeah, I mean I wouldn’t necessarily attribute it to someone buying such a specific type of tech, but in many other hobbies it wouldn’t be unusual

I think there are two types of people you could consider in this scenario.

The first being an individual who has a genuine interest in a hobby, they research what gear would be the best for what they want to do, and then puts in the work to gain expertise.

The second type is where I think the derision is focused. These are the people who walk into a store, and either ask for the top of the line gear or just buy whatever is the most expensive, without putting any thought into it, and don’t really care about the hobby. In other words, the hobby is performative, and the gear becomes a status symbol.

I don’t have any ill will towards someone buying the best gear for their needs, regardless of skill level, but if you’re just doing it for show, I think that’s fair game for mockery.

The opulent newb.

Yeah, everyone knows you have to at least say it in a funny way while waving a stick around.

Elon’s statements are the verbal equivalent of getting drunk and vomitting on a wall. Stuff comes up that you never expected to see, it creates a huge mess, and whatever sticks, sticks.

My wife’s childhood cat was really old when she finally came to live with us in one of our rental places we lived while I was still doing grad studies. We used to close the door bc it was the one room with semi functioning AC, and during the summer we could kind of keep the room a decent temp if we kept the door closed. Anyway, the poor kitty would scratch the door and meow to be let in, and would not stop until we did (she would of course wait until we had fallen asleep first). Anyway, eventually we figured fans and an open widow were easier than being kept awake all night, so the door stayed open. That’s when she started the fun new habit of 2am hairballs while sleeping between our heads…

Any echo chamber can produce illusory truth effect. Repeated exposure to misinformation can result in a person failing to identify it as a lie, and begin to register it as fact and the lie gets amplified.

They view the show as a documentary, not a comedy.

Well it was about that time when I noticed that Clarence Thomas was about 8 stories tall and not a Supreme Court Judge after all, but the Lochness monster!

When tech companies say they want to “democratize” they typically mean they are making a service more widely available to the consumer. The democracy bit is that the consumer “votes” with their wallet. A notable early adopter was Amazon, and I would hardly think that the public, today, see that organization as a paragon of virtue. So, in this sense of the word we’re somewhat failing ourselves here.

In the context you present, the companies themselves become little democracies internally. This sounds nice but would ultimately lead to chaos and ruin for those companies. I think this would lead to highly unstable, unprofitable businesses that no investor would ever give money to, or at least not expect any returns from.

Furthermore, I don’t necessarily think it would benefit the consumer in the end. Maybe the employees mostly vote to have a good solid ethical company, or maybe they vote in their own best interests to bring home higher wages and/or just keep their jobs safe. One could argue we just witnessed one such example of this with the recent OpenAI debacle with Sam Altman. Board fired him for potentially going against the stated charter of the company (one that has an ethical basis of essentially putting the security and well being of humanity above all else), at the risk of destroying an $87billion company, yet the employees staged a mutiny forcing the board to reinstate him.

But I digress. At the end of the day I think the most we can ever really expect from companies is that they will, inevitably, find new and creative ways to extract ever increasing amounts of money from us, until such time that we simply cease giving it to them.

Edit: spelling.

Yeah, I know. Best I could do was ask for a vengeful looking celestial charlie chaplin.

Stupid ai and it’s content warnings. Had to go with a vengeful celestial charlie chaplin and edit the moustache down a little.