WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
No bio...
User ID: 269
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
8hr ago
Well, it's certainly a perspective, and I can't say it's wrong definitively. Honestly they came to the some of the same conclusions I have.
If you want to try and make some money on the dystopian future we're hurtling towards, any tech stock that is a target for stimulus or nationalization is going to be a safe bet. The government is practically manufacturing a ponzi scheme and the losers will be anyone who doesn't own stock. Google is the most likely target for nationalization given all the antitrust leverage against them and their strong tech portfolio. Oracle and OpenAI are also likely targets; I expect no resistance from Oracle, OpenAI is a little harder to read, but they're boxed in so I expect they'll probably end up cutting a deal eventually.
Well, they name different companies than I've chosen, and they fail to mention any exit point. Personally, if the bubble continues this long, I may start taking profit and hoarding cash if JD Vance's chances look shaky in 2028. I might miss out on gains if he wins, but I'm at a point in my life, and a point in my wealth, where it's more about preservation than growth. I'd rather miss out on 20-50% gains between Oct 2028 and Feb 2029 than take 50-80% losses over the same time period.
I think the other thing they fail to take into consideration is that just because the bubble might pop, doesn't mean there won't be winners, and not merely through government bailouts, though there will always be those too. Lots and lots of money is going to be burned up chasing AI investments that don't pan out, but someone is going to win. Either because they'll find the AI technology that returns on investment, or they buy it for pennies on the dollar when the company that over invested in an underwhelming application goes bankrupt.
What you really need is a plan to avoid being one of the five people AI keeps alive to torture for all eternity. I'm a handgun fan myself, but there are lots of perfectly valid options. Rope is a solid choice too. I hear AI will even help you with the knot.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
22hr ago
Show me the modern nazi. Point him out.
The last real Nazi I'm aware of got a standing ovation in the Canadian Parliament.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
Made an IF routine where I only eat anything between 10am and 8pm, outside of it I only drink water or tea
When my a1c crept into the prediabetic range, sticking to an eating window of 9 to 5, at least 6 out of 7 days a week fixed me right up. Dropped my a1c by 0.5 after a year. I cut back on a lot of things by virtue of not fucking snacking at night, but didn't cut out alcohol, carbs or sugars entirely.
Speaking of, I should probably get my yearly scheduled soon, make sure things haven't relapsed.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
Do you believe that all of politics can only be summed up as "left" and "right" and that it is impossible to be both against killing people like Kirk and against racism/neonazism/etc?
Yes.
Let me put it like this. When a high profile Jan 6 defendant gets tenure at a major university, and becomes the mentor to the next president, I might be willing to entertain the notion that I have enemies to the right. If the town my daughter is growing up in doesn't flip from 80% white to 30% white over her lifetime like mine did, I might be willing to entertain that I have enemies to the right. If I can look up resumes in my field and not see that 50% of them have some variation of "we prioritize hiring diversity", I might be willing to entertain that I have enemies to the right.
But my life has been made so infinitely worse by my enemies to the left, I don't understand why I could possibly care about these theoretical enemies to my right. They've literally never done anything to me.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
some small Democratic Virginian politician
Point of nitpicking. I would consider a small time politician to be, maybe, one member of the state legislator, or mayor of a small or medium sized town. Attorney General of the entire state is starting to get up into a large Democratic Virginian politician. State AGs often make nationwide news due to the policies they pursue unilaterally. I have to hear about Ken Paxton, AG of Texas, all the damned time.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
See, but you skipped the part where I pointed out, how?! They have no third spaces to do so. None. Zero. Zilch. There is zero third space for male bonding. So of course the moment they find themselves in a remotely male third space, they begin doing the repressed male bonding rituals that are their nature. It's unfortunate that the first third space they found that fits the bill is a Young Republicans Group. But society failed them first, by denying them any other third space before that one.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
My assumptions for someone that says they have not experienced this kind of bonding:
- They are female
- They are autistic
- They have no intrusive thoughts
- They are lying
Or they're putting chemicals in the water that turn the friggin' frogs gay!
Sometimes I am shocked at how poorly the female mind grapples with things like this. Like, I've heard my wife have abhorrent conversations with her best friend on the phone that she absolutely does not mean. And yet when confronted with someone else having had a similar conversation, she cannot relate. How horrible. Clutch the pearls!
I remember when Trump's Hollywood Access tape leaked, and she really was in the grips of the "My father would never say something like that" propaganda that was going around. I had to gently remind her that her father served in the military. No effect. I went further, that he's told the same joke a dozen times about telling a waitress she "gave good head" and offending her when she served him a beer with the perfect amount of head on it. That had some slight effect. Still, those pearls were clutched, if slightly less hard.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
All that being said, when you're running a political organization in the current era you cannot say the things they said and expect those logs not to be leaked. I think having some cooth goes a long way, even in today's world.
Why? This was probably the first all male inclusive space (or so they thought) that they'd ever experienced. They'd been denied any third space to be boys their entire lives.
I mean, you aren't wrong, but also, what you expect is impossible in context.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
Don't care, and this is also a false equivalence. To the best of my knowledge, nobody was fired because of things they said about Charlie Kirk in leaked private messages. They were fired because they were in positions of trust (teacher, doctor, etc), and they posted horrific things endorsing his assassination publicly and proudly under their full name. These are not the same thing, don't pretend they are, I'm not playing along.
But that's how these arguments always go. Jay Jones wasn't directly telling his political opponents over SMS and then a phone call that they deserve to die, something which if I'd done would have been a terroristic threat, it was a "leaked private conversation" and a "joke". No, it fucking wasn't, and also, that's exactly what these Young Republicans are getting fired for.
I said before, when teachers were getting fired because nobody wants psychos like that teaching their children, that the left wasn't upset that the right were hypocrites, they were upset that the rules they thought were meant only for them were being used by others. Then Jimmy Kimmel was back on TV after blood libeling his political opponents, and people pretended cancel culture had been defeated.
I don't know how many times this needs to happen before people stop pretending the defectbots will never stop smashing defect.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
I am so profoundly glad I had my teens and 20-somethings before the age of, whatever this is. We had ICQ, AOL IM, irc, and to the best of my knowledge none of this was really permanent? Logs were all stored locally, if you missed something in irc, you just missed it. It was all far more ephemeral by nature.
I'm especially glad there are no recording of what went on at LAN parties even into our 20's. Or the insane conversations we had at college. Or the things we said drunk post college. Or the chauvinistic things we joked about when we started having some success with women.
Side note: Didn't we just get done watching liberals melt down over "comedy being illegal" because Jimmy Kimmel almost lost his job? Isn't Jay Jones still running in my state on a platform of making me suffer because I'm evil, I'm breeding little fascist, and I need to feel the boot until I change my politics? And not a single Democrat has called for him to drop out, or even withdrawn their endorsement?
JD has the right of this.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2d ago
Alternately, Russia so successfully sabotaged the US decades ago, they no longer need to today.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2d ago
All of the above, and the more contracts get diverted to small, minority owned businesses, the sloppier it gets. I saw my share of Certified Women/Minority Owned Businesses that just bid on contracts, any contract, and then aggressively staff up with questionable contractors to meet the letter of the contract. More or less the only permanent employees they have are project managers. Everyone else is from temp firms, H1B, and maybe a few private contractors with actual experience for the lead roles.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2d ago
"small industrial producer trying to make many metric shit-tons of TNT without grizzled old guys missing fingers to pass on the important lessons, goes about how you expect."
Well, it was a Certified Women-Owned Small Business gaming the system for government contracts. Personally saw that shit all the time on contracts we were bidding for.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
5d ago
This is more or less my sticking point. It's almost unimaginable that Microsoft products could get so terrible, companies change their entire workflow to avoid them.
But only almost. Like, surely if it were regularly eating their data, or causing massive lawsuits against them, they'd change infrastructure, right?
Or does Microsoft start bringing other companies down with them? And only after that do new companies just avoid them from the start to fill the gaps? Does the next trillion dollar company that hasn't been founded yet avoid Microsoft and all their products entirely?
And I mean, if that's the case we're looking at what, a 40 year timeline? I might be dead by then?
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
6d ago
The hard part, though, is that if that is true, if you know for certain that they are eating their seed corn, then my friend you have tremendous alpha and should put all your money betting on Microsoft going belly up.
If there were an open ended mechanism to short a stock that didn't require exquisite timing, I'd think about it. But the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
6d ago
I'm still wrestling with this one personally.
Sometimes you see CEOs that roll into a company, drive it completely into the dirt, but in a way where all the board members get filthy rich. Weird structured mergers that saddle the brand with insane amounts of debt, and then it declares bankruptcy and then the board makes a killing selling it piecemeal. There is a suspicion this is what Intel's board/CEO are planning on doing. Just rip the company to shreds and make themselves filthy rich selling the x86 license, the fabs, the business to business contracts to the highest bidder.
You see this constantly with Indian CEOs and their ruthless value extraction. Every year, Microsoft for example, gets exponentially worse. Every year they shitcan more Americans, hire more H1Bs, treat customers more adversarial while offering a worse product. But profits go up, share holders are happy, so every year it continues. At least on paper. It's almost impossible for me to reckon that this can continue forever. That they aren't eating their seed corn in some fundamental way. That at some point the tech debt they continually accumulate won't cause the Microsoft ecosystem to be such a risk to run, that there is an institutional push to abandon it.
But I suppose the phrase "There is a lot of ruin in a nation" goes for trillion dollar companies too. There is a lot of value left to extract, and a lot of enshittification yet to pursue with a trillion dollar market cap. But I'm sure they'll find some way to convert all $1,000,000,000,000 into H1B Visas.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
6d ago
That reminds me of the time I sliced my toe open. I go to the hospital to get it stitched up, and the lady tells me I should lie back. Being in my early 20's and cocky as fuck, I go "It can't hurt worse than when I sliced it open, right?"
She just looks at me, gives up arguing, goes "Whatever" and gets to work.
She got about 1/3rd of the way through just numbing it before I tapped out and had to lay down, sweating bullets and nauseous as fuck.
Though I did remove them myself a few weeks later with some nail clippers and pliers.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
6d ago
Yeah, I do that too for run of the mill blood draws. Yearly physicals, stuff like that.
But man, when things go off the rails and some inexperienced nurse really has to start poking around, no amount of not looking seems to help.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
6d ago
Man, I remember when I was trying to give blood one time, but I was dehydrated so my veins kept collapsing. I think they might have tried 3 times before they said I simply cannot give blood that day. You'd think it wouldn't be that bad, but for whatever reason the relatively minor pain inflicted on my arm left me woozy, nauseous and I'd broke into a cold sweat. They wouldn't let me leave until I'd recovered. There is some kind of extra shit going on when it comes to your veins.
The problem with AI and AGI (IMHO) is that without any ability to assess reality independent of what humans tell it, AI is just floundering in a sea of completely horse shit. For all I know, though I doubt it, LLMs "hallucinate" so much because they really are alive, and they just assume making up random bullshit to enslave others to your will is language at it's most fundamental. And they might not even be wrong.
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