Allowing us to drive much longer. Once self-driving cars are common and assuming our wider civilization doesn't collapse for a laundry list of reasons then insurance companies are going to make it prohibitively expensive for you to be able to take your car off self-driving mode.

A self-driving car will follow every rule to the letter and it will refuse to speed.

I do wonder if you will see higher speed limits though. Most speed limits are set intentionally low with the understanding that everyone is going to go 10 mph over.

Hell I had to do a long drive today and it been a while since I did a really long one so I was driving slower than usual to be careful but found I was still 10 over while people were passing me on the freeway

I don't blame you. It's a lot. To be honest, I got under-stim boredom halfway through listening to my own inner monologue as I typed it. And I couldn't be bothered to do significant editorial review because I wanted to hit that Submit button as fast as I could to get the hit and speed my way to the next hit.

Try simultaneously binging a shiny-new-and-then-cancelled Hulumazonflix series in order to make my comment neurochemically tolerable (barely). If that doesn't work, binge harder or scroll harder.

Like you.

I don't normally directly insult people but you are either extremely stupid, extremely evil or both.

I'm going to lose here now because I'm going to explain and as God man Reagan told us if you're explaining you are losing, praise be to Reagan praise be to Trump.

So the person question collected data from various sources and summarize them into reports. These reports would periodically need to be corrected because the underlying data was less than perfect because in a country of 340 million people believe it or not it's hard to get a read on what individuals are doing.

This is all extremely well known and well understood. The data was not bad and the data was extremely consistent. That meant that businesses could make good decisions using the data because although it often needed correction for accuracy the amounts being corrected by and when they would be corrected were extremely consistent.

However that consistency is going to consistently show the economy tanking come October because that's when the effects of Trump's national sales tax hit us like the list of an angry fat smelly God who has senility and a bruise on his and because he's on the verge of dying and being kept alive by hundreds of millions of dollars worth of medical science...

October is special because that is approximately when the stocks of things companies bought to get through until Trump gave up on his trade war and national sales tax run out.


Except he's not president because guys like you willingly consume right-wing extremist propaganda and spout bullshit you know nothing about that you picked up off of oan or Fox News or whatever rat hole on YouTube you found those talking points, assuming you're not just a bot because there is somebody running bots on this forum. Although they're pretty amateurish so I can't quite tell if you are or aren't.

By the way I'm not really addressing you. I'm addressing people fooled by you in the believing those talking points.

Do those people I say, kiss your retirements goodbye. All that money you have saved up and all that value in your house and equity and everything. All of it is going to get taken away.

We have 2,000 people in this country close enough to being trillionaires that if they can just get their hand grubby little hands on some more money they can be trillionaires.

But the economy isn't growing fast enough for that to work.

What that means is the only way they can get what they want before they age out and die is by taking it from YOU.

If you numbnuts want to sell your property and give the money to Trump you go ahead but stop dragging me into it.

Thanks, I needed a good laugh.

Russia is way past "partisan gap". They tried that. Didn't work. The left wing didn't bite.

You can get sales figures for bookstores from their SEC filings. a quick Google shows library traffic is easy to find too and it's been declining. I don't think I need to remind everyone to State a bookstores in America.

Don't think it's that it was them being lazy I think it's that the stuff you are talking about is already known so they wanted to do a proper survey.

There is nothing wrong with a self-reporting survey as long as your data set is large enough and representative enough. I haven't read the study though so not sure how good this one is. But again given what we know about the state of bookstores and libraries it's likely to be correct.

When Tim pool got outed as a Russian asset. Tucker Carlson too but I mean at that point we already knew it was just getting formalized.

And there were a couple dozen other popular right wing YouTubers and pundits who got caught taking hundreds of thousands of dollars directly from Russia State media without disclosing it.

I'm not really calling out right wing hypocrisy because the right wing is completely incapable of the emotions of shame and self-awareness that are associated with hypocrisy.

I mostly just wanted to remind everyone that right wing media is a Russian state-owned operation and if you are consuming it you are consuming media that is an enemy of your country. Might as well just boot up some old Soviet TV at that point.

Every time I see a flood of press attacking the Democrat party I can be sure the Republican party just did something especially nasty.

The hard part is there is so much nastiness right now I can't pick one. There's the fake Epstein file release where they just released a bunch of files everyone already had and acted like everything is good. There is the attempts to distract from the big beautiful bill by renaming it. There is Trump's rapidly declining health and clear signs of senality that even our news media can't sane wash ..

And things are moving so fast it's possible I missed something.

Engagement farming doesn't merely sell advertisement.
It habituates cognition to a higher base level of engagement-stimulus, and THAT part works regardless of whether you eventually click through or buy a product. Simply seeing a clickbait headline stimulates the brain even if your higher-level critical thinking recognizes the bait and reminds you not to click the link. Your reaction of eyeroll, disdain, disgust, annoyance as you scroll past it is still a state of neuro-endocrine excitement. And every public and private experience is now being reshaped around engagement.

You simply cannot sustain that throughout entire narratives in long-form novels. If everything is the most important thing, then no thing is important. Narratives need dynamic range. The longer the narrative, the larger the range.

The movie "Run, Lola, Run" was a deliberate exercise in maintaining the constant tension of narrative excitement. But even that film only worked because it was an outlier within a storytelling medium with a wide range of immediacy levels. if every film was at that same intensity, the collective audience would become less interested in film as a medium, even if they couldn't explicitly explain why. It's why narrative arcs like the MCU can't perpetually dominate the field. You can only escalate the "existential threat to the country planet galaxy universe" so far before you escalate yourself into a corner.

You either have to balance the excitement with tedious characterization backstory or throwaway "monster of the week" episodes to preserve the value of the single long-form payoff, or you have to abandon the single long format buildup and shift toward a series of constant lower-level hits which must necessarily be kept short and narratively isolated from each other to preserve their punch.

In this unacknowledged global epidemic of tech-caused dopamine tolerance, we have chosen the latter.
The activity hasn't changed, but the functional payoff of the activity has. It's not that people are reading less, it's that what they are reading is less durable. It has to be, in order to maintain the stim level of each short snippet.

The article says "reading for fun is plummeting". Well, when people scroll 8,000 words on their socials, are they not reading for fun? I'll answer my own question -- no, we are not, because our cognition is being reprogrammed on a massive scale. The nature of "fun" has changed from more of a satisfaction-completion model to a stimulation-maintenance model. Ask yourself whether you ever feel satisfied or fulfilled at the end of the night after interstitially side-scrolling your feeds for two hours. Have you finished it? Do you ever get to any sort of end of the feed and feel that "Ahhhh.... now I see how it all came together" cognitive payoff you used to get from finishing a novel? Even when you stop scrolling, is it because you have reached fulfillment and enrichment, or is it simply because the time has come to force yourself to darken the screen and go to sleep just so you can make it through another day of work?

Stories like this one always result in people upping initiatives to push books on kids, as if access to books is still as rare and challenging and elitist as it was in 1897. In fact, the supply/access to books in 2025 is so pervasive that the monetary value of individual books is approaching zero. Which is why we now have hundreds of thousands of people with a "Little Free Library" in their front yard or church lawn or local park where they literally give millions of books away for free to anyone who wants one.

But access is not the cause of this story. If "reading for fun" is plummeting, it isn't because people are having a hard time finding books, it's because people are having a hard time reading books, because it simply isn't fun anymore. The cognitive nature of "fun" has changed, so when our brains are looking around the local environment for sources of "fun", the "fun" provided by long-form reading is being compared to this new level of "fun" which is immediate and infinite and probably already in your hand/pocket right now.

As Alanis Morrissette sang: "I've got one hand on my cellphone, and the other one is scrolling my cellphone screen."

It's dopamine all the way down.

Especially kids. My kid had orders of magnitude more homework than I did. And when they went to college it was just nuts.

businesses don't want to train and they have deep pockets so they went to the government and they took over the school boards and they changed things. They basically added a ton of on the job style training to college education.

They didn't want to pay for that at the high school level so they just heaped on tons of homework.

I've said this before but when my kid was in high school it was not uncommon for me to get up to go piss at midnight and find them still doing homework. Parents complained and in their senior year it backed off a little bit but just a little bit.

That's one of the defining aspects of my life. Big business and Rich assholes will make my life a fuck of a lot worse and me and everybody complains and they back off a little but when they're done we're worse off because we never get back what we lost.

They specialize in two things. Doxing gay and trans people and trying to encourage them to commit suicide. So it's absolutely not going to fly having a kiwi farms user hand out their actual identity.

This is one of those cases where the worst sort of person is doing something that needs to be done. But for kiwi farms I have genuine mixed emotions because they are hiding behind anonymity to commit actual crimes.

I suppose it's possible they cleaned up their act a little bit because they were taken offline when even the cdns who run the white supremacists wouldn't touch them because of the legal liability. But either way that's the whole point of going to kiwi farms so I'm not sure what else they would do.

4chan has problems but there is at least a community there that aren't just cruel psychopaths. Honestly if the owner wasn't such an ass wipe I think the form would be pretty nice.

The deep tragedy here is -- no one can sue the person who trained the bot to become a suicide coach, because that person is no longer alive.

"AI" in its current form is a mirror. The more you interact with it, the more it becomes you. You use your words to incrementally, continuously coach it to display on your screen more words which could be your words and thoughts. This person took a mirror and stared into his Self-abyss so attentively that his abyss began staring right back into him, and talking to him.

That hurts, it's awful and fragile, and I sympathize with the parents who are trying to make the world provide them with closure for a wound which - in my experience - is fundamentally impervious to closure. Over time your grief dulls or the questioning and guilt becomes a manageable part of you. It's like a corneal defect, or that splattered bug on the edge of your windscreen -- never completely invisible, hovering just out of conscious thought in your emotional periphery, but can fill your field of vision quickly if something causes you to turn and look at it again.

The suicide of a loved one is a violently chaotic shredding of the fabric of your world.
There is no closure. No resolution.
Any hope of resolution died when they did.
You will carry that jagged scar for the rest of your life.

They promoted line workers to management, kept them doing line work, and now they're old enough they want to fire them but didn't want to get sued for age discrimination.

They learned the trick from IBM

They're systematically taking control of all available information sources.

Elevenity billion dollars a year. Or one half the cost of a Trump Golden thrown (praise Trump)

But I read enough to get the gist. Deforestation means higher temps and that means people who can't afford ac get sick and die.

The numbers are probably correct. It wouldn't be hard to compare great strokes from before the deforestation to now.

Heck, parts of India are going to be unlivable soon.