Emacs, with no helper key bindings. Vi advocates just don't understand the power of self-punishment available in emacs.

Some people think that companies doing all that for profit are fine and dandy, but it's evil and horrible when the government does it. Most of them are too stupid to put together that if companies here (USA) are doing it for profit, the government can pretty much have access to all of it anyway.

"We know nobody would choose this, so we're going to force it on them and hope nobody notices."

Remember when companies had to make something that people wanted to exchange money for? Instead of trying to dictate every aspect of life to people and then wondering why nobody loves them for it?

Pepperidge Farms would remember, but they were too busy trying to tell you you should remember, and buy more cookies.

Anybody else feeling a little queasy here? Yeesh.

They're trying to make sure the entire AI industry is so up in the rest of the economy's guts that when the crash comes the only choice the government(s) have is to throw money at them until they're whole. When the crash comes, it's going to be fun for about three minutes, and then we're going to start following after it, like passenger's a huge ship as it goes down, the draw of the down-flow will suck a whole hell of a lot of us down with it.

Not just our wages, though that's the beginning of the dream. The real dream is creating a perpetual profit machine for the owners while needing absolutely no actual humans, and no need for actual products or commodities involved. Just a bunch of digital bits floating this way and that, creating waves of profit for virtual shipments of nothing. It's a beautiful vision of the future if you're one of the folks directly involved in it. It's a dystopic nightmare that ends the illusion the general population ever had any value at all to the owner class and the politicians once and for all, leaving most of us to try to sort out how to live once the economy is completely separated from its need for us as employees or consumers.

This helps lead to adults that crave authoritarianism because they think some "parent" needs to solve the crises of living for them. There are those of us who have seen this coming since the "never tell a child no" trend started some thirty plus years ago, and have been wondering if society will wake up to the idea that raising children involves teaching them how to deal with reality, not just softening every blow until they move out, then wondering why they aren't equipped to handle living on their own.

I really don't think preventing people in college from getting a fair assessment is going to help this situation. For some individuals, not getting anything other than pass/no will stress them out because they won't know if they barely passed, or if they passed with flying colors. Maybe someone can twist this into something about equality, but I still think it's the wrong direction at the wrong point of life. These kids are going to graduate and wonder why their boss's in their first jobs are so mean to them for expecting something other than just barely skating by with minimum requirements sorta/kinda met. And everybody's gonna be confused as to why..

They were gonna make it 3D, but their moms told them they weren't sure how to hang 3D objects on their refrigerators.

We weren't ready for it. The information age required a level of collective intelligence that we may have been close to possessing at some point right before it kicked into full swing, but that intelligence was being intentionally lowered in the USA for certain, and likely a few other modern countries. We didn't need the world to lose their minds up-front to arrive where we are. We just needed enough to let the momentum build, to treat as lab monkeys to test the tech on, to perfect the invasive nature of it, the addictive qualities that make people enamored with it, and the capability to use that infatuation to start swaying public opinion. The lessons learned here were applied worldwide by appealing to sophistication, "Aren't you smart enough to be bettered by this amazing bit of shiny?"

And now, yes, it's mostly propaganda, lies used to manipulate public opinion dressed up as free thinking. "Look at your big brain, you're too smart to believe facts!" And entire countries falling to the sweep of technological thought replacement, that most are not just accepting, but paying for and actively pursuing.

I miss the early days of the net, when it seemed like we were connecting in new ways, finding out we could 'talk' with people all over the world, expand our knowledge through interaction, through sharing, through forging new relationships that would make the pen-pals in foreign lands of yesteryear seem quaint. And it all got turned into a giant clusterfuck of corporate greed and power-monger brain-shredding.

I used to think a lot about the changes my grandparents or great grandparents lived through. My grandpa lived through the transition from traveling and working the land via horse to tractors and cars, and by the end he was sitting at our computer every visit to check weather reports and crop trends, or researching his favorite historical subjects like Ancient Egyptian culture. And then I think about what changes I've lived through. From rotary phones and televisions in every living room to carry-along supercomputers that track us, report on us, and shovel ads at us everywhere we go. And cars that do the same. And corporations claiming ownership over the items we purchase outright from them after the sale. I don't think we're on a good path, and while I used to see exits along our path that didn't involve massive societal upheaval, those exits have been fewer and much further between every year.

I know some would want to ascribe this to some secret society pushing an individual agenda, but it looks pretty much like we're just letting it happen in increments and individual bad decisions that pile up over each other, creating a sweeping wave of bad that nobody seems to have control over, yet some seem to be quite pleased with the results until it turns against them.

You will fit the right wing narrative, or you are a troll. I've noticed the same thing.

If you told people forty years ago that people would pay a thousand dollars a pop every few years to carry around a surveillance device that was always listening, constantly sending their location to anyone snooping, and able to record anything via video or audio at a moment's notice and instantly broadcast it anywhere on the planet, they'd have had a similar reaction to what you're having to this story. Never underestimate a marketing sweep that captures the collective consciousness. Even better if they can convince the business world that these things are vital to productivity, like they did with smartphones. Imagine having a device that can nudge you awake every time the boss decides in the middle of the night that he's had a brainstorm that's going to change the world. There's more than a few C-suites that would salivate at that prospect.

Somewhere along the way these big tech companies decided that if data exists, they already own it, and it is wrong on an ethical level that anyone, anywhere, ever thought otherwise. Therefore, we are all just nodes in their data-store that they have not yet found a way to tap into and utilize. Submit, apply their shiny data-harvester, and STFU so they can monetize your thoughts and start trying to sort out how to shove ads into your dreams.

OH WAIT! NOT THOSE STATE'S RIGHTS!

I'm so sick of hypocrisy just being embedded into every single god damned fucking thing our government does. To the point when something like this happens, most of us just shrug it off, because they've successfully flooded the zone so much, we're fucking drowning in it. We either have to be continually depressed over what an absolute dogshit pile of failure we are as a country, or we have to learn how to ignore it, the way people in big cities eventually learn you can't say hello to every person you see or you'll be exhausted just walking to work. And the worst part is, the best thing we can hope for at this point is that we swing to the other party at the midterms, so that we can watch them drag-ass and pretend to prosecute some of the worst offenses, and do absolutely nothing to fix any of the actual damage that's been done so that the dipshit brigade voting public that can't stand to pay attention to it except for like a week before the election goes, "Hmm. Seems bad now. Go back other way."

We need real solutions, not more foot dragging nonsense followed by hysterical (as in insane) levels of corruption, followed by more foot dragging, followed by still more hysterical levels of corruption. And it doesn't seem like anyone has any clue how to reach for actual solutions. Even Bernie is a skipping record of talking points that will never, can never be achieved. And people are starting to beat the communist drum every time someone dares say maybe affordability should be a priority again. Pure insanity at every level.

We could tackle this problem by instilling decency into people from an early age. And before somebody decides I'm preaching religion, no, religion tends to do exactly the opposite of instilling decency, especially in the US. It tends to codify hate speech as an accepted reality, rather than a fee-fee that somebody isn't mature enough to set aside for the betterment of both others and themselves. We need to stop treating every situation as an excuse to start slinging hate. I know it's hard, especially when the current crop of politicians have been using hate as talking points for the last several decades, and some still try to pretend these are people we should look up to.

In general, we just need to start treating each other better. I know, reality says we won't, but it's not as impossible as the powers that be want us to think it is. Maybe we just ignore those idiots while they play their games and get back to being decent human beings? If they remain insistent enough, we can turn what little hate we have left on them, and stop using it to knock other people around that are just trying to live their own lives.

Honestly, what I'm watching as a GenXer that'll be retiring in about 13-15 years, is the collapse of most of my business supplied, government mandated retirement funds. 401ks will be absolutely smashed to oblivion by the stupidity we're watching happen right now. Social Security will eventually be saddled with some of the stupidity, as some government lackey will suggest the AI "rise" is the solution to the insolvency problem we see coming, most likely right before the AI bubble, now more resembling a world sized globe in and of itself, finally pops. I have other funds, and play those extremely conservatively, plus an ESOP where I work in a company that is about as far removed from tech as you can be and still exist as a business in this day and age that should cover enough for me to still retire on time, but only if I prepare to live like an absolute miser for the rest of my life. Granted, I'll be doing better than most thanks to that ESOP. I feel bad for the folks that work for companies where pensions don't exist, ESOP retirement buy-backs aren't an option, and the government is doing everything it can to make sure they have zero safety net in the coming years.

But hey, man, at least we aren't *SCARY QUOTES*SOCIALISTS*/SCARY QUOTES* with their evil taking care of the people that make the whole economy run.