I hear that "thunk" in my fantasies; but for all my mentions here on Slashdot of torches and pitchforks, I don't believe I'll ever hear it in real life. Between the public-facing tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, and Meta; and companies such as Palantir with lower public profiles; the surveillance apparatus is so pervasive that the secret planning required to bring down the overlords is no longer possible.

Now, bringing back the era of blades hissing through aristocrats' necks might become possible if the makers, hackers, and FOSS software developers started working together on large-scale circumvention of the infrastructure which spies on us all. Sadly, I'm not seeing much of that.

Yes, we have "hacktivism" - but as far as I can tell it's nowhere near to being sufficiently vigorous, vicious, and bloody-minded to counter the likes of Thiel, Andreesen, Musk, and the rest of that soulless lot. Lacking in the public at large is an awareness of the existential threat these fuckers pose to us.

Too true. Unfortunately, the last two or three decades have seen the extreme dumbing-down of US citizens. Critical thinking was actively thwarted, curiosity became a justification for casting people out, and the desire for knowledge became a social liability. This resulted in a pliable populace which reflexively goes along to get along, even if where they're going and what they're getting is an extended visit in hell on the way to oblivion.

The Trump administration is cooking the books but they can't do it fast enough to head this off.

Even with the shell game the numbers are falling.

This is a post pandemic, starting to be AI era job market. Kinda looks like the pre-genocide Gaza strip, where one young person would support seven family members. This is my Signal chat today - two people overdrawn, one about to default on mortgage, a fourth who needs to move for safety's sake but can not afford.

This is a global phenomenon and the Hormuz "peace" where both sides keep shooting is NOT helping.

Years ago Republican pollster Frank Luntz, when asked how bad things might get, deadpanned "France. 1793."

We're not there yet, but you can faintly hear the thunk of falling guillotine blades, if you listen closely ...

I never did read LotR, nor did I see the movies. I did, however, read Atlas Shrugged. In those days I ate books the way I ate potato chips; I found a thick book in the school library on a Friday and figured I was set for the weekend. I had no idea what I was in for. Your mention of "unbelievable heroes" and "emotionally stunted" is spot on. It wasn't until well into my 20's that I finally started to let my observations of the world inform my critical faculties rather than the other way 'round. The more I observed and thought for myself, the more I skewed toward Democratic Socialism.

I'm sure that Libertarians are some of the favorite lapdogs of the oligarchy. Hell, they may even manage to stay employed when so many others are being pushed out of the labour farce. And no, that's not a typo.

Average citizens in most of the modern world fell or were pushed into the corporatocracy trap, and their life circumstances are largely the playthings of billionaires and their minions. I like to think that if FDR had had a like-minded successor, at least the Western world would be a much better place.

Good points. My only caution would be against conflating the evolution of some Western societies with the evolution of Homo Sapiens in general.

Now AI, via robotics, will eventually be able to construct its own meat puppets with AI-directed brain development. Soon there will be no further need for the messy process of giving birth and raising kids to adulthood - just grow adults in a vat, program them, and put them to work.

I'm sure that Thiel, Karp, Musk, and the like are jacking themselves off while contemplating this news.

No, not the 'aliens' that Trump is always on about; I'm talking about extraterrestrial beings.

In the 1996 film 'The Arrival' - very entertaining and highly recommended - aliens passing as humans infiltrate businesses and government to do things which drastically increase the rate of global warming. These aliens need a significantly hotter climate in order to live comfortably and thrive, and they plan to do away with us pesky humans altogether.

If I was an alien looking to implement the above plan, I'd start in someplace like Florida, which is already very hot. (In the climatic sense, not in the Trumpian "America is the hottest country" sense). Florida is also a place where wacky conspiracy theories abound, so a real conspiracy could hide in plain sight. And if you told me that DeSantis - who has never struck me as especially humanoid - was in fact not from Earth, I'd just say "Yup, that fits".

Jeez, maybe the Republicans really were right all along when they said "The aliens are the problem"...

Or you could just - you know - slowly deflate the AI bubble and let people continue to do the work that AI is is in the process of taking over.

Also, since the advent of AI was predicated on almost all the work done to keep society together and functioning to this point, sharing any wealth and productivity gains produced by it would seem to be a moral imperative. And no, putting on some dog-and-pony bullshit pretense of finding new roles for displaced workers is not an attempt to share the wealth. It's just a distraction - a pretense that "we really care about society, even though we're secretly pleased at the prospect of its demise and will do everything we can to make that happen".

The oligarchs want the bulk of humanity to die. They see that as the only way to slow the global warming that threatens even them, as well as the only way for them to have unfettered access to the limited food that will be available when the ecosystem collapses and the AMOC reverses. These fuckers are not our friends - don't fall for their gaslighting.

In an already-funny thread you made me laugh the hardest, and managed to throw in a wince as well. Thanks, I think... ;-)

If I could I'd mod you up as either Insightful or Informative - thanks for the fresh take.

Shocked, I tell you! /sarc

It seems that at some point, some parasites end up feeding on others of their own kind.

I wonder what will happen to all the parasites when the non-parasite host at the bottom of the food chain is ultimately sucked dry...

A BS for Trump? How utterly and tragicomically appropriate!

Applying today's standards retroactively to work published decades ago is stupid beyond belief. Relying on AI that does this kind of shit is evil.Then again, we're talking about Springer, so both stupid and evil are entirely expected. So, fuck Springer.

Given the current regime's policies, I wouldn't be in the least surprised if they started tearing out existing wind and solar infrastructure to build coal-fired generating stations in their stead.

Just curious here, as I'm not very familiar with the management of cell towers. Would it be feasible under emergency circumstances to reduce the transmit power to, say, 25 percent of normal? That would reduce the coverage area and leave a lot of folks without service, but would still leave a significant area WITH service, and would roughly quadruple the uptime.

I'm thinking that people could at least move around until they picked up a bar's worth of signal to make critical calls. Am I missing something?