As a science fiction writer, I find it weird that some sf tropes - like space colonization - have become culture-war touchstones. You know, that whole "we were promised jetpacks" thing.
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
The jetpack showman hoped to cash out by tricking Uncle Sucker into handing him a fat military contract. Robo-car scammers used their conjurer's tricks to cash out to the public markets, taking Uber public on the promise of robo-taxis, even as Uber's self-driving program burned through $2.5b and produced a car with a half-mile mean time between fatal collisions, which the company had to pay someone else $400m to take off their hands:
Residents of 21 cities in Utah have access to some of the fastest, most competitively priced broadband in the US, at speeds up to 10gb/s and prices as low as $75/month. It's uncapped, and the connections are symmetrical: perfect for uploading and downloading. And it's all thanks to the government.
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
That's not the only vast, impersonal, implacable force that Musk claims he can best with his incredible reality-distortion field. Musk also claims that he can somehow add so many cars to the road that he will end traffic - in other words, he will best geometry too:
I want a DIFFICULT competitive (non pvp) rpg with REAL money on the line.
Every 12 months you buy a character for $10, you can have a maximum of 30 hours of play time on that character for the month (with some form of real ID checking to prevent multiple accounts) and every character who dies (absolute permadeath no exceptions) kicks $5 into the kitty.
Do you go out hard early in the month to get the best loot and most xp or be patient and let other people discover this months mechanics, be more likely to survive but also more likely to fall behind the curve? Wait to learn the different types of enemies or go full Leroy? Tweak your character to suit the different meta every month or be focused and pray? The interesting part would be that once it gets down to the last 100 players, people start getting paid a % of the kitty with #100 getting free entry next season and it going up from there.
#Palestine / Israel announces largest West Bank land seizure since 1993 during Blinken visit
Israel's settlements in the occupied West Bank are widely viewed as a violation of international law, which prohibits the transfer of civilian populations to territories seized through military force. Despite this legal standing, the Israeli government has continued to expand its control over Palestinian lands in the West Bank through various mechanisms, including land appropriation orders.
[…] “If the Israelis annex this area near Maale Adumim, it will be a catastrophe for Palestinians who live in the south, […] Palestinian traders, especially in the south, will be cut off, and it will become impossible to have any independent Palestinian ways of life.”
On 11/2, we mark Europe’s single emergency phone number, available everywhere in the EU, free of charge.
How does it work?
🔴 Simply dial 112 from any fixed or mobile phone to reach emergency services like ambulance, fire brigade, or police.
🔴 Specially trained operators will handle your call and can assist in multiple languages.
@EU_Commission I remember installing a new PBX system that started with #100. When test dialing, I mistakenly dialed 112 for the first and only time in my life. After apologizing, I wished we had used 911 or just kept the old number 0611 :)
I just saw, that fedidb now has data for the biggest fediverse accounts, so I did a little plotting with it. Here is a graphic of the scattering of the 100 biggest accounts by the instance they are on. 38 of them are on mastodon.social https://fedidb.org/popular-fediverse-accounts (the data is in the alt text) #mastodon #chart...
Long before the current wave of #AIHype, we were being groomed for automation panics with misleading stories. Remember this one? "'Truck driver' is the most common job in America. Self-driving trucks are just around the corner. How can we prevent America's army of truckers from turning into a howling mob when the robots steal their jobs?"
More than $100b has been set on fire chasing the robotaxi dream, and the result is most charitably described as a technological curiosity, requiring 1.5 high-waged remote technicians to replace each low-waged driver:
On April 19, 2023, a Russian anarchist named Dmitry Petrov was killed in battle near Bakhmut, Ukraine. In this episode of our podcast, we offer a eulogy remembering Dmitry.
Dmitry was an uncompromising anarchist fighter who participated in an unbelievable amount of radical activity around the region. His extraordinary life spanned anarchist organizing as a teenager in Moscow; environmental defense, radical unionism, and refugee solidarity activism; years of underground direct action against police, military, and profiteers from gentrification; participating in the Maidan protests in Ukraine, an uprising against dictatorship in Belarus, and the struggle against the Islamic State in Rojava; co-founding the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization; and finally taking up arms against Russian imperialism in Ukraine.
Think of everything that makes you miserable as being caught between two opposing, irresistible, irrefutable truths:
"Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops" (#SteinsLaw)
"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" (Keynes)
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
We lost a decade of transit investment thanks to the Uber con, at the same time as traditional taxi drivers were forced out of the industry. Uber can't be profitable and still pay a living wage, and the fantasy of self-driving cars as a means of zeroing out the wage-bill altogether remains stubbornly, lethally unworkable:
If you had the funding from a major company and total creative freedom, what video game would you get made?
Spreading of the 100 biggest fediverse account ( wehavecookies.social ) German
I just saw, that fedidb now has data for the biggest fediverse accounts, so I did a little plotting with it. Here is a graphic of the scattering of the 100 biggest accounts by the instance they are on. 38 of them are on mastodon.social https://fedidb.org/popular-fediverse-accounts (the data is in the alt text) #mastodon #chart...