jwz

There Is No Place In A Functional Society For Elon Musk

Somewhere amid all the Congressional hearings called for by all of this, though, someone simply must find time to break Elon Musk on the fucking wheel. The level of wealth he has attained would make him an existential threat to democracy even if the United States had reasonable campaign-finance laws, which it does not, and even if Musk were not, personally, an open and explicit enemy of pluralism, of the rule of law, and of racial and gender equality, which he is. As things stand, he is, in literal and fundamental terms, incompatible with a functional and functioning society. [...]

The silver lining in allowing such obscene wealth and power to concentrate themselves in one revolting addled herb, constitutionally incapable of winning the sincere esteem of any person less detestable than himself, is this: It is a problem with the exact same size, dimensions, and outline as Elon Musk himself. Yes, OK, sure: He is in turn a symptom of a much larger and more complex problem, that of capitalism itself. We will deal with that as we go. But Elon Musk's wealth and power can be broken, as straightforwardly as by breaking Elon Musk. The most direct path to doing durable good for American democracy, right now, is the one that leaves tire tracks across Elon Musk's stupid fucking face. [...]

Tell your congresspeople! You must break Elon Musk. Make him a scarecrow for the other members of his class. There will never be a better opportunity: People want blood, and virtually everyone in the world hates this scumbag. If Elon Musk has so much as a million dollars to spend on the 2028 election, the blue Congress will have airballed a layup.

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That's cold.

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I normally have my mini-murder of two or three crows who hang out by my window and tolerate me and my tithe of peanuts. But the other day there were five, and one was not welcome. They kept just sidling over on the wire, screaming, pushing this crow off. There were even a few seconds of aerial dogfighting! I wish I had gotten video.

Then I heard epic screeching, I went to the window, and one of the crows was perched on the wire and holding that crow in its beak by the very tip of its wing feather and shaking it like a dog with a chew-toy. I have never heard a louder crow than that dangling one. When it was finally let go, it realized that it was... perhaps time to leave.

"You don't have to crow home, but you can't stay here."

I really want to know what the drama was! If these were humans I could ask around, my staff would have heard some gossip about why so-and-so got their ass kicked. But I am so frustrated that nobody is ever going to explain to me which crow offended who and how! I have no entry into the crow gossip network!

Anyway, come see our screening of The Crow tonight. "Light it up."

Previously.

If you posit that souls, ghosts and zombies exist; then one who died with unfinished business, but whose death happened to turn their soulless corpse into a ravening zombie and set their ghost free; then that ghost, upon re-possessing that corpse, would find no resistance at all. Haunting your own zombie just brings you back to life.

Probably immortal, possibly with a skin condition.

I will not be taking any questions.

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A couple of weeks ago, some crackhead threw a bottle at one of our second floor windows. We have no idea who this assclown is. Does he have some kind of grudge against us? Against that window in particular? Who knows.

Long time readers may recall that those Above DNA windows are crazy complicated. On the outside are the original warehouse panes (which might, for all I know, date back to 1920) and directly inside those is a sheet of double-paned ¼" laminated glass. Then there's an air gap, then an angled false wall that only attaches to the floor and the ceiling, not the outside wall; and that wall has a plexi window in it.

Our new friend was only able to break the outer pane; the laminated sheet stayed intact. But to replace that pane meant a lot of excavation to even get to it. Our crew took down the plexi and the bumper-bars, but even after that it took the glass folks (our next door neighbors!) a couple of hours to replace it. So that cost $200 in glass and $1,600 in labor. I made a time lapse:

Up next: doors!

Our back doors were falling apart, rusted out and beat to hell. Back in 2021 we replaced the front doors, and did some repairs on the back doors, but it was finally time; we had to replace them. So that was another $10k, because doors with panic hardware are stupid expensive, and incredibly finicky to install and adjust. It took them over six hours to install them today. I was gonna make a time lapse of that too -- you know how I love my time lapses -- but, 6 hours, it would have taken days to render, so nevermind.

Last time, when we replaced the front doors, a generous donor covered the cost for us... Apropos of nothing...

Rent!

Our rent just went up by 20%, so that's great. Now, before you start getting mad at our landlord, let me point out that since the beginning of COVID, he had been giving us a temporary discount on our rent. He didn't have to do that, and it had been incredibly helpful. "Temporary" turned out to be six years! But now he's raising it to what is actually stipulated in our lease. And while I can't really be mad about it, it still sucks.

If only our income had gone up correspondingly. Oh-ho-ho-ho. Ha-ha-ha-ha.

And now the panhandling...

Typically the end of a post like this is where I add some yadda yadda yadda Patreon stuff. Well, that isn't really working any more. These days we get one or two new patrons signing up per month, and five or six unsubscribing. It's a slow bleed but a consistent downward slope; we're losing 10% of our members per year. We're down to only 425 active members, from a peak of 580 back in 2020.

It is hard to guess if that's because people are sick of Patreon in general (relatable!) or if they no longer find what we are offering to be of value to them. But either way, it is not only an unfortunate decline in what has been a reliable income stream; but also, it suggests a declining lack of support and enthusiasm for what we are doing here, and that doesn't really bode well either.

In summary, everything is terrible.

Talking Points Memo:

I keep coming back to this graph because it's so eye-popping, almost impossible to believe. As you see in the legend, the blue line is data centers. The grey line is everything else. Everything else. Commercial properties. Rental properties. Single family homes. Multiple family homes. Pick your preferred flavor of development, NIMBY, YIMBY, urban, rural, it's in there. You basically have rapid data center growth and everything else contracting. [...]

In a general sense, it's probably a safe bet at any time that the economy is largely working for people with capital. But in an economy driven by consumption, that at least ties back significantly to things people want. The simple reality here is that the AI boom is making huge amounts of money for people at the top of the economic ladder (almost entirely through the equities market) while choking off investment in everything else. Housing and commercial construction are getting crowded out.

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Dear Lazyweb,

Due to dumbasses squatting me, I'm gonna need you to go click "thumbs-up" or "stars" or whatever on this repo so that it bubbles up to the top of the list in search results.

Thank you in advance for this utter fucking waste of everyone's time.

Headline ending in a question mark: no.

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Wednesday in Salazar v. Paramount Global, a case about digital privacy. Well, it should be a case about digital privacy, but it is actually about whether a law passed in 1988 to regulate (not making this up) Blockbuster Video can be used to protect us from prying, data-hungry tech giants. Which... is asinine. It is absurd that a law meant to protect people who rented Emmanuelle IV represents our best chance to get stronger data privacy regulations in the year 2026. And yet, here we are. [...]

(For our younger readers: Blockbuster was a store where people would go to rent video tapes of movies, and stores were physical places where goods or services could be exchanged for money, and goods and services were things people could afford to buy before Trump started a trade war as well as a war-war for no reason.) [...]

We shouldn't have to wait for one of these guys (and it's going to be a guy) to be headed to a confirmation hearing to realize that it's probably a bad thing for OnlyFans to sell their viewing history to the National Enquirer. Updating laws so that they actually make sense, textually and literally, should be the job of Congress, not the Supreme Court.

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Pivot to AI:

I suggest the social action: shame. Shame these people. Their actions are shameful. AI bros hate being shamed and they try to make rules against shaming -- because shame works.

None of these people doing shameful things deserve a place in polite company. They should be shamed for their shameful choices.

The AI industry is also running a PR push to redefine common word usage. The word "slop" is also super effective -- so the bros really hate "slop" and try to define it to mean slop they don't like. But all AI output is slop. It's social spam. That's what it's for. It's slop! Say "slop" every time.

The Linux AI slop brain rot will collapse with the AI bubble. You see these bozos comment on Linux Weekly News with dumb AI promotional tropes like "AI is here to stay" as if the bubble will go on forever. But the crash is foreordained by the finances. Linux nerds, go read the finance press for once. Even if AI was everything they say it is -- and it isn't -- the investor money is running out, and you can't service hundreds of billions of dollars in debt with five billion in audited revenue.

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