There’s a difference between ‘a person’ and ‘every person’. A person can definitely do things better than any chat bot. But not every person can. And depending on the situation, a person who can may not be available.

Even then, there is a place where the AI beats all persons and is better in one way: speed. If the task at hand does not require a better result than what the AI outputs, then the time savings is big, because there are no situations in which any human will work faster.

If those guys, especially Trump, could personally launch with no chain of command or chance for a sanity check in between, I think I really might rather have nothing more than an LLM in charge.

…you know, I never thought of it that way before but yeah, the way our economic system is designed, money is like gravity. Once it passes a certain threshold, it just…accretes.

And much like gravity it would take a rare and exceptionally violent event to break that hold and scatter it again in a way it won’t just pull back together.

Interesting thought though: in a world where it is normal to own weapons, to protect yourself during purge, and where it is normal for people to talk about plans for getting together in heavily armed groups to protect themselves during purge…it suddenly becomes a lot easier to coordinate in order to overthrow oppressive and evil governments.

Why do you have an arsenal of weapons? Purge. Why are you talking to people about getting together with weapons and supplies? Purge. Why are you discussing meeting places for your group? Purge.

I haven’t seen much of those movies myself, but I got the impression it’s even considered reasonable to discuss plans about who you’re gonna kill during purge.

At 77 I think it’s gone past normal and into a completely different weird niche.

Too much light for it to be a grue, it has to be pitch black for that.

There certainly wouldn’t be any regrets (because you would not have time to do so before death).

So she’s a midget stripper wearing 2 and a half foot heels?

Now show me where they’re paying attention to what they can’t do.

Like, how nobody can just access secure government systems without proper clearance, which the President can’t actually just give without procedure.

Or even more simply, the fact that Trump is not in fact currently eligible to be President in the first place due to his part in the events of Jan. 6.

I do not have confidence that they will be stopped by the fact that something is not permitted, because they aren’t being stopped by things that are not permitted, and if this continues for 4 years…there will be nothing left of the system that is supposed stop them.

To be fair, hasn’t made much difference cause one, he got caught, and two, nobody else has done it.

I don’t blame any particular person for it, of course. Hell, I share the blame myself. I haven’t killed any CEOs or politicians either.

But it’s not gonna work unless more of us gather up the courage Luigi had and take action.

Nationalize the companies involved in production and distribution and eliminate profit, making and selling everything at-cost also works.

There was in fact a Dragonlance movie in 2008, Dragons of Autumn Twilight. I have not seen it to know if it was even a little bit good, but hey…there was one!

Crystal Pepsi.

It’s deeper than that. It’s about defense of the Status Quo. No superhero looks around at the parts of society that we just accept without thinking about and says this needs to change.

Well first, spend a long time practicing tiny handwriting. Like, let’s make the absolute most use out of this sheet as possible; it’s possible to get the size of handwritten characters down to about 3mm, but let’s say 4 with the assumption that I can’t get it down that low. That means I have about 74 lines vertically to write in, each line able to accommodate somewhere between 70 and 52 characters, depending on the width. Let’s average it to 60 characters per line, so 74x60 = 4,440 characters, times two for two sides of the page. Average number of characters per name is 7, so 14, plus two for spaces, and let’s add another two for a middle initial and another space. That’s 18 characters per name. This means I should be able to fit just under 500 names on the page if I use both sides as efficiently as possible.

I’ll get the list of the 500 richest people in the world, and start going down it from richest on down. But not all at once. First the top name. One week later, the next name. One week after that, the next name down, and so on. After a few weeks the pattern would become obvious and we see what happens. Sadly I have no magical knowledge of who is the richest person at any given moment, so I have to just go off the list I already possess (or any new information I decide to be sufficiently trustworthy). One every week for five hundred names is 3,500 days, or 9.5 years. That is long enough to make it quite apparent this is inevitable and make it seem like it’s going to continue forever, and it’s long enough for legislation and other things to be done in response. Let’s see how they freak out and what they try to do in response.

One timeline, actions can have an effect. But once you time travel you unmoor yourself from normal causality, so you could do things that should negate your existence and nothing will happen to you.

Indeed, if you time travel again you can’t affect your own actions anymore. Like, you travel back 20 minutes, do things for an hour, then jump back 5 minutes, when you go back the second time you can’t alter yourself. You could go later the you from before you ever time traveled though.

For me, given my age and all…five million.

Which kind of rich do you mean? The ‘this person is truly wealthy but it’s not unreasonable’ or ‘this person is unacceptably rich and should have their money taken away if not worse’?

The former can be somewhere around…$10,000,000 or so. Lower the older the person is really (cause I consider rich versus remaining expected lifespan), so maybe even as low as $6,000,000 for someone who’s currently 40.

The latter where it’s simply unacceptable for people to have that much I’d start the cutoff around $400,000,000 or so.

And slight sidenote on the unacceptable levels: Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos both are so unacceptably wealthy that they could make one person a day wealthy by my $10,000,000 standard…every day…for 100 years…before running out (and that’s assuming they stopped accruing money at the beginning of this)…and still be unacceptably wealthy to a crazy degree.

Oh and all my numbers are assuming no additional income and definitely no interest or investment (but also assuming the money remains the same value it has today).

Primaries are only rigged in that yes, the rules and the entire framework is built to benefit those currently in power, but that is less rigged than the general is against a third party, which is to say, totally, absolutely, and unassailably rigged. Proclaiming it impossible because it’s rigged is silly when you’re advocating for instead competing in one that is far, far more rigged and has far more structure to prevent any upsets.

We have never actually won a primary and had them ignore it. They use their structural advantages as much as they can, but if we push hard enough to overcome those advantages, they don’t just nullify the election and go with their candidate. We do get people like Ocasio-Cortez in there from time to time, when people actually show up to the primaries enough to flip it to the more progressive candidate. If we got enough candidates like her in, not just in congress but state houses and such too, we’d actually start getting places.

Now the bribes and money on the corporate side, nothing we can do about that - we have to overcome it so that we can get officials in place that will do something about it.

Now lemme put it this way. I live in bumfuck Ohio where there’s no chance of a progressive candidate being elected. But I still vote in every primary. People who live in places where there is more of a chance of doing something need to be as diligent as I am, if not more, damnit.

No, a third party is non viable. But the right move would have been exactly what the crazy right wingers have done with the Republicans. Get organized and primary the fuck out of the people blocking things.

The “tea party” gave us the blueprint, but we’ve been too dumb and lazy to follow it. When they didn’t give us the public option with Obamacare, every primary since then should have been about cleaning house of the corporatist, establishment Democrats and replacing them with real progressives. But since we’re too lazy and dumb to vote in primaries in mass numbers, their establishment people keep sailing to victory.