I’m sorry. (from a gX)

I’m not typical. I was one of the nerds even the nerds bullied on, and this was the hey-day of the jocks and nerds paradigm.

When George W. Bush started torturing, I thought that’s not the America I was raised to believe in and opened some books (on moral philosophy and history) and started my journey to becoming a raging far-left communist.

By the time we were learning about years-long crunching in video games development, I realized that our capitalists can’t even follow their own rules. Id est, the facts were not informing the hypothesis.

Nowadays, I see the species as primitive hominids who bomb other countries and strip away civil rights based on feels and vibes, or in other words, can’t follow rational instruction when we have the power to choose to not, and this is likely going to kill us.

Maybe some other animal can evolve complex social relationships and do better, or be less susceptible to selfish interests of a few subverting the community of many.

Yes, I’m bitter.

Max Headroom: Twenty Minutes Into The Future circa 1985

We may have to revise our education system so that it’s not connected to our credential system.

There’s a story about Einstein teaching physics and letting the kids who didn’t want to be there leave and do something else with the time. The ones who remained were quite attentive.

There are multiple models for teaching that do something similar, let kids approach a subject when they’re ready. Yes, they goof off a lot early on, but eventually even STEM and literature call to them, and they pass equivalency exams in their late teens.

In the meantime even when I was in high school in the 1980s, our system was created to sort kids into sports stars that might become college players, STEM kids that might become scientists and engineers, and House Hufflepuff (common laborers).

The education system has only gotten progressively worse since then, as its budget increases have not kept up with inflation. And then there’s the whole effort to insert evangelist Christianity (+ American Exceptionalism + Conservativism–Capitalism) into public school.

And to this day, we still use the lecture / lab / test model that excludes a lot of alternative comprehension and learning models. We’re not looking to teach kids, rather we’re looking to harvest the geniuses, and turn the others into bonded laborers and soldiers for billionaire vanity projects.

The problem is, it’s plausible they are ice, and in the US hoodlums gathering near a van before pulling a heist are rarer than unmarked ICE guys waiting to acquire a target, so if this isn’t a movie set, they’re most likely ICE.

If they are this obvious, I’d see if I could get a flash mob of civilians with phone cameras.

Either they move, or if action goes down, there’s going to be a big protest soon.

Also we’ll know who they took.

Someone should meme this up as a bunch of dudes about to get jumped by Spiderman.

There are some pepper sprays that are mixed with red difficult-to-remove dye for the purpose of identifying those involved in an incident.

Legal in California!

Never let the assailant take you to the secondary location.

Urban self defense classes have been teaching this since the 1970s, at least.

Isn’t this like every guy at the Unite The Right rally of 2017? Maybe crossbred with Michael Douglas in Falling Down

Too quick, though a classic.

Falling into a deep canyon (or from the top of Notre-Dame) would give him a moment to think about what he’s done. More so, being stuck in a lamp in the Cave of Wonders.

I am especially particular to the horror of being torn apart and eaten by hyenas (that you’ve just betrayed), but I’ve reserved that for people higher up on the Trump hierarchy.

I think falling from a great height is too kind a Disney fate for Charlie Kirk. Perhaps he should be permanently turned into a kitten to suffer the effervescent (grabby, drooling) adulations of small children for all of eternity.

When I played The Sims 2, the first thing I’d do is create a small public lot where everyone could get all their needs met and buy food and a cell phone (since starting characters didn’t have one). There were some oddities, since Sims get dirty quickly, I’d replace sinks with showers, and would make sure coffee was available everywhere.

Eventually, sims could walk from their home, rather than investing in a garage and a car or taking a cab.

Note that Disney and Universal pirate other people’s stuff whenever they want.

Note also that all the Generative AI services are very protective of their big cistern of web-crawled data, say when China borrows it for DeepSeek.

Content, content everywhere and not a drop of principle.

The Soviet Union is long gone. Communist should no longer be a derisive and should sound like a 20th century cliché in 2025.

I wonder (can’t confirm) if the evergreen state of communist or socialist as derision is due to the far right propaganda industrial complex still pushing (hard) that anything that isn’t capitalism is a moral wrong.

It’s a day and a half the way we Americans drive which is to run on coffee and fast food and burn above the speed limit for fourteen hours a day.

I am (or was, now I’m having doubts) of the belief that European motorists were more inclined to take their time, see some sights and not exhaust themselves in the transit. That may have been a late-20th century thing.

One of the factors is that the US is surprisingly huge. It takes EU tourists by surprise that a quick jaunt from NYC to visit their friend in Chicago is several days by road (unless you drive like an American roadtripper for fourteen hours a day) moreover, there’s just huge tracks of land featuring not-too-exciting vistas (unless you plan your road trip to feature pretty routes, in which case multiply the distance by 1.3), so for the short while that airlines were regulated and we weren’t worried (yet) about the air-travel carbon footprint (Huge. Enormous. Colossal.) it made sense to fly everywhere in the US.

Now that it’s insanely expensive and inconvenient to fly, and we shouldn’t be doing it, it’s time for the US to build HSR for realsies, if the automotive / fossil fuel industrial complex will let us.

If you’re close enough, you can walk.

ETA I’d expect there are fast rails from Berlin to Paris, and if not, why not?

I’m getting a paywall or adblock block or something. Anyone have a less problematic link to the article?

BMW and VW are the same beasts they were when they were backers of NSDAP in Germany.

Between the VW emissions cheating and BMW’s subscription car features, it seems their attitude towards commerce has not changed a jot.

Then let’s see Microsoft do this with full transparency and keep a publicly accessible list of forbidden words. Then evidence this is a general policy should be plain.