The phrase “synthesised expert knowledge” is the problem here, because apparently you don’t understand that this machine has no meaningful ability to synthesise anything. It has zero fidelity.

You’re not exposing people to expert knowledge, you’re exposing them to expert-sounding words that cannot be made accurate. Sometimes they’re right by accident, but that is not the same thing as accuracy.

You confused what the LLM is doing for synthesis, which is something loads of people will do, and this will just lend more undue credibility to its bullshit.

Ooohhh I started that season but didn’t finish it. Thanks!

I think they’ve dropped the College Humor name, now they’re Dropout.

Which season is that? Is it Fantasy High Senior Year?

This is an extra twist on the concept that they’re not real.

I’ve been watching some dashcam compilations lately, and one thing that I find very comforting is that regardless of who is legally at fault, almost every accident could’ve been easily avoided if anyone involved had just slowed the fuck down and chilled the fuck out, and since that’s how I drive it makes sense I don’t get anywhere near having accidents. The freak accident that you couldn’t have avoided is rare.

If someone is tailgaiting and making things unsafe, don’t brake check, just slow down gradually. If they won’t make you safe by backing off, make yourself safe by reducing your speed. Look to get out of their way, move over, pull over, whatever, and try to let them past. It’s real simple, you just need to let go of the idea that you have a right to the spot in front of them.

There’s even one road I used to use a lot that was high speed with no passing for several kms, and if I got tailgated, I’d slow down and pull over to the shoulder. Sometimes they got the message and backed up before I pulled over so I’d speed back up and we’d be on our way, but I always took a decent amount of pleasure in taking my time to pull over safely, which usually meant delaying them a lot.

Which dictator do you mean? The democracy movement and the June struggle was in 1987, 10 years before the general strike.

Also, neoliberal capitalism is very, very happy with right wing dictators because they love oppressing workers and lowering wages. Just look at Pinochet in Chile.

And again the June struggle was won by popular struggle, not market forces. The idea that the unions supported the dictator is a weird one too. Like, where are you getting that, and is there any evidence they weren’t just yellow unions approved by the dictator?

Even then I don’t know why you brought those things up. You just added a bunch of details and I guess assumed those details - some of which were very wrong - were somehow in support of some point, but you didn’t say what that point is.

And I don’t know why you think I’m talking about industrialisation when I talk about workers improving their lives. That is not at all what I’m talking about. And industrialisation isn’t a capitalist thing, they just happen to coincide in human history. We don’t have alternative Earths to test the idea, so crediting the gains of industrialisation to the market and capitalism is weird. You just put that out there completely unsupported.

That’s another thing neoliberal economists love to do, just blame all the problems of capitalism on unions and regulations, and credit every good thing that happens on the glorious invisible hand.

And since you understand a good amount of economics, perhaps you can tell me what is the scientific basis of supply & demand for instance? I’ve looked for this information and had people try to show me, but they’ve never actually shown it. It’s a fundamental part of economics so I’m told. What is the science behind it? The perfectly straight, perpendicular bisecting lines on an unscaled graph do not suggest any scientific basis to me, they suggest the aesthetics of science devoid of its substance. If you could disabuse me of this notion then perhaps I could move on from my current woeful ignorance on the matter.

And finally, you don’t think there’s any conspiracy around Epstein, fine. I bet it’s easy to maintain that idea when you just ignore all the evidence I gave you.

Honestly it sounds like someone was paid to do something about adblocking and just like… did something. Like if you were tasked with reducing adblocking, and your first and most obvious idea of “reduce the obnoxious ads” was disallowed because enshittification is mandated, you could say no, which most workers won’t do, or you could just do whatever random bullshit feels like it might work because it’s punitive. Or at least it’s a gesture that shows your boss you’re trying.

Authoritarian systems like capitalist corporations are inherently low-information for exactly this reason. People on the low rungs doing the real work who understand what needs to be done will typically not report problems to their superiors. And when they do, those superiors tend not to listen, because the idea that lower workers know something they don’t threatens their leadership status.

Also our society’s legal system trains us to believe punitive measures must do something even though they don’t.

Also I guess another reason they might wind up at this strategy is that straight up telling users that the problem is their adblock is the fastest way to get adblockers to block your countermeasure, so they think they have to be sneaky.

I guess that’s possible, and a very creepy thought, but more likely they saw the level of general attention on the issue and backed off globally.

I definitely got really awful, unplayably spotty playback that seemed linked to adblock usage. Then I saw an article about it and confirmed I wasn’t going crazy, and that day it stopped happening, so it felt like I was going crazy all over again. It’s like the moment they realised it was going to become a problem and they weren’t as sneaky as they thought, they turned it off. I haven’t had an issue since then.

You’re right, it’s not, but ignoring him doesn’t get rid of him either. That’s not how capitalism works.

They don’t have to choose, they have the power to make Aussie politicians bend the knee, and everyone knows it. That’s what they’re afraid of.

Land acknowledgements devoid of teeth are common, where someone flaccidly admits that Indigenous people exist and have some unspecified connection to the land, not where someone actually states out loud the crimes that put their opera house on that land.

This was a good acknowledgement that actually implicates the current ruling class. That’s why they cancelled him.

Edit: he actually went on to say more, but I stand by the fact that this wasnt just a standard acknowledgement.

That sounds very realistic to me.

I think our first family PC had 40MB of storage, and we loaded optical discs into a caddy before inserting them. That was in the late 80s.

It’s fascinating to me that your example was South Korea. That’s literally the place I had in mind when I talked about the working class organising to better their lives. They have deeply militant unions.

You know they had an honest to goodness general strike in 1997, right? And that they were specifically striking over laws that would legalise strikebreaking? That’s going to have a tectonic effect on the quality of life of workers in general. They fought hard for their pay increases and got them. That’s not attributable to market forces. Striking is literally a breakdown in market behaviour, where the bosses have squeezed so hard and so unfairly that the workers have to withdraw their labour in order to get what they need.

And every single worker’s benefit we enjoy today was a function of labour activism. 8 hour days, the weekend, child labour laws, OSHA, I could go on. And all of those benefits are actively fought against by the ruling class because they erode their power over us and raise our wages.

Also, orthodox economics is basically the managerial class being funded by the owning class to come up with post-hoc justifications for why they should keep their wealth. It’s not scientific in the slightest. The Economist is basically neoliberal propaganda.

Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent goes into this in some detail, about the forces that act to ensure that the dominant media narrative caters to the ruling class on all levels, and he has talked extensively on how this process works in academia as well. I forget if the academic discussion is a large part of the documentary, but it’s well worth watching anyway. It’s free on youtube: https://youtu.be/BQXsPU25B60

Also… if you really think the Epstein network was just two or three people… I mean wow. You know authorities seized a bunch of blackmail from his island, video of rich people with kids, and it has never surfaced since? Those same authorities ruled his death a suicide, because they’re doing their best, honest, but they just can’t seem to find that missing collective brain cell that would let them figure out the blindingly obvious. Was that the one guy arranging that too?

I’m not saying the ultra wealthy run the network themselves, that’s what I’ve literally been saying they don’t do. The difference is if they got caught actually doing the deed, if would be a very different matter, because you physically cannot do that via proxy. That’s how the blackmail can exist, and why it was covered up.

Oh and to answer your question about who their drug dealers are, they have middlemen for that as well. Personal assistants who are on call for anything the client needs, who will readily break the law rather than disappoint a client, and whose instructions are generally vague enough that any legal risk falls on the assistant. Again: diffusion of responsibllity.

Don’t kid yourself, the society of the wealthy and powerful is rotten to the core, just as it was in the days of monarchy. They just have better cover for it nowadays. It’s no longer the divine right of kings, but the invisible hand of the market.

Honestly most of that gets eaten up just airlifting my mansion. I’m sick of doing it, but I’m glad I invested early in the airliftable frame kit when I had the place built. The foundations wouldn’t have held up more than one or two moves otherwise, and there’s no way I’m commuting more than 15 mins.

I think our disagreement here is pretty narrow, about how covert the coverup really is. But when you say you “have a pretty good picture of how it works,” I have to ask if you know anything about who is currently supplying children for the ultra-wealthy’s sexual entertainment. If you don’t know, if it’s not generally known, then I think that means there is a covert network that does its best to stay hidden.

If you think that’s somehow no longer happening any more, then I think you really don’t understand how the world works. People like that do not give up their indulgences easily.

You may simply think I’m ascribing more planning and coordination than I really am, and that would just be a miscommunication. However, I do think there are definitely some small number of people who put a lot of thought into how to get away with this, and they’ve largely succeeded for decades.

A journalist could get to the bottom of the coltan mining trade and expose one chain there, but how do you think they’d fare exposing the latest Epstein-style network? Do you think they’d live through it?

Honestly even that’s ambitious.

Yeah, that’s true, but my point was even in the worst-case scenario that consequences really did happen to someone, it would be a middleman, and that’s by design. Epstein was no different in that respect.

Sure, it scares them, but do they really viscerally believe it’s not just a thing on TV?

There was a guy on some news network around 2020 when people were panicking about Bernie Sanders and his nefarious communist plot to destroy America, and one guy was talking about how there was a time when he was really scared the communists would come in and kill all the rich people and he might’ve been one of those people strung up in Times Square. He certainly sounded terrified to me. Like I’m sure it was partly crocodile tears, but also you don’t pull that story from nowhere. That’s obviously something he thinks about.

I mean, I wouldn’t say I’m always actively terrified of being hit by a train, but I take steps to avoid it. That’s what I mean - they know it’s a threat.

If you want poor countries to get on the development path, this is the deal basically, and slavery and other awful things tend to slip in along with that.

This is tangential, but it’s my biggest issue with what you’ve said. Poor countries all over the globe are made and kept poor by colonialism which rolled into modern capitalist imperialism. Africa in particular has been particularly brutally invaded, pillaged and oppressed for centuries. The most recent mechanisms by which this is done have been the World Bank and the IMF sucking them into predatory loans with structural adjustment policies that are calculated to keep them poor and strip them of vital infrastructure.

The cheap labour isn’t some natural transitional state between “undeveloped” and “developed”. It is an imposed condition, and the only time such countries “develop” and improve their station is when the working class organises and forces change to happen. It is never handed down from above or a natural outworking of wealth flowing in from the market. The market is structured to ensure that any wealth that flows in from the exploitation of cheap labour is kept in the hands of a few and siphoned back out as quickly as possible.

This is very similar to the way that the working class is kept in a state of poverty by capitalists within their own countries, and oppressed by the state and the legal system. This is the situation that allows wealthy people to prey upon the children of poorer people with relative immunity. The girls are often plied with money, and if they do go to the police, what do they say? “Trump raped me on Epstein’s private jet?” The cops won’t touch that, and the wealthy know they won’t touch it. We know it because that testimony exists and it hasn’t gone anywhere. Even if a detective took the case, he’d wind up at the bottom of a river before too long.

I’m not saying this is a “conspiracy” in the sense that this entire situation is engineered just to get young girls, it’s evolved over centuries to maintain power, and the powerful will take advantage of it every way they can.

Yes, it is a lottery, but within their ranks there are those accepted as “one of them” and those considered “nouveau riche”. If you look at that article I linked, he was a teacher at a prep school who lied about his qualifications, drank with the students and walked around the halls with a fur coat and gold chains with his shirts hanging open. Regardless of his family’s wealth - it doesn’t sound like it was that much - he was being gauche. He was acting like the nouveau riche that the wealthy look down on. Most of the very wealthy are people you never hear of and that’s intentional; they stay out of the public eye because they’ve seen what happens to the rich & powerful when revolutions happen. They can’t stay totally hidden, but they prefer privacy.

And I’m not saying the wealthy acted as a united bloc to hire him and then dump him. I said “someone” might have done that. I’m sure it wasn’t all planned out by some shadowy group, but it’s pretty straightforward to imagine a strategy of deniability, where he buys his way into the inner circle by taking on all the risk and doing the dirty work of trafficking minors. He might have known that his head would be on the block if the network was ever compromised, but that would be a trade he was willing to make for access to billionaire-adjacent levels of wealth and a steady stream of underage girls.

And the idea that it was just Epstein and Maxwell doing all the dirty work by themselves is laughable. There was definitely a network in place to enable their work, and powerful people above them providing cover. The entire ruling class who they were buddy-buddy with were complicit to some extent. The idea that that network simply disappeared or dissolved when those two were arrested is also ridiculous. I would bet any amount of money that the network that trafficked those girls barely paused its operation. They hung out Maxwell to dry and buried Epstein, and they carried on doing what they do. Anyone in the network who acts a little too indiscreet can probably be hung out, but anyone being smart about operating a network like that would be recruiting people to act as middle men purely to provide a buffer and ensure they themselves don’t end up twisting in the wind. The fact that Epstein was crass and gauche makes him the perfect fall guy, because everyone goes, “Oh yeah, that guy, he was always a creep.”

And yes, somebody did a covert operation to kill Epstein. I can’t “prove” it either but there is no way that didn’t happen. Someone made the call and a small group would’ve carried it out. There are any number of people who would do that and ways to get it done. The wealthy have access to private armies who hire ex-intelligence operatives, they would have absolutely no trouble with it. You don’t need a huge conspiracy for that to happen, but the entire structure of capitalism relies on diffuse responsibility and layers of deniability. The ruling class don’t get their hands dirty as a rule.

So for instance Intel, Apple, NVidia, AMD and so on are profiting off of coltan mining in Africa, where child labour is rife and the death rate is prodigious. However, if the layers of bureaucracy, corruption, bribery and corporate shell games ever allowed someone to be held accountable for how many kids they fed into a meat grinder to get their precious metals, then the person who would go to prison would be a mine operator in Africa or maybe an executive who interfaced directly with the mines. It wouldn’t be the shareholders of the companies who are demanding the coltan.

That’s not a covert conspiracy, but the basic principle of putting middle-men in between you and the awful things you’re doing is still there, it’s a tried-and-true method.

Now, trafficking children so the wealthy can personally molest them is something that inherently cannot be diffused. Those individual people are doing the molesting. So that means this particular part of the operation does have to be covert. We know it’s covert because we mostly only have speculation about who was actively molesting and who was just given a ride on a private jet. We also know it’s covert because Epstein was killed to cover it up. We know for a fact that multiple former US presidents were on the list and they were rapey kinda guys, plus there is direct testimony of Trump forcibly raping a 13-year old if memory serves.

That’s sort of an open secret, but also there’s obviously a lot of it being hidden. Of course it’s being hidden. The wealthy are terrified of having their heads cut off. The extraordinary thing in this instance would be if there wasn’t a covert conspiracy.

Thing is they technically can be, but are they ever? Epstein wasn’t a billionaire, he was in the crowd but he was nouveau riche, not truly considered one of them. This kind of gatekeeping shows just how much the wealthy deliberately maintain the class gap.

And he was definitely a limited hangout: “spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.”

It’s the phrase “while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case” that really describes what’s happening here.

That’s why he was killed - they couldn’t risk a high profile person like him talking. They hung out as much as they could afford, and with someone they didn’t really care about. It looked sus, but they really couldn’t afford more, so they just killed him.

In fact, he taught the wealthy’s children and was seen to flout the boundaries with students and the dress code. He was plucked from there to start rubbing shoulders with the ultra rich and trafficking children for them. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone noticed his indiscretions, and decided that they could extract him from that environment, keep their own kids safe, and ply him with wealth to start exploiting children professionally. Then, if the whole scheme ever came down, they had a ready made fall guy.

Why have I never considered vertical tabs before? The screen is way too wide for normal pages, you can fit a bunch more information sideways per tab, and way more tabs vertically than horizontally. You could even double-stack them with all the space available.

This is such an obvious change to make.