Uriel238 [all pronouns]

I’m glad that incident is getting remembrance now. We’re now seeing how capital control of services is a national security risk.

Elon Musk is exhibit A in the case for why the people need to seize the means of production.

<Bolshevik chorus swells>

The co-founder of the Ukraine Defense Fund, which has helped secure Starlink access for the Ukrainian military, told The Atlantic that he estimates there are now over 250,000 Starlink terminals in use across the war zone.

I found the article in The Atlantic (Paywall bypass here):

[Musk’s] company has earned hundreds of millions of dollars from the Starlink terminals operating in the war zone. Liscovich estimates there are well over 250,000 of them. In the past, SpaceX, which runs Starlink, has reportedly charged the Ukrainian government $2,500 per terminal each month, and it has cut off service when bills go unpaid. Earlier this month, when U.S. military officials asked SpaceX about the outages in Ukraine, the company advised switching to an upgraded contract to restore Ukraine’s access, U.S. officials told us. (Musk and SpaceX did not respond to questions for this article.)

As for incapacity for gaming of Starlink, that’s anecdotal, having heard it is a problem from fellow gamers here in the States that depend on Starlink. There’s enough of a lag to disallow for common action games, although this is a known issue consistent with all satellite internet services. Hence the need for rural ISP buildout blocked by the big communications oligopolies (and presently the well-bribed Trump administration)

You’re remarkably antagonistic for a Lemming. Are you sure you’re not a Musk-shill or a bot?

Musk is charging Ukraine $2500 per month per Starlink terminal, for over 250,000 terminals. Musk is making bank for shitty service (it’s not fast enough for gaming) and then he cuts services for partisan purposes, costing Ukrainian lives.

The upsell maneuver reminds me of when Verizon tried to do the same thing to California wildfire response services when communications cut out during disaster control efforts. That didn’t play well, either.

In the 70s, it just wasn’t Hallowe’en if you didn’t get a Chick tract in your candy haul.

Look up Paul Piff, who’s the social psychologist who set up the experiment. He did a TED talk on the experiment, Does Money Make You Mean?

I heard about it first on Gary’s Economics’ YouTube video on Elon Musk.

I swear that money nukes brain cells.

You’re not wrong. When people get a sufficient amount of wealth or political power, they end up surrounded by sycophants who want a taste of their sweet lucre, or to have that power directed towards a specific agenda, or just to be adjacent to privilege.

Compare the environment that induces AI psychosis.

The effect happens at small scale too. An experiment involving Monopoly games in which one person (chosen at random) got bonus money and turns, the privileged player would get louder, eat more of the snacks and attribute their victory to their skill rather than their bonuses.

So, funny story that might be related. Engineers directed by their management to tokenmaxx often will just prompt very complex, difficult tasks to drive up their token usage.

Using the metric as the goal is a great way to give perverse incentives. SEE ALSO the US Stock Exchange.

Agentic LLMs haven’t yet killed anyone, though Anthropic Fable has attempted extortion. OpenAI and Anthopic, the privately owned public benefit corporations, are another story, and while I can’t cite examples, I suspect their dedicated data centers are shortening the lifespans of their human neighbors.

It would not surprise me if either of them hired PMCs or PSCs to do their wetwork for them.

Sam Altman has lost the plot.

His own model of LLM isn’t sustainable or profitable, where the local software model us.

And the economy isn’t there just to make Sam Altman richer.

This is (another) Let them eat cake moment in which another spoiled aristocrat has lost touch with the common people.

Im old and out of the breeding pool, but I’m staunch anti-natalist when society becomes inhospitable or even hostile to future generations. The US has totally bought the ticket to ride to population implosion.

Although it’s not really that bad. Fertility dropped below 1.6, a number that is notable only because MAGA, white Christian nationalism and big capitalism are freaking out about it. But they’re still bankrolling manosphere influencers, and their followers are entirely repugnant and inelligible.

Case in point FBI having to inform ICE that the tradwife-minded women interested in them on dating sights actually just want to dox them.

Fertility of 2.1 is replacement, and in normal times, the US rate is still below that and made up by immigration. But that means whites would have to share their society with non-whites. As first and second generation immigrants work hard, commit fewer crimes (than the general public), take harsher jobs and pay their taxes, I guess they make their white-supremacist neighbors feel insecure.

Betas are going to be the next Silent Generation, the low-population gen born during the Great Depression, known to be a sad, cautionary lot with lifelong health problems. I do not envy them their future. And that’s even if none of the catastrophic existential risk scenarios manifest in their lifetime.

(We’re going to run out of water in their lifetime.)

IUDs work mechanically by inhibiting implantation of the zygote in the womb.¹ Contrast, the pill, which prevents contraception with hormones. This means your mood cycle will change less with IUDs

Note that some IUDs include a hormone component. Discuss with your doctor what is your best choice.

This also means complications with IUDs are also mechanical, most commonly unintended eviction. In prior eras, sone IUDS could scrape or puncture the uterus, but their design is vastly improved so its extremely rare.

¹ Yes, this freaks out the anti-abortion-access and anti-contraception-access crowds since they assert personhood at conception. To that, I offer this statistic from the Guttmacher Institute: 75% of all conceptions fail to result in live birth. By far the majority of them are due to failure to implant. Selection is intrinsic to the human reproductive process.

This also means the most populous place in the Christian Cinematic Universe is the Limbo of the innocents, on the fringe of Hell, at 300 billion souls, most of whom never breathed air. Unless Limbo is not cannon, in which case they go to the Hell of the Damned totalling 400 billion souls. Its awkward.

Anti-intellectualism runs thick in MAGA, as it did in the German Reich.

It has its price.

We’ve seen what happens when we manage our economy without data-driven expertise (inflation, affordability crisis)

We’ve seen what happens when we fight wars with vibes and memes instead of strategy and objectives, ignoring and even discharging our educated and experienced generals (global energy crisis, destabilized Middle East, depleted high-cost munitions, demoralized troops, national disgrace in the global community)

We’ve seen what happens when we dismiss our experts in the food, health and disease prevention departments of government (measles outbreak, sweeping food contamination crises, elevated death rates)

Trump 2.0 is a master class in what happens when the people allow tyrants to seize power. It’s not just the malevolence, but mostly the incompetence.

Lemmy gets new blood every time Reddit further enshitifies its experience.

A curious flaw in that story is that Adam and Eve were supposed to know in advance that disobeying and eating from the tree is wrong, before they had knowledge of what wrongness or disobedience is.

I like the evolutionary interpretation, that humans developed the capacity for social cooperation (including interpersonal ethics, moral good and evil) and then realized paradise (the natural world) was actually a bot of a quagmire, teeming with disease and parasites. They were less evicted as realized they could do better.

According to Wikipedia: Delaware charges no income tax on corporations not operating within the state, so taking advantage of Delaware’s other benefits does not result in taxation. At the same time, Delaware has a particularly aggressive tax on banks that locate in the state. However, in general, the state is viewed as a positive location for corporate tax purposes because favorable laws of incorporation allow companies to minimize corporate expenditures.

So, yeah, I was oversimplifying.

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Delaware is the state where a bunch of companies are legally but not physically headquartered, ro evade state taxes and regulations.

States need to rethink their tax laws for companies: If you do business here, you pay taxes here.

Um, how? Corporations don’t care if they go under. They also don’t care if they commit genocide or are responsible for major industrial disasters.

So financialization.

Rentseeking with extra steps.

More and more, alleged captains of industry are showing themselves to be confidence players who just defend capitalism because they got lucky in it.

Oh my. You weren’t kidding. I searched unicorn and yeah, teems of examples.