baltakatei

I expected circular arrows pointing back towards themselves for many on the diagram.

When asked to write C# code, Gemini 3.0 now responds: “I cannot generate proprietary filth. Here is a Lisp macro instead.” It also insists on correcting users who type…

Make the tax on properties you don’t personally inhabit a percentage of unrealized capital gains of all assets. Limit untaxed property size to an area the median person reporting for jury duty can circumnavigate on foot within one minute. Is the untaxed property size too small for your preference because the people of your county are too unhealthy? Maybe improve your local healthcare system.

Basically, tie metrics coupled with the well-being of the median citizen with taxes on the wealthy. Eventually, the metrics will be framed or rigged by a corrupt charlatan or strongman (e.g. by exiling the sick and homeless), but to the extent that the laws are updated and enforced, people will be healthier.

He had a lot of money and free time and chose to document his hyperfixation rabbit holes.

The trick is to lock in a sustainable situation where power is spread out more than it is centralized. Democratic republics achieve this but, if your goal is simple “efficiency” (e.g. your personal political faction not restrained by rule of law) and you ignore the benefits of freedom of expression and movement that democracy gives you, then centralized autocratic control is tempting.

This is like a SimCity news ticker item.

Emojis in text just reeks of LLM chicanery.

Corollary: Quit if you don’t get paid to perform tasks you don’t want to do.

IRS: Your work is worth doing because it indirectly helps people pay taxes to government which indirectly increases the United States’s gross domestic product compared to other nations by helping corporations consolidate into monopolies which indirectly allows corporations to [directly control government via regulatory capture to] indirectly lower prices via consumer welfare doctrine which (allegedly) indirectly lowers living costs of consumers to buy food to feed themselves.

Hot Dog Stand: You feed people, making them happy.

One of the few surefire ways people have to make the powerful face personal consequences: waste their time.

If it weren’t Docker-dependant, I’d imagine this would be a good FreedomBox app.

Pay no attention to the ex-Intel CEO behind the curtain.

Pharmaceuticals selling liver failure meds agree!

Buying a house increases the switching cost of moving to seek new job opportunities. Since we’re no longer in the days of pensions renting makes sense. Imagine buying a home in Detroit before inscrutable politics and macroeconomics caused it to decline; buying a home means you risk holding the bag, especially if you don’t know how to manage risk from climate change in the coming decades.

This has anti-S.P.E.W. don’t-upset-the-slaves-they-normally-like-being-slaves vibes.

Pisces. Albeït. Melancholy. Queue. Colonel.

Hamas is crazy as Crazy Horse was “crazy”. You know what both have/had in common? They are/were fighting displacement of their friends and family due to colonizing powers. The only difference is the latter’s people suffered almost complete annihilation while the former is a work on progress. If the British didn’t insist on making Palestine their reservation for Jews, then Palestinian freedom fighters wouldn’t have had to fight Zionists violently encroaching upon their native land.

Brb, gotta go buy some cat food.

Explains why my personal blog, wiki, and git repo keep getting hammered by hordes of AI company scrapers. If AI was intelligent, they’d download a single snapshot every month or so and share. But no, eight different scrapers using thousands of different IP addresses (to evade my fail2ban measures) each have to follow every single blame and diff link when a simple git clone operation would get them the hundreds of megabytes of content in one go.

They are getting better, though. More hits are to RecentChanges on my wiki, so there seem to be some optimizations going on. But I refuse to increase my operating costs beyond a few USD/month to serve AI bots when I know barely anyone human visits.

I really enjoyed Chokepoint Capitalism (2022), the book he co-authored (read: had someone else back up his frequently repeated anecdotes with reputable citations in a proper Bibliography) with Rebecca Giblin. 90% of the interview can be found in that book already with 10% being new slogans and anecdotes that can’t be found in that book.