- Biplane
- Jul 18, 2005
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No Viet Cong ever called me gamer
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May 18, 2024 21:53
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- Adbot
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ADBOT LOVES YOU
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Jun 10, 2024 06:18
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- OBAMNA PHONE
- Aug 7, 2002
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TBF Boeing would love for the 747s to finish phasing out, lots of profits to be made once the FAA lets them expand their current lines.
E: Oops
none of what you are saying makes sense
the market for large 4 engine jets for passenger flights has been unprofitable for a long, long time. the last generation of 747 barely sold any passenger versions and the a380 was a financial black hole
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May 18, 2024 21:56
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- Mandel Brotset
- Jan 1, 2024
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No Viet Cong ever called me gamer
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May 18, 2024 23:00
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- nikosoft
- Dec 17, 2011
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ghost in the shell, but somehow much worse
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College Slice
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Winco is so good
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May 18, 2024 23:13
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- Mustached Demon
- Nov 12, 2016
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May 18, 2024 23:16
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- mawarannahr
- May 21, 2019
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remember those articles about how leftists should invest in companies to steer them in the right way instead of boycotting or divesting?
Column: Exxon Mobil is suing its shareholders to silence them about global warming
finance.yahoo.com posted:
You wouldn't think that Exxon Mobil has to worry much about being harried by a couple of shareholder groups owning a few thousand dollars worth of shares between them — not with its $529-billion market value and its stature as the world's biggest oil company.
But then you might not have factored in the company's stature as the world's biggest corporate bully.
In February, Exxon Mobil sued the U.S. investment firm Arjuna Capital and Netherlands-based green shareholder firm Follow This to keep a shareholder resolution they sponsored from appearing on the agenda of its May 29 annual meeting. The resolution urged Exxon Mobil to work harder to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of its products.
quote:
Exxon has more resources than just about anybody; 'overkill' doesn't begin to describe the imbalance of power.
Shareholder advocate Nell Minow
The company's legal threat worked: Days after the lawsuit was filed, the shareholder groups, weighing their relative strength against an oil behemoth, withdrew the proposal and pledged not to refile it in the future.
Yet even though the proposal no longer exists, the company is still pursuing the lawsuit, running up its own and its adversaries' legal bills. Its goal isn't hard to fathom.
"What purpose does this have other than sending a chill down the spines of other investors to keep them from speaking up and filing resolutions?" asks Illinois State Treasurer Michael W. Frerichs, who oversees public investment portfolios, including the state's retirement and college savings funds, worth more than $35 billion.
In response to the lawsuit, Frerichs has urged Exxon Mobil shareholders to vote against the reelection to the board of Chairman and Chief Executive Darren W. Woods and lead independent director Joseph L. Hooley at the annual meeting.
He's not alone. The $496-billion California Public Employees' Retirement System, or CalPERS, the nation's largest public pension fund, is considering a vote against Woods, according to the fund's chief operating investment officer, Michael Cohen.
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May 18, 2024 23:46
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- post hole digger
- Mar 21, 2011
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No Viet Cong ever called me gamer
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May 19, 2024 00:03
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- Pink Mist
- Sep 28, 2021
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remember those articles about how leftists should invest in companies to steer them in the right way instead of boycotting or divesting?
has the same vibe as telling leftists to vote in primaries. since the center controls those channels they can tweak the results anyway. for some reason they let the right wing do whatever though wonder why that is
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May 19, 2024 00:06
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- WampaLord
- Jan 14, 2010
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I was watching some old footage from 2005 of folks in a grocery store and was struck by the amount of full size carts being pushed around that were completely filled with groceries. idk if it’s just where or when I shop, but I rarely see that nowadays. strange thing to be nostalgic for, things are fine
I saw some dude with a relatively full cart check out ahead of me last week, his total was $260
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May 19, 2024 00:24
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- Skaffen-Amtiskaw
- Jun 24, 2023
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My hack to getting things people envy is being rich, dickhead. It's ez pz and the poors hate it.
Anyway, everything is poo poo lately? Who knew?
The Decay Of Everyday Life
quote:So where does this leave us? We're on our own.
This month I've described what can be summarized as The Decay of Everyday Life: the erosion of the fundamental elements of everyday life: work, opportunity, social mobility, security and well-being, which includes civility, conviviality and a functional, competent social-political order.
In other words, Everyday Life includes far more than the financial statistics of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the stock market, wealth and income. Everyday Life is fundamentally about relationships, agency (i.e. control of one's life and ownership of one's work), the fulfillment of life's purposes (livelihood, family, friends, community and self-growth), leisure time and the experiences of everyday living, both the stressors and the joys.
As I've explored in recent posts, the experiential elements of Everyday Life have decayed over the past 40 years: life is more difficult and less secure in ways that are not offset by technological advances. Indeed, the most highly touted technological advances (Internet and mobile phones) have increased the burdens of shadow work and introduced new pathways of addiction and stress that have reduced well-being. Rather than being free, they include structures of control that we have yet to grasp, much less limit.
The Decay of Everyday Life echoes the title of one of the more important books I've long recommended, The Structures of Everyday Life Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century Volume 1 by Fernand Braudel. The book outlines how changes in the economic structure led to changes in everyday life.
The structures I outline in the five posts describe the economic structures that shape our daily lives and the political and social structures we inhabit. While I focus attention on the way globalization and financialization have hollowed out our economy and increased the precarity of labor, in the larger context we can identify these structural drivers of decay:
1. The balance between labor and capital has been skewed to capital for 50 years. Labor's political power and share of the economy has declined while capital's political and economic power has become dominant. This has driven income-wealth inequality to extremes that are destabilizing the economy and the political-social orders.
Increasing the sums labor can borrow to keep afloat only works until debt service consumes all disposable income, crushing consumption. The end result is mass default of debt and the erasure of debt-based "assets" held by the financial elites (top 10%).
Labor will have to restore the balance with capital or the system will collapse in disorder. History is rather definitive about this causal chain.
2. Process and narrative control have replaced outcomes as the operative mechanisms and goals of the status quo. The illusions of limitless "progress" and "prosperity" have generated a mindset in which outcomes no longer matter, as "progress" and "prosperity" are forces of Nature that can't be stopped, so we can luxuriate in Process--completing forms and compliance documents, submitting reports to other offices, holding endless meetings to discuss our glacial "progress", mandating more Process, elevating managers who excel at Process--with the net result that building permits that were once issued in a few days now take months, bridges take decades to build, and incompetence reigns supreme.
To obscure the dismal outcomes--failure, delays, poor quality, errors--narrative control is deployed, expanded and rewarded. The managerial class has been rewarded and advanced not for generating timely, on-budget, high-quality outcomes, but for managing Process and Narrative Control: everything's going great, and if it isn't, the fault lies elsewhere.
The net result of this structure is that the competent either quit in disgust or or assigned to Siberia, while the incompetent are elevated to the highest levels of corporate and public-sector management.
3. The dominance of monopolies and cartels has fatally distorted markets and politics, undermining the foundations of everyday life. By eliminating competition and buying political-regulatory complicity, monopolies and cartels lock in ample, stable profits, profits that are increased by squeezing labor and reducing the quality and quantity of goods and services, to the point that quality services and goods are either luxuries available only to the elite or simply unavailable at any price, as the knowledge, systems and values required to produce high-quality goods and services have been irrevocably lost.
4. The dominance of digital communications in everyday life has increased the unpaid shadow work we're forced to do and injected new forms of narrative control, digital hypnosis, addiction and derangement into daily life that cannot be reversed in any meaningful way other than drastically limiting our exposure to the toxic flood tide.
So where does this leave us? We're on our own. The status quo is incapable of unwinding the fatal distortions generated by the dominant economic structures, and so it is also incapable of "saving" us from being seated at the banquet of consequences. This is why the only rational response is to focus on increasing our Self-Reliance.
Rather than becoming enraptured by the apologists and cheerleaders proclaiming everything's great, launching a lifeboat and setting a course for land is a strategy with much higher odds of success.
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May 19, 2024 00:46
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- Palladium
- May 8, 2012
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Very Good
✔️✔️✔️✔️
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Anyway, everything is poo poo lately? Who knew?
vote.
state of human progress by impressing with something so stagnant and mundane
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May 19, 2024 00:49
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- Xaris
- Jul 25, 2006
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Lucky there's a family guy
Lucky there's a man who positively can do
All the things that make us
Laugh and cry
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latest rob horning piece is pretty good
quote:A few weeks ago the New York Times ran a package of short pieces about “how TikTok has changed us,” pegged to legislation passing that could possibly ban the app in the U.S. That framing makes it seem like there is something unique about TikTok specifically, but the elements of its popularity are not mysterious: Amanda Hess sums them up as “short-form videos, algorithmic timelines and searchable sound clips,” as well as the billions of cell-phone cameras and network of millions of users that those elements depend on. The package intro also notes another important quality: “Unlike Instagram, Facebook or Snapchat, TikTok didn’t build itself around social connections. Its goal is pure, uncut entertainment.”
The other platforms have now largely followed suit, so most of them primarily incentivize the development of attention-grabbing techniques that can be isolated, copied, and applied to any kind of content with a minimum of context. Viewers can enjoy “attention-getting” as a kind of content in and of itself (perhaps that is what “pure, uncut entertainment” means) and keep current with what approaches to attention getting are effective and normalized. TikTok shows a steady stream of ostensibly ordinary people, people the audience has no particular a priori stake in, trying to be interesting, so the time spent on the platform becomes not only an ambient experience of parasociality but also an education in how to seem interesting to no one in particular. It exposes viewers to an evolving grammar of poses, postures, idioms, vocal tones, settings, editing tricks, and facial expressions that establishes a palpable sense of media presence in the absence of physical presence and garners social approval in the abstract. It thereby teaches a contemporary form of etiquette: These are the acceptable, i.e. lucrative, ways to broadcast your identity to strangers. This is how you can commodify yourself.
Even in videos that don’t feature people, a similar spectacularization is at work. One of the items in the Times package, by Becky Hughes, is about recipe videos. Where printed recipes depended on cooks reasoning their way through step-by-step instructions presented in as dry and rational a manner as possible (hence their peculiar tone; their terse imperatives), videos simply show the process and expect viewers to mimic what they see. A viral recipe is more like a viral dance craze or challenge; you participate through gestural emulation rather than through discourse.
Hughes writes:
quote: for all the access to techniques and cuisines that TikTok has provided home cooks, the platform favors concepts over actual recipes — eggs fried in a puddle of pesto, sandwich fillings chopped into a homogenous mixture, mini pancakes served like cereal. The most shareable recipes are the ones that you can watch once, then turn around and make — no measurements, bake times or reading needed. Just dump, stir, like, follow, repeat.
I would guess that the most “sharable” recipes would be the ones you don’t need to make at all but can watch over and over again as a performance, a video poem of metamorphosis. Video recipes can be enjoyed passively, as entertaining spectacles (what Hughes here calls “concepts” ) rather than practical aids. The same suite of techniques that make people you’ll never meet seem compelling can also be applied to food, to make it seem interesting even when you can’t eat it. Whether one actually learns how to cook a particular dish is incidental to learning how to stage and consume a spectacle. You need certain ingredients and equipment and manual dexterity to make and enjoy a meal; to enjoy a spectacle, all you need is a phone.
The way TikTok conflates experience with voyeurism makes it a somewhat clear demonstration of Guy Debord’s “society of the spectacle.” Debord argues that under the conditions of late 20th century capitalism — conditions of media centricity and monopoly that have only intensified into our century — spectacle and lived experience are in a complex dialectic that sustains a generalized alienation and a universal reification. “It is not just that the relationship to commodities is now plain to see, commodities are now all that there is to see; the world we see is the world of the commodity.” Debord concludes that individuals are “condemned to the passive acceptance of an alien everyday reality” and are driven to “resorting to magical devices” to “entertain the illusion” of “reacting to this fate.” TikTok could be considered as one of those magical devices (along with the phone in its entirety) that manages that dialectic. Under the guise of “entertainment,” passivity reappears to the entertained individual as a kind of perfected agency; alienation is redeemed as the requisite precursor to consumer delectation.
TikTok makes it plain how this spectacularizing logic applies to everything: Anything at all can be profitably presented as entertainment at the expense of the specificity of its own concept. That is, anything can become entertainment instead of what it is — it is more valuable to the system (as reflected by the infrastructure provided by TikTok and other platforms) as spectacle than as a reflection of its own content. A video recipe has to entertain; it doesn’t have to help you make something edible. What’s important is that it prompts viewers to equate viewing with doing. The resulting passivity allows the cycle to strengthen itself — one is not actively seeking any content or information, so one’s impatience and expectations of being entertained continue to grow stronger.
“The spectacle is essentially tautological,” Debord writes, “for the simple reason that its means and ends are identical. It is the sun that never sets on the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire globe, basking in the perpetual warmth of its own glory.”
Open AI’s Chat-GPT4o — a new iteration of its chatbot product that emphasizes its ability to mimic personability — can also be understood in these terms. Its means are its ends. It subordinates content to the interface, information to the way it is presented, and works to marginalize its significance so that the purpose of chatting with a bot is to keep chatting with a bot. Max Read concludes from Open AI’s recent demo that it has realized that “the point of A.I. is to talk to a cool computer.” It’s an interface that customers can use not to get anything done but solely in order to enjoy an interface, in a techy approximation of why people chitchat.
It’s hard not to see OpenAI’s anthropomorphic turn as an admission that mimicry is all that chatbots are good for — part of a pivot away from productivity and labor automation and toward selling pseudo-companionship, automating away your need for friends. (This typically credulous Kevin Roose piece, in which he recounts his experience testing out some AI companion products, seems indicative of the industry’s drift into the experience economy.) Read quotes John Herrman, who points out that “what OpenAI presented was instead primarily a step forward in its products’ ability to perform the part of an intelligent machine,” and not some step toward competence or factual reliability. Facts are irrelevant to the truth of the experience OpenAI sells, which is grounded in the fantasy of having someone you can always talk to and boss around without having to worry about managing their performance. The chatbot performs “assistance” in a way that makes its actually doing anything more and more beside the point, much as the recipe videos make cooking anything beside the point. Users can just consume the entertainment value of a chatbot’s responsiveness as a reified phenomenon — what Paul Ford describes as generative AI’s “shamelessness”:
quote: What I love, more than anything, is the quality that makes AI such a disaster: If it sees a space, it will fill it—with nonsense, with imagined fact, with links to fake websites. It possesses an absolute willingness to spout foolishness, balanced only by its carefree attitude toward plagiarism.
Models are trained to sound confident, and that performed confidence can be enjoyed separately from what that confidence is supposed to be attached to.
For his part, Read also likens generative AI to a confidence game: magic tricks. He writes:
quote: a few years in to the generative-A.I. craze, it seems pretty clear to me that these apps, in their current instantiation, are best thought of, like magic tricks, as a form of entertainment. They produce entertainments, yes — images, audio, video, text, shitposts — but they also are entertainments themselves. Interactions with chatbots like GPT-4o may be incidentally informative or productive, but they are chiefly meant to be entertaining, hence the focus on spookily impressive but useless frippery like emotional affect.
Where TikTok instilled a passivity that is limited to spectatorship, chatbots render conversation (normally an active, reciprocal process of engagement and potential conflict with another consciousness) into something passive and consumable while still taking on the flattering trappings of participatory activity. Just as the point of TikTok’s algorithmic feed is to get people to consume more TikTok, so the point of a chatbot’s conversational interface will be to get people to keep talking to it. Who wouldn’t want to have a chat with a talking advertisement? It is like an algorithmic feed that can put into words how everything is centered on you. Even if it could reliably do anything else, it wouldn’t feel as satisfying as that. Xaris has issued a correction as of 00:58 on May 19, 2024
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May 19, 2024 00:55
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- rudecyrus
- Nov 6, 2009
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fuck you trolls
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My hack to getting things people envy is being rich, dickhead. It's ez pz and the poors hate it.
Anyway, everything is poo poo lately? Who knew?
The Decay Of Everyday Life
lmao just become more SELF-RELIANT! food too expensive? grow your own! it's so easy!
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May 19, 2024 01:11
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- Scarabrae
- Oct 7, 2002
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lmao just become more SELF-RELIANT! food too expensive? grow your own! it's so easy!
https://i.imgur.com/pwFdvLE.mp4
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May 19, 2024 01:13
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- Palladium
- May 8, 2012
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Very Good
✔️✔️✔️✔️
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that seems like a loving PITA to clean up
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May 19, 2024 01:58
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- Homeless Friend
- Jul 16, 2007
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that seems like a loving PITA to clean up
its a bread maker op, it just slides out
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May 19, 2024 02:23
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- post hole digger
- Mar 21, 2011
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lmao
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May 19, 2024 02:34
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- Xaris
- Jul 25, 2006
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Lucky there's a family guy
Lucky there's a man who positively can do
All the things that make us
Laugh and cry
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its a bread maker op, it just slides out
i have one of those old-rear end heavy metal pasta rolls from like 1970s and it's also a pain to clean. pretty sure everytime i use it i end up getting bits of moldy dough from the last time i used it (always on a 12-month use cycle when i get a wild hair up my rear end to try it again). fresh pasta is one of those things i've just decided is not worth the massive time investment over buying some middle-tier dried pasta or bulk fresh pasta, and then i learn my lesson.. until i forget my lesson and repeat the mistake
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May 19, 2024 02:37
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- Rectal Death Alert
- Apr 2, 2021
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poo poo that sounds awesome
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May 19, 2024 02:39
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- post hole digger
- Mar 21, 2011
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i sent this to my friends but i dont think they 'got' it
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May 19, 2024 02:50
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- gradenko_2000
- Oct 5, 2010
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HELL SERPENT
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Lipstick Apathy
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https://x.com/conner_omalley/status/1791159584658432155
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May 19, 2024 04:04
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- Precambrian Video Games
- Aug 19, 2002
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I'm a dumbass so I still click on YouTube Music's discovery mix semi-regularly but I've noticed more questionable likely AI-generated music on there from artists with virtually no online presence and also songs with awful AI cover art and/or videos. Neither of those is really new - the Spotify fake artist/music thing is years old - but one particular one that caught my attention is Cafe de Anatolia. I liked one song that was recommended because it was alright if a bit too long, and after that I got dozens recommendations by them. Why? Well despite claiming to be a record label they are listing themselves as the artist on every single they release, which seem to come daily. By liking just one song by them I got all of these new singles in the explore/new release page, which looks like this:
That's about half of the page dedicated to this one "artist". Some of the actual artists seem to be real to various degrees although of course I have to wonder given the shadiness and the crappy AI cover art. Who are these people anyway?
quote:
Our Story
Our Story
Cafe De Anatolia is a Record Label and Artists Management Agency producing the best music mixture of genres and the highest quality of Ethno, Deep House, Chill Out and Oriental music, while managing some of the best artists in World area.
History
Cafe De Anatolia was founded on 16th of May, 2017 by Zoran Iliev (aka. Billy Esteban), his daughter Monika Ilieva and his son Nikola Iliev (aka. Nickarth).
The idea about creating Cafe De Anatolia Label came spontaneously while the daughter studying in Slovenia, and the father working in Austria met on a coffee on Nebotičnik, in the centre of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Sharing their experiences, Monika proposed they make their own Record Label, since she was studying International relations and diplomacy and was already using her negotiation skills in closing deals on behalf of her father in his previous music arrangements. After this they started together with Nikola intensively to search for artists and work on developing the story of Cafe De Anatolia. Monika continue her education (master studies) in Ljubljana focusing on Strategic Marketing Communication and Brand Studies which helped considerably in the branding of Cafe De Anatolia.
Since 2017, there are many compilations, albums and EP's released by Cafe De Anatolia, compiled by prominent artists such as: Billy Esteban, Rialians On Earth, Dj Professor, Dj Brahms, DJ Manuel Defil, Nikko Sunset, Vudu Brada and others.
Some of the most popular releases are: Oriental Touch, Ethno, Caravan, Dune, Oriental Trip, Mediterraneo, The Silk Road, Best of Cafe De Anatolia.
A lot of exclusive artists of Cafe De Anatolia also make performances in the name of the brand around the World: Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Greece, Italy, Romania, Macedonia, Morocco, Russia, Serbia, Austria and many more.
Uhhh... okay.
For whatever reason, their actual youtube page doesn't have this flood of singles but instead has one 2h long mix every week, with a slightly different style of godawful AI cover art.
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May 19, 2024 04:07
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- Adbot
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ADBOT LOVES YOU
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Jun 10, 2024 06:18
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May 18, 2024 21:53
