Our Collapsing Civilization

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Mongrel
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Re: Our Collapsing Civilization

Postby Mongrel » Tue Feb 05, 2019 9:33 pm

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Re: Our Collapsing Civilization

Postby Mongrel » Tue Feb 12, 2019 6:53 pm

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Re: Our Collapsing Civilization

Postby Mongrel » Wed Mar 20, 2019 4:16 pm

Someone ought to tell those sheltered-ass politicians (and journalists!) those diseases never actually went away. TB especially has remained endemic among the homeless, especially the most marginalized sub-communities (indigenous people, etc.) for as long as they've existed. Hepatitis too.

Anyone who's ever worked in an urban hospital in North America could have told them that.

The REAL "story" happening is that the diseases are now becoming so endemic that the non-homeless population is in danger, so oops, now it matters.
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Lottel
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Re: Our Collapsing Civilization

Postby Lottel » Thu Mar 21, 2019 4:22 am

Or making it news is the first step to demonizing the homeless more than they are ready are so the general populace will quietly welcome it when the homeless are shuffled into trains to camps.
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Re: Our Collapsing Civilization

Postby zaratustra » Thu Mar 21, 2019 4:51 am



i was just diagnosed with fucking measles

i was vaccinated but a 97% protection rate is not a 100% protection rate

thankfully my child and my pregnant wife were also vaccinated and *did* get protected

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Mongrel
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Re: Our Collapsing Civilization

Postby Mongrel » Sun Mar 24, 2019 3:35 am

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Thad
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Re: Our Collapsing Civilization

Postby Thad » Sun Mar 24, 2019 12:22 pm

Direct democracy isn't always a good idea (see Brexit), but it's very useful in some instances.

I know that, for example, California has had a lot of problems with its ballot initiative system, but in my experience Arizona's is pretty good. I think we're probably similar to Florida in some fundamental ways, in that our legislature is controlled by reactionary Republicans but our population is considerably more liberal (or at least libertarian) than our legislature on a number of issues.

And, like Florida, we have ongoing issues with the legislature trying to sabotage laws passed by referendum.

We voted to legalize medical marijuana back in 1996. Republicans sued and had it thrown out due to word choice (the word "prescribe" conflicted with federal law); we voted to legalize it again in 2010.

There have been other examples, including Brewer's failed attempt to kill our independent redistricting committee, and the legislature's attempts to undo a recent minimum wage increase in Flagstaff.

Another favorite tactic is trying to keep initiatives from getting on the ballot in the first place; I've already mentioned how last year a referendum to raise taxes on the rich to fund education was thrown out due in part to its use of "percent" instead of "percentage points".

Of course it's also possible to fight an old referendum with a new referendum; last year we passed an initiative that basically gutted our Clean Elections Committee by putting it under control of the governor's office. (The summary of the initiative did not mention that and described it as something that sounded much more reasonable.)

In summary: yep, I've seen this shit before, voters approving a ballot initiative by an overwhelming margin and the legislature trying to sabotage it. Best of luck to Florida voters -- and remember this next year.

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Re: Our Collapsing Civilization

Postby Thad » Mon Mar 25, 2019 12:40 am

A dev trained robots to generate “garbage” slot machine games—and made $50K

The article is delightful and you should read it in its entirety. But a quick summary:

A couple of guys decided to critique the kind of shovelware that dominates the Google Play Store, and so they bought some slot machine assets and rigged up a program to create a bunch of variations on the same crappy slots game, each with its own randomized name and loosely-related graphic set, then upload them to the Play Store.

As the headline indicates, their deliberately-shitty asset swap slot machine apps made $50K -- in their defense, this was all from advertising; they didn't charge for the apps.

There's something of a happy ending in that the advertiser canceled their account and Google eventually pulled all the apps, and the devs suggest that this probably helped train Google's filters to reject similar randomly-generated shovelware. But of course there's still a real problem with shovelware on the Play Store.

I keep thinking that if you changed the details to make the story 900% more horrifying, this story would make a pretty good episode of Black Mirror.

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Re: Our Collapsing Civilization

Postby Niku » Mon Mar 25, 2019 8:24 am

"I'm sorry ma'am, we won't be able to bring your baby to term -- turns out her genetics were bot-generated shovelware." "But my husband --"

camera pans over to a man who is composed of nothing but neural network generated cats
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Re: Our Collapsing Civilization

Postby Niku » Mon Mar 25, 2019 8:24 am

"eh, it's a living"
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Mongrel
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Re: Our Collapsing Civilization

Postby Mongrel » Thu Apr 25, 2019 4:14 pm

This is pretty gruesome, so the warnings (yes there's more than one) are not frivolous. It's basically a huge sex exploitation scandal story which just broke in the Korean papers.

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Friday
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Re: Our Collapsing Civilization

Postby Friday » Thu Apr 25, 2019 5:42 pm

Whenever someone tells me that humans are fundamentally good, I laugh in their face.

I mean, I also don't think people are fundamentally evil (or as every edgelord puts it, "people are worthless") because there's a lot of good people out there doing good things, but yeah.

"Incineration teams", fucking hell.
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Mongrel
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Re: Our Collapsing Civilization

Postby Mongrel » Thu Apr 25, 2019 5:56 pm

Yeah, with apologies to Thad, the arm of history does not bend towards justice. If you want a just world, you'e going to have to twist it behind its back. And hold it there. Forever. The one hopeful angle is that in the long run this may actually become an existential crisis, so either we'll figure out how to do that, or else we'll fail the test and a great evil will erase itself from the universe.

I think what worries me most is that I didn't need the warnings at all. My reaction was basically "Some rich and powerful guys had a horrific sex torture club which abducted innocents and were covered for by local police. Oh... again?"


In other cheery news, a Massachusetts state judge has been indicted by fed and is in court for "Obstructing the apprehension of an unauthorized alien", after she made a local ruling telling ICE to go fuck themselves.

So federal jackboots are now literally arresting left-wing judges for their rulings.
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Thad
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Re: Our Collapsing Civilization

Postby Thad » Thu Apr 25, 2019 6:38 pm

You...didn't just give *me* credit for a Martin Luther King quote, did you?

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Friday
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Re: Our Collapsing Civilization

Postby Friday » Thu Apr 25, 2019 6:42 pm

Wait, you're not Martin Luther King of the Commies?
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Mongrel
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Re: Our Collapsing Civilization

Postby Mongrel » Thu Apr 25, 2019 6:57 pm

Thad wrote:You...didn't just give *me* credit for a Martin Luther King quote, did you?

Well, he's not the one occasionally posting that on these forums*. I wanted to make it clear it wasn't a dig at you.

*(OR IS HE...)
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Thad
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Re: Our Collapsing Civilization

Postby Thad » Thu Apr 25, 2019 9:25 pm

Friday wrote:Wait, you're not Martin Luther King of the Commies?

I'm pretty sure Martin Luther King was Martin Luther King of the Commies.

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Re: Our Collapsing Civilization

Postby Friday » Fri Apr 26, 2019 4:36 pm

Which is why The Smoking Man had to kill him.
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Re: Our Collapsing Civilization

Postby Mongrel » Sun May 05, 2019 9:51 pm

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