Yes. DP is the right choice for civilized people.

Move the USC capitol to Milwaukee or Minneapolis/St. Paul. Both nice and central. Despite seeming landlocked, both have ocean access, Milwaukee through the Great Lakes and Minneapolis through the Mississippi. Plenty of industrial capacity and open land in the area if they need to expand. Midwestern culture is pretty resilient and underappreciated frankly. Minnesotans are basically honorary defacto Canadians already. Milwaukee featured prominently in Wayne’s World, starring Canadian Mike Myers (who started the recent Canadian “Elbows Up” movement) so we’ve already got that significant cultural connection there too. They’d be good choices I think.

Pre-Trump47 I was in the first camp. I’m not going to lie about how long it took me to figure it out. It was always obvious that the system was broken, but I’ll admit that for a long time I was foolish enough to believe the system worked well enough that it was worth trying to fix, that the fundamentals were sound and there was enough good there to want to save it.

Recent events have shown and continue to show me how naive I’ve been, none of this is an accident, it’s all part of the poker game and we’re all putting in most of the chips that keep it going whether we know it or not. And I have to be thankful that Russia, China, USA, Israel, Europe, and even my own country’s governments have made this all so abundantly clear that even I (and hopefully a lot of other people) can finally see it. I’m joining the resistance. Fuck the system and all the crooked people involved in it, it’s time for a cyberpunk revolution.

“A few turns away” until suddenly the meme of the kid riding a bike shoving a stick in his own spokes.

Well I guess this game is going to be keeping me up all night after all.

I thought ICE was already doing that.

The government of the people has become the government against the people for the corporations.

Too late I already starved to death long ago. I am just a ghost in the machine, still screaming at the injustice of the world.

That’s how it should be. That demonstrates why the working class must maintain control of the means of production. Contrary to popular belief, that’s not actually communism, rather it is the difference between feudalism and freedom.

When the feudal lords own the thing(s) you use to make your living, you’re not really free and disempowerment and disenfranchisement becomes endemic and cumulative. Plantation slaves and tenant farmers had an awful lot in common, they were not free, did not have any form of mobility, physical, social or otherwise. The lord owned the land and pretty close to everything in it. They controlled the job, controlled the housing, controlled the costs, controlled the compensation and ultimately controlled the tenants lives. There is some difference in the degree of control, but mostly only in degree.

Tenant employees are not much different today, except that it’s all been dressed up to look more free. Most of it’s an illusion though, and that shows when you start actually trying to exercise any freedom. If you don’t own any of the things that are earning your paychecks, you’ll be a slave to the people who do. That’s not something capitalism requires or even expects. A free labor market is part of the free market that capitalism requires to function effectively. Entrepreneurship is one of the pillars of capitalism and growth but it cannot exist if people or even small organizations cannot afford to own anything productive enough to be competitive or successful.

Like it or hate it, capitalism itself is not quite the problem. What we’re doing now is not functioning effectively because it’s not actually capitalism anymore, it’s feudalism. Whatever you want to call it, late-stage-capitalism, neo-liberalism, techno-feudalism, neo-feudalism, what is happening today is not what capitalism used to mean, and it’s not just because we just didn’t “properly understand” capitalism until now, and it’s not because this was actually an inevitable outcome.

Capitalism is just a tool, it’s one tool in a toolbox that we can use, it was never supposed to be the only tool, but even if it was the only tool, what we’re using it for now is not what it was supposed to be used for. What we understand about capitalism’s intended function is not matching what we see happening in the world because it’s been changed, it’s been corrupted. Important pieces of the framework that we used to call capitalism have been lost. On purpose. It has been stripped down from a tool to a weapon.

Capitalism is not the problem, we can get rid of it if we want, but it won’t solve the problem. The lords claiming ownership of everything are the problem, and even if we did throw it all away to switch to communism or something else, they would still be there, they would put themselves in the same places of power, and they would cause exactly the same problem, just like they did in communist Russia, maybe even some of the names and faces of the lords changed, but the problem certainly didn’t! Corruption and greed and exploitation and rent-seeking don’t care what economic system you’re using, they will find ways to corrupt, hoard, exploit and seek rent from the less fortunate, because that’s what the humans desiring those things want. And they will use any system at all to get it. The system is only at fault in that it was not protected from this kind of abuse. Any system will have to be or it will end up the same way.

The most intriguing part of this analysis is where WinDirect is used to shut down Windows 95’s GDI and then proceeds to reprogram the video card to take over full control of the display. Ballsy, and as close as you’re likely to get to a programming equivalent of “hold my beer”. Things were wild back in those days, man.

… and it still pretty much just works, even on Windows 11.

Make Apathetic Gretzky American.

I think Walter would be ashamed, I knew him personally from his charity work and he was a good man, a true Canadian and pretty opinionated in his own quiet way. I’m glad he didn’t live to see his son involved in and downplaying this shit. I can’t imagine how he would’ve felt good about it. Money and celebrity (and as someone else suggested, maybe CTE too) corrupts some people. It seems Wayne is one of those.

Elbows up, our defense doesn’t care whether he’s a star player or not.

Or just be cautious, thoughtful and sensible if you do. Only a Sith deals in absolutes.

I wish AI had a physical face so I could punch it.

They can try. Bans require enforcement, and they catch a few of us weirdos from time to time, but the hydra always grows more heads.

Sure, but a name is just a name, they still work just fine even when they only reflect their origins and don’t reflect the current reality anymore. NATO’s already got a handful of members that are a stretch to consider under anything but the broadest definition of “North Atlantic”. Tim Horton’s used to be about a hockey player, now it’s just, passable coffee and shitty food. Sometimes they don’t even reflect the origins either. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea hasn’t ever been very Democratic, has it?

Even if they really are attached to the limitations self-imposed by the name, I feel like they need to consider whether Europe is strictly just a place or can it also be a state of mind? Alternately, we can just surrender to Denmark and become a territorial extension of Greenland (which isn’t even green!). It’s fine either way.

I promise I’m only being like 65% tongue-in-cheek.

The dark web became known as the hideout of internet criminals. Once we’re all internet criminals, it will just be the hideout of everyone. Time to drop all these commercial services that we’ve let take over the internet and go back to being anonymous weirdos talking to other anonymous weirdos on websites run by anonymous weirdos. The web was ironically a nicer place. Also a shittier place, but at the same time a nicer place. This is why we can’t have nice things.

Perhaps I was laying it on a little thick for you, but sometimes you’ve really got to sledgehammer the point home, to ensure the people in the back can hear. My point has been made, nobody is obligated to take it personally, you are welcome to ignore it or do with it whatever you please. That said, if your instinct is to take it as a personal attack directed at you, maybe the point actually is directed at you after all. I tend to trust people’s own judgements on this.

Only buying things that are the lowest price has many consequences and not all of them are beneficial to you. Sometimes it’s just that the thing you are buying for the lowest price is crappy and poor quality. But now we are coming to realize that one of those consequences might be the destruction of the world. Figure out how to price that consequence into your economic model, and choose accordingly.

Apparently not destroying the world is more valuable to some people than others. Personally, I would pay at least 1000% more to not destroy the world, because not destroying the world is really important to me. Maybe it’s not as important to other people, I don’t know. The wonderful thing about the world we are destroying is that everyone gets to make their own decisions.

That is some very black or white, us or them, red team vs blue team thinking. It’s very interesting that you immediately jump to that conclusion when I am not even from the US at all. The answer to your question is absolutely not, and the fact that it’s a “world economy” doesn’t and shouldn’t mean any people are obligated to do business with and accept the controlling interest of literal monsters fueled by oil and oil money. Ethics must also be allowed to control the economy, not just money. The world’s financial systems have consequences beyond just the economy.

It’s definitely not new, but it’s time to start thinking about how strange it is, and start pulling these assholes off their money-merry-go-round.