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Cake day: July 30th, 2024

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  • This is why libertarians and many modern authoritarian LOVE corporations. Unlike governments which have some accountability (that has seriously been dwindling) corporations can basically do what they want. Laws are effectively written by corporations so that anyone in any position of authority is never thrown in prison or even needs to worry about that (ultra low level workers can be thrown to the dogs to placate the public every once in a while) and meanwhile the right of protestors has been so seriously curtailed that soon even in formerly first world countries they might be able to break out the machine guns like they did in central America in the 1910s and 1950s. In Britain protestors are being sentenced to record prison terms that were formerly reserved for rapists and muggers.

    There is little question that corporations are behind them all.



  • Exactly. I am elder millennial, and I grew up in Dubai. Back in the 80s and 90s in Dubai the only security cameras that existed were in malls and some supermarkets, and public CCTV by police did not exist. Traffic light cameras to catch people speeding and/or running a red light only got started in the early 2000s. This is one thing that I honestly say that really demarcates the early 2000s from previous times is the fact that the possibility of mass surveillance became a reality only back then. Before that surveillance was mostly disjointed and not at all interconnected. If you had security cameras, then they were on VHS tapes and unless you had the budget to get new tapes regularly, most people would just rewind the tapes and tape over and over, meaning they will degrade fairly quickly, and since most places didn’t keep an archive for too long, if something ‘suspicious’ happened a few weeks prior that you weren’t informed about until today, it would be lost since those tapes were likely overwritten, and there is no way to recover that.

    The 90s were far from perfect for me. I had a fairly hard time growing up. But I honestly just wish for the dignity of not being on camera 24/7. My apartment building has cameras on all floors and I cannot exit or enter my own apartment without being caught on camera. That is if those cameras are real and not fakes.


  • Robocop… the movie they love but don’t realize is a complete mockery of THEM. As a kid I thought that Robo was just cool, but as I got older and rewatched it a few times, I realized just how deep the rabbit hole goes.

    You know what’s one profound thing I noticed a few years ago that flew over my head? The ED-209 robot does not have a non-lethal apprehension method. It only threatens to kill for non-compliance, and then does so if compliance is not absolute. It has no way of restraining or leading arrested suspects if they comply, and no other method to deal with non-compliant suspects other than to blow them away. No tasers, no net gun, no ropes, no tear gas, no sci-fi ‘set for stun’ laser beam, nothing.

    On top of that another thing I realized is that Dick Jones considered that thing to be street ready to take on law enforcement. From everything to ultra-violent encounters to jaywalking and parking tickets. What it tells me about his mentality is that he would be a HIGHLY successful billionaire today…







  • Nope. It is only for the peons. Dissidents will have ANY behavior be seen as bad and the fascists will be identified specifically to train the AI to ignore them or automatically rule them out as suspects. Blame their victims and not the perps.

    BTW, people like Zuckerberg fucking HATE people like you and me. He considered the people who trusted him with their emails (when he was in university and coming up with the idea of Facebook) to be absolute idiots and even more so for trusting him with that information. He lives his life in a way that insures that we know as little about him as possible. He lives in a compound that is impossible to view via satellite imagery AND he has the actual house he lives in surrounded by dummy buildings specifically so that people cannot spy on his with telescopes. He is obsessed with privacy and probably has never been seen on CCTV in years.






  • I am not sure, but I think Milton Friedman once revealed the depths of his ignorance about racial segregation in the US and that the claim that laws demanding all segregation be dismantled were a violation of the free market principle and that a true free market would dissolve segregation.

    Chicago, as you mentioned, was used as an example to show just how dumb he was. Chicago had no official segregation policy. From a purely legal standpoint if an Irishman wanted to get an apartment in a black neighborhood and invite Italian friends over that would be a huge taboo and suffer reprecussions over it even if he wasn’t doing anything remotely illegal.

    The only way it COULD have dismantled is to make law to strictly forbid that kind of discrimination on any grounds.


  • Some people still think billionaires are just like us. They aren’t. Their mentality is 100% different than the average person. Even basic things like their concept of money is extremely different and almost alien to ours. We think of money as the thing that we need to survive, the thing that keeps food on the table and a roof over our heads. Having a good deal of money for the average person is a source of comfort. It allows us to know we don’t have to go hungry and we can afford medical care when we are sick.

    For billionaires money is an abstract concept. They operate on such massive sums every day that the idea that a few thousand dollars can make or break someone is inconceivable to them. When Elon Musk bought twitter he was originally kidding, but when the owners forced him to, raising the 44 billion dollars did nothing to harm him. In fact, his net worth increased greatly not too long after he shelled out amounts of money that would literally have ended world hunger several times over. Money is a source of leveraging power for them and they aren’t afraid to ‘lose’ a lot of it because they know they can get it all back with remarkable rapidity.

    Borders also don’t exist to them. If Zuckerberg or Bezos wanted to go to India, or Zambia, or China, or Germany, or Finland, or the UAE, or wherever, they doesn’t have to concern themself with things like visas or residencies or whatever. They could go and set up shop wherever and not need to concern themselves with that.

    They legit do think of themselves as being gods and are vastly superior to us. Their view of the poor being leeches on society while they are the providers when basically everything shows the opposite is not something they find contradictory. In their minds the population at large exists to serve them, not the other way around. This is why tech bro start ups that have created enclaves in some third world countries and they steal massive public resources for their projects all while imposing their own extra-legal or illegal restrictions on the poor is not seen as a problem because they really do view black and brown people as perpetual slaves that must be shown their place time and time again least they forget.