The biggest con with tumblr is the CEO

The ban of every website’s existence.

I’ll have to take your word for it

Goes back to email. Easier to create a machine that churns out digital messages than find humans to do the work manually. So you get increasing loads of spam and gibberish, attempting to out-shout one another in a digital space with no bureaucratic regulation or material limits.

That said, one thing that made early social media like Facebook and MySpace and Livejournal appear valuable was the degree of human interaction. What’s more, the interpersonal networks that formed between verified humans gave enormous value to communications across the platform.

Facebook did a pretty good job, early on, of limiting who could join based on authentication through college admin offices. MySpace had a large cohort of real human artists producing real human music, which attracted a real human following. Livejournal predated a lot of advertisement-by-blogging. After the Dot-Com bubble burst, this is where you could see green shoots of economic value in a digital space.

We’ve demolished all that chasing fictitious capital. How valuable it was in practice is debatable, of course. But it’s all gone now.

Reddit, very famously, used bot traffic at its inception to create the illusion of a community big enough to compete with Digg.

It was the OG “fake it till you make it” business.

As the company implements an increasingly draconian “ban every account that looks at me sideways” admin policy, I’m not sure if “2/3rds of the traiffc” isn’t lowballing it. There are entire threads - from initial post to bullshit bottom comment - that get created by bot traffic on the modern site. It’s a full blown hall of mirrors over there.

The irony of this image is that, on the one hand, you absolutely have the Blue Collar and the White Collar snearing it out at one another over who suffered more and earned the most.

On the other hand, you’ve got the Blue Collar guy doing 12-hour shifts to guarantee Mr. White Collar gets cheap energy and fancy techno-widgets and fresh food. Meanwhile, you’ve got the White Collar guy doing 12-hour shifts to make sure Mr. Blue Collar pays the highest price for gasoline and can’t afford a cell phone plan and shops at Dented Canned Goods Store.

Like, you want to talk about class solidarity. But White Collar Guy gets paid extra precisely because he makes Blue Collar Guy’s life worse. Then he pays Tophat Guy a hefty vig for the privilege.

Meanwhile, Blue Collar Guy is so sheep-dipped in the cultural propaganda that he thinks its some kind of privilege to pay a four-figure monthly truck note to commute to his flop house on a $40k salary. The only reason he wants that $50/hr job is to stack a bunch of mortgage debt on top of the car debt and the credit card debt. At no point does he stop and ask whether these consumerist babbles are benefiting him in a material way.

And neither of them seem to realize working harder is making their lives worse.

Iran is scheduled to play three group-stage matches beginning on 11 June, including fixtures against New Zealand and Belgium in Los Angeles, followed by a match against Egypt in Seattle.

The comments come after Iran’s sports minister, Ahmad Donyamali, said the team would not take part in the tournament following the US-Israeli war on Iran.

“Considering that this corrupt regime has assassinated our leader, under no circumstances can we participate in the World Cup,” he said.

Amazing how a six paragraph long article managed to bury the lead.

Feel the same way about people wringing their hands over dead US soldiers, as though they’re the only people who matter.

A Thai shipping frigate just got hit in the Straight of Hormuz, and I have seen absolutely nobody on national news raise the question of whether any of the crew were injured or killed. Similarly, Israel and the UAE have been incredibly close-mouthed about civilian deaths from Iranian attacks into civilian areas, because they consider it a public embarrassment. Nobody seems to want to talk about the “collateral damage”.

And then there’s the death toll in Iran itself. I was getting ear-blasted with “Iranian Government Murders 10,000! 20,000! 30,000! people!” for weeks. Suddenly, Iranian deaths don’t matter, unless they’re high ranking politicians or military figures.

This reeks of the same coverage we got out of Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, and Ethiopia. National news is entirely contained within jingoistic nationalist terms. We’re covering (and increasingly gambling) on the outcome like its a basketball game.

Vile.

Epstein didn’t keep a low profile. He was everywhere, taking pictures and glad-handing other plutocrats and showing up at events.

Like, if anyone is on your short list, I would think it would be Elon Musk. Musk’s initial gambit was throwing a bunch of keggers at Stanford to make friends with the prior generation’s Silicon Valley failkids. That’s how he met Thiel and got into Paypal, made his first billion, and became an ahem Angel Investor for all sorts of glamour projects.

Opus 4.6 is genuinely pretty decent at programming now if you give it a good backbone to build off of.

Soup from a Stone.

Amazed they didn’t ask for 5-10 years of experience in AI coding.

the volume of such posts surged from just under 2,000 per day to more than 6,000

I refuse to believe Twitter only had 2,000 anti-islamic posts a day.

assigns them a score if a citizen walks on the sidewalk correctly

Funny story about Jaywalking

The automobile lobby in the US took up the cause of labeling and scorning jaywalkers in the 1910s and early 1920s. In 1912, for instance, Popular Mechanics magazine reported that the term was current in Kansas City: “The city pedestrian who cares not for traffic regulations at street corners, but strays all over the street, crossing in the middle of the block, or attempting to save time by choosing a diagonal route across a street intersection instead of adhering to the regular crossing, is designated as a ‘jay walker,’ in Kansas City.”

In 1915, when New York City’s police commissioner Arthur Woods sought to apply the word “jaywalker” to anyone who crossed the street at mid-block, the New York Times protested, calling it “highly opprobrious” and “a truly shocking name.”

Originally in the US, the legal rule was that “all persons have an equal right in the highway, and that in exercising the right each shall take due care not to injure other users of the way”. In time, however, streets became the province of vehicular traffic, both practically and legally.

Anyway, enjoy your hyper-criminalized car culture hellscape while making spooky fingers about Evil Foreign Country.

I mean, I wish that were actually true.

One of the bleakest turns of the post-war Eastern Bloc was the speed at which they re-incorporated ex-Nazi officers into the Stasi. I’d have to dig it up, but there’s a whole line about a German describing his career as roughly “First I worked for the monarchy to suppress fascism, then I worked for the fascists to suppress communism, then I worked for the communists to suppress capitalism, and now that the communists lost I’m old enough to retire.”

Reminds me of the old (apocryphal) story of Stalin, FDR, and Churchill debating what to do with the Nazi officers’ corps after their defeat.

"The German General Staff, [Stalin] said, must be liquidated. The whole force of Hitler’s mighty armies depended upon about 50,000 officers and technicians. If these were rounded up and shot at the end of the war, German military strength would be extirpated.” When Churchill angrily declared he would be no party to such mass retribution, the President quipped that he would act as mediator, and suggested the compromise of shooting only 49,000. In heat, Churchill left the room. Stalin himself fetched him back, assuring him it was all a jest.

The tendency to treat enemy soldiers as honorable adversaries while foreign civilians are resources to be exploited or speed bumps to be flattened is extremely fascist.

What separates Hitler and Hegseth isn’t their army’s treatment of survivors of a military operation, but their view of their targets as military or civilian. Hegseth knows he’s targeting civilians and treats them just like a German military commander would treat other civilians.

“Wow, are you going to give further details?”

“Then we might have to actually do something, so… no. But hey, elections are coming up! Maybe we can form a committee to look into it in the next ten to sixteen months if we win.”

Hey, friendly reminder that this bitch voted for Marco Rubio right along with everyone else in the Senate.

2001

I believe we didn’t invade Iraq until 2003.

Although, curiously enough, Iran helped us do it.

Doubly ironic, given that Bush Sr was so instrumental in beefing up the Iraqi military ten years before the '91 invasion… for the purpose of invading its neighbors. (https://archive.is/HwX3A)

What is it about hardline reactionary Islamic governments getting baited by American neoconservatives to spin around, show us their backs, and point to the spot a knife would sink in most deeply?

Apologies if I’ve touched a nerve.

Again, not clear how the US plans to neutralize long range missile capability of Iran.

Target the depots and destroy them with artillery.

You quite literally have no clue regarding the subject you’re opining on here.

This was established decades ago in excersises the US has been running since the Cold War Era.

The goal isn’t to defeat Iran in a quick war, but to neutralize the nation’s long range artillery and turn it into a free fire zone for American and Israel armies.

Ukraine isn’t Iran. It has a firm rear guard of support from the NATO block, supply lines that can re-arm and re-staff depleted arsenals and positions along the eastern front, and allied agencies ready to pick at Russia’s flanks - by seizing cargo shipping, assassinating ranking political leadership, and blowing up critical domestic infrastructure.

What the Iranians lack, at the end of the day, is friends. Nobody in the Russian, Pakistani, or Chinese government is going to send saboteurs into Israel on their behalf. Nobody is going to help them keep the Straight of Hormuz shuttered. Nobody is going to blow up Saudi desalination plants or bomb peripheral American military bases.

Once Iran military can no longer produce and deploy new ballistic missiles, the country just becomes target practice for its enemies. We (probably) won’t see a Rumsfeld-style blitz into Tehran, like they managed in Baghdad. But we will see Iranian airspace closed, critical infrastructure destroyed, and population centers targeted to effectively break up the political face of Iran into its component parts.

What becomes of a nation without a central bureaucracy, an intercity municipal system, or a functional electrical grid? This was a country already in a water crisis months ago. It is a nation functionally under siege by the most sadistic and savage militaries in history. People are going to die by the millions before this is over, simply due to disease, drought, and famine. It’s going to be a country the size of Germany experiencing what Israel has done to Gaza.

Quite literally bombed into the Stone Age.