Because we the sucker peasants of the west have largely been propagandized by the owner class from birth into embodying this meme:

Automation isn’t the enemy.

As ever, the owner class that hoards and wages economic war on you though automation for their exclusive benefit at their society’s expense are your enemy, whether you would fight them or not.

Arguing that we should “save” back breaking, repetitive unnatural movement, manual labor jobs that break human bodies by the time they’re 40 is the WRONG hill to die on. Fight for the citizenry to reap the benefits of automation through taxation, not to keep shitty jobs robots can do faster and better. Fight to change the economy so that everyone doesn’t need meaningless jobs machines can do better so we can have actual time to live our lives.

Taxing the fuck out of automation would let everyone win, because a heavily taxed robot is still far cheaper for the company than a human or possibly several humans for that one robot would be, so automation is here either way. We can riot to change our economy to benefit from this technology as we should, or we can be steamrolled yet again by the dictates of the affluent who will demand and get all the benefits and none of the responsibility if not confronted and countered on revolutionary terms.

Please pick the former. There’s no dignity or meaning to be had shuffling boxes around in an Amazon warehouse. Begging the owners to let us try to continue to compete with literal purpose built repetitive labor machines is not the way.

Cypher was factually correct in acknowledging that knowledge is pain.

Cypher was ethically wrong choosing willful ignorance because he made it other people’s problem.

I prefer the pain of truth to the bliss of ignorance. It is the source of meaning I have chosen in life.

The strong stare the ugly truth in the face without hope or expectation, the weak wake up in their bed and believe… whatever they want to believe.

The propagation of pleasant willful ignorance is the main mechanism allowing most of our global crises to proceed.

You’re incorrect. He said it in interviews constantly, and in one of his books (which he narrated the audio book for so he said it there too).

“Don’t confuse me with those who cling to hope. I enjoy describing how things are, I have no interest in how they ‘ought to be.’ And I certainly have no interest in fixing them. I sincerely believe that if you think there’s a solution, you’re part of the problem. My motto: Fuck Hope!”

-George Carlin, excerpt from his book Brain Droppings

The NYT Strikes me as an organization that would rather attempt to continue to exist under Trump than try to fight the rising fascist tide he’s riding.

They’ve always been that high on themselves, and they’ve always been pragmatists to the point of standing for nothing except their own gravitas.

Thank you Scotty!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_oxynitride

And remember, because I feel this always needs to be said with such sums…

193 million isn’t enough for him, and 193 million plus whatever millions he made in years prior isn’t enough for him. He’s going public because he’s a broken, disturbed human being that looks at his unethical levels of wealth, enough for most of the other humans that live here to live 2 dozen extravagant lifetimes, and still demands mooooooaaaaaar.

Why isn’t this widely accepted as severe mental illness?! This is hoarding disorder.

These aren’t big ocean house sums. These are buying politicians sums, and they are only achievable through exploiting other human beings and selfishly pocketing most of the value of their labor because you can get away with it.

Our civilization rewards behavior like this, while literally punishing pro-social behavior like teaching.

Think about what that says about humanity. Our values are wrong and our entire species strives to elevate practicing sociopaths.

When’s the last time you’ve heard of a pizza delivery person going to the wrong house and killing someone?

Doesn’t happen.

I think you could drastically minimize any impact by doing the time travel in space and merely observing from high orbit, assuming your time machine has no form of exhaust, which if you have a time machine seems like a relatively small engineering challenge by comparison.

You might displace a few atoms in the void, but it’s the safest way one could go about it.

I mean, technically displacing the air with that time machine on such a massive time scale is just as likely to result in returning to a civilization of dolphin people as riding a dinosaur would.

I thought we had a labor shortage.

I’ll befriend one of these immigrants actually fighting to give their family a better life over one of my exclusionary, self professed “conservative” countrymen born on third base acting like they hit a triple any day.

Also I consider nation state borders to be the imaginary lines that enable the local warlords/oligarchs to entrench their power over their region, and carve up our communal habitat for private benefit. It’s a damaging, tribal, animalistic concept that divides humanity on more than geographical terms. Wrong idealogical direction if we want to be a civilization and not beasts at each other’s jugulars in the dirt.

Don’t get any hopes up.

The last time Democrats had a supermajority, their biggest legislative achievement was a health care band-aid dreamed up by the ultra conservative heritage foundation designed to ensure big health insurance keeps profiting off sickness and death, and passed originally by Republican Governor Mitt Romney. And there are still uninsured Americans, and people being economically destroyed despite having supposed health coverage.

Republicans are the greater villains, and I vote for Democrats solely on that basis of least bad harm reduction, but lets not pretend either party is the people’s champion, or at all interested in addressing our disgusting, embarrassing, massive socioeconomic inequity.

We have the villain party®, the feckless wet noodle party(D), and within the feckless wet noodle party, all of about 2-5 people between both chambers of Congress who openly advocate for policy that would actually do good for most of the citizenry. And those 2-5 are despised by both parties proper far more than those parties hate one another.

Look at the sheer scale and number of massive, malicious mistakes that one of our billionaires makes, while having ZERO impact on their tangible quality of life or lifestyle. None. Their ego score goes down and nothing else changes. The people they laid off suffer, never them.

Remember that when some pro-market capitalism class traitor nitwit inevitably tries to shame struggling people for daring to get a latte, eat Avacado toast, or get an education based on learning and growing as a person rather than solely insatiable greed.

People in the little club basically have to rape dozens of people to finally be permitted to fail, like Harvey Weinstein.

You aren’t poor because of “your bad decisions,” you’re poor because of a relatively small, insatiably greedy, powerful group of people that demand and expect almost all of the capital value your effort produces to go directly to them.

The GOP establishment, which the Federalist Society that now controls the SCOTUS represents, never liked Trump.

They spent decades turning their base into conspiratorial, counterfactual nitwits through the media they own because then they could easily tell them “climate change isnt real! Give rich people all the money! Poor people made bad decisions!” etc, and rob everyone blind to thunderous applause and their nitwits defending the owner’s grift from the rest of us.

Then one day a notorious opportunist got up on stage, said the quiet parts out loud, co-opted that engineered willfull ignorance, and stole their nitwit brigade right out from under them. Remember, the turning point for Trump was the day he told the crowd he’d like to take protesters out back and “beat the shit” out of them. Prior to that he was hiring extras to attend his rallies.

The Machiavellian Mitch McConnells and John Roberts have been quietly seething ever since. Trump makes them feel dirty because he embodies the crassness of the con they’ve been leading their nitwit voters around by from a sterile distance. Their crass nitwits aren’t supposed to bleed into their halls of power! Their careful, coordinated long game grift compromised by a 2 bit snake oil song and dance grifter.

No one should have that much power.

I wouldn’t have trusted Fred Rogers with a billion dollars, and he’s practically the only famous stranger I could have seen trusting with my newborn alone.

It’s a society warping level of wealth. No single, unelected, unaccountable person should possess that much uniltateral power.

The global allowance encouragement of such an exploitative, reckless goal is why we are in our various bleak situations.

My dad cooked steak like this.

I thought I hated steak until I became an adult and tried a properly prepared one.

Money doesn’t buy happiness.

What it does is eliminate and prevent most causes of human unhappiness, and practically all unhappiness based in meeting basic human needs.

And I’m sorry, but daddy not being proud of you or mommy dying young when you have means doesn’t equate to the misery of rooting through a dumpster out of hunger or having a pig kick you out of an underpass into the rain to die of exposure.

This is way too uplifting for C&H

Positively wholesome.