Fasten your seat belts as today my own personal “Wayback machine” is taking us all the way back to March of 2003. At the time the Iraq war was still only two weeks old, and Republican law makers in the U.S. had their sights set on critically important decisions.
I have Opinions™ about artificial intelligence. I’m not wholly against it, but I do feel that the current over-enthusiastic investment and circular dealing in the industry is a toxic aberration. We are spending trillions of dollars on technology that produces a few billion dollars worth of questionable benefit, all while consuming vast amounts of power, water, and technology.
This is my greatly overdue response to the Blaugust ‘community builder’ “Low Stakes Hot Take” challenge.
I’m a man. Men generally grow more hair on their face than women. Sometimes they style or trim that facial hair in ways that please themselves or others.
Men who are not deeply interested in their appearance do not spend significant time every day making it *look* like they started growing a beard… and then stopped before it finished. Yet Hollywood wants us to believe that this ‘half-grown’ look is totally a thing that non-fussy men do. And that really frosts my cookies.
I have been pondering what to write about ‘Liberation day’ since April 2- the day itself. Trump unleashed the stupidest tariff war, writing off over six trillion dollars of stock market value in the two days that followed. The stock market isn’t the economy but any time the stock market drops 10% in two days it is time to be concerned.
I’m going to try to break this down a bit for myself and hopefully doing so will help others who are attempting to parse the events. What follows is an expression of my opinion based on actual analysis: you may disagree with me freely, but I am reasonably secure in my understanding of the facts. This is a long one- Buckle up, and feel free to use the table of contents to jump around to what interests you!
The world is topsy turvy at the moment. There are a lot of things being done by Trump and Musk that sicken me and frankly should outrage any American worthy of being called a citizen. But if there is one thing I have to pick that angers me the most it is how the U.S. is now treating the Ukraine and Russia.
Apparently the Ukraine is to blame for Russia illegally invading them, destroying Ukrainian cities, and killing tens of thousands of innocents. If I understand correctly, they are guilty of not surrendering their home and land to the Putin dictatorship. Oh, and Putin isn’t the dictator: Zelensky is.
Why is the leader of the U.S. parroting Russian propaganda lies? And how can any ‘peace’ negotiated by this toddler possibly be considered ‘fair’?
The world right now seems to be a bit of a mess from my perch here in Canada, what with the ongoing MAGAt dumpster fire south of the border. It sometimes seems like there is no justice, no type of consequence even for the most deliberately toxic behaviours.
But sometimes, not as often as I’d like, there is a small glimmer of justice. Someone occasionally pays a price for their cruelty, arrogance, and corrupt behaviour. This is one of those times…
I use an RSS reader and subscribe to a number of traditional news feeds like the BBC, Reuters, and CBC. I also have a collection of blogs and gaming related sites whose feeds I follow- but I’m focusing on the traditional news for the moment.
Lately I’ve been carefully curating which stories in my news feed I actually read, and I occasionally feel rather guilty for my choices.
A lot of social media content is pure fakery. Accounts are created and posts generated entirely to attract eyeballs either for revenue generation, political manipulation, or simply because it is ‘entertaining’ to certain people. The algorithms amplify much of this content towards more and more extreme viewpoints because that is what keeps most of us engaged. This is true because humanity, in the larger sense, is horrible.
Humanity has made a mess of the world over the last couple of centuries or so. We’ve also experienced an unprecedented amount of progress on many fronts. Halting our destruction of the environment is mandatory if we want to continue surviving on this planet, but halting all technological progress is also not the outcome I’d like to see.
I can tell when a holiday is near based on the volume of spam email in my inbox. I receive twenty or so spam emails per day throughout most of the year: this is the curse of having a 20+ year old email address. But when the taps open wide in holiday season.
