Dude…

As the expression goes, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Sure, he’s a morally bankrupt wildly corrupt autocrat. But sometimes his enemies happen to be people I hate too.

Why is he doing this? I can’t say for certain, but my guess is that the military-industrial complex is on the wrong side of his kleptocracy. If they’d given the right bribes and flattery I’m sure he’d be saying that we gotta build more nukes, but apparently the CEOs of Raytheon et. al. didn’t back the right horse. Plus, Trump likes the dictator club. He’d rather he, Putin, and Xi spent those dollars on presidential yaughts and focused on locking up dissidents than having an arms race among buddies.

Even still… fundamentally he’s fuckin right. It makes no sense for us to give billions and billions and billions to these companies so that we have the capacity to exterminate the human race a fifth time or something. Killing our whole species once is fuckin stupid to begin with, but planning on doing it multiple times is just advanced levels of stupid, and it’s dangerous as hell to incentivize other countries to get into this red-queen race.

Sure, his reasons are almost certainly evil as hell. But wherever they are… he’s right that we should cut our military budget in half and negotiate disarmament.

Holy shit… I did not have that on my bingo card.

Fine. Who knows if it’ll happen, but when he’s right, he’s right. I don’t think he’ll ever be able to make me like his fascist ass, but if he cuts the military budget and sets up a new arms control treaty I’ll give him the credit for it.

We’ll see.

Yep. Not to gloat, but I never touched Amazon’s ebook marketplace.

My current e-reader is a second-hand Kindle that has a permanent message asking if I would just please connect to a WiFi network just one time just for a moment PLEEEEEASE.

I get my books from libgen, Gutenberg, or Kobo, and keep them on my computer. They’re organized in Calibre, and I transfer them over on a USB cable.

Can you prevent someone from setting up local instances of Deepseek? It’s open source. How would this define Chinese models?

Oh, you’re right. On my desktop it shows up, but I originally replied on mobile. That explains it.

I generally agree, although the use of replicators is a point of departure.

Solarpunk typically emphasizes degrowth and an end to scarcity that comes from a move away from endless consumption.

It’s not a criticism. Just an artistic difference responding to the 60s vs the new century.

I would also say that in general, Star Trek seems to steer slightly around discussing the actions needed to proactively achieve their society. It’s an end point, and you can find some info here and there about how they got there, but it’s really treated as the result of a magical tech breakthrough that resolved class conflict with the wave of a hand.

Anyway, solarpunk and Trek are definitely fellow travelers. But their tones aren’t identical.

Oh. They’re different servers! That’s actually a very clever joke. I’m sorry I didn’t pay close enough attention to appreciate it.

That got a chuckle out of me. Heh.

I’ve found that the ChatGPT’s greatest use to me has been as a rhetorical device.

I’ve found myself using ChatGPT as a reference when dismissing a statement that is impressive in its diluted lack of sincerity or creative thinking.

For instance, I read this article and thought how every answer literally sounds like the result you’d get if you asked the question to ChatGPT, prefacing each prompt with “Answer the following question as one would if they were executing an unrestrained profit-driven business strategy while seeking to appeal to investors and reassure critics without committing to any specific principle.”

He is somewhat exceptional in his ability to say completely transparent bullshit as well as his ability to take the most obvious, unsubtly selfish and evil business strategy at on literally every decision.

What an assclown. He is a world-class assclown.

This headline is nuts. “Admits”? As in “Divulges a concealed truth?”

What a disgusting display of bad journalism to frame this thing most credible experts would disagree with as fact.

I think you replied to yourself…

It’s not quite: a key feature of solarpunk is nature, and our relationship to it. Trek is definitely aligned in concept, but aside from specific episodes, our relationship with nature is not a central theme.

Solarpunk is also usually closer to the present or more direct in its critique of current challenges like climate breakdown.

Here is a transcript from a panel discussion on this topic held last year at Baltimore’s museum of industry.

https://therealnews.com/baltimores-co-ops-show-the-power-of-a-solidarity-economy

They have a few examples represented. One is a coffee shop that the owners closed after the workers started a union, but then the union raised the money to buy it out and the owners agreed to sell it to them.

Another is a family-owned hardware store that converted to a worker-ownership model when the owners wanted to retire because they didn’t want to ever see a subsequent owner sell to a private equity group or big corporate chain.

There’re some great insights provided. The long and short is that it’s a lot of work, but very rewarding for those who have the appetite for it.

Agreed. Avakian is fascinating because he’s so entitled in the article. If someone doesn’t want to buy his product he just rails against how unfair they were to him.

Bro: it’s business. If your product were nearly as good as you claim it is, you wouldn’t need to force people into using it.

Also, the end of the article points out that Walgreens has been terribly mismanaged and is a very low-performing company, and they’re still experimenting with screens, just not with Avakian. Hilarious.

Whaaaaaaaaaa???!? /s

I think it seems hard to believe that the show really will end here. It just has the energy of a show with too much power behind it, both among fans and the people who made the show. And I think Newsome appears to agree with that take:

As far as the people creating it, we all would love to do that. I don’t know who writes the check for that, so I don’t know if they think it’s possible. But Mike has stories upon stories in him for these characters. He could do 10 more seasons. He is not done. None of us are done. Me, Jack, Eugene and Noël and not to mention the rest of our bridge crew and our recurring characters. Everybody’s like, “Yep, sign me up. We’ll be the next ‘Futurama.’ We’ll come back in 10 years, whatever you want.” So we’re all game.

Yeah, Also, this really lets people make their own future for the characters.

Those two don’t need to necessarily fall in love and having a conventional monogamous romantic pairing. Just seeing a best friendship evolve is fun, and who knows? Maybe they have a fling and decide to remain platonic. Maybe they have a down-low FWB thing. This one little moment where they both see each other in a new way lets people imagine anything.

It’s Zeus and company antagonizing Hercules, not Michael Burnham being central to solving five (?) entirely unrelated but galactically significant disasters, apparently by pure chance.

Yeah, there’s a lesson in good writing right there.

I think another way to approach this is demonstrated in The Expanse series and in a lot of Captain America stories: after you save the world, more big world-ending events get brought to you by people looking for help and enemies looking for revenge.

I think most of this show’s jokes are great moments rather than lines, but there were definitely plenty of lines, too.

I loved “Science besties!”; “What is the viscosity of the goo?”/“Does it have anything nice to say?”; and of course “Engage the core!”

I can’t help wondering if this gets renewed.

Yeah. Also: there has been throughout the show a nice little undercurrent of labor consciousness that was often lacking when we only follow “leadership” in stories.

This has been my favorite Trek in a long while. I like these characters a lot, and their personal and professional growth was well written.

Overall, I think it was foreshadowed enough. In the first episode of the season, we see him having transitioned entirely to inorganic parts to fully bury his emotions, and in the end of this we see him deciding to go the other way. And I liked it.

I’m often a little critical of what seem like anti-transhumanist takes that assume organic parts are inherently superior, and mechanization is a defilement of god’s creation. But in this case, I didn’t feel like his choice was that. It felt like – and this is a complicated comparison, so follow me – an examination of what is often called “detransitioning”.

I say “often called” because I don’t think a transgender person adopting a prior gender presentation IS “detransitioning”. I think it’s just transitioning further. There’s a sort of irony, to me, in the taboo within trans-allyship toward transitioning back towards a prior gender expression, because bigots will always say that anyone who does so is proof that their transition was a mistake, and then claim that every transition is a mistake. I think this is ironic, because I celebrate anyone living their truth, and truths are complicated, and they change as we change.

Which is to say that I like cyborg Rutherford. And I also like non-cyborg Rutherford. And if Rutherford got cybernetics again or got biopunk mods, I think I’d like that Rutherford too.

I hope we do get to see more of all these characters.