Sadly, serious problems are not always easy to escape, especially when we have crises such as housing and affordability that make it difficult to escape. It was something that I had to talk about with my roommate during the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 since it was clear that some of our dynamics were not healthy.

On occasion stuff got smashed. It wasn’t direct violence directly against each other, but it was violence.

In the end, we considered two factors. One, that things got that heated rarely, like maybe once a year. And two, that we were both proactively working on our respective shit. In therapy, changing our bad habits for better ones and so on. And so we decided to stay in place. It didn’t escape that we were in a rent-controlled flat in San Francisco, and if either of us moved, we’d likely have to move out of SF.

(Eventually, the neighborhood gentrified and the landlord became hostile, really wanting to swap us out for the high rent Google techs could afford, but that’s a different story.)

Anyway, serious problems often come with serious circumstances that need to be weighed. And yes, I think we should live in a society without social crises that force dysfunctional people to stay together when they need to separate. But that is not what we have here in the US in 2026.

By my understanding, harm reduction is a process. It’s a matter of steps, and the first one (switching from acting out to drinking) might not look like a great leap forward.

But you’re supposed to keep going.
~ If eating junk food and watching reality shows keeps you from needing to drink, you eat the snacks and watch the tube.
~When you can substitute the junk food with fruit, or something easier on your body, you do.
~When you can move away from reality shows, say Saturday morning cartoons, you do that too.

Essentially, you move away from harmful habits and towards healthier ones in small steps.

But that’s not represented in the first step, which is to what I was referring in the first place.

Fair enough, and there are certainly better habits. But booze has been a counter to working-class stress for a long time, hence vodka being the national spirit of Russia and the Soviet Union.

We learned in Trump 1.0 that he is extremely isolationist and wants to cut the US off from the world like it’s North Korea.

The way an abusive spouse cuts their partner off from all other social contacts.

The way FOX News encourages its viewership to stop watching all other media sources so they’re in an information silo.

And the US voted for him again, because we vote based on vibes and bigotry. Because we have forgotten our civic duty to vote responsibly. Because we are suckers for lying confidence men who make ridiculous promises.

So the US is due for more than a bit of harsh finding out. We should have learned after George W. Bush. We didn’t and FA’d. (Effed A?)

Anyhow a lot of Americans have cut off their MAGA relatives and neighbors. It is no surprise at all that Canada — and the entire international community — might do the same.

I’m skeptical the US is going to survive to the November election, much less the new Congress in January.

Harm reduction. If a shot of bourbon keeps a fellow from battering the wife and kids, or shooting up a school, then it’s doing its job.

Curiously, when I was drafted into jury duty here in California, we were shown a video that said something like The people are society’s last line of defense against bad law.

I took it personally, figuring it was my duty to not enforce any law that was unjust or protect any institution that was cruel. But I didn’t get selected.

Though this happened with the grand jury, which only needs a majority vote (sometimes a supermajority). It means a lot of people chose to nullify or didn’t trust the prosecution to give a fair trial.

The Department of Justice has been doing stuff like that a lot since the Trump administration, to the point that they lost presumption of regularity (the assumption in advance that state actors are being honest and following the rules in good faith). There were so many prosecutions that were clearly directed by the White House and were vindictive persecutions of political enemies that the judges just stopped believing anyone from DoJ.

It didn’t help that all the honest prosecutors in DoJ resigned when they were ordered to do something unlawful, resulting in massive brain drain. All the rehires are unskilled if not incompetent, and sometimes they issue legal statements that sound like a Truth Social post.

Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos are all unapologetic James Bond villains.

In fact, they might be even more ridiculously evil than the Flemming and movie villains. Ernst Blofeld is arguably more reasonable. (Blofeld, on whom Felonious Gru was based.)

This seems to fall into the Thanks! I’m cured! category, but I have gotten better over time at estimating how long it takes me to travel places.

The anti-piracy efforts of the RIAA and MPAA (and the publishing houses and…) are still pretty robust, but that didn’t stop any of the big AI companies from using gigatons of copyrighted material as datasets to train their LLMs. It’s why when you ask them to generate an image featuring Winnie The Pooh, they all know what you’re talking about.

But the big companies absolutely did not get permission to do this. Nor did anyone give permission to allow for the recent jailbreaks by AI task systems to hack into other companies. If that were any singular human (not of the owner class) they’d face charges under the CFAA. But since it’s a massive company with an army of blue-haired lawyers, nothing was done about it, and the companies actually bragged about their AIs escaping containment.

Extinction by AI takeover is far more interesting than extinction by global drought.

Once again Hallowe’en is getting back to its roots.

PS: I wrote a thing in 2024. Sorry, I don’t know how to do intra-lemmy links.

It depends on the judge. Click-wrapped ToS, EULAs and privacy policies are a known dark pattern:
They’re longer than Shakespearean plays.
They’re difficult to read even at a college level.
They’re often presented in a tiny window with difficult controls.
They’re presented suddenly and mid process, often as part of an already lengthy string of steps. Often the user is eager to just move on.

Some judges have recognized this and do not see click-wrapped contracts as binding, especially when the person clicking them can be a child, or a cat, or a computer glitch.

But then a lot of judges were appointed through a willful organized effort to put pro-business judges on the bench, and will rule in the favor of companies over individuals regardless of the circumstances.

Not at all! China isn’t trying to do the same buildout. In fact, they’re turning towards the AI-as-software model, in which AI is run locally and sold as software rather than being sold as compute from large supercomputers.

It turns out that most of the things common folk and common businesses do with AI are managed pretty well with open source AI software run locally with a dozen terabytes of training data.

And if the US companies sold tokens at their actual rate (not at a loss) then it would be cheaper for even small businesses to put together a high-powered PC and set it up to do AI tasks. So for everything that isn’t the stuff I listed, the AI-as-service model is already obsolete.

I betcha a nickle that the fines paid to the canteen would be more than offset by the increase in profits due to worker productivity.

It’s like the time theft myth, the belief that workers will intrinsically slack unless you micromanage them. In fact the opposite is true, when workforces are allowed to chat with loved ones and surf the internet their productivity improves.

Curiously, when a company mandates that 15-minute breaks are taken and lunch is eaten during lunch break (even when workers are obsessive and want to work through breaks) then their productivity improves even more.

But the upper management of companies don’t actually want to manage in a way that data shows maximizes profits.

It was everyone’s golden era. And then the owner class pressured the political class to memory hole the period so we forgot all the lessons we learned.

It’s why we need to bring unions back to forcibly make sure those lessons are applied.

Can confirm. How Money Works talks about it (Here on YouTube) regarding the recent mass layoffs by big tech, first, by pressure through RTO mandates, then blaming layoffs on AI, only they got rid of too many people and their businesses couldn’t run.

So why did they do it? Vindictiveness. Because of the great resignation during which workers had some negotiating power, and the C-suite resented that and wanted to show everyone who’s boss.

I’ve been following the trend since the early 2010s when we realized that crunching development teams is useless for meeting deadlines, but dev companies crunch anyway, traumatizing the team.

I’m pretty sure billionaires aren’t especially bright, rather started with generational wealth and then got richer through luck and ruthlessness, to the point that they only failed upwards. (There are a few exceptions who understand the social contract, but they really are exceptions.)

And they surround themselves with sycophants so that their psyches are completely comfortable. They stop actually considering data or news that might hurt their feelings, which means they make bad decisions that cost their companies money.

Aw man, you guys are my best friends ever, I ever tell ya that?

This is your periodic reminder that Flock Safety is only the tip of the problem.

Some districts are de-Flocking only to install an Axon ALPR network service. Keep fighting until your community outlaws all ALPRs and ALPR lookups are inadmissable in court.

There are other technologies that are already in use and widely abused by law enforcement such as IMSI catchers, geofence warrants and Drones as First Responder. Learn what your district allows and be a civil nuisance untill that shit is blocked.

Judges have long ceased tightly constraining judicial warrants, and most courts accept the good faith exception, so US and state courts cannot be trusted with any overreaching surveillance technology or forensic tools. This includes chromatic field drug tests and detection dogs.

This is how the kids know they are not in an institution of learning, but a prison for the crime of being juvenile.

What we’re also not going to hear is how often devices are misplaced, confiscated without return or just dissappear like socks in a dryer.