Friday Afternoon Links
About The Author
Riven
[riv-uhn]
noun
1. a gaming, lifting, shooting, intoxicated, ravenous, and happily-taken nerd.
2. often aims to misbehave.
3. and though she be but little, she is fierce.*
And rumor has it that she (and her husband) are also delightful dinner companions. You didn't hear it from me, though.
In his quest to save Hong Kong’s rapidly fading freedom, however, Lai has sacrificed his own. The entrepreneur and media mogul currently sits in a Chinese prison, charged with “conspiracy to collude with foreign forces” and “conspiracy to publish seditious publications.”
Over here, we charge our political prisoners with “parading” or “trespassing in a public building.”
“misinformation against public health” seems to be their attempt to catch up with the CCP on “seditious publications”.
I’ll say that I enjoyed M3GAN. It’s a worthy addition to the killer doll movie lists, and handles evil AI much better than the terrible Child’s Play reboot did.
They ditched the “soul of a serial killer” thing? That sucks — anyone can do killer AI after all… “psycho soul-trapped in a doll body” at least was relatively rare (yeah yeah… lots of ventriloquist dummy devil dolls over the years… but it felt fresher.
In the reboot, they ditched Charles Lee Ray. The reboot has a sweatshop worker essentially flip a switch to “EVIL” (they turn off the safety functions on a doll), and the Buddi dolls (not Good Guy dolls) are more of a Nest/Alexa thing that connects to the network and allows you to control other devices in the house. Note, that the reboot has not received a sequel, while the original movie has jumped over to a TV show that (at least the first season, still need to catch the second and third) managed to incorporate ALL of the Child’s Play films (yes, even the gods awful Seed of Chucky) into a coherent plot and world.
“Russia has shown time and again they have the capability and intent to exploit Russian companies, like Kaspersky Lab, to collect and weaponize sensitive U.S. information, and we will continue to use every tool at our disposal to safeguard U.S. national security and the American people,” Raimondo said in the press release
Or, y’know, they’re just poking the bear because they can, and they think there will be no repurcussions.
Now do US Companies when the TLAs come a knockin’, assholes. We should be better — but we damned well haven’t been (hell, a good chunk of them volunteer the info before hand…)
Dammit. I use Kaspersky. I like Kaspersky.
According to my model, the economy is booming
There’s a question journalists, economists and President Joe Biden’s campaign have been puzzling over for months: Why, when every traditional indicator is positive, are Americans so displeased with the economy?
According to the most recent jobs report, job growth is steady, unemployment remains low and wages are rising. The gross domestic product, a common measure of the health of the economy, has been growing since the second quarter of 2020. Even inflation, which in 2022 reached the highest levels Americans had seen in decades, has finally been cooling.
And yet, consumer sentiment is pessimistic. In June 2022, the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index reached the lowest level ever recorded since tracking began in 1966 — lower even than during the Great Recession of 2008. No matter how you slice it, there’s a gap between how the economy is doing and how Americans feel about it.
Maybe Joe Everyday Dolt looks at economic indicators like government spending and debt and thinks the country is irretrievably broken and doomed.
Yes, literally nobody in the respectable media have even thought to ask “maybe the way we define a ‘good economy’ needs improvement?”
Yup… maybe leaving all the daily requirements of life out of the “indicators” means something. Whodathunkit?
Start with “some jobs are better than others”.
It’s like they don’t do their own shopping.
Pro Tip: Next time you’re at the store and you pass by the meat aisle because everything is too expensive, just remember the GDP is up and you’ll feel better.
Everything’s too expensive, so I go to the butcher and get meat there, since it has more flavor than the grocery store disappointment.
It’s good that the price of meat is up. Meat production contributes to climate change. Eat the bugs, peasant.
“when every traditional indicator is positive”
Perhaps because they are so clearly bullshit propaganda, rather than a good faith attempt to track the economy?
The new Zelda game looks great. I watched the trailer yesterday. Puzzle heaven. And I really like that new look they started with Link’s Awakening. I still think the Game Boy Zelda games were the best Zelda games.
I hope that opening fight is the only appearance of Ganon/dorf in the game. The series used to have more varied villains. Give the demon king a rest.
Might be funny if they use him as Bambi in a Godzilla vs. Bambi style opening chapter twist….
(Note: Never got into Zelda, no idea how ludicrous that would be… but it sounds funny to me if done right).
I went from the first two Zelda games to not playing them until BotW. Hell of a generation jump for me. I like the looks of the new one (and Awakening), found Awakening a bit thin (but it was a port of an older portable game) and didn’t like the dungeon builder they put into it.
Awakening was the first game in the series I managed to beat. (Breath of the wild was second). I have a favorable view of it.
It does look good. I do miss me some Nintendo – there is a link in there to a new Metroid: Prime that has me salivating.
That’s expected next year, and I believe this is the first news since the new Prime game was announced. There was both a remaster for Prime and a 2d one (Dread) released on the Switch as well.
Skips the first couple of links… these are supposed to be the fun ones that don’t black pill me more! sigh…
I’ve just been indulging in !nd!ff3r3nt the whole time. This sounds as promising as 50 Shades spinning off from Twilight and I strongly suspect I’ll have just as much interest as I did in those.
I’m tempted to return to college to look into an art criticism degree just to check if there is at least one (if not two) semesters of “How to Write As Pompously As Possible To Separate You From The Hoi-polloi” — that’s certainly what that headline screams to me…
Consult your optician if eagle eyes last longer than 4 hours.
Interesting music video… if any of our “native” tribes ever doubted they are linked to Siberia on one side and Japan on the other, they should watch it. Could have been cosplaying Japanese or Inuit just as easily. At least the boyfriend’s name wasn’t Poppy (we are all Poppy).
In retrospect I shouldn’t have watched it… damned thing is a mindworm burrowing in deep with that repetition….
Somewhat relevant, and Don-bait:
https://www.espn.com/college-football/insider/story/_/id/40321386/college-football-bill-connelly-most-influential-teams
As with so many areas of American life, the pandemic has changed virtually everything about how people think about the economy and the issues that concern them.
What if the “big change” is Americans’ willingness to accept government “data” at face value? What if the hard-won default assumption now is that the government is lying, and manipulating reality to its own ends?
That’s the kind of talk that gets you reported…
You know why.
Everything is fine! You just dont know how good you have it!
Just got back from the grocery. 3lbs of potatoes, 3lbs of onions, a bag of corn chips, 1pk of a dozen flour tortillas, a head of lettuce, 2lbs of tomatoes and two packs of cigarettes = a tad over $75
The ‘dont believe your lying grocery bill’ argument just doesnt seem to be getting any legs. The trouble is that most people dont understand that this is being done deliberately.
A little early for other links — but this caught my eye early this morning and while I’m not sure it is truly the case, it would explain a lot. When you sincerely think PR flacks can change the world by changing the narrative… you can’t understand why your narrative isn’t working.
There are people who think Biden’s young staffers are running the show, and this would be proof of that.
The ‘Post reality civilization’ article posted recently covers that very well.
I guess I would sum it up as ‘they believe their own bullshit’.
“change the world by changing the narrative”
Postmodernism in a nutshell.
If it weren’t for St Joe Biden, it would have been WORSE!
Hey, that’s Obumbles line!
“….jobs saved or created…”
What the heck are they charging for cigarette packs these days? All the other stuff you listed is about $30 in my local supermarket.
Well, I saw a news article that said individual cigarettes could go for $25/each in Gaza… so getting a pack for $20 would be a steal!
I see the El Cheapos are about $7-8 a pack. A carton of brand name is an 8 pack, down from the old 10. I was a 2 pack a day guy when I quit about 50 years ago.
Since I don’t pay much attention anymore I’m not too curious.
Same with the booze.
Cigs 7-8 bucks. Local market is far out of town near where we are. Were I to drive Ito town I could have had that for 50-60 bucks but time and gasoline figures in.
Since we pay for everything with a Discover card and pay it off to zero every month I have an excellent idea of what our monthly expenses are. They have exactly doubled since the commies got the Whitehouse.
On top of inflating the dollar a huge factor is the left’s war on fossil fuels. Gas is double what it was under trump and that translates to everything thing else being more expensive. Of course that was the whole point of shutting down energy production.
Prosperity gives people options. Authoritarians dont want us to have options, so we get a war on prosperity. It is that simple.
$18.13 here (sans smokos, and 5lbs of potatoes. not 3) I’ve said it before and I’m sure I’ll say it again – living in North-central Ohio is like living in another country based on the things you people claim.
I don’t think I’d be close to either of your prices, but Walmart is out of potatoes online (?) so I couldn’t really check.
$24.13 from Target (which is about a third more than you) without the cigs as well, which brings it to around $40…
Don’t know about LA, but in MA those two packs would be half the total.
TPTB, I have 2 stupid articles listed as “Pending”.
Pretty sure that means they are ready, just wanted to be sure.
My life is sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows
That’s how this refrain goes
So come on, join in everybody!
Still gonna get drunk and possibly rant, though
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87821224358?pwd=eW55MTRDbDNtQkh2aHd3M1Nmenlzdz09
My girl lollipop?
When you sincerely think PR flacks can change the world by changing the narrative…
Tinkerbell will get better if you just clap hard enough. Don’t you want Tinkerbell to get better?
I have said before, this all reminds me of the collapse of the aristocracy in Europe. They became so powerful and unaccountable that they were detached from reality. That never ends well for anyone.
Qu’ils mangent de la brioche.
Lollipop
Lollipop
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gOy-2U0ajU
I like where your mind’s at Brooks.
The AI company finally paid me. They also assigned me to a new project because of the high quality of my latest work.
Two-factor authentication was recently added to the site. Doesn’t matter. NSA most likely stole all their source code months ago, particularly anything related to natural language processing and AI-generated software.
Man, we are getting very close to Terminator-level stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ntksk9SpPs
“Look, I am not stupid, you know. They cannot make things like that yet.”
“Not yet. Not for about 40 years.”
1984 + 40 = 2024
Not sure if molecular memory is a thing yet. I suspect will be here soon.
***
Molecular memory is a term for data storage technologies that use molecular species as the data storage element, rather than e.g. circuits, magnetics, inorganic materials or physical shapes.[1] The molecular component can be described as a molecular switch, and may perform this function by any of several mechanisms, including charge storage, photochromism, or changes in capacitance. In a perfect molecular memory device, each individual molecule contains a bit of data, leading to massive data capacity. However, practical devices are more likely to use large numbers of molecules for each bit, in the manner of 3D optical data storage (many examples of which can be considered molecular memory devices). The term “molecular memory” is most often used to mean very fast, electronically addressed solid-state data storage, as is the term computer memory. At present, molecular memories are still found only in laboratories.
***
Molecular memory….I outlined a short story back in the early nineties with that idea in it. I was inspired by my frustration at the limitations of computer memory at the time. I was told I was nuts.
I should add that the day is rapidly coming when no engineering, physics, or math student will do their own homework. The golden age of cheating is nigh. Even so, no AI help for exams, so that will separate the wheat from the chaff.
Employers care more about persistence than intelligence. Seems odd to me. I’d prefer lazy, smart people over patient, average people when it comes to solving hard problems on a tight schedule.
Some people are just too hard to deal with. /Employer
“I’d prefer lazy, smart people over patient, average people when it comes to solving hard problems on a tight schedule.”
It takes all kinds. Somebody (Clausewitz?) sorted people as follows:
Smart and lazy – field marshal.
Smart and energetic – staff officer.
Dumb and lazy – guard the motor pool*.
Dumb and energetic – avoid at all costs.
*updated for modern times
https://x.com/Zlatti_71/status/1804130393555096003
My partner and I, two American citizens, returned from Russia last month. I’m glad that in the last several years I completely stopped paying attention to what the US government has to say on most issues. While it’s more difficult to get to Russia these days, once you’re inside, there are no hordes of foreign tourists, all sights are readily available and uncrowded. Get a Russian sim card, get a Mir card from a bank (yes, as a foreign tourist) in 30 minutes, and then everything is pretty normal.
How was the vibe while you were there?
Totally fine. People on the streets were enjoying sunny days. With the exception of billboards advertising contract service in the military, there were no signs of the war. But various other jobs were advertised in a similar fashion. No young men without limbs on the streets. Plenty of military age men everywhere in public. Unlike what I hear from my second cousin in Kharkov who now drives everywhere. Even the NYT had an article about it.
Nice.
Lai’s story was the subject of a 2023 documentary produced by the Acton Institute. How it will end remains unclear.
I saw that documentary at FreedomFest 2022. It’s excellent.
Jimmy Lai is a hero.
The Saudis abandon the Petrodollar, and US News outlets are now talking about a Saudi 9/11 connection.
And only 23 years late too. They’re clapping seals that bark, or don’t bark, at the fedgov’s command. Just so spineless…
The US spent decades turning a blind eye to Saudi-funded Islamist indoctrination around the world.
***
According to The News International, in 1947 there were only 189 madrassas in Pakistan but “over 40,000” by 2008.[3][4] According to David Commins book, The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia, their number grew from around 900 in 1971 to over 8,000 official ones and another 25,000 unofficial ones in 1988.[11] In 2002 the country had 10,000-13,000 unregistered madrassas with an estimated 1.7 to 1.9 million students, according to Christopher Candland.[12] According to the New York Times, as of 2009 there more than 12,000 registered madrasas and more unregistered ones in Pakistan. In some areas of Pakistan they outnumber the underfunded public schools.[2]
In 2020 it was reported that there are more than 22,000 registered madrassas (with many more unregistered) teaching more than 2 million children.[13]
***
I should not that madrasa just means school in Arabic and does not necessarily have religious connotations. Hence my amusement over the pant-shitting because Obama attended a “madrasa” in Indonesia.
So if “madrasa” just means school, why is their spread Saudi-funded indoctrination?
The curriculum: Saudi textbooks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Arabian_textbook_controversy
“President Biden Bans Kaspersky Antivirus Software”
Spongebrain Shitspants has too much power, then again all presidents do. I mean, what a crock: we all know this isn’t about computer security.
Eugene Kaspersky is a graduate of a KGB technical school:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_of_Cryptography,_Telecommunications_and_Computer_Science#Notable_alumni
Funny how it wasn’t much of an issue until international relations went south. I’d imagine third parties do the requisite audits and whatnot.
Two high school classmates of mine graduated from it.
Just about everyone with technical education who grew up in the Soviet period had some involvement with the KGB. There was just no way around it.
I have no doubt that current Russian intelligence services have deep ties with Kaspersky, just as NSA has deep ties with AT&T and other US big tech and telecom corporations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUkv1NyT_ms
The AT&T building in downtown Augusta, GA has a SCIF which is visible from the entrance. I’m convinced NSA has an office in it.
Jay Leno’s 1940 Lagonda V12 replica.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pusZXECS0mM&ab_channel=Soma
Is it 5:00 yet?
No. But I don’t care.
Hi Riven! What’s shakin’?
Something extremely silly for the weekend.
I can’t decide if the Otyken being exposed to the West was a good or bad thing.
Regardless, daaaaamn.
Woke up early and had a lovely time with 3 and 9-year-old nephews. (Sans 11 year old. He got things ta DO.) The chimps greeted us. They were a marvelous addition. There are 21 of ’em, IIRC. That was a lovely way to start the early ‘weekend.’ Ev likes Uncle-Time.
My needling is fairly smooth, but I am…grrg. EMBARRASSINGLY bad with knots. Tying rubber tourniquets is hard. Just the knot was confusing, despite knowing how to tie my shoes. (And double-knot ’em!) Keeping the bastard from rolling over on itself is predictably difficult for me. Meh. I couldn’t walk the first time I tried, either. *kicks pebble* I should be better at simple shit like this. Meh. Takes all kinds.
Toynbee said that civilizations generally die by suicide. The mechanism is that the ruling class develops a morality in conflict with the common people. This leads the ruling class to push for a universal government while the common people form a universal religion to protect their values. His theory has some overlap with ibn Khaldun’s idea of ‘asabiyyah (social cohesion).
Khaldun said that barbarians conquer a decrepit state, improve things for a few generations, become corrupt, and are in turn swept away by a new wave of barbarians.
In Italy, they say shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in 3 generations. 3 human lifespans = about 200 years. Very few dynasties in history lasted longer than that. The longest dynasty in Egypt lasted 250 years. That’s about the same length as the Tokugawa Shogunate.
Tide comes in, tide goes out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynasties_of_ancient_Egypt
Byzantine Empire lasted more than thousand years, I think.
True, but that was multiple dynasties, most of which lasted less than a century.
Turns out it’s pretty hard for a father, son, and grandson to all be competent rulers. Usually #2 or #3 is a royal fuck-up, and if there is #4 or #5, they are borderline retarded.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Byzantine_emperors
I guess it would be more accurate to say that dynasties die by suicide and civilizations die by conquest.
Hey, I was going to tell you that word on the street is that Tractor Supply Company’s management is woke now. I think you were looking to work for them, so be prepared for DEI classes.
[Kif sigh]
This is why I applied to a Christian school and will probably end up working there. They asked me about my religious views, and I said that while I was raised Christian (LDS) and have studied various holy books, I’m non-religious and don’t care much for singing or praying. I also told them that Galileo said math is the language god used to write the universe, which is a sentiment I find poetic and intriguing.
When I lived in Africa, I did some volunteer work at an orphanage run by a local Christian charity. I taught English there on the weekends and made a website for them:
https://goodhopetrust.blogspot.com/
So that won them over at the interview.
Hands that help are better than lips that pray, though I got nothing against people who pray, especially if that is their only option.
Public education was supposed to be a bastion of classical liberalism. So much for that.
“Hands that help are better than lips that pray.”
Very true, oh Derpy one.
Generations are generally considered to be about 30 years, historically the length of time a productive adult’s time. Or, putting it another way, the length of time it takes children to displace their parents (again, historically).
Has this been mentioned already?
A Nevada judge dismissed an indictment Friday against six Republicans accused of submitting certificates to Congress falsely declaring Donald Trump the winner of the state’s 2020 presidential election, potentially cutting from four to three the number of states with criminal charges pending against so-called fake electors.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/judge-dismisses-charges-nevada-fake-185849203.html
Well that is good news!
I know there are plenty of other SMBC readers here, but I feel that this one needed to be highlighting for the rest:
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/star
I trust that will inspire many of you.
“be highlighting”? WTF.
That’s funny.
I had some public meetings with 50-60 angry locals and they just don’t really phase me anymore.
Pedant ON:
It’s faze, not phase.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/faze
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/phase
Pedant OFF. Carry on.