allocating a few days a month to all fit members of a community to do work which no one volunteers to do.

I can agree to that as long as it’s a spelled-out condition of living in that community. As an autistic person myself, I like having expectations and conditions written out clearly and concisely, in mutually agreed-upon language.

Exactly. They just shrug and go, “Oh, well. Can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. Has he considered marrying a white woman? He should head to his local church, I’m sure there’s a nice young thing he can scoop up there.”

Privacy is one of those things I feel that if not everyone can have it, then nobody should. If the billionaires and the government want my secrets, then I want all of theirs.

Yeah, let’s put everyone’s dirty laundry out there for everyone else to see. A system where everyone has everyone else’s leverage? Beautiful. Blackmail stops working because everyone already knows, but on the upside, I also know everyone else’s dirty laundry and corpses are buried.

This, exactly. A nice tidy way of keeping their hands clean. Deport them to a country with prisons where detainee deaths are common, or their government can be subtly coerced into killing the people our government sends there. When people demand answers, our government can just throw up its hands and say, “Well, how were we supposed to know they were doing that?”

Did you know that Northrup Grumman developed the standard USPS mail truck? They also developed the B2 stealth bomber. Northrup never intended for their truck to also be a stealth bomber, but Ted said “I’m about to do what’s called a ‘pro gamer’ move.”

This. The most valuable properties are neighborhoods where nobody lives. Honestly, HOA boards should kick everyone out and gate up the entire neighborhood, only sending in mowing crews to sculpt the yards.

Metaphysics notwithstanding, he’s narcissistic to the point of believing that he’s “one order of magnitude above human”. The rest of us? We’re the first stage on the rocket. He not only wants to live forever, he wants to live above we mere mortals, free of all our petty needs and desires. This world is his playground, his toy; created for him and other billionaires like him. And if he and they can’t have it, then, they’ve ultimately decided nobody can.

What’s worse are the rich, out-of-touch fucks who should know better, are so narcissistic and so afraid of death. What they fear about it, is that the world will continue on without them. They’d rather the world end when they end. As far as they’re concerned:

• The world as we know it did not exist prior to their being born into it.
• The world was made for them and their descendants to enjoy. All others are expendable tokens to spend as they please.
• If they are mortal, then the world should not continue to exist after their deaths.

This. If there’s actually a toilet, then how does it work? I imagine the toilet probably works like the replicators do. You notice how when anyone on board the Enterprise eats, there’s dishes, but no sinks/dishwashers? When they’re finished eating, they literally set the dirty dishes down in the replicator and they’re instantly returned back to energy. I imagine the toilets work under the same principle.

Then literally Web 2.0 is the problem. All social media stops existing if we go back from Web 2.0.

“I’m glad you changed your last name, you sonuvabitch!”

I don’t know if I fully agree. After 9/11, the conservative movement was attempting to change the consensus(Evil brown foreigners are coming to kill you and your family). The fact that a black man won the Presidency not once, but twice speaks to a failure to meaningfully change it.

“Blind box” in the tech context is an algorithm that hides its operations from everyone, even its own creators. You give it an input, and then it produces an output, without showing you how it arrived to that output.

Yeah, George would think he’s spotted some slick NFT grift or crypto rug pull that it turns out he was the one getting rug pulled, by Newman.

Yes, just like how tax preparation companies lobby to keep the IRS from just telling people what they owe in taxes. It keeps the tax prep companies in business.

Well, the show has been off the air for a long time, but I absolutely could see Kramer having an AI chatbot girlfriend, or George Costanza trying to get people suckered into an NFT grift/cryptocurrency side hustle.

Was PayPal always evil, though? The concept of it wasn’t. People wanted an easier way to conduct transactions electronically. Something faster and more convenient than, say, a Western Union money transfer order.

To go a little more in-depth, if a product would simplify certain aspects of life, make them more straightforward and less prone to a chain of comedic errors, then it’s a good product.

If a product makes things more complex, has more things to go wrong, and more corners and edge cases for some weirdo like Kramer or George to think they’ve spotted a killer side hustle, then it’s a bad product.

Now, I’m not saying that smartphones and computers and the Internet aren’t complicated, but they are far simpler to how things were done before. Read old hobbyist magazines to get a sense of the complex system of self-addressed stamped envelopes and hand-compiled mailing lists it used to take to get info on your hobby. Meeting a friend in a nearby town to go see a movie at a theater you haven’t been to before required a shocking number of cross-referenced paper resources.

This. Without regular people, they have nobody to exploit. They could exploit more robots, but robots don’t have the same needs as humans. They could program them to have the same needs, but then that would just be going back to square 1, because then they’d have to pay the robots so they could buy the things they need.