aesthelete

Our representatives are the ones who are supposed to be acting. Again, what did this speech accomplish?

Dude, they are in the minority. The only thing they can hope to do is obstruct what Republicans are doing. Holding the floor is a good way to do this. They don't have to hold the floor physically to obstruct most things, but it's better IMO...because it gives them a bigger platform to scream from.

If I were a democratic senator, I'd be setting up to physically filibuster everything the whole session and use the time on the floor to have a parade of people continually shit talking Trump. It generates headlines and diverts attention, and gets people talking. All good things IMO.

I'm irritated with Democrats most often because they seem to not give a shit about fighting when they don't have the votes. Booker's actions are a step in the right direction.

One of the ways you sleep walk into a dictatorship is by "complying in advance". We may be on our way to a dictatorship but there's no need to roll out the carpet for it. Booker is doing a good thing by using his platform while he still has one.

There may be no way out of this without violence and bloodshed, but that doesn't make non-violent, more conventional forms of resistance useless. They work as force multipliers. I support Booker and I also don't think the Tesla takedown people are terrorists.

When I used those things, I absolutely understood why a CEO would want those to be the future. It's everything they're looking for: a strident, confident yes man machine who will produce without consternation any kind of spin (unethical or not) to any kind of gibberish content requested.

Yeah I mean there's that but the reddit demo uses ad blockers frequently and ad-based content on reddit is already probably not that profitable. There's a lot of people running astroturf campaigns for various things, but how are you seeing revenue out of that? Some schmuck buying the wrong type of portable speaker because of a crappy recommendation won't add to reddit's bottom line when it's the speaker maker's internal marketing intern. If anything, it'll just further cause people to lose confidence in them.

The only path they had toward profitability was feeding all of their user data into AIs for revenue from AI companies, but chatbots are also unprofitable and that revenue probably won't even cover the costs to run the servers, and besides how many companies are going to be dumb enough to pay for that privilege? We're talking about folks that already stole every piece of artwork, literature, and news article they could get their grubby little mitts on. Why would they continue to pay reddit?

Ultimately the biggest conceit of the "attention economy" is the idea that attention automatically translates into dollars.

(And they're bleeding attention too.)

The economic angle was -- I thought -- to make shit like this break through to "conservatives". Since that doesn't seem to work and they care about their own bullshit goals no matter the impacts and suffering they cause (economic or other) I too think we should just fucking stop it.

The obsession with conversational interfaces likely stems from two places: sci-fi and CEOs (and other executive, businessy types) who are used to ordering people around.

This "company" has no real path to profitability to speak of.

Nah those fucking paddles or whatever at the fake of the union were the easiest type of protest.

These motherfuckers will still be chirping about "cancel culture" while hanging from chains in Trump's gulag.

Stadiums are getting increasingly fascist. My response will be to stop going to events in them.

Exactly the point

A demonstration of the "soft power" that Vance was telling Ukraine to use.