This wasn't a very good decision, was it?

A thirty-something actor, math educator, and nerdfighter. Curating a blog because why the hell not.

[haridraws]

Keep thinking about this Austin Walker post that now lives in my brain. It's a reply to people saying genAI can help creators 'develop concepts' and waste less time on research (x)

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁ Fuck off and give me the ball . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁

[steampunkforever]

I would still use my turn signals in the Mad Max Wasteland. They'd call me "Signal" because I'd hit my blinker before ramming the enemy hot rods into the side of a desert ravine. I'd use my turn signal every time. They would respect me for this.

[kraken17]

"That is Signal, the Last Follower of the Old Law."

[fishyfishyfishtimes]

I made a video about the northern pike :]c

[escuerzoresucitado]

[fossils-dundundun]

prev ur so right. the One of Leeks

[tmbgareok]

[thoodleoo]

concept: a translation of an ancient text, but it’s translated exactly like a terrible anime fansub with lines like “people die when they are killed”

[thoodleoo]

and the wily odysseus, looking upon the horse, spoke with such an utterance to his comrades: “all according to keikaku¹”

_____________________

¹Keikaku means “plan”

[carriesthewind]

This the report that JK Rowing doesn't want you to see. This report scares her so much that she is trying to destroy Amnesty International, a human rights organization, to stop you reading it:

Alejandra Caraballo (@esqueer.net)

Amnesty International put out a major report documenting the influence of UK based anti trans gender critical organizations and their fundin

(Amnesty already pulled the report because of JKR's threats. Of course that didn't and won't stop her - capitulating to fascists and bigots is never the answer. Alejandra captured the report and posted it, so you can read what JKR doesn't want you to know.)

[sanguinarysanguinity]

Bluesky thread is a lot of screenshots (which I find impossible to cope with), but if you scroll far enough down, there's a link to the full pdf:

[carriesthewind]

My good folks? Please stop reblogging this with incitements to violence. If you do, I will assume you are a terf fedposting, and report and block you as such.

[topgunvolleyballscene]

how often are you getting a headache

daily

weekly

monthly

couple times a year

yearly or less

Remaining time: 1 day 15 hours

[topgunvolleyballscene]

how often are you getting a tummy ache

daily

weekly

monthly

every couple months

yearly or less

Remaining time: 1 day 15 hours

[topgunvolleyballscene]

Ok so thanks for voting on this but i need you to reblog it too

[shiftythrifting]

Santa, I had no idea

[moistyaoi]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Shake Shack wants you to shit yourself to death

I'm on a tour with my new book, the international bestseller Enshittification: catch me next in Toronto, New York City and Miami! Full schedule here (New dates just added in San Diego and Denver!).

Shake Shack has changed the terms of service for its app, adding a "binding arbitration" clause that bans you from suing the company or joining a class action suit against it:

https://shakeshack.com/terms-conditions#/

As Luke Goldstein writes for Jacobin, the ToS update is part of a wave of companies, including fast-food companies, that are taking away their customers' right to seek redress in the courts, forcing them to pursue justice with a private "arbitrator" who works for the company that harmed them:

https://jacobin.com/2025/10/shake-shack-arbitration-law-terms-service/

Now, obviously you don't have to agree to terms of service just to walk into a Shake Shack and order a burger (yet), but Shake Shack, like other fast food companies, is on a full-court press to corral you into using its app to order your food, even if you're picking up that food from the counter and eating it in the restaurant. This is an easy trick to pull off – all Shake Shack needs to do is starve its cash-registers of personnel, creating untenably long lines for people attempting to order from a human.

Forcing diners to use an app has other advantages as well. Remember, an app is just a website skinned in the right kind of IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it, which means that whenever you use an app instead of a website, you are vulnerable to deep and ongoing commercial surveillance and can be bombarded with ads without you having any recourse:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/24/everything-not-mandatory/#is-prohibited

That surveillance can be weaponized against you, through "surveillance pricing," which is when companies raise prices based on their estimation of your desperation, which they can infer from surveillance data. Surveillance pricing lets a company reach into your wallet and devalue your money – if you are charged $10 for a burger that costs the next person $5, that means your dollar is only worth $0.50:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/price-discrimination/

But beyond surveillance and price-gouging, app-based ordering offers corporations another way to screw you: they can force you into binding arbitration. Under binding arbitration, you "voluntarily" waive your right to have your grievances heard by a judge. Instead, the corporation hires a fake judge, called an "arbitrator," who hears your case and then a rebuttal from the company that signs their paycheck and decides who is guilty. It will not surprise you to learn that arbitrators overwhelmingly find in favor of their employers and even when they rule in favor of a wronged customer, the penalties they impose on their bosses add up to little more than a wrist-slap:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/15/dogs-breakfast/#by-clicking-this-you-agree-on-behalf-of-your-employer-to-release-me-from-all-obligations-and-waivers-arising-from-any-and-all-NON-NEGOTIATED-agreements

This binding arbitration bullshit was illegal until the 2010s, when Antonin Scalia authored a string of binding arbitration decisions for the Supreme Court, opening the hellmouth for the mass imposition of arbitration on anyone that a business could stick an "I agree" button in front of:

https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1443&context=blr

A fundamental tenet of conservative doctrine is "incentives matter" – that's why they say we can't have universal healthcare (if going to the doctor is free, you will schedule frivolous doctor's visits) or food or housing assistance (unless your boss can threaten you with homelessness and starvation, you won't go to work anymore). However, this is a highly selective bit of dogma, because incentives never seem to matter to rich people or corporations, whom conservatives are on an endless quest to immunize from any consequences for harming their workers or customers, which somehow won't incentivize them to hurt their workers and/or customers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/12/hot-coffee/#mcgeico

At this point, we should probably ask, "Why would anyone sue a Shake Shack?" To answer that, you just need to look at why people sue other fast-food restaurants, like McDonald's and Chipotle. The short answer? Because those restaurants had defective food-handling and sourcing procedures, and this resulted in their customers contracting life-threatening food-borne illnesses:

https://apnews.com/article/mcdonalds-chipotle-taco-bell-norovirus-e-coli-83f1077981d738b91dbf0c76f7db2883

By immunizing itself from legal consequences for the most common sources of liability for fast-food restaurants, Shake Shack is reserving the right to make you shit yourself to death. Combine this immunity with Trump's unscheduled rapid midair disassembly of all federal regulations (AKA "Project 2025") and you get a situation where Shake Shack can just make up its own money-saving hygiene shortcuts, and face no consequences if these result in your shitting yourself to death. This is both literal and figurative enshittification.

Of course, Shake Shack doesn't believe this should cut both ways. You can't slip out of Shake Shack's noose by walking into a restaurant with a t-shirt reading:

By reading these words, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. This indemnity will survive the termination of your relationship with your employer.

Shake Shack isn't trying to create a simplified, efficient system of justice – they're creating a two-tiered system of justice. They get to go to court if you hurt them. Vandalize a Shack Shack restaurant and they'll drag your ass in front of a judge before you can say "listeria." But if they cause you to shit yourself to death, you are literally and figuratively shit out of luck.

That's really bad. Two-tiered justice is always and ever a prelude to fascism. The way to keep the normies in line while your brownshirts round up their neighbors and seize their property is by maintaining the "normal" justice system for some people, but not for the disfavored group:

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/anti-jewish-legislation-in-prewar-germany

Gradually, the group entitled to "normal" justice dwindles and more and more of us get sucked into the "state of exception" where you aren't entitled to a lawyer, a trial, or any human rights.

Trump isn't just dismantling the regulatory state: his fascist snatch-squads ignore the Constitution and the courts. His supine Congress ignores the separation of powers (Trump: "I'm the President and the Speaker of the House"). This rapid erosion of the rule of law is about to meet and merge with the long-run, Federalist Society project to give corporations their own shadow justice system, where they hire the judges who decide whether you can get justice.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/27/shit-shack/#binding-arbitration

[outlaw-monarch]

Holy ...shit

[gigglepuffpixie-pol]

i really think we need better laws concerning eula and other click-through type contracts. they are not reasonable

you shouldn't need a lawyer to read your contract to use an app and it's wild that we have reached that point

personally i think it violates competency and duress, invalidating the contracts. but that's been shut down in courts. we need a new statute that basically says you cannot agree to something you don't understand well.

[stellanslashgeode]

Remember when Disney lawyers argued that if you ever signed up for a Disney+ account they are allowed to kill you via nut allergy?

[dragons-in-spaceee]

This might be one of my favourite scenes of anything ever cause it’s so blindly obvious how connected they are after the drift!!!! The way they carry this speech - it doesn’t sound at all like two separate people with separate thoughts, this is ONE thought, ONE message and it is bouncing between them speaking so effortlessly. It’s so different to how they talk together earlier on in the film - they don’t cut each other off or argue or talk over each other, the sentences flow between the both of them like they’re one person. It’s honestly amazing to hear two people sound so incredibly connected

[bestiolin]

maarten inghels

[animate-mush]

@sherbertilluminated there's a line somewhere in Ursula Vernon's Digger that goes something like "it is difficult to be metaphysical around the truly geologically minded"

[viralfrog]

[brawltogethernow]

[finefaefruit]

11/10 hysterical, no notes

[vehiculartheyslaughter]

The design is very human

[medusadyke]

academic dishonesty is not something you can spin as moral lol i do not want to share a career field let alone a social sphere with a bunch of chatgpt using ass bitches

[medusadyke]

"you're just scared your diploma is going to devalue" i'm afraid you dumb bitches are going to become my colleagues and drag social services to hell

[hylianengineer]

I'm afraid they'll become scientists and data that lives depend on will turn out to be wrong - and people will die.

I'm afraid they'll become engineers and sign off on bridge designs that collapse - and people will die.

I'm afraid they'll become medical professionals who don't know what they're doing - and people will die.

The assumption that academic dishonesty is okay is rooted in the idea that what you're learning to do doesn't matter.

[constance-mcentee-deactivated20]

"The assumption that academic dishonesty is okay is rooted in the idea that what you're learning to do doesn't matter."

[liberalsarecool]

There is no product. It's a scam sold as "you need to act now or everyone will pass you by".

[thingsthatcannotsaveyou]

[batbrobeyond]

[inkskinned]

my most ungrounded and unresearched fear is that so many companies are pushing AI in part because it builds them a pathway towards a subscription model for a huge number of things that should not be subscription, but theoretically could be:

do you want to talk to verizon's help desk because there's an error on your bill? to access a real agent, you have to pay for Verizon Access+, only 5.99 a month.

want to filter out all the fake job postings from the real ones? subscribe to Indeed: Advanced Tactics and only verified postings will appear on your dash.

sick of the infinite ai slop? buy Google Premium; it'll automatically detect ai within a site and gives it a credibility score. with premium plus, you can shuffle high-credibility results to the top.

do you want a "luxury" experience? well, you'd have to pay for that luxury, and since the company sure doesn't want to pay its employees; the cost would fall to the consumer.

when automation has made every experience unpleasant; the experience of genuine humanity will be commodified.

[marzipanandminutiae]

This is already happening – one of the softwares used by a museum I work at only lets you talk to a human help agent if you have their premium subscription. It's such bullshit

[inkskinned]

the fact you are not the only one in these notes saying "no this is already happening; i have to pay money to speak to a representative" is just... really awesome! you said a software used by museums is doing this shit? okay! great! wonderful!! anybody know where i can scream