Zappa going too crude gets wearisome (and ages horribly), Zappa going too classy gets a bit oblique, but Zappa merging crude and classy in a perfect whole is the best.
love this tom and b’elanna would truly be sooo annoying about it. like how dare you steal our bestie just to knock him up and treat him like that. and i don’t even think seven truly would be especially callous from an objective point of view, tom and b’elanna just think she is because they’re freaks. they’d be horrified she’s not waiting on him hand and foot and harry would be like “i’m literally just borgpregnant it’s not even in the top ten worst things that have happened to me…”
my name's cougar but my friends call me mountain lion and my mama calls me puma and today's my first day at big cat high. i'm so nervous i hope they don't realize i'm not panthera >ܫ<
emo cheetah jughead smoking behind the school: it's hopeless, catamount. they'll never see us as 'real' big cats... us outcats gotta stick together -ﻌ•
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:
Here's a fun fact about Elon Musk: in 2020, his (nominal) net worth was $20b, and today it's $1t (nominally). But that's not the fun fact; this is: everything he's done since 2020 was a flop.
As John Quiggin writes, the pre-2020 Musk was the Musk of Tesla, batteries and Starlink. The post-2020 Musk is the Musk of Starship, robotaxis, Cybertrucks and Twitter – a string of commercial flops and assets that literally exploded. I would add that post-2020 Musk created the world's hungriest money-furnace, an automated child-porn production tool called "XAI":
Quiggin declares that this is the era in which "financial markets fail in the task of valuing assets accurately," and "the institutional structures that are supposed to make them work have given up trying." Nor did this start with the Spacex IPO. As Quiggin writes, Bitcoin and other cryptos were once shunned by nominally sober financial institutions like Goldman Sachs, but today, not only do all the big banks offer crypto services, people have largely stopped calling it cryptocurrency because no one is even pretending that it's a form of money. It's a tradeable collectible, not even particularly useful for paying for crimes or laundering money.
Spacex is just a continuation of the logic of crypto, in which something is valuable because some people think other people will pay more for it in the future, and not because it does useful things:
That's the logic of the whole market today. AI – the world's money-losingest technology – attracts investment at the expense of everything else. When horrified NIH lifers begged the DOGE boys not to shut down long-running medical research projects, Musk's broccoli-haired brownshirts laughed in their faces, saying we don't need cancer research because "GAI" is almost here and it will cure cancer. You could hardly ask for a better example of investing in vibes over value than shutting down real cancer research to free up money for teaching more words to the word-guessing machine because it's about to become God and cure cancer.
Today, Goldman Sachs isn't merely all-in on crypto – it's all-in on the Spacex IPO. As Quiggin writes, the bank has signed off on Musk's claim that "Musk's ragbag of assets" will grow one hundredfold in the next 40 months.
Quiggin's short essay has been rolling around in my mind since I read it a couple days ago. Then, yesterday, I spotted this essay by Owen McGrann entitled "The Dead Economy Theory":
The perfect name for this phenomenon! Or so I thought. Then I read McGrann's article, and discovered that it's yet another piece asking how the economy will work after AI takes all of our jobs because AI is absolutely going to do that and there's no point in even questioning whether that will happen.
Look, thought experiments about how to deal equitably with labor displacement in the face of automation are all well and good. I'm a science fiction writer, that stuff is my bread and butter.
But applying "dead economy theory" to the blithe acceptance of the claims of AI pitchmen is a terrible waste of a killer coinage. The true risk of AI to your job isn't: "an AI will do your job." It's: "an AI salesman will exploit your boss's infinite horniness for replacing mouthy workers with pliable machines to sell him a chatbot that can't do your job, and then your boss will fire you and replace you with that inept, defective chatbot."
By the same token: the real "dead economy" risk isn't that all the productive labor will be done by chatbots owned by a habitual liar and eminently guillotineable billionaire like Sam Altman. The actual dead economy risk is that our institutions and markets will continue to move capital from productive activity into memestocks, vibes, and bubbles.
We could do "AI cancer research" by producing tools that automate gnarly multivariant analysis problems for cancer researchers. But what we're actually doing is defunding cancer research (especially any research into "systemic" cancer because studying systemic things is "woke") to free up fiscal space so we can build data-centers and make Musk into a trillionaire.
That's not just a dead economy – it's one that'll kill everyone you love and everything that matters.
These are the LAST DAYS to get Canny Valley, the extremely limited edition, signed and numbered book collecting my Pluralistic collages. I’m not selling these — they’re exclusively available to people who donate to Creative Commons for their 25th anniversary.
Every time I shitpost about Hasbro's mismanagement of Dungeons & Dragons as a franchise I get people coming out of the woodwork to demonstrate that they conceive of all criticism of the corporatisation of the tabletop roleplaying hobby as an extension of being "anti-5E".
Ironic given that an anti-corporate backlash forced Wizards to put out the 5E rules under creative commons, guaranteeing that something resembling 5E could survive even the total and irrevocable collapse of Hasbro and the uttermost failure of any attempt to salvage things from its wreckage.
For those who don't know: Ikumi Nakamura is the woman who was senior artist on Bayonetta, and designed the titular character along with Hideki Kamiya. Their greatest moment of bonding was over their insistence that Bayonetta keep her glasses on at all times.
Nakamura cannot go to horny jail. She is the warden.
