Selective enforcement is the core of conservative law making.

Bonus:

Oh no, says Sam, the eminently predictable consequences of my own actions have come to pass through no fault of my own.

And he's not wrong. If I search for any topic on Google without narrowing my search very carefully, the first page will consist of one AI generated autoresponse and ten AI generated articles from SEO-exploiting link farms.

If I search for advice on Reddit I have to narrow it down to posts from before 2022 or comments will be full of users who see a question and think "it is both useful and appropriate for me to plug this question into ChatGPT and post its answer."

(Edit: oh, shit, I forgot, Reddit also inserts links to AI-generated answers in old comments. So I'm reading an old comment and think the author linked to something relevant but the link actually triggers Reddit Answers to supply AI garbage. Ugh.)

Product reviews have been 95% spam and ad copy for decades.

I read fucking fanfiction and half the stories that started in 2025 show signs of being at least edited by LLMs.

If that's not the shambling zombie corpse of the Internet pretending to be human I don't know what it is.

"Contrary to expectations revealed in four surveys, cross-country data and six additional studies find that people with lower AI literacy are typically more receptive to AI," the paper found.

Ouch.

Becoming?

Becoming?

In the last few years, people have been pointing out an emergent benefit of ink on dead tree books: there are no banner ads, no tracking cookies, no social media integration, no gamification, no information about your reading habits sent to Google's data mines. When you buy a physical book, you own it, and nothing you do with it can be tracked, monetized, advertised, or subscriptionized.

And I bet some tech bro heard that and said "Hold my beer".

Ironically, back then people my age were warning kids "don't trust anyone or anything you read on the Internet, don't give out any personal information to anyone".

Fast forward 25 years and my peers are quoting 8chan shitposts as fact and "investing" their life savings on crypto websites they heard about on Discord.

Fuck Midjourney, and also, fuck Disney. I hope they spend years in court blowing millions on high priced lawyers and making each other look bad.

Just to make sure I understand: the amazing new capability of ChatGPT is the ability to open a different app and use it for you.

So instead of using the app directly you're paying a middleman to use the app for you.

... Now that I type it out, I can see a ready-made audience among tech illiterate older people.

The Trump administration is going mask off in so many ways that have nothing to do with racism. Though that too.

This is connected to all the formal groveling sessions where Trump's minions or big tech CEOs take turns thanking Trump for existing and for being the incredible awesome masculine big-handed alpha male America needs. And this is banana republic dictator shit, sure. But it's also how billionaires act towards their employees and subordinates.

All of them.

What Donald Trump is doing in public is no different from what Zuck and Musk and Bezos and all their ilk do in private with their lower caste servants and sycophants.

Demand flattery, hold court and let their courtiers line up to praise them, because they don't understand the difference between flattery and respect. Reward obedience and punish disobedience, because they don't know the difference between obedience and loyalty. And wield your power blatantly and without subtlety, suck up to your superiors and bully your inferiors into obedience, because they don't know the difference between strength and authority.

Trump does this shit in public because he doesn't believe Americans care about equality anymore. He thinks Americans want to be led by a powerful alpha male leader who demands public displays of submission and gets them. He thinks America doesn't want a President, first among equals, but a King, who stands above his subjects. And, unfortunately, I don't think he's wrong.

And the King is pleased - pleased - when their subordinates come to literal physical blows over access to the King. Because such men confuse aggression with strength, just as they confuse flattery with respect.

Two of Trump's courtiers were so desperate for his approval that they almost came to blows over it. These are two men so manly that they are willing to physically fight other men who disrespect them - which makes them two alpha males, as conservative minds see it - and these two alpha males respect Trump so much that they're willing to physically fight for Trump's attention.

In the mind of Trump and those like him, this is one of the greatest compliments he can receive.

You don't understand. That protest provoked an emotional reaction in me and I didn't like it. Responsible protests don't hurt people's feelings. They went too far.

https://allthatsinteresting.com/discrimination-against-vegans

A shockingly high number of people have a negative view of vegans. And, separately but relatedly, veganism is (unfairly) associated with the far left in the United States. So a lot of conservative and moderate readers will see the word "vegan" and automatically think "this must be irrational leftist bullshit".

Even to some meat-eating liberals and leftists, "AI vegan" will read as "arrogant moral scolds who want to take away your chatbots and think they're better than you because they don't use AI."

I can't tell from the article whether "AI vegan" is a term people are calling themselves or something the media made up. But when mainstream media compares a movement to animal rights or veganism, it's almost never meant to be a positive.

Here in California, utility companies are "solving" this by instituting extremely high fees for the privilege of connecting your solar power to the grid. If I recall from the last time I ran the numbers, rooftop solar panels no longer make economic sense for the vast majority of residential customers - it costs more money to install me solar panels and pay the monthly connection fees then you'll save by producing energy over the lifetime of the solar panels.

Edit: I just googled and it looks like after public outcry the regulators pulled their really bad fee schedule to replace with a slightly less bad fee schedule. The system works!

Probably the one time in history PG&E tried to fix a problem ahead of time. 😆

And it eliminates the stigma of only the poor kids getting free lunches.

The stigma is the point.

Conservatives believe receiving charity should be shameful.

Because conservatives (and neoliberals) think poverty is a personal moral failure - if you're poor, it's not because society and capitalism and racism and structural inequality screwed you over, it's because you, personally, were lazy or wasted your money or broke the law or didn't work hard enough.

So if a child can't afford a school lunch, it's because their parents are bad people. And shaming that child with an obvious "free lunch" (I remember having a bright red card that I had to show in the cafeteria, and the lunch lady would sneer at me and loudly proclaim "here is your FREE LUNCH" and hand me a cheese sandwich and an apple when the other kids were getting pizza just to make sure everybody knew my parents were poor) teaches the child to be ashamed of their parents and be ashamed of their poverty so they'll work harder to avoid poverty as adults.

And if schools give every child free lunch, not only do they lose that "teaching opportunity", they teach children that food is a right and that everybody, no matter their economic status, should have enough to eat, which is a direct attack on the fundamental principles of capitalism and American society.

Go into a conservative space and tell them people have a right to food and shelter and medical care and watch them froth in rage.

AOC is calling for protests. Equating protests to terrorism puts you in the ignoble company of the Iranian government, the Saudi monarchy, and the Georgia cops who charged protesters with felonies for distributing flyers.

Believe it or not, people on the left have been discussing this for centuries.

The general idea is recognizing a right to "personal property", which you get from using something, instead of the capitalist idea of "private property", which you get from buying something.

Currently in Western capitalist societies, if a rich person buys fifty houses, he owns fifty houses; he can live in one and collect rent from the other forty-nine, or leave the other forty-nine vacant, or tear them down to build one giant fortified survival compound, as he chooses. His property, his choice, whether it benefits the community or not.

In a society without private property, that rich person could only own one house - the house he lives in - because he lives in it and uses it. The people who live in and use the other forty-nine houses would own those. And the land underneath the houses would be owned by nobody, but belong collectively to the community, so no one person or company could accumulate land to the detriment of everyone else.

Landlords hate this idea.

Here's a really super basic summary:

https://www.workers.org/private-property/

And here's a long complicated discussion:

https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/anarchism-and-private-property

I don't.

I remember when American conservatives in the '60s claimed to support states' rights. But what they actually supported was segregation and Jim Crow. They used "states' rights" as a rhetorical tool to hide their racism behind a facade of principle, just like the Confederacy had a hundred years prior.

Among the American right, only useful idiots (like libertarians) actually believed in states' rights - or small government rhetoric in general - as a principle. It was always empty rhetoric. And now that Republicans are openly supporting Trump's big government authoritarian conservatism, it's become obvious how badly the Ron Paul types were used.

At least the newly unemployed soldiers will have a nice well-paying paramilitary to join, so they can keep supporting their wives and their wives' boyfriends.

One of the freedoms the American military purportedly protects is the freedom to talk shit about the American military.