A lot of people don't know Amazon is directly responsible for a lot of the destruction of Postal Workers rights

Another way they are subsidized via taxes is preferential agreements w/ the USPS. The justification is to supposedly enable the USPS to be "competitive".

Compete my ass. Fuck Amazon

I was mostly joking here, but that we can't trust those in power - whether referring to politicians or olig... I mean "leaders of industry" - is the problem. If you can't respect power (aka "wealth") it should be redistributed until yours is about average.

"Big brother" doesn't have to be menacing.

Amazon shouldn't be broken up. It's too late.

Amazon should become property of the US govt. Or, rather, actually "publicly owned".

And in places outside the US where it has stol... er, built infrastructure, it should become public property there too.

But not the fraudulent "stock" kind of public.

The Onion Has a New Plan to Take Over Infowars

Here's how we're taking over InfoWars.

www.reddit.com/r/AskHistori...

I had to check his Wikipedia, so due to the words there I'm going to come out of left field & not explain anything

>No one says fear is a liar
>But I’ve been told “No one gets out alive
>So trust us with your life

>Worry is no form of treatment
>You lost the sun to the walls of your bunker

Get sublimated nerds

The linked post & article is only linked because I figured it's only efficient to link things and also because get sublimated nerds

We are more like the moon.

>The sun doesn't give light to the moon assuming
>The moon's gonna owe it one

Regardless, the best we mortals can do is organize the energy which we are given - and importantly, not distort the natural equilibrium of Nature. If we don't do that, it will do that to us.

We are not the sun.

music.youtube.com/watch?v=dKAw...

>Why construct a wooden horse to get inside the city walls, when you have gigantic tusked creatures capable of tearing down the Scaean gate?

Heard this song for the first time recently though I've known them most of my life, and when I looked up the lyrics I learned his first name was John for the first time which was neat https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/manchesterorchestra/iwasalid.html

some people know things for which they have no explainable explanation https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/audioslave/shadowonthesun.html

I found this a day or so ago, originally the poems were created by Gilbert Keith Chesterton though the book of poems was compiled by an other (whose name I do not know as it was not listed) included this note at the beginning of their book: THE WILD KNIGHT AND OTHER POEMS By Gilbert Chesterton 1900 My thanks are due to the Editors of the Outlook and the Speaker for the kind permission they have given me to reprint a considerable number of the following poems. They have been selected and arranged rather with a view to unity of spirit than to unity of time or value; many of them being juvenile

Musicians (& other artists) - especially those who write from deep - are the original para- social relationships

Don't amplify others inherent destructive vanity

Confidence is a must but must be self regulated

The first and only technological problem

I have more about this but I can't right now.

The thing they don't seem to understand, is many of my generation and kind, do not really have that sort of animal nature in us. I mean, we do, because we all do. But when we are reduced to nothing, we do not get violent... not like that.

We are all mind.

Regarding this song, and things like people being dehumanized - which is very literal in some cases - and, ideas like how a person reduced to having no choice often becomes violent...

Yikes

When the mods of the politics subreddit say

>"Free speech" doesn't apply here

That might be a sign of an issue

Though if you didn't know there's an issue that's your issue

But it's definitely a sign of where the issue is likely rooted

BTW: they put free speech inside scare quotes, not me

You can thank not only much of the AI industry, but especially - especially, because he (& his former company) somehow continue to escape most of the blame for this - Eric Schmidt & Google for whispering in Trumps ear since at least 2016 (& Obama's before that) about how China is evil and our enemy

That is why framing AI & technology as many AI companies (eg OpenAI, Palantir) of being a "weapon of war" is fundamentally broken. Framed that way it becomes another catastrophically irreconcilable conflict like nuclear weapons. We don't need more of that. We need to get rid of that mindset entirely

Xiaolu Guo: 'Growing up in a communist society with limited freedom, you're a spiky, angry rat' The Chinese film-maker and fiction writer talks to Maya Jaggi about Tiananmen Square, political martyrdom and learning to live in Hackney

Contrary to the generally agreed idea that America, or other places, are bastions of freedom... not so much. But keeping things open & importantly trying to change "from within" is the way, the how & the why.

>I can't believe anything's freer in one state or another – it's just degrees - Xiaolu Guo

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang ‘nearly lost his composure’ when pressed on selling chips to China — ‘You’re not talking to someone who woke up a loser’ The Nvidia boss says that keeping Chinese AI researchers using the American tech stack is a good thing for the U.S.

Though I disagree with the general premise of "competition" (depending on how it is framed), ultimately his notion of needing to keep things open - which is analogous to the general philosophy underlying open source as well as "free markets" (which we do not have) - is both accurate and correct.

Mining China’s ‘Little Red Book’ for Open Source Gold - bellingcat Xiaohongshu, a female-focused lifestyle app, is a rare window into China for researchers outside the country.

Researching China isn’t easy. With many foreign sites blocked, journalists depend on domestic platforms. Even under tight controls, Chinese apps are the main window into the country. Chu Yang’s latest guide explains how to research Xiaohongshu (Rednote). www.bellingcat.com/resources/20...

sweet maybe I'll finally understand wtf the story is

>If you wanna speak of the devil
>You will feel the wave of his or her invented wings

>Words of war become acts of war
>I'm not fucking around

>But you're broken on the inside baby
>& that will never have the final say

We are something different. Think Godzilla.

>I don't care for what it's worth

>I don't believe that you are with me
>It's so beneath you, gazing up

>I won't kneel
>I won't bow
>If you're there God
>Strike me down
>You won't

>There is none higher than this blood
>And I won't serve anyone
>No there is nothing above
>And I don't serve anyone

music.youtube.com/watch?v=OfEh...

What's up with this

>Aurelia, new wolves await
>Aurelia, they brought you new chains

>They're barking in the wrong key

>& you sing along

>Aurelia, dream animals wills
>Are real enough to make the slow kill

---

>>Aurelia is a name from the Latin name Aurelius, derived from aureus meaning "golden"

music.youtube.com

Shouldn't, but does. That's why taxes exist! And why taxes do, indeed, perform the function of redistributing wealth.

It is in the best interest of all of us for things (like money) to be equally distributed. Any system far outside of a natural equilibrium will be violently turbulent. Simple.

Using what I understand from the theoretical bits of quantum mechanics & the "self-evident" bits from classical physics (ie complex math sucks) I've got a solid concept tying together a lot of, as of now, incoherent fields. Specifically this screenshot can help elucidate a (not in)coherent economics

Thrice - Blood On The Sand [Audio] YouTube video by Thrice

>We wave our flags we swallow fear like medicine
>We kiss the hands of profiteers & their congressmen

>Fear will kill your mind & steal your love as sure as anything
>Fear will rob you blind & make you numb to others' suffering

>This has to end.

music.youtube.com/watch?v=SecJ...

See this thread also ↓

Amusingly I realized upon reflection that idea (accumulation of things already in excess - like attracts like - is true for each thing individually, as well as other things like intelligence, knowledge, and wisdom. Assuming no artificial "handicap")

bsky.app/profile/rele...

Consider who was interviewed by journalists during the US Iraqi War on television and radio and in the press generals. Experts on weapons systems and Pentagon officials dominated. No artists were interviewed. No historians, no novelists, no theologians, no school teachers, no doctors. Is war the business only of military experts? Is what they have to say about the war the only prospective citizens need to have? I should think that weapons system experts would be the last people to be interviewed on the matter of war. Perhaps the absence of any others may be accounted for by saying the first casualty of war is wisdom. Stay awake. I can envision a future in which what I've been saying about wisdom will be commonplace in newspapers. I cannot envision exactly how this will be done, although I rather like imagining a time when in addition to OP-ed pages, we will have wisdom pages filled with relevant questions about the stories that have been covered, questions directed, those who offer different bodies of knowledge from those which the stories themselves confront. I can even imagine a time when the news will be organized not according to the standard format of local, regional, national and World News, but according to some other organizing principle, for example, the seven deadly sins of greed, lust, envy, and so on. Do I ask too much of editors, too much of newspapers? Well, perhaps, but I say what I do because we live now in a world of too much information, confusing specialized knowledge and too little wisdom. Journalists may think it is not their job to offer the wisdom, I say, why not? Who can say where their responsibilities as journalists end? The problem to be solved in the twenty first century is not how to move information, not the engineering of information. We solved that problem long ago. The problem is how to transform information into knowledge and how to transform knowledge into wisdom. If we can solve that problem, all the rest will take care of itself.

>"concerns that the voices shaping global conflict reporting are often narrow and predictable."

My concerns extend far beyond (what is intended by) "conflict reporting". But that's another topic.

A related point made by Neil Postman, many years ago:

I bet that the "philanthropy" Trump cited as reasons for giving Michael stock fraud Milken a pardon was directly related to the "club" - that is, tax free - being described in these articles.

This is why I have spent too much time looking into "non profits"

Because 501c's are 99% fucking bullshit