Oh good, so different from using Terrorists to justify the surveillance state.

Speaking of which the NSA Haiku Generator has been lifeboated!

Consul Leak Toxic
DDOS Agro Burst
Hazmat Ebola

Our surveillance goons are bored and lonely! Give them something to scan every day! 👋

Sure!

So my original fantasy (during the Obama era) was to create what would start as an wiki of all^† the constitutions of all nations of the world, translated to all^† languages.

Then there’d be a workshop section where amateur legal experts could take known clauses and tweak them so that they’d be better (say, revising all the US federal elections so that they’re ranked choice, and fixing all the instances of two-party procedure so that they accommodate any number of parties. Or, for another example, fixing UK Parliament so that it is appointed by sortition from all qualifying citizens.)

The point of all this when the world isn’t on the precipice of despair is twofold:

1) It provides a resource for new societies to look at what other constitutions look like, so they can pull from what works, which means that coups d’etat are more likely to result in something other than a provisional dictatorship that accidentally becomes permanent. Because we have new states rising from the ashes of the old frequently. And…

2) It provides a place to crowdsource amendments to constitutions already in place (or to change current non-foundational ordinances). Right now, here in the US, we depend on our legislators to write laws, and they rely on their staffers who often have corporate allegiances, when they don’t receive bill text directly from corporate or special interest lobbyists directly. So it would create a place for the public to talk about it and have its own input.

Such a website was a no-brainer to me, so much so that I had assumed that it existed somewhere online. But no, no-one has made it.

I don’t have the skill it takes to start what might eventually become a sizeable project with lots of political enemies, like Wikipedia or Wikileaks. But maybe here on Lemmy creating an interested team would be easier.

For now it’s a pie-in-the-sky idea, as I wouldn’t have any idea how to begin it.

† This is the internet definition of all, id est as many as we could crowdsource.

As best as we understand the motivation of the constituency, they felt the economy was bad under Biden, that immigrants were increasing crime, weighing down our social programs and taking our jobs, and that Trump will fix everything with his concept of a plan.

In reality, Biden was dealing with the after-effects of Trump’s economy, plus the COVID-19 epidemic, and while prices did increase, the US has recovered better than any other nation, so he can’t really be faulted on the economy, especially after Trump’s initial response to the epidemic of pretending like it’s not already in the community, and politicizing mitigation efforts like masks and social distancing.

Then, immigrants are taking jobs that Americans don’t want, are paying taxes, and commit fewer crimes than the general population. So all of our concerns about immigrants are demonstrably false.

And if Trump’s previous methods of fixing the United States is consistent, then he’s only going to break things. An example would be his efforts to repeal the ACA, which turned into the skinny repeal that is, killing the program without a replacement, because making a better healthcare program was too hard for the GOP.

I remember all this, and it’s troubling the short memories of the American electorate. It’s not the first time, though. They should have remember not just how bad it was under George W. Bush, but how awful Republicans became during that time. Street Republicans were outwardly endorsing torture and suggesting that waterboarding wasn’t really torture. It’s like they lost all moral direction or even basic sense in favor of party loyalty.

Now as more votes are processed, and as we’re able to see how demographics voted, our review of the 2024 election might change, but right now it looks like huge chunks of the electorate are just forgetful and completely daft. More likely they’re just racist and bigoted more than they care about their own self interests.

If they got it they’d know that putting a Democrat in office and then pressuring them can get results, which is how we ended DADT and DoMA. The GOP doesn’t care what the public thinks.

It’s worth tapping the quote (accredited) from Linden Baines Johnson:

I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.

Unlike prior revolutions in which the new regime was established after the old, we should write a new constitution in advance.

Start with a framework. Maybe take the Constitution of the United States and make some no-brainer changes (getting rid of the EC, say. Or election by ranked choice)

And then, we develop it. Run clauses by legal scholars, hold town halls. Get it on the web. Debate about the benefits of competing clause versions.

So that when there is a movement, a resistance (and there will be) an organized rebellion, the people will not just have an enemy to fight against but something to fight for.

The DNC often deals with this, because the nature of federal politics in the US requires them to appeal to the general public, which has left-leaning interests, and then businesses and oligarchs for sponsorship which have right-leaning interests.

Remember they made the Democratic Party primaries less democratic after Carter was elected because he was too left wing. And they’ve only been able to nominate neoliberals since.

So no, those of us on the left have no candidates. And since its a two-party FPTP system, we only can vote against the worse popular guy by voting for the slightly better other popular guy.

In this case, assuming the election went down as it appeared, the majority of the US voted for the racist autocratic dictator rather than another neolib. (Granted, Biden went further left than we expected and I had hope Harris would as well. Walz certainly seems to understand the US public, but none of them are without ties to industrial interests. We’d still only be able to expect a couple of scraps.)

What this tells me is that most Americans don’t get it. They think they have a choice. And now they’re going to endure the consequences of their folly.

A dark age is a low-data age. It’s not dark as in a slow development age. We see the end of the Islamic Golden Age (areound the 14th-15 centuries) as as time when advancement in the Middle East slowed as astronomy and algebra were reinterpreted as sorcery against God (except when done for the religious authority or the caliphate / sultanate). Compare witchcraft and witch burnings in the late middle ages and early reniassance. Anyhow a lot of smart people got executed by the religious authority, and so development slowed, allowing Christian imperial interests from the west to catch up.

This won’t be a dark age even as the US state tries to bury what happens in disinformation campaigns. There’s too much archeological data to be available. Though future civilizations may not prioritize studying what happened while we navigate some great filters like the climate crisis.

It’s going to suck and people will die, and some atrocities will be so heinous as to require memorials and denial movements, but it will be super hard to bury the records.

The US is going to join Russia as a has-been, but it was always a genocidal bully, and deserves to crumble like Rome.

Because of course it did?

This was super-expected.

This smacks of the hyperloop, a false product offered to suppress support of other competing products.

Id est, a high-capital entity using their power to suppress competiton for smaller (more sincere) interests.

The original thought experiment had to do with playing around with infinity, which is a whole field of mathematics with a lot of crossover. It raises questions like whether we can assume any fixed-length sequence of digits can be found somewhere in the mantissa of a given irrational number (say, π).

In a company as blue-chip as Disney, the discontinuation of access and privileges and security clearance are indicators of imminent repositioning, likely firing if you’ve engaged in mischief (such as voicing your opinion or comparing salaries).

It’s why you give sweet Christmas presents to the awkward guy in HR and invite him to all your socials. Blow him if he’s into it. He’s your intel source regarding who is in danger of discharge, and if the boss doesn’t like you.

This disgruntled guy had to be lower rank than the mailroom if HR wasn’t given notice, and his access was super low priority. No-one cared.

(Yes, I’m bitter.)

So the secret to this thought experiment is to understand that infinite is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is…

The lifespan of the universe from big bang to heat death (the longest scenario) is a blink of an eye to eternity. The breadth and size of the universe – not just what we can see, but how big it is with all the inflation bits, even as its expanding faster than the speed of light – just a mote in a sunbeam compared to infinity.

Infinity itself looks flat and uninteresting. Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity – distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless. And thus we don’t imagine just how vast and literally impossible infinity is.

With an infinite number of monkeys, not only will you get one that will write out a Hamlet script perfectly the first time, formatted exactly as you need it, but you’ll have an infinite number of them. Yes, the percentage of the total will be very small (though not infinitesimally so), and even if you do a partial search you’re going to get a lot of false hits. But 0.000001% of ∞ is still ∞. ∞ / [Graham’s Number] = ∞

It’s a lot of monkeys.

Now, because the monkeys and typewriters and Shakespeare thought experiment isn’t super useful unless you’re dealing with angels and devils (they get to play with infinities. The real world is all normal numbers) the model has been paired down in Dawkin’s Weasel ( on Wikipedia ) and Weasel Programs which demonstrate how evolution (specifically biological evolution) isn’t random rather has random features, but natural selection is informed by, well, selection. Specifically survivability in a harsh environment. When slow rabbits fail to breed, the rabbits will mutate to be faster over generations.

This tells me they are less interested in the well being of the students as they are in intercepting the trajedy and drama that become symptoms of students in dysfunctional circumstances.

Humans don’t have the technology to manipulate society to deal with the climate crisis. But then we can’t get a four-day work-week in the US because a handful of billionaires oppose it.

So far, we’re showing about the impetus that cyanobacteria had when it was their turn to kill off the planet. It would have been better if they could have stopped multiplying but they couldn’t help themselves. We can’t help ourselves either, just with extra steps to reach the same position.

University of Missouri, I believe. (Sent to me from there.)

To be fair, I may have stopped getting updates anyway? I suspect what happened is typical, that some Win10 update bugged the update process and I was supposed to either roll it back or get the next one by hand and just… didn’t.

It is my intention to start looking at linux distros and have one installed by Summer 25…assuming I haven’t immolated in a wildfire or been sent to a detention center by then.

Yhe fifth circuit believes regional monopolies should be exploited to control consumers.

With proper competition, banning someone for suspected misuse would only chase them to competitors.

The fifth circuit is incompetent.

Taarna

I bought it specifically to support the dev, which is way more effective regarding small games by small publishers than big games by big publishers.

The thing is, I waste neuron power on things that didn’t happen all the time. The long term decline of House Frey after the Red Wedding given that all the other houses ceased to trust them. I ponder Merry and Pippen captured and carried by the Uruks. I think about Opheus petitioning Hades for the return of Eurydice, and the rape of Medusa by Poseidon. Prometheus taking pity on his clay apes and teaching them fire, knowing that they would eventually reach for the stars and create life from raw materials, displacing the Olympians. And then their response, offering the newer, sleeker, curvier model, Pandora, comes with free jar of mysteries!

Just because the Eden story is mythical doesn’t mean it has no use, and ultimately it will, like most of our mythology, succumb to the death of the author, its meaning changing from any long, lost original intent (or what we imagine their intent to be) to what it means to us.

And this is why the NSA is supposed to close exploits rather than harvest them for surveillance.

This is why surveillance backdoors are always bad, and you can’t math around that.