I was riffing on the original and translated titles of foucault’s most well known work. whether it was sarcasm or not; 🤷‍♀️

also, generally, you want your data going as few places as possible. not to beijing, not to washington, not to palo alto.

what’s the word for a thing that worms its way into your life, makes you depend on it, then uses that to exploit and damage you?

there’s a word for that.

okay but consider that you don’t have as much surveilance of your employees, and without that, how are you supposed to discipline them?

…cluttered? the fuck?

has this fucker seen a cubicle? why did she allow it?

it WAS dealt with pretty quick, but yeah I bet it’s still pretty absurd, even if they at least ask… some questions?

what the fuck is wrong with boats on principle? I’m not anti-civ. I would suggest that we should switch to sails or solar though, for slow container ships.

but for land transportation: switch to fucking trains and (e)bikes/scooters

yeah, you can whine about “MUH FREEDUMS” but a modern commercial car can’t go off road for a substantial length of time. if you’ve ever DONE off-roading, it is not the same as traveling over asphalt. you cannot go long distance like that; not as a consumer. it’s a fucking expedition, and even vehicles capable of it (most modern 4wd vehicles are not) you need to be willing to put that extreme wear+tear on your vehicle, and go through that ordeal. you fucking aren’t. no, shut the fuck up, you aren’t. not as a regular thing to get somewhere. maybe once or twice a year as a cool adventure.

so your car needs well maintained infrastructure to get there just like a train does. except the train’s infrastructure is safer, easier to build, easier to maintain, massively higher capacity, and substantially cheaper to use.

plus, you can use overhead wire/third rail, which means you don’t have to carry any power (petrol, batteries, whatever. weight is weight) on board. think of it like the speed boost things you drive over in a racing game. it’s really that good.

plus, you can just, like, sit on a train and chill. last train I was on? I took a NAP. can’t do that shit in your car. don’t talk about self driving-that’s not real without infrastructure investment, which locks you more into expensive infrastructure, and why even bother when you could have cheaper more efficient infrastructure with literal centuries of testing and iteration? other things I’ve done on a train: run a D&D game, watched a movie, written a paper, had sex without it being a safety hazard (we splurged on a sleeper car), paced, ordered lunch, gotten completely shit faced (amtrak’s coctail selection is pretty sub-par and their wines aren’t great, but nobody in california cares if you’re on edibles, and it’s not really ‘allowed’ but you can absolutely trip on acid on a train relatively safely), physical therapy, pooped (yeah not my finest hour, but the paper is better than average) read a god damn book, attended a remote conference while traveling to an in-person conference. in india, where the trains mostly work; they have trains that offer massages and five star meals.

okay, so, some nitty gritty. sorry about where I started that, I probably didn’t intend a pun. gravel rails and ties to keep them the right distance apart. pot hole? add more gravel and bang it back into shape. there are (barely) functional rail lines from before automobiles existed. meanwhile, in cold climates where they need road salt, asphalt roads don’t last a year before becoming unusable. even the basic physics of it favor trains-steel wheels on steel rails are just more efficient-you’re not bouncing around and steering side to side constantly, plus you’re carrying less weight of machine for the same amount of humans/cargo. there are places that currently have asphalt roads where you couldn’t take a heavy freight train, that is true, but those places also have weight limits for trailers going over them, for exactly the same reason. if you can take a car there, in any practical terms, you could build equivalent quality rail (or bike path) and run cars of similar weight/function over it.

we are running out of sand. we are not running out of gravel. road salt is an ecological disaster ruining our precious fresh water. tire dust is visible in the air where I live; that’s what the famous smog of los angeles is mostly made of, and if you have testicles, it is in there (that’s most of the microplastics that are in everything). trains have none of these problems. little bit of steel dust, too heavy to end up in the air, easy to clean up, even hypothetically possible to recycle it.

trains may depart on a regular schedule, but where the system actually functions and isn’t subservient to cars, which mostly make themselves look good by ruining the fuck out of everything else-don’t even get me started on induced demand, look it the fuck up- you usually get there faster with less frustration and more shit done in the meantime.

I really don’t want to hear your counter-argument. if you can’t imagine how this is better, you’re not engaging in good faith. if your excuse is that the people you let have your power are pieces of shit who would never do anything that wasn’t shitty, that sounds like it’s not really a problem with trains (or bikes or whatever), and you need a guillotine ASAP, but you probably knew that because of all the genocides or whatever they did/endorsed and the fact you don’t have healthcare.

oh, and high speed rail can go MUCH faster than 75 MPH with relative safety. look up the original shinkansen, then look up the modern ones.

basic state logic.

they’re incapable of sucking less. their whole episteme is about centralizing, about reducing thought the farther it gets from the central authority (whether that’s one guy, a class, or a building like the pentagon), but you CAN increase violence, threaten, flatten, disable, basically wherever.

for several years in the early 00’s, the process for getting security clearance involved no background check, just knowing who to ask. they literally rubber stamped it.

getting a fed job or something still did, but just security clearance, on its own, for anyone? just ask. not even nicely.

of course.

this feels like you think car roads just appear magically from nowhere, and are an elemental feature of the world, not a ridiculously bloated maintenance expenditure of literally every municipality in the country.

places a trolley or train can’t get you

okay.

highway system

so um… I feel like if a car without 4wd can get there, a train can get there, with the same or less amount of effort+maintenance+ecological-fallout.

this shit is unsustainable, and if we want a future, we cannot wait for it to die on its own.

which it eventually will, because that’s what “unsustainable” means, but holy shit. the amount of resources and ecological damage that goes into maintaining it, the amount of LABOR than goes into maintaining it, fuck.

of course that asshole uses he/him pronouns.

and nope, not interested in proxies, only perfect opposites.

they outnumber the ‘tech crowd’ because we use technology to infantilize outselves, of which this is a prime example.

tl;dr: copyright law has always been nonsense designed to protect corporations and fuck over artists+consumers

but now corpo daddy and corpo mommy are fighting, and we need to take sides.

and it’s revealing that copyright law never existed to protect artists, and will continue to not do that, but MUCH more obviously, and all the cucks who whined about free culture violating laws are reaping what they fucking sowed.

agreed, but its an interesting contradiction revealed in the legal frameworks.

turns out, copyright laws have literally never been used to protect artists!

th… that’s fair. I probably wouldn’t want to touch some awful light-mode pervert anyway. just, you know, curiosity. I guess it makes sense that they wouldn’t be.

okay but that’s all back-end. I actually have an example like this!

okay, so, if im playing an old DRM’d game I have on my desktop, and want to switch to my steam deck, I can do that.

but the interface that works on my steam deck (controller with touch pad, but no keyboard) is maddening to use on my desktop. I know, because I tried it once-steam calls it ‘big picture mode’ and it feels like being crippled when I use it on a computer with a full keyboard and mouse.

but I pick up the deck, and it’s nice. it functions, its interface is pretty close to perfect. and if I tried to use either of those on my phone, i would take a train up to washington and fucking beat a valve employee to death with it.

what you’re talking about is back end interoperability. totally unrelated, and I agree it’s good! also, doesn’t really exist anywhere near as much as it should, but that’s sort of a different problem. see, each of those platforms has different affordances and design conventions. now, you can run compatibility and seamless use, so the video just appears where you want it. I actually have a slightly janky (but best I’ve found) version of that set up on my LAN.

but I would like to be able to click around and take a broader view of the incoming shit on my desktop with multiple 4k monitors. i absolutely need gesture support on my tablet, and on my phone I need gesture support, plus ABSOLUTELY DO NOT have space to display multiple things at once.

I don’t need hamburger menus on my fucking desktop. I got space, and my cursor is precise enough the 90s/00’s are the best we’ve done with UX in that space (because we stopped trying as soon as the iphone dropped). having ONLY ONE THING displayed at once on my desktop is fucking annoying. I have 7680 horizontal pixels over a few feet of space on my desktop, no one thing takes up that much fucking space, nor should it, and I like the ability to click and drag shit from different apps and move shit around and do all that good crap. it’s great! and on my phone or tablet, that doesn’t really work. I should be able to click and drag to my tablet, if I want to set that up (my tablet is air gapped because that’s easier than degoogling and I mostly read+music on it) but my tablet needs a totally different interface, and anything that DOES work for my tablet, where im only ever really doing one thing I need to look at at once, is going to be frustrating as hell on my desktop.