TotalBrownout

The appeal of LLMs seems uncomfortably similar to how Thomas Jefferson enthusiastically employed dumb waiters to limit interaction with enslaved people.

Most (all?) unions currently have in their constitution a clause where all members must attest that they are not a communist. Openly endorsing communism gets you kicked out. Interestingly enough, this also applies to fascism...

Getting people from casual left "content consumer" to a true "revolutionary"

If you are a disaffected liberal, it's easy to believe that the world is ending... a worldview/ideology which assumes a coming apocalypse asks nothing of you. By comparison, a political project that offers a positive vison for the future but requires direct action is a heavy lift. It takes more than agit prop to inspire and move someone from the former to the latter imo.

Same racist that argued that reconstruction was “objectively bad” and the idea that blacks deserved something better than Jim Crow was “communism.”

Wellbutrin gave me inflammation/joint pain, especially in the knees.

This is a popular meme format among people with aphantasia… I’m assuming that’s the missing context here.

To a liberal, expressing solidarity with others begins and ends with pressing the blue button… even when that button does 99% of what the red button does.

So, basically just a protection racket at this point...

In the downtown cores, where demolition costs are highest, there are lots of businesses that would be willing to re-locate once rents reset. Suburban office parks are the ones that should be torn down and redeveloped.

The Yard Sale model makes me think it doesn’t even work on paper.

This tracks... "middle class" is an income band encompassing those who fall between 2/3 and 200% of median. The US is a terribly unequal society where something like 40% of the population falls within this band, with high degrees of wage compression near/at subsistence-level... the distribution of those within the technical "middle class skew to the low end of the range. Because poverty is best conceived in relative versus absolute terms, it's fair to say that the "Middle America/the average person" in the US lives in poverty.