Since 2000, the improbability constant of the universe has been rising at a geometric rate. It crossed the believability threshold in 2015, shortly before Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the Presidency.

At that point, scientists had predicted that the satire cycle would cease to circulate, leading to a breakdown of the humorsphere; but scientists at The Onion headed a task force that managed to find a loophole in the Costello Impossibility Limit, and allowed them to theoretically continue writing and publishing satire until the improbability constant reaches the Costello Limit and all of reality just becomes fiction (predicted to be some time in 2033).

Anyway, because of that loophole (which is named the “Twain Track,” after Mark Twain, who pioneered some of the early satire that eventually led to this discovery), satire is no longer required to be false.

Well, the market will definitely contract. I would say at least one of the big AI players will go out of business or be acquired by a competitor over the next few years, and at least one of the big tech corps will sunset their AI model over that timescale as well. Nvidia stock is going to take a steep nosedive. I think the future for consumer AI is mostly in small, quick models; except for in research and data analysis, where just a few big players will be able to provide the services that most uses require.

They currently have enough money to keep going for a while if they play their cards right, but once investors realize that the endgame doesn’t have much to offer them, the money will stop flowing.

I’m probably going to be allowing most of my streaming subscriptions to lapse over the next year or two. Gonna stick with Dropout and PBS, but that might be all.

My apologies, I thought you were making the opposite argument. But I still disagree.

All other things being equal, educated people are statistically less susceptible to disinformation and fallacious arguments. If they weren’t, the fascists wouldn’t be trying to eliminate public education, and the electoral map wouldn’t correlate so strongly with education.

Foucault wasn’t wrong about right-wingers using educational systems for indoctrination, but that’s not the current GOP playbook. Their strategy relies on people being too anxious and uneducated to separate fact from fiction, and to provide the propaganda another way (specifically, via carpet-bombing media, social and otherwise, with disinformation). Why bother wasting time at the school district level when there are nationwide platforms where people line up voluntarily to get their ration of AI-generated, foreign-actor-crafted lies delivered straight into to their eyeballs?

Yeah, we’ve gotta fix the education system. And yeah, we’ve gotta get people to recognize where they’re being controlled. But I don’t think that eliminating the former is going to accomplish the latter; and clearly the other side knows it, too.

Looks like they originally animated him eating a sandwich but decided to put in a slice of deep dish pizza at the last minute.

Right-wing propaganda nonsense. Education teaches you how to evaluate sources and interrogate assumptions.

Once the bubble pops, we can go back to letting AI do what it’s actually good at—pattern recognition, summarization, translation, natural language processing—and stop trying to shoehorn it into every single thing.

I think we overemphasize water and should talk more about people’s hydration.

It’s definitely getting broader than that, with the way that wealth stratification continues to skyrocket. But I don’t mean “actually rural,” I really do mean “more rural.” A good amount of city real estate prices have priced lower-income folks out of the urban core in many (most?) cities, gentrifying the downtown and resulting in a reversal of 1980s White Flight as the working class move to now-cheaper suburban and rural communities.

I didn’t mean just farmers or whatever. I just mean people who haven’t got the money to live in the Trader Joe’s district.

That’s probably a good read on it.

Working class people tend to be less-educated, live in more rural areas, be a part of less-diverse communities, and be prone to accept authority figures. And the GOP has spent a half-century trying to convince that exact group that every problem they’re experiencing is actually the opposite. So they vote against their best interests in election after election, and then the people they voted for successfully convince them that the Democrats actually torpedoed it all and they could’ve actually made everything better if they just had one more term…rinse and repeat across 25+ election cycles.

Interesting. That’s potentially a really valid point. And then, does the Gore presidency mean that there’s no Obama presidency (since he campaigned on a much more moderate platform as reaction to Bush) and thus no Trump presidency?

Hmmm.

I believe that’s always been the case, officially. It certainly was about fifteen years ago, when I worked in pharmacy. I know there are some ways that hospitals had of getting around it (like charging the full amount and putting it on a payment plan, but then immediately forgiving the remaining balance after one payment), but I don’t think those loopholes have been closed even still.

I’m not the creator, but I assume it’s pointing out the absurd juxtaposition of living in a crumbling civilization on a warming planet, yet being forced to continue doing such banal things as buying food in order to survive.

I get why you say that, but I disagree.

Unironically yes, and it’s sad that that’s the case. However, he did issue a similar EO in 2019 which didn’t do much; the administration claims that it lowered costs on the most expensive procedures by 6%, but whether that’s true or not the cheapest procedures became about 3% more expensive. Something like 20% of hospitals and insurers were ever in compliance, which Trump of course blames the Biden administration for; and attempts to make the EO a law went nowhere on the Hill.

But yes, healthcare price transparency is a good thing. Still, I’m a bit suspicious; because the insurance companies actually welcomed the EO when it was first signed. I can’t figure that one out.

Because the tax preparation companies paid them a lot of money.

Agreed. Lots of time til 2028, but as it is I think his only hope for the Oval Office is in Big Macs.

Definitely. If New York City (just the city) were to secede from the United States, it would be the 101st largest nation in the world; almost as big as Switzerland, and bigger than New Zealand, bigger than Singapore, and bigger than every Nordic country except Sweden. They can really throw their weight around.

And as a part of the US, they can honestly do even more. Most companies don’t want to have a “New York” version of their product and an “all the other states” version, so they’re pretty likely to fall in line with whatever New York asks for. Especially if California follows suit; that’s a sixth of the US’s population in just those two jurisdictions.

Actually it says “Ocean Blindness.” And apparently it’s a real fake thing. Home-grown human-made photo fakery.