Yeah I read the state of the world talk every year. Bruce always has a smart take. Although this year I think he is underestimating Trump.
ATT gobbling Time-Wartner and we are worried about these ma-pa operations? Content is Queen!
And China, Badiou or Beddoo or sumpin gonna singularitize them all. Chess, Go, Hold-em, then AI will takeover trolling. Future pretty bleak without my RT checks.
Happy to contribute.
"Their moonshots all miss the moon."
is great. So is
"The guy's got two billion friends but nobody likes him."
Hasn't Amazon been strategically foregoing the sales tax advantage to try to build more warehouses and become even more monopolistic?
There's hints that Zuckerberg might be interested in politics. He's repudiated his atheism and he's taking a 50 state tour this year. I sure hope not.
And fuck Jeff Bezos with a rusty chainsaw for treating his employees like dirt.
I'm reluctant to disagree with Sterling too vigorously, but really the only thing he nails in this rant is Apple's stupidity in being obsessed with thin computers. Give me a bigger battery and a decent selection of ports. It's not like I'm going to shave with the fucking thing.
Actually the more I go over it the more I dislike this piece. It's pining for the days of disruptive bladifuckingbla internet shit that was obviously an anomalous situation even as it was happening. Newsflash, Mr. Sterling - it's not 1998 any more. Anybody who's surprised that revolutionary nimble little companies don't scale to megacorporations is really kind of dim witted.
It's not like I'm going to shave with the fucking thing.
EUREKA!
The killer app I've been seeking! "Keep the soul patch, Siri!"
Top that Zombie Steve Jobs!
5.last.
There's no bladibla internet shit these days because the Tech Giants gobble it all up before it can be disruptive (or preemptively hire the staffs and then have them working in call centers). The old Tech Giants just sneered at the new stuff until it ate their collective lunches. New TGs learned from that.
Agree on: Amazon, Facebook, Apple
Disagree on:
Microsoft- not that he's wrong, but why is it such a terrible thing to be the default supplier for the most essential piece of office equipment that needs to be replaced every 4-5 years?
Google- I think they've diversified pretty well which was the idea behind the alphabet thing. (Disclosure- part of my salary is funded by a collaboration with an alphabet company.)
Candle that smells like a new mac
Google predicts next year's fashions
People are so crazy. How long have we had smartphones?
Are we all already collectively wailing, "WAH, we need another life-changing device, or else we might have to confront how useless and mortal we are!"
10: Yes, everyone always appreciates your deep insights into the tech world, considering that you've owned a smartphone for a little over a year, and you barely know how to use it.
The next life-changing device will be cyborg devices (or whatever the trendy term is for them), IT systems directly integrated within your senses to allow seamless intelligence augmentation (directions, methods to help with e.g. cooking or job tasks, facial recognition, video conferencing.) But the way they're going I sure as hell wouldn't trust apple to do it. "Oh, you paid $50k for that implant? Sorry, we changed the plug shape so you can't update/charge it any more." Probably wouldn't trust Google either- "Hey, it mostly works, why are you complaining that there's a 6 inch lump on the side of your face?"
12- Will it close with you inside it when you don't want to talk to someone?
7: I think the issue is simpler than that. The internet was a one-time thing and everyone rushed in and made their bucks and the next disruptive thing will be robots or spaceships or something as yet undreamed of. The big guys are avoiding the mistakes of IBM, but there isn't some huge disruptive internet thing hiding in the wings waiting to make its dramatic entrance. The landscape has changed, and anybody anchoring their expectations of technological progress in the internet boom of the 90s is in for a disappointment.
12: It needs to open up at the bottom, so it can also function as a toilet. No more bathroom breaks needed! Hurray!
Are you taunting me? You know what I think of C/r/ D/ct/r/w.
As for Bruce Sterling, mondo 2000 folded years ago and we all miss it, but not enough to pay for back issues on eBay, so Sterling's tweets are the next best thing, I guess.
I for one, am quite keen on thin computers. Maybe not 'have to carry a huge fecking bag of dongles' thin, but thin enough. The previous generation of Macbook Pros, or the non-Mac ultrabook equivalents are fine. I wouldn't want any bigger. And I'd trade some FLOPS and other features to keep light and compact.
I travel a fair bit for work, and I work enough from home that I spend probably 10 hours a week carrying a laptop around. My wife's cheap 4 year old Windows laptop would be intolerable.
FWIW, all of the machine learning stuff that Google and Amazon are doing is pretty amazing. We've been playing with some of it at work (and may build some things that use them), and it's striking how much you can do with just some images and some really shitty metadata if you throw those tools at them.
it's striking how much you can do with just some images and some really shitty metadata if you throw those tools at them
How much time can you really spend looking at pictures of yourself with cats growing out of your orifices?
I don't even have to use pause/play, given the title of this thread, to say that the Trump kompromat has now been reported as a video of Trump-hired prostitutes performing a "golden showers show" for him on the bed where the Obamas had previously slept.
Thin is good, but battery life is more important than thin and at least one proper USB port is non-negotiable.
21- I really hope some of this evidence actually turns up. So far nothing seems solid enough to damage Trump.
8: Yeah, I think he's off on Google as well. A lot of the moonshot stuff hit the moon, just not a lot in the last year or two, visibly at least. Android was a moonshot once and now its the world's dominant operating system. So was Gmail. OK Google is by far the best all purpose consumer AI. They may not be monetising it particularly well, but Google Docs is still a better quick collaboration tool than anything Microsoft has managed after throwing billions at the problem. Google Photos is pretty remarkable at making your photos searchable.
21: Not bad enough, and to my mind not bad at all. I mean ordering people about, dominating and humiliating people, having people submit...this is Trump's day job. That shit is his work.
Of course the rich and powerful need relief in submission, masochism, golden showers and coprophagia. Only admirable.
Yeah, unfortunately anything bad enough to sink Trump is bad enough that you can't wish for it to exist in good faith. But I still think his downfall, eventually, will be plain and simple failure at his job. Maybe he'll be lucky enough to avoid it, but I don't think the US can coast on bread and circuses for much longer than four years, assuming a bitterly unpleasant but not close reelection against a sacrificial Democratic lamb in 2020. Yes, we'll be good and fucked, but it is at some point going to sour.
I guess the CIA still has some juice after all, so to speak.
The golden show stuff is humiliating and ridiculous, but, given what we know about who he is, not really damning or even unexpected (except in the 'novel new sex act' kind of way.)
No, whats really awful is the prolonged, active engagement in a conspiracy with a foreign government. The intelligence briefing released over the weekend seemed designed to allow it to remain plausible that Trump was somehow an uninvolved bystander, when it was quite obvious that was never true. This piece answers the "what did he know and when did he know it" bit with "plenty" and "for the past eight years."
I suppose it's not really all that shocking. He's been taking the piss all along.
I think it says something about the current state of Reddit that the story is not on the front page. You can get a lot of down votes out of a state-sponsored troll army.
Maybe Obama's about to announce that the inauguration is going to be cancelled.
Why is everyone on Twitter talking about peeing? I can't grab the context.
The river flows where it flows indeed. Wow.
We should have a thread on the Russian connection and its skeptics. I am at this point pretty skeptical, fwiw. I liked Obama's speech tonight a whole lot, for all its blind spots.
We should have a thread on the Russian connection and its skeptics. I am at this point pretty skeptical, fwiw.
Why?
And now that I've caught up with the threads I see it was discussed up thread.
This is Trump engaging in a voyeuristic act from the sound of it. I think the only thing that would compromise Trump sexually other than the live boy/dead girl would be engaging in urple's entirely novel act.
I don't think anything could compromise Trump sexually at this point. I'm not sure if there's anything else that could.
Its less the piss fetish and more the whole "spying for the Russians" thing that bothers me.
I mean, hell, other world leaders have had it known that they fucked a dead pig and still survived in office long enough to assure their country's eventual destruction.
Spying and constant close contact with the campaign.
37: sadly I don't have time to comment at length tonight, but the evidence generally seems to be thin (beyond the extensive guilty-looking circumstances). You can look up Masha Gessen's latest NYRB piece on the intelligence summary. I think it's an interesting case of a strong and coherent story about motives and capabilities distracting from thin evidence, and I say this knowing how initially credulous I was. That said, there is a whole lot I don't know, obvs.
The best line:
"The rich guy's rose-gold wrist toy."
I have a bit of a crush on Masha Gessen.
To be clear other crushes include, but are not limited to, Vlado Perlmutter, Miriam Hopkins, and Arturo Benedetti Michaelangeli. I would have a crush on Estrella Morente except I'm a bit scared of her.
Call me a clueless, early-modern-English artisanal wannabe, but I've got a crush on Adam Bede.
Trump buys into trickle down economics but takes it more literally than most conservatives.
Call me a clueless, early-medieval-English artisanal wannabe, but I've got a crush on the Venerable Bede.
Wasn't it Gessen who had that very public cockup about "Russia's population is dwindling due to Slavic fatalism" which relied on the reader not noticing that all her figures were 15-20 years out of date?
I will put a small amount of money on the latest Putin-has-pics-of-Trump-doing-something-most-people-would-find-nasty shock horror being a set up by somebody in his team so that the liberal internet will have a three day freakout before it's shown to be based on zilch, and then nothing bad anybody says about him will carry any credibility again.
21, 51 et al.
The golden shower story was apparently invented by someone on 4chan's /pol forum as "fan fiction." The author of it claims he shopped it to lots of news outlets and to Wilson. There are images of the original post on various sites.
That which does not kill him makes him stronger.
My money is safe, then. What worries me is how long it would have continued to be gleefully circulated if he hadn't fessed up.
Oh, well, if 4chan says it isn't so....
I mean, of course its not all true. Its a collection of different reports drawn from a variety of sources. Some of those sources are going to be better than others, and some probably include intentional disinformation.
The basic premise that Trump was highly involved with Putin's efforts to undermine the election/democracy seems sound to me, as it is corroborated by so much other information we already have.
Some of the details given about Trump/Putin coordination have been denied. For example, Trump's lawyer (Michael Cohen) is alleged to have met with Russians in Prague last summer (IIRC), but he says he's never been to Prague.
I think this is likely to fall into "fake but accurate" in the end. Trump and Putin have helped each other out without actually doing anything requiring provable coordination.
Of course, I've been reading "Foucault's Pendulum" so maybe all my craziness meters are miscalibrated.
My main reason for thinking it's true in the essence (Trump is a Russian tool) if not the specifics (piss off) is that Trump is clearly not a guy who can keep focused on one thing for very long, but for over a year he's never once criticized Russia or Putin. This while he's criticized or mocked, as Kasparov said: Republicans, Democrats, the Pope, US elections, CIA, FBI, NATO, Meryl Streep. There must be something REALLY big in his mind that keeps him from ever slipping up in saying something negative about Russia.
50: who knows? If only there were some easily available public record of these things with a searchable archive and some technology for referring to specific items from an external... But what's your point? You give the intelligence dossier a lot more credence? You think Putin is personally calling the shots? Or was it purely a drive-by?
57.1 But has he ever been to the Czech Republic?
I thought this was interesting if a bit of a rabbit hole I'm reluctant to go down. I mean it's no game theory but some puts some of the pieces together nicely
https://twitter.com/chris_baugh_/status/818998378285580292
If only there were some easily available public record of these things with a searchable archive
Yes, then you could have linked to it in 43.
OK Google is by far the best all purpose consumer AI.
Case not proved. Each has strengths and weaknesses, and if Google is stronger overall, I don't think it's remotely "by far".
On Putin/Trump, I view 59 as basically dispositive. Even on other shit where his inconsistency has clearly been bullshit (e.g., he's bullshitted about tax cuts for the rich, but it's been pretty clear all along that he would, in fact, cut taxes for the rich), he's made noise to obfuscate or to please the audience at hand. Other than denying that he's a puppet, he's never bad-mouthed Putin or Russian aggression.
62: Can you advise me on how to deescalate this inane conflict, in that case? We seem both to be too lazy and uninterested to pursue it sincerely, but I don't want to leave without reconciliation. I wish you no ill.
Probably for the best. I heard you need a license to ill.
Phone posting on a poor connection, lost my name in 65. Also JESUS is it no longer possible to take Bart to SF at rush hour? Do I have to add an hour to make the connection?
Anyway there is no longer truth, just spin and wishful thinking, so I will never know with certainty whether I or various people around me are the source of this eyewatering stench.
59 is a good point. It's the dog that didn't bark.
Trump has been anti-NATO for a long time; he was very opposed to US intervention in the Balkans, for example. (Even before he married someone from former Yugoslavia.) But that was mainly on solid Republican grounds that it cost a lot of money and really who cares about foreigners. Actually being pro-Russia is slightly different.
Though, again, just as Putin is hungry for a world where the two superpowers decided everything and the lesser nations just had to fall into line, a lot of people on the US right kind of like that idea as well.
I will never know with certainty whether I or various people around me are the source of this eyewatering stench
MOUSEOVER!
I once had a stench that I couldn't find the source of until I went to change the furnace filter. The mouse was over, so very over.
57
I think this is likely to fall into "fake but accurate" in the end. Trump and Putin have helped each other out without actually doing anything requiring provable coordination.
Agreed. Reminds me of 9/11 trutherism. The belief that Bush or people in his administration were actually involved in planning it is a counterfactual paranoid conspiracy theory and is viewed as self-discrediting. The belief that the Bush administration believed that they would benefit from something like 9/11 and therefore chose not to prioritize that kind of national defense... is IMO reasonable, but there's no evidence of it, and it's not the kind of thing that we'd expect there to be evidence of anyway, so there's not much to say about it either way besides "well, would those people really stoop that low or not?"
Likewise, all evidence that Putin is blackmailing or bribing Trump or in any kind of deliberate untoward collusion with him is third-hand from unreliable sources at best. On the other hand, they're both openly corrupt autocrats, of course their interests and priorities overlap.
Quick, somebody give me ten reasons why I should care if Trump is a Russian agent.
Only half-kidding. There was a thread at Welch's where somebody mentioned that spy traitor x gave the Russians our supersecret submarine technology, and then somebody asked:"And then?"
Not that I like Putin or Russia, but I grew up with forty years of Cold War and wondered then and wonder now if it was all worth the millions of lives billions of dollars and decades of paranoia.
What unbearable things will Putin do to us with Trump as poodle?
Crimea? I'll try to suffer through it.
74.1: because at some point he's going to want out?
I thought it was a joke, but apparently the firm that made the binders and binders of legal docs Trump had next to him won the "Russia law firm of the year 2016" award. You have to admit the guy knows the art of trolling.
52: The golden shower story was apparently invented by someone on 4chan's /pol forum as "fan fiction." The author of it claims he shopped it to lots of news outlets and to Wilson. There are images of the original post on various sites.
This turns out to be an insupportable claim on the part of the 4chan person. See. Also a similar story at Gizmodo.
That means its totally true. I knew it! Its too good not to be true!
77. There's a difference between "the memo," which was a 35-page document obviously cobbled together from multiple sources, and the "golden shower" story.
74.1. If Trump is a Russian agent, then Putin has a green light to invade one or more of the Baltic states. These are NATO members and emphatically don't want to be part of the Russian Empire yet again. If it happens and NATO does nothing, then NATO is dead. Maybe this is a good thing, depending on your view of foreign policy. If it happens and Trump does do something about it, it could lead to WW3. Better for all of us if Putin decides it's not a great idea.
73. Bankrolling through generously financed loans is the real issue, apparently largest volume was after DJT's AC bankruptcy. Sergei Milian brokered.
https://www.ft.com/content/ea52a678-9cfb-11e6-8324-be63473ce146
74.1: Also, Trump and Putin are both interested in being able to nuke third countries without fear of reprisal or sanction. As long as they agree that they're OK with with each other being able to do that, they can, and nobody can stop them.
Maybe now would be a good time for a Jacobin article about how drone strikes and nuclear first strikes are both neoliberalism and equally bad.
On the OP:
Actually, Amazon is looking pretty good. Best of the lot. Unfortunately, there's only one guy with any clout there, Jeff Bezos. Bezos is a great businessman, but he's now the Washington Post and therefore out of favor with the regime. Maybe that's the right moral place for a business leader of his world changing caliber now
I don't pretend to grok Sterling's angle -- I'm not going to delve into his State of the World series -- but these sentiments suggest he has little idea what's going on at Amazon (dot com, the ecommerce website, leaving aside Amazon Web Services, its internet of things, its production of films and series, and so on).
togolosh gets it right in 5.
Amazon has, in the last couple of years, made it incredibly easy for Chinese importers of counterfeit goods to infest the site. As well as sellers who never intend to send you anything. These sellers are not infrequently selected for what's called the Buy Box -- that yellow box on the right of the screen allowing you to purchase with one click. Their prices are not remotely the lowest, their feedback may well be crappy; Amazon has promoted them nonetheless.
It also not only tolerates but encourages essentially fake sellers to proffer their non-existent goods (by, for example, advertising a new copy of a book they do not have, then having a much cheaper used ex-library copy shipped to you) -- so-called bookjackers, or dropshippers, or spiders. That business has been going on for years; and that article is quite outdated at this point, having been penned when the phenomenon first arose. Legitimate third party Amazon sellers have begun to leave.
Is this "world changing"? Is Amazon a remarkably successful business, and Bezos a great business man? I guess. But it doesn't look like a particularly sound moral place to be: Bezos is engaging in an increasingly transparent scam. Don't be fooled by Amazon's assurances that they're on top of all this. No, they're not.
But I acknowledge that Sterling is probably not talking about how cool Amazon is from this perspective.
But it doesn't look like a particularly sound moral place to be: Bezos is engaging in an increasingly transparent scam.
Maybe he and Trump can patch things up after all. Kindred spirits.
"This 'Trump Golden Shower' is nothing at all like the plumbing fixture I intended to purchase."
Maybe he and Trump can patch things up after all. Kindred spirits.
I don't know about the patching up, but yes, Amazon (dot com) is the work of a con man.
This is short and to the point. Accurate as well. http://www.ianwelsh.net/the-latest-dossier-on-trump/
This is a year-old take on Amazon--they had a non-trivial profit this year, although small relative to their size--but that chart.
87: Not really. There was a worrying bump in the 2016 data, but not to above where it was when Obama started. And I can't find if that figure was age-adjusted or not. (Also, those most at risk of death - the very, very young and the old - were pretty much all covered before Obamacare. Obamacare is pretty far removed from anything that should have an effect on the gross mortality rate.)
Amazon (dot com) is the work of a con man.
Let's not allow the website of a conman harm the reputation of a magnificent river.
A river named after women who fulfilled the highest purpose nature set for their sex: shooting arrows at Spaniards.
Apparently fucking fake news is good for lefties as well as righties.
3 seconds of Google led me to this. Without age adjustment, no significant change in mortality. After adjusting for the aging of the population, the mortality rate is still fucking half what it was in 1960 and decreased by a nearly constant 1% per year every fucking year since 1974.
With sufficient lag, the mortality rate has been constant.
and decreased by a nearly constant 1% per year every fucking year since 1974.
Well, sure, but isn't it convenient that you're ignoring the non-fucking years.
OT: Somebody wants to build a tube from here to Ohio.
(Warning: Autolaunch sound)
95: There already is a tube. That's how we can communicate here.
But Zanesville can hear us in this tube.
Didn't someone do the math on the proposed CA hyperloop and figure out they'd be crushing peoples brains with the g forces of getting up to speed?
But having the tube end in Ohio solves that problem. What do you need a brain for once you get to Columbus?
The brain on the train will get a sprain on the plain.
"87: Not really. There was a worrying bump in the 2016 data, but not to above where it was when Obama started. And I can't find if that figure was age-adjusted or not. (Also, those most at risk of death - the very, very young and the old - were pretty much all covered before Obamacare. Obamacare is pretty far removed from anything that should have an effect on the gross mortality rate.)"
The rising death rate in 2015 doesn't need to be due to healthcare to be worrisome.
There was an insane post-communist death streak in Russia due to suicide, despair and vodka.
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/09/02/dying-russians/
"By the mid-1990s, the average St. Petersburg man lived for seven fewer years than he did at the end of the Communist period; in Moscow, the dip was even greater, with death coming nearly eight years sooner."
If a man in the mid-90s in Moscow died eight years sooner, he'd have died under Communism.
It has to be sustained to be troublesome. It wasn't. It went back down the usual 1% in 2016 after increasing 1% in 2015.
It takes a whole lotta 1%s to drop 7 years from life expectancy.
Wait, is 102 the missing link in 50? Or part of it?
OK Google is by far the best all purpose consumer AI.
Case not proved. Each has strengths and weaknesses, and if Google is stronger overall, I don't think it's remotely "by far".
Google Assistant /= OK Google. I don't have an Assistant-capable device yet to verify, but the reviews I read said there was lots of OK Google functionality that wasn't (yet?) available via Assistant, and that it would fail questions that OK Google would answer correctly.
I guess I mean Google Now, not OK Google, which is just the activation phrase.
74: "here was a thread at Welch's where somebody mentioned that spy traitor x gave the Russians our supersecret submarine technology, and then somebody asked:"And then?"
...that was me, here.
That reminds me to check if "Dude, Where's My Car" is on Netflix.
108: Sincerely sorry
I took most of the Russia shit seriously, so haven't been pushing back much on the hacking or "dossier." I didn't care, but I believed, and still do, anything of Trump.
But this dethrone the king shit is getting some kind of sloppy crazy, and makes me revisit the exploding cigars to Castro story. Was that true?
Folks, the right is just better at this kind of stuff. The left fucking riots, storms Bastilles and Winter Palaces and levitates the Pentagon. We ain't smart, of course the bosses buyout the smart ones. We have numbers and determination and not give a shitness.
The left has one weapon: bodies.
Nothing to lose but your chains means Fuck yeah, I'll die, but I am goddamn gonna take a rich fuck with me when I go.
That's it. The whole story. Mean it.
And then we'll win.
Spartacus won for those values of "winning" that include having you executed corpse displayed beside a Roman road.
Shhhh
Most times you lose, but this is morale shit we're doing now.
Most times you lose, but this is morale shit we're doing now.
One of the things I've been remembering, post-election, is seeing the Atomic Comics -- a pair of activists who started doing stand-up comedy as a way to process their anger about Reagan -- and them leading the crowd in the chant, "The people ... United ... Will sometimes win and sometimes lose."
It's a good thing to hold onto.
Yo, I never fucked Spartacus
I never fucked Crassus
106: So do you mean what the Pixel has, or yet another service?
If you stare into a mirror, lit only by a candle, at midnight, and say "Vladimir Putin" three times, he comes out and puts an oil tycoon in jail and kills some reporters.
You want to keep your distance, because he may kill them with obscure radioisotopes.
Other than that, I'm not seeing a downside. Does this work repeatedly?
The reporters work for Jacobin and The Nation. Once they die the money to pay for their replacements gets mysteriously transferred to Breitbart.
I died for somebody's name but not mine.
How did you come to name your cross Smith?
By trolley.
||
Online dating prospect? Was just the first to suggest Fresh Salt.
|>
"Old enough to order a drink in a bar" seems like a step in the right direction.
126 Seriously? You're sure he's not a lurker?
No, but it still seems unlikely.
If he asks you if you want to sex Mutombo on the third date I suppose you'll have your answer.
It seems slightly more likely that he's a lurker than that he's a serial killer.
Unless he lists "Clown" as a hobby or profession.
