In the meantime weasel programs are very effective, and a better, if less known metaphor.

Sadly the monkeys thought experiment is a much more well known example.

Irrelevant nerd thought, back in the early nineties, my game development company was Monkey Mindworks based on a joke our (one) programmer made about his method of typing gibberish into the editor and then clearing the parts that didn’t resemble C# code.

Really high Poe factor. I can’t tell if the cartoonist is posting this ironically or not.

I’ve heard enough people regard bicyclists as a menace (and feeling ashamed in the cases when I’m quiet about being a bicyclist) that this really is how we’re seen.

ETA the source explains a lot. Not knowing where it came from, though, seriously high Poe.

All the major ministries and megachurches have a youth pastor problem which comes with the territory of having a youth ministry (that councils teens on their life problems).

Public school teachers and public school guidance counselors have to go through years of training to talk about personal issues and even sometimes share emotional intimacy without it turning into romantic or physical intimacy. And yet we still have the occasional incident in schools where faculty is caught banging a student. (To compare, a 1990s statistic suggested about 33% of psychotherapists are banging one of their clients, but I can’t source the stat.)

Contrast youth pastors who are untrained volunteers from the parish. Furthermore, most ministries presume their members, being church-going neighbors, don’t need vetting for moral character. According to Redditors who grew up in Southern Baptist youth ministries, the new pastor was the freak of the week since it had turnover like Defense Against Dark Arts.

Furthermore, their fidelity as a counselor to teen church members is already compromised since they are tasked not just with counseling kids on life stuff, but also to take opportunities to steer them toward devotion to the ministry that is, to find ways to sell them more Jesus. So even some of the well-intended youth ministers are going to find it too tempting to transition from manipulation towards the interests of the church to manipulation to further their own romantic interests.

But then, those with experience may also recognize it is a safer place for child predators to find new marks, since the ministry will be motivated to silence the victim in order to protect the reputation (now falsely so) of the ministry and the church. This compares to sex scandals in large commercial companies, especially if the aggressor is a high-ranking officer of the company. It becomes too attractive to either pay off the victim or threaten them with blackballing.

NYT has been faking being a liberal rag though the late 20th century, but since the Trump era (2015 forward) it’s gone more and more mask-off.

While I’m here, a look up the Behind the Bastards two-parter on How The Liberal Media Helped Fascism Win which compares the German (often Jewish-owned) newspapers in the 1930s to US news agencies in the 21st century. Spoiler: The owners and editors of the news identify way more with ownership class than working-class Jews (or in the US, anyone who is marginalized who isn’t rich).

If Libity has to do with libation, then yes.

Jefferson was all about the trees of liberty and the blood of patriots and tyrants.

Curiously he also imagined that an ultimate weapon would outlaw war forever. He was half-right: We just have war with no-nukes rules. But we should appreciate that nukes are difficult to make and are too messy to be actually useful.

I suspect he didn’t imagine that guys going amuck (a trope since time immemorial) would be complicated by a surfeit of semi-automatic weapons. I imagine his solution would not be to limit civilian weapons but to look at the problems that drive guys to go amuck.

And also Jefferson, while he believed in abolitionism academically he did so not enough to free (or pay) his slaves, which means he didn’t have a solution for shit (literal poop) mixed into the meals sent down his dumb waiter.

And the problem with the amuck thing is it can still scale, hence billionaires might make AI-controlled swarming armies of killer robots to dominate the world, and then have a trusted lieutenant decide to use the same army to just burn it all down like Mad King Aerys Targaryen.

And no amount of gun control is going to stop billionaires from making doomsday weapons.

Thank you. Still plausible-ish and still good satire.

Two issues:

~ The problem persist despite the incident. Maybe this is the beginning of a sea change for healthcare in the US, but so far, it’s a single ring wave in the pond.

~ Europe is no stranger to problems being solved, including each other, via violence.

They protect their own from the working class.

But they very much are not friends to each other, and are glad to speed along succession if it suits their interests. You are right that deaths that look accidental or like natural causes

Still, you have a point that the bullet casings were labeled to make a statement. The question is if that was sincere, incidental or to throw off investigations. This guy seems to be well skilled.

The French Revolution and the English post-war (WWII) Cultural Revolution. Yes. Though there were two very important musical technologies. In Paris mid 19th century, the Pianoforte ( soft / loud ) allowed for a keyboardist to express velocity changes, allowing for more impassioned expression (hence the Romantic age), and then a similar thing happened in the mid-20th century, with the electric guitar, the output of which could be run through filters, essentially turning them into early synths.

Mix that with musicians learning and expanding on the blues and we have the Rock-&-Roll revolution of the 60s and 70s.

🤓

France was a revolution of a monarchy in a continent of monarchies, who in turn demanded they choose a king, and that was after they were tired of Robespierre’s culty shenanigans.

France refused because they didn’t want to be dictated to by the international community (who again were still feudal lords). Napoleon developed the Napoleonic Code, establishing bunches of civil rights and rule of law, before inventing the Levée en masse (popular conscription) and proceeding to make Europe his personal bitch^†

They tried a bit of the constitutional monarchy thing with the Bourbon restoration, but again Charles X went Heritage Foundation on the French and started rolling back rights eventually resulting in the July Revolution of 1830 (more guillotines, more piles of heads).

It wouldn’t be the last.

Note in Russia / USSR, the moment the Red Army won and Lenin started going Communist, Wilson pushed Europe to embargo the union, to never give it a chance. The Red Scare started at the beginning, and was entirely about its threat to King Capitalism. Of course, we’d see the true colors of Capitalism a couple decades later with the Great Depression, and Hoover was glad to let people live in cardboard boxes and piles of paint cans while dying of malnutrition surviving on flour paste. Compared to that, Lenin’s arrangement started looking really good, and FDR’s New Deal, a stopgap to give capitalism one more chance really pissed off the industrialists, who began their plot to propagandize the United States into a fascist pro-capitalism bulwark. That was a pivotal moment in the white Christian nationalism movement that is taking over in 2025.

But I’m pretty sure the far right is going to be happy enough to shoot first.

Going back to France again, it’s much like Nazi-occupied Paris, in which the German Wermacht soldiers were such Karens, and the garrison was so brutal that the French couldn’t help themselves but take action. It started with cutting phone lines, defacing propaganda and slashing tires, but eventually La Résistance organized into a formidable fighting force.

We know ICE is eager to crack heads, typically immigrants and their families, but in Trump’s first term they went after anyone who was Latin enough or simply brown enough. If local law enforcement behaves as the nationwide police unions have been pushing them to, we’re likely to see civil unrest rise up in many states, and then we’ll be one sympathetic dead victim away from riots and Molotov Cocktails.

/🤓

† These days, mostly thanks to WWII, the French are known as cheese-eating surrender monkeys, but historians like to keep in mind that everyone gets their turn in the barrel, and everyone gets their turn on top of the hill.

That would be super stingy.

The incident still appears to be a professional hit (as of this comment).

That means its much less likely to be about the wrath of countless UHC victims, and more likely a business associate or rival.

That said, we lowly proletariat are already dying, and will do so a lot more as Trump and the Heritage Foundation advance their agenda. The sooner we all get on board with resistance, the better.

That said, there are effective nonviolent means of revolution, but I suspect sooner or later some pretty woman will get killed horribly on camera, and the whole country will start exploding.

Before you prick your finger and commit to the contract, lemme remind you it took about a century for France to settle down into a republic and then still didn’t establish some basic rights until the 20th century.

And that century included an attempt to take over the world (by Emperor Napoleon), a bunch of ambitious dictators, the invention of the Piano, and consequently, romanticism and multiple instances in which the guillotines had to be pulled out and heads piled high because the ownership class refused to play nice.

Okay, you’re slightly better informed. Do do some research.

Sign away.

Professor Larry Lessig has outlined at length how elections are corrupt, and we’ve watched the courts get so corrupt, well that Citizens United, Loper Bright and Trump v. US 2024 were able to be ruled without intervention from a psychiatric ward.

The thing is, courts are an alternative to settling civil and social disputes with violence. And elections allow for the peaceful transfer of power (e.g. without violence).

So if both the courts and elections are subverted (they are) violence becomes the default way by which regimes are ousted and laws are changed.

The reason we tried to set up democracy in the first place was all the Game of Thrones shit. It seems the ownership class never got the memo how bad it gets.

I don’t believe in justice.

I believe in consequences.

We either create a society that favors positive outcomes or we don’t.

When we don’t we end up with too many negative outcomes, which feed into more negative outcomes like a vicious cycle and then everyone has a bad day.

Too many grudges yields a high rate of terrorism, which in the US looks like rampage killers with assault rifles. Also a shitload more of suicides; we’re really not that confrontational as a society.

So far, this still looks like a pro hit. The suspect is still at large, where novices quickly get located. And they knew their way around their weapon, clearing a jam neatly mid-encounter.

It could be revenge for denied coverage, but it smacks of something more personal, a rival or enemy or someone who wanted him dead not for revenge, but out of the way, say a power grab.

It’s a guess based on too little data, but it smacks more like Göring deciding to eliminate Röhm.

However, Charles Dickens is still right. If you forgo humanity in persuit of wealth, the public will cheer your demise, whether it is by gunman or crush depth pressures undersea. Today’s revelatiob is less that a rich guy died, but that the public is delighted by the news of the incident, and has little shame about it.

Yes, the pundits are saying DISCLAIMER: Shooting is bad. Murder is bad before they talk about how the healthcare service executive really had it coming.

And that’s coming from the liberals, not us radical left pinko-commies who have Bolshevik choruses back us up when we talk.

I’m far left and get it, but I also understand the controversy. In Das Kapital Marx explains how the ownership class will always push for more gains until the working class struggles to survive and the economy collapses as a whole.

On the other hand, the problem isn’t simply that industrialist greed is inevitable (though history bears this out so far) but we haven’t developed a model that successfully mitigates this problem. This isn’t to say it doesn’t exist, only that it doesn’t exist today, kind like superluminal space travel.

There are capitalists who believe it’s possible to create a well-regulated capitalist system that is resistant to corruption and the influence of money on government, but they have been in the minority since the 1980s, and since then market manipulation shenanigans like private equity have only increased. So even if it is possible, and industrialists should be motivated to preserve a status quo that allows them to stay rich and in power, we just don’t even try.

Rant: (One of the things I find fascinating is how the game industry still sees crunching as acceptable, even though retroactive studies have showed crunching consistently reduces productivity. Similarly, micromanagement of online workers and telecommuters – to prevent them from web-surfing or checking email or chatting with loved ones – costs way more than the productivity lost and workers allowed to do these things even excessively show higher mean productivity rates. And yet over-surveillance and micromanagement of online workers and telecommuters remains the common norm. This demonstrates that the management structures that are commonly used within our capitalist model don’t do what they’re supposed to do, which is maximize profits and shareholder dividends, and yet the giant crackdown we’d expect to happen for doing abuse for abuse’s sake… isn’t. It’s all just a charade to preserve a stratified social structure.)

Oh the Tories want US style healthcare so bad, the way they’re cutting into NHS.

I can’t speak for Australia, but from the corruption bullshit I hear coming from their whatever socialized medicine they have right now is at risk of dissolving.

Hopefully, the EU knows better than to go the same route.

You and several nations full of people, friend.