UnderpantsWeevil @ UnderpantsWeevil @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

If the AI cannot run the business then we must conclude that the business does not produce anything of real value.

Nothing to do but downsize and move on.

Microsoft is in the process of downsizing to the tune of 3% of its global workforce and rising.

Could be they really are unironically cruising towards a CEO overseeing a bunch of spam bot email accounts they're treating as headcount.

I gotta say, given the state of Tennessee at the moment, I would not want my statue anywhere near the other icons they're raising.

Easy to forget that Italy was with the Allies group in WW1. But also that WW1 ended with private sector creditors knocking at the door of winners and losers alike. The old aristocracy had leveraged itself to the hilt in order to finance a pointless, needless, catastrophic war between regional powers. And now the new aristocracy of capital was trying to strip the copper out of the walls of the proles in order to pay back what was owed.

This lead to a groundswell of socialist organization and radicalism in the wake of the Great War. One which threatened aristocrats old and new. The only response Italians (and Germans... and Brits and Americans to boot) could conceive of was a fascist heel-stomp on the necks of the rising organizations of labor.

TRAITORS OF THE WORLD!

Hardly traitors. Fascism was pioneered to preserve the aristocracy and the capitalists alike, by turning worker against worker along ethnic and national lines.

It was the socialists who were the traitors. They sought to end the old world and bring about a new one. And they nearly did it.

I start wondering if it’s safe to imagine that maybe things could get better

It's always safe to imagine. Imagining is the first step to a better place to live. But the dream can't live in your head forever. At some point, you need to take action.

I have no faith that working within the electoral system will fix that.

Mobilizing a large group of activists around a set of tangible and popular goals is its own reward, whether or not the electoral system is accommodating to the politician's success.

RCV undermines the necessity for a partisan vote. That's why Cuomo - the party establishment pick - lost by 8 points to a local outsider with better politics and a cleaner reputation.

But I agree, at some point, you do need to support someone. And if that someone is part of a large political organization (aka a party) they can bring a lot of financial and labor resources to bare when organizing and implementing political reforms. In the case of New York City, which is functionally a one party municipality (Dems regularly swamp the GOP 2:1), Zohran's entrance to the statewide political scene is a huge break from the traditional partisan politics that gave us Eric Adams and threatened to give us four more years of a corrupt, real estate entwined sex pest.

The fact that he's got a large, active, well-financed DSA behind him - in a way that transformed a coronation into a competitive primary - is a huge point in his favor.

We're a ways off from that, simply because VPNs have too much business utility.

But we're definitely moving in the direction of "Everyone who uses the internet has to show their ID first" as a means of tracking the bulk of retail web surfing.

Damn, you're right. I wouldn't want to vacation anywhere that has a long history of atrocious civil rights abuses.

Books tickets to Florida

mankind does not have the ability to build roads across our state

Only pipelines

Nothing however breaks because of AI

The trajectory is the same, but AI put more gas in the tank in a machine that one might have assumed had reached its limits a decade ago when outsourcing had played itself out.

What NYT and other legacy media is mostly worried about is that with AI psyops and fake news is becoming more and more democratized instead of an expensive top-down ordeal and for making harder for anybody to trust anything anymore, a trust that they relied on to control the narrative.

I think you've got it a bit backwards. The NYT operates as a paper of record in large part because it emits a signal that echoes through downstream media. And that stems from the general trust the paper has cultivated (undeserved trust, but welcome to the dictatorship of the bourgeois, folks).

The implementation of AI as a system of record is replacing the NYT as a trustworthy source, in part because the NYT has finally degraded its own credibility. And in part because why would I go fight with a bunch of paywalls and pop-ups and ad banners on the NYT when I can (seemingly) get the same information from a nice clean OpenAI / Gemini / Deepseek prompt.

The expense of setting up a system of record is still enormous. The catch is that the AI companies have more money to propagandize their own reputation. Meanwhile, the NYT and the WaPo and the cable news channels have been suffocating in comparative obscurity when they weren't outright touting AI venues as alternatives to themselves.

News isn't being democratized. Its as horded as ever. These older outlets have simply become vectors to send people to the new and far more efficient Consent Manufacturing Machines.

BBEG: Rogue Paladin Player's Little Brother's Character

Paladin Player:

Alaska: "We have the biggest state!"

Texas: "How long does it take to drive across?"

Alaska: "We wouldn't know, we've never left Anchorage."

Of course it isn't fun when you go into it with the mindset that the story will be that.

I don't think its mindset so much as experience. If you've never watched an MCU feature before, I suppose it could still be a lot of fun. But they've been making these shows since 2008, at least? If you've seen them, you've seen them.

reviews should actually review a show/movie

Sure. And if you've made your brand on the "I hate everything with non-white men in it" the first thing out of your mouth is going to be "That's not a white man on screen so it sucks!"

But if you've spent nearly twenty years watching the Superhero franchise eat its own tail, what is left to review? This feels like asking someone to give a cinematic review of the latest Pokemon episode. "Guys, it looks like they're trying to catch another rare one and... omg its Team Rocket again, I wonder if they'll get foiled this time, too".

The studios have failed in providing such more broad and general feedback channels.

The studios think they have a formula that prints money. And the formula is so deeply engrained, so dogmatized, that there's no room left for more than a change to the window dressing. The fact that they did take 18 years to get to "Maybe someone else can play Iron Man?" is illustrative of the trench they buried themselves in.

Even in the best case s scenario - bakeries compete making uniform quality products without involving political shenanigans - the price of bread is independent of the cost of production.

What you're looking for as a business is the "clearing price", which is the price at which your (sales * price) generates the maximum revenue.

New capital that lowers per unit cost does not change the price. It raises profit margins. Only when multiple vendors in competition have access to this capital does the clearing price fall.

Not if you're using duplicate item cheats

I think its worth noting that currency forgery is a business that operates on scale. Forging one $100 note is an enormous amount of work for not much payoff. The goal is to forge 1000s+ of $100 notes.

But at that point, you run in the question "Where do you spend it?" Unless your forgeries are exceptional, you can't just drop them off at the bank, precisely because banks will become suspicious if you show up with a duffle bag of 50 year old notes.

Fortunately, we have a number of methods for laundering currency - either by spending it where people don't look to hard or by mixing it with more modern notes so the 1000 notes you just printed don't stand out in a pile of 100,000s of such notes. Strip clubs, casinos (this was the original plot of Rush Hour), liquor stores, and other cash-heavy businesses do a great job of co-mingling fake and real notes. Black market trafficking is also a popular venue for disposing of dirty cash, as drug runners and smugglers are notoriously unsophisticated in detecting forgeries.

So, old bills can and do work as counterfeits in the right venues. And eventually, you'll see them vacuumed up and disposed of at the Federal Reserve right alongside the legit older currency. It's just a lot more work to do correctly.

apparently you don’t even realize that this isn’t a movie. It’s a show.

It doesn't matter. It's the same story they've been telling for the last twenty years. It's tired and played out. "What if Iron Man was a woman over 8 episodes instead of three movies" isn't fun anymore.

Nowadays these reviews or ratings are being used by the monoculture people to say “at the moment our monoculture likes x and hates y”.

Sure. Because they think the solution to a played out franchise is to make it darker and edger, having learned exactly nothing from the collapse of the DCU.

Deadpool & Wolverine was #2 at the Box Office for 2024.

Something of an exception that proved the rule, as the whole Deadpool formula is to parody and mock the main franchise.

Captain America: Brave New World underperformed Ant Man & Wasp Girl (itself a disappointment) despite enjoying significantly more promotion. The Disney+ MCU shows are all getting cancelled regardless of popularity, because the budgets are so high, including Agatha (which was mid in no small part because it was trapped in the Marvel formula).

Marvel films were also in the top 10 in 2023 and 2024.

Thanks to the enormous extensive promotion, they've managed to juice their rankings next to other lower budget films. But promotion costs money and if you're not scraping $1B on your main line film every year, it's hard to justify $100M+ telling people to go watch the film plus another $200-500M to make the damned things.

When you can release a movie like Terrifier 3 and rake in 45x what you spent for it, or a more traditional Disney film (Moana 2) for a scant $100M and take in 10x, you have to question the Marvel math.