I read four words then was hit with this.

You’ve just hit the article limit with your free Sifted account.

Ok, ok. If you insist. I won’t read your article.

I met Bill in Boston on a trip to the Science museum in the 90’s. Perhaps we were annoying kids but I will never forget how much of a dickhead he was to everyone in my group including the teacher.

It’s not that hard to be nice to actual fans. We were all excited to get to meet him. Even the teacher agreed that Bill was at best unfriendly.

Fuck you, Bill Nye.

Homomorphic encryption (zero knowledge cryptography) is a known solution to this problem.

https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/96232/zkp-prove-that-18-while-hiding-age

No new movies and TV shows are being made. I’m a 43 year old industry veteran, forced to look for a new career.

Anecdotally, I used to make $120k/year for the past 10 years like clockwork. The past two years, though: I made $18,00 and $22,000.

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2024-07-11/production-activity-report-hollywood

This article says 40% but that’s in LA. In other places, production is down 90%.

Wedge issues.

Equal rights for

everyone

regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation and ethnicity are something that we, as a society, actually solved decades ago that aren’t even a question. They were brought back into public discourse by corrupt people that seek to keep us distracted while they rob us all blind. The two party system in the US (and any nation that uses a FPTP voting system that limits us to a MAXIMUM of two viable parties) is a HUGE reason why they still exist.

The reason we still argue endlessly about these solved issues is that the two parties are so similar in their other policies that they have decided to highlight those issues (as if there’s even a debate about them) because the two parties align in lockstep behind the other issues. The super wealthy people at the top don’t want us talking about things that will cause ALL of us to stand up and demand improvements to our material conditions so they have their demagogues loudly trumpet the absolutely miniscule differences between them and the conservative parties to whip their voters into a frenzy in support of voting against their best interest.

Then, I have to fight with unwitting dupes in the comment section that have fallen victim to the marketing gimmick that the black female version of Reagan is “fighting for good” despite her being politically aligned with Reagan on virtually every issue other than identity politics.

I’m calling the DNC technique of wrapping Reaganomics in a friendly identity politics outer shell “woke-washing” because of how similar it is to “green-washing”.

Chomsky proved this conclusively.

I agree with this assessment for the most part but one side of me plays devil’s advocate on this:

I sort of came to realize in the end that it was possibly purchased to push all leftists off the platform, allowing Musk to compete with Google and Facebook in heavily manipulating and censoring discourse in American society (and let’s be clear, they did. Just because it was an attempt to help “the good guys in the DNC” by Google and Facebook doesn’t make it not an open and shut case of treasonous manipulation of discourse.

As an absolutely prolific Twitter user pre-2016, I was very quick to leave….but at the same time, I eventually came to the sad conclusion that Xitter (pronounced Shitter) actually does need leftist voices as long as it exists. IMO, it (and Google and Facebook) should be dissolved, open sourced, decentralized, and socialized for the crime of treason/undermining democracy.

We (people of the fediverse with a strong sense of integrity) basically fled to our own decentralized, open source platform where we have 1 millionth of the reach with our voices. Being around such a cesspool where astroturfers working for Progressive think tanks and their conservative buddies would gaslight me about the popularity of things like Single Payer or student loan reform…which was not great for my well-being…But let’s not pretend that leftists that remain on the platform are bad people for doing so. An echo chamber has a way of brainwashing people. So, conservatism would be even stronger had more of our brethren not stayed.

Just a small counterpoint. I strongly dislike conservatism and the conservative ethos of “fuck you, got mine”…but perhaps they were playing 4D chess with us a bit.

In similar news, Enron says that people should stop being ambulance chasers by calling them out for corruption, fraud, and illegal activities.

ClownStrike had a massive, glaring issue with their main functionality that is THEIR COMPANY’S ONLY REASON FOR EXISTING that has been correctly attributed to criminally inept architecture decisions, no redundancy, no checks, no safety measures, and no accountability.

If I made the executive decision to design a system without any safety measures that could potentially push unchecked, malicious code to 90% of the computers that the business world runs on, I would be sued into dust. Honestly, if there were any justice in the world, the people at CrowdStrike that designed such a shite system should do actual prison time for their ineptitude.

It all goes back to money in politics. First-past-the-post and Citizens United absolutely fucked us. FPTP gave us a MAXIMUM of two parties (both are “private” organizations that literally have non-democratic bylaws for their primaries) and Citizens United made massive political bribes into a legal form of free speech.

Edit: I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the excellent and nuanced comment below that corrects my hypothesis and details the concerted effort by capitalists and the World Bank since World War II to violently quash any and all leftist/socialist movements that they deemed a threat around the world.

The cavernous power vacuum on the left caused by unchecked capitalism/corporatism (corporate personhood) caused all of the fiscal conservatives in the GOP to leave the circus and take over the DNC (look into the “Democratic Leadership Council” headed up by the Clintons and their right wing buddies). Now, we’re stuck with an extreme right wing vs. a bunch of old school Bob Dole right wingers like Chuck Schumer. As a leftist, it hurts so much to see the Overton window shift unnaturally toward fascism. We have “spirited” debate about things that wouldn’t even be a question in a society (equal rights for all people…like what the fuck. There’s only one answer that even remotely makes sense to non-sociopaths) that isn’t sick to the core with corruption. It hurts to be spat on and shamed by people that should be my allies (or in a different political party altogether) because I have the intellectual honesty to call out the DNC for their blatant corporatism. I always say: Obviously Trump is shit. It’s the power vacuum on the left that caused this shift toward radical right wing ideas becoming mainstream.

Here’s a favorite graphic to show how badly FPTP polarizes the US government:

I use NixOS btw.

Wait. Capitalism isn’t silicon serfdom?

This one is a future Streisand Effect hopefully.

The criminals in New South Wales that had this YouTube journalist’s house firebombed:

https://youtu.be/PF1-1CNggQA

https://youtu.be/E46DmpLq4XI