mm_maybe

The other way to navigate it is if you get into the storyline of the Gizzverse, the fictional universe that is referenced throughout their songs, but not in chronological order. Trying to piece it together has encouraged me to branch out and listen to albums I otherwise might have ignored.

To each their own. That's part of what makes KGLW so fascinating. They're a band that two people with very different musical tastes can both love equally!

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. About to release their 27th album and have covered pretty much every genre so no matter what you like, there's probably a record for you. My favorite is the Flying Yellow Microtonal Banana, full of great tracks, but Billabong Valley has broad appeal.

That's interesting; I had a conversation once with a friend whose SO was addicted to porn about how she would feel if she discovered that he had AI deepfakes of her. She was very clear that she would see it as a huge relief and a compliment, even; obviously a large part of the hurt she was feeling had to do with the betrayal of having her SO lusting after other women. Otherwise, I don't see how the question is any different for AI porn than other porn; the unique thing about AI is that it's possible to make porn about one's spouse.

This caused me to delete Google Maps, but their removal of Black History month from Google Calendar is what's making me contemplate migrating everything else away from them...

I am partial to the rest of what you said but Census data were already publicly available and actually what they did was make it less accessible to data scientists and researchers like me working on the normal kind of regional planning stuff.

Seriously, why the fuck is he still CEO of that company? He's actively undermining them in every way on a global scale. Tesla shareholders are idiots...

I'd say that violent incursion into blue states with the help of federal forces and local brownshirt provocateurs is almost a goal of Project 2025 and MAGA more broadly so I wouldn't count on it not happening wherever you are. We've seen plenty of that kind of thing on the West Coast particularly. Local police unfortunately have a large membership overlap with said brownshirts.

There is also the issue of massive-scale gerrymandering, party politics preventing candidates we want from being given a chance to run in general elections, the electoral college, and widespread voter suppression and disenfranchisement as well-documented by Greg Palast and others. If they actually counted our votes we might get a more representative democracy, but what we have now is not that.

What about canceling a specific day of work every week? That would spread out the pain on both sides, but in a way that makes it less painful for workers because some may have sick days they can use. If literally nobody shows up on every Friday it sucks pretty bad for the bosses, even if they show up all the other days.

The problem with this is that Trump acting on his own, or in pure MAGA mode, is even worse than him acting under Musk's influence. I mean I absolutely hate Musk and the bad name he's given EV's, but his influence on Trump is literally my only glimmer of hope that the American vehicle fleet will electrify enough--and quickly enough--to stave off the very worst version of climate catastrophe. Sadly Musk either doesn't seem to give a shit about his own company, or is too busy making the cynical play that in a subsidy-free market Tesla wins due to sheer scale, as long as tariffs keep out cheap import EVs... it wouldn't be the first time he had screwed the EV market at large in order to be the top dog in a smaller luxury niche.

But again, with immigration, Musk and Vivek are the only dissenting voices in a sea of xenophobia, even though, again, I hate the cynical anti-labor motivations behind their advocacy for H1B visas. Still, the alternative is Stephen Miller and full-on white supremacy with no exceptions for smart hard-working brown people.

It absolutely sucks that our glimmer of hope is that the billionaires who used to sound more liberal will feel some weird compulsion to act consistent with their past statements, and it's a very slim chance that this will happen anyways. But given the state of affairs, it's what we've got.