It's AI yeah. Look at all the tech on the table in the middle, it all just dissolves into sludge. Also, it's hard to articulate, but there's something about the way current image generation models generate transparent materials, such as that squat little water bottle in the foreground, that always jumps out to me. I suspect because it's primarily learned what drink container should look like from overlit advertisements.

The fifteen minute city concept is threatening to the right, so like with so many terms they are diluting their meaning to blunt their effect. They did this with "urban", they are doing it now with the term "woke", it's a linguistic sabotage.

I worked in retail for years right up through the pandemic, in grocery and drug stores, and it's really illuminating to experience that environment when you've already been inoculated against these taking points. Because there has been no increase in shoplifting.

Shoplifting has always been easy and commonplace, it happens every single day and it always has. The only thing that has changed is that people who work these jobs are being fed this narrative of a shoplifting crime wave, and have become more paranoid and hostile as a response.

In response to this cultural pressure, this propaganda effort to obscure and deflect awareness of drastically plunging buying power and general impoverishment, petty managers seeking a sense of control over perceived attacks on "their stores" (nonsense serf logic) are chaining everything to the floor. And this of course only worsens their declining sales, because why bother even trying to buy something in the store if you're doing to do so legitimately if you have to ask someone to get it for you? You might as well have it delivered tomorrow by Amazon!

Between this and the fusion power news earlier this year I am fully willing to believe that China is going to end energy scarcity in this century and leave the US in the stone age.

God almighty, I lived long enough for seasteads to come back in style. What ancient SA threads will we resurrect next?

Indeed, and the republican voting base is so all-in for him at this point I can't imagine them taking no for an answer at this late hour. The republican party simply cannot come up with an alternative candidate, everyone in the running is polling penny shavings compared to him. Even if there is some procedural technicality that the Democratic party can gesture to, it will ultimately come down to whether or not it's expedient to enforce those technicalities.

Which is to say, as always, the CIA decides who's president.

qbittorrent has been my preferred choice for the better part of 10 years, ever since it was forked off of μTorrent (do not use μTorrent, it's loaded with spyware). It's open source, compiles on any operating system, and has fine grained tools for controlling your connection, very good for making certain your traffic stays secure. Transmission is a good alternative, less fully featured but it has a simpler interface if that's important to you.

If I could teach every spineless American liberal one thing with the snap of my finger it is that STEALING IS EASY AND MORALLY CORRECT IN MANY SITUATIONS.

Suggests alarming lack of stability.

The Secret but for geopolitics.

Incorrect, everyone gets a 12 inch Thinkpad, product of the objectively superior PRC manufacturer Lenovo. It will come with a 500 page operation and service manual (multilingual) and require only one screwdriver.

It will never stop making my stomach churn to see the very real problem of antisemitism leveraged to provide rhetorical cover for a genocide.