Absolutely amazing.

My guess is that at this point there are so many user prompts its received so far in its training set that bring up both Copilot and privacy concerns that it first interpreted the question, then searched for the most common topic associated with itself (privacy), then spit out a hardcoded MSFT override response for 'inquiry' + 'privacy'.

Firstly: wow, an actual unpopular opinion!

Secondly: I will go so far as to say absolutely tooooons of people wear earrings that I personally find extremely silly, unfashionable, or outright gross.

Sorry ear plug people. They look goofy when theyre in and they look horrifying when theyre out.

Probably this opinion of mine comes from knowing a person who managed to get their ... ear loop? caught on something and tear apart.

Also: I think its child abuse to force a 3 to 9 year old to get their ears pierced.

I used to date a person who worked at a Claire's... and they would tell me that they would often, as in multiple times a week, have a family of recent immigrants from... India? Bangladesh? ... come into the store, and they would have to physically restrain a screaming obviously unwilling child to get their ears pierced.

Anyway: I think it is too far to agree that earrings in general are just bad all the time, but there are lots of cases where theyre done poorly.

What this tells you is that a man who spent a huge chunk of his life working for corporate cannibalization companies thinks that Trump would be so bad for the economy that even predatory corporations would suffer.

Its not like Romney ever had any actual policy positions based on anything other than political expedience.

'Course Republicans these days dont even seem to be pretending they have any coherent policy positions beyond 'we hate immigrants' and 'women dont deserve basic human rights'.

Bleck.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, a bunch of Anglo American economic advisers recommended economic shock therapy of basically removing still existing subsidies for lots of basic consumer goods, apartment rent, etc.

The effect this actually had was to basically completely collapse the economy even further to the point that it was pretty common for a worker to be paid not in money, but in what a factory produced, and theyd have to go barter it for other things.

It was also common during this period for people to have to attempt to barter say their TV or a tool for food.

What emerged from this is basically a naked oligarchic kleptocracy.

While the official mechanisms of government existed... people barely had any faith in them as the new democratic government had essentially immediately collapsed the economy and led to coups and coup attempts.

Putin stepped into this basically with the idea that over time general faith in the government could be restored with real economic gains and a strong sense of nationalism, focused around him.

Initially his strategies and tactics, while brutal, did deliver real tangible progress, as Putin is exceptionally adept at basically negotiating with the other oligarchs. Corruption was and still is the norm.

Overtime... yeah, basically now the entirety of Putin's tactics and worldview and how the propoganda he uses domestically meets most if not all of Umberto Eco's tenets of fascism.

One can have a fascist leader in charge or involved in many different forms of formal government, as fascism is closer to the ideology of a movement than it is to a form of government.

But now, is it a dictatorship?

Well, basically, officially, no, unofficially, yes, but with the caveat that basically the whole thing could fall apart if various oligarchs are not sufficiently placated, or if someone can basically emerge as a more competent strong man... or if the entire economy/society collapses.

Putin has proved extremely adept at keeping himself in power for the last 20 ish years, extending executive term limits, and basically for a period of time sitting back and letting Mebvedev be President for a term while Putin essentially semi-temporarily-retired to merely being the Prime Minister, then resumed as President.

tl;dr: Basically yes Putin is a fascist dictator, though there are some interesting differences with other fascist dictators.

Also please note that Trump is also a fascist, also by Umberto Eco's tenants of fascism, and has outright stated he wants to be a dictator 'if only for a day'. Yeah thats how that works, just one day as a dictator.

Ultimately this is why the MAGA crowd is so pro Russia and Putin. Both their leaders and movements are fascist.

Yep, been saying this for years now, the vicious and irrational hatred against work from home employees is driven by two main factors:

1. At a systemic level, despite work from home being obviously less costly in the long run than maintaining an office space, if work from home were allowed to proliferate it basically pop the commercial real estate bubble and then basically every corrupt mayor and idiots in upper management would be shown to be corrupt idiots.

2. At a more personal level, upper and middle management people essentially get their kicks from seeing busy little worker bees near them, and they would personally have existential crisis when they realize that 90% of what they do is negging and then ommitting or misrepresenting that in actual meetings. Actual meetings which can easily take place in zoom, or often replaced with just an email.

These are some good quotes here, and I realize this is slightly off topic but:

The whole thing with Aloy having peach fuzz.

I just... I still cannot get over that.

How... how is it even possible that a great number of people who ostensibly clamored for more realistic graphics... screamed and cried about peach fuzz on a young woman.

The... seemingly the only possible explanation is that they had simply never actually seen a girl or womans face up close.

It still just shocks me that that outburst was even a thing that could possibly happen.

Like, I am an autistic and often socially awkward guy, a video gamer through and through since the 90s.

But I've had female platonic friends my whole life, and girlfriends.

And I know that girls/women, -shock horror- even many young guys and young men have peach fuzz!

Fucking baffles me still to this day.

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ALRIGHT YOUTUBERS its time for CPR step 1:

Don't waste any time in ensuring the victim's airway is not obstructed...

Its the majority of the Republican Party.

This is from CPAC 2022, the largest PAC for just generally promoting Republicans, had a bunch of prominent and popular Republican speakers as well as less well known and more insane ones.

Its basically 'Oh my god, he admit it.'

They all kept joking about being Nazis, then got offended when people got offended by that, then doubled down to the point that most of them just became indistinguishable from Nazis, but have propagandized themselves so well that they think anything that is not them is Nazis.

You can try and talk with some of the more moderate ones and they will not explicitly support 100% exactly fascist policies all the time in their little dream world of 'my perfect candidate', but they'll almost always vote for a fascist over anything else.

Please stop making me look into his dead corporate demon eyes...

And thus social media has reached its apex.

After a decade plus of bombarding people with a mix of whatever they desire most and whatever causes them to become emotionally invested to the point of exhaustion, we see the pinnacle innovation of social media:

A literally completely fake person selling overpriced fashion I guarantee was made in a sweatshop, that nearly no one viewing 'her' can afford or look good in, who receives many thirsty comments praising her as if 'she' will be their friend or something, who in the process of doing all this also puts out of business actual human models who are simply fake in every sense of the word that is not literal.

It is basically the most perfectly capitalist thing I can imagine. Everyone loses except the capital owners.

I mean sure, maybe it will get some people whose entire personality is "I am pretty, worship me!" to think about doing something actually useful or learning and developing a real personality.

But... we are fairly far into the predicted cyberpunk dystopia now. No its not exactly as predicted, but shockingly close in many ways.

The average consumer of content cannot tell a bot or a fake person such as Aitana here from a real one, and there will just be another after news of Aitana in particular gets around.

At this point I would say that most humans have basically failed a reverse Turing Test.

Pretty misleading title.

It is known why the rivers are running orange. It is because the permafrost is thawing.

Sure, the exact, specific process causing the oxidation is being debated by scientists, but ... the reason is because the permafrost is thawing.

Anyway, what this nearly certainly means is that the artic has already blown past the feared warming tipping point and is now releasing methane, which is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

This article should be focusing on how this likely indicates that climate change will intensify faster than commonly understood by the general public.

But instead it diverts from this.

If a mad-cow-like disease jumped the barrier to humans and began spreading through Americans, the main problem in eradicating it would be that basically no one would be able to tell the difference from the average 'Enthusiastic' Republican Voter and someone whose brain is melting due to an actual pathogen.