#boarding ramp

[sw5w]

Senatorial Decoy

STAR WARS EPISODE II: Attack of the Clones 00:03:19

[abrahamvanhelsings]

going fucking insane why is everyone i talk to 100% on board with the rapidly increasing militarization of our society. 'yes but russia! we need to protect ukraine and europe' listen i understand the sentiment. but has any situation in this world ever been resolved by an arms race. no. in fact things have always gotten worse. meanwhile you're advocating for the further establishment of the state's monopoly on violence and the expansion of military activity in every single aspect of our society, physically as well as ideologically. get well soon i guess.

[lost-technology]

I don't know when I'm going to have the energy to do my Trigun fanwork, so just a heads up if I am a bit pokey-slow on it. I... happen to also be in the American Politics fandom and it's a pretty horrible fandom right now. (This because I happen to live here, cannot afford to escape / have no way otherwise of escaping). We've just hit despair-levels surpassing the Couch Scene. *Sigh.*

[what-grace-has-forgiveness]

Hey United quick question but what the fuck does this mean?

[dravidious]

You're more amazing than a 1/1000 chance

Blue commons, and another rare I had an idea for

Blue and black together cover all 4 modification themes in the set, so a card that rewards you for using all the different themes is obvious! Unfortunately, treating +1/+1 counters and keyword counters as different kinds of modifications would be confusing, difficult to word, and wouldn't even match the usual reminder text for modified, so you don't technically need to use all 4 themes. But still, this is some great untapped design space, perfect for rare!

[fridayiminlcve]

ONE OF MY EX CLASSMATES LITERALLY TOOK A FOUR DAY LONG TRIP TO USA FOR THE SOLE PURPOSE OF SEEING TAYLOR YESTERDAY NIGHT IM GOING TO KILL SOMEONE

[cappurrccino]

the fear and dread that lurks within me right now, because i accidentally used my last large dreamstone, do not immediately have the 1,500 shells needed to change a small one to a large one, and have a pretty rare t-rex on my wishlist that probably won't spawn in the couple days it'll take me to get that dreamstone but sure might

[sw5w]

Maul Flips Over Qui-Gon

STAR WARS EPISODE I: The Phantom Menace 01:17:21

[alittlegreekreader]

obviously i should have finished the research ethics module which has to be finished for me to pass year one before Now considering the new year starts in like 3 weeks. but perhaps if my uni really wanted me to finish the research ethics module they should've considered making it less boring.

[byjove]

“If you CHOOSE to stay in one of those evacuation areas-” we need to have public transportation running out of evacuation zones and free public storm shelters before you can say bullshit like that. we need to have free wheelchair ramp instillation on homes. we need to have free out of state pet boarding facilities. we need public infrastructure for the people in flood zones since these hurricanes are only getting worse and they are not going to stop.

[stopfunkinwmyheart]

[phantomrose96]

If anyone wants to know why every tech company in the world right now is clamoring for AI like drowned rats scrabbling to board a ship, I decided to make a post to explain what's happening.

(Disclaimer to start: I'm a software engineer who's been employed full time since 2018. I am not a historian nor an overconfident Youtube essayist, so this post is my working knowledge of what I see around me and the logical bridges between pieces.)

Okay anyway. The explanation starts further back than what's going on now. I'm gonna start with the year 2000. The Dot Com Bubble just spectacularly burst. The model of "we get the users first, we learn how to profit off them later" went out in a no-money-having bang (remember this, it will be relevant later). A lot of money was lost. A lot of people ended up out of a job. A lot of startup companies went under. Investors left with a sour taste in their mouth and, in general, investment in the internet stayed pretty cooled for that decade. This was, in my opinion, very good for the internet as it was an era not suffocating under the grip of mega-corporation oligarchs and was, instead, filled with Club Penguin and I Can Haz Cheezburger websites.

Then around the 2010-2012 years, a few things happened. Interest rates got low, and then lower. Facebook got huge. The iPhone took off. And suddenly there was a huge new potential market of internet users and phone-havers, and the cheap money was available to start backing new tech startup companies trying to hop on this opportunity. Companies like Uber, Netflix, and Amazon either started in this time, or hit their ramp-up in these years by shifting focus to the internet and apps.

Now, every start-up tech company dreaming of being the next big thing has one thing in common: they need to start off by getting themselves massively in debt. Because before you can turn a profit you need to first spend money on employees and spend money on equipment and spend money on data centers and spend money on advertising and spend money on scale and and and

But also, everyone wants to be on the ship for The Next Big Thing that takes off to the moon.

So there is a mutual interest between new tech companies, and venture capitalists who are willing to invest $$$ into said new tech companies. Because if the venture capitalists can identify a prize pig and get in early, that money could come back to them 100-fold or 1,000-fold. In fact it hardly matters if they invest in 10 or 20 total bust projects along the way to find that unicorn.

But also, becoming profitable takes time. And that might mean being in debt for a long long time before that rocket ship takes off to make everyone onboard a gazzilionaire.

But luckily, for tech startup bros and venture capitalists, being in debt in the 2010's was cheap, and it only got cheaper between 2010 and 2020. If people could secure loans for ~3% or 4% annual interest, well then a $100,000 loan only really costs $3,000 of interest a year to keep afloat. And if inflation is higher than that or at least similar, you're still beating the system.

So from 2010 through early 2022, times were good for tech companies. Startups could take off with massive growth, showing massive potential for something, and venture capitalists would throw infinite money at them in the hopes of pegging just one winner who will take off. And supporting the struggling investments or the long-haulers remained pretty cheap to keep funding.

You hear constantly about "Such and such app has 10-bazillion users gained over the last 10 years and has never once been profitable", yet the thing keeps chugging along because the investors backing it aren't stressed about the immediate future, and are still banking on that "eventually" when it learns how to really monetize its users and turn that profit.

The pandemic in 2020 took a magnifying-glass-in-the-sun effect to this, as EVERYTHING was forcibly turned online which pumped a ton of money and workers into tech investment. Simultaneously, money got really REALLY cheap, bottoming out with historic lows for interest rates.

Then the tide changed with the massive inflation that struck late 2021. Because this all-gas no-brakes state of things was also contributing to off-the-rails inflation (along with your standard-fare greedflation and price gouging, given the extremely convenient excuses of pandemic hardships and supply chain issues). The federal reserve whipped out interest rate hikes to try to curb this huge inflation, which is like a fire extinguisher dousing and suffocating your really-cool, actively-on-fire party where everyone else is burning but you're in the pool. And then they did this more, and then more. And the financial climate followed suit. And suddenly money was not cheap anymore, and new loans became expensive, because loans that used to compound at 2% a year are now compounding at 7 or 8% which, in the language of compounding, is a HUGE difference. A $100,000 loan at a 2% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, accrues to $121,899. A $100,000 loan at an 8% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, more than doubles to $215,892.

Now it is scary and risky to throw money at "could eventually be profitable" tech companies. Now investors are watching companies burn through their current funding and, when the companies come back asking for more, investors are tightening their coin purses instead. The bill is coming due. The free money is drying up and companies are under compounding pressure to produce a profit for their waiting investors who are now done waiting.

You get enshittification. You get quality going down and price going up. You get "now that you're a captive audience here, we're forcing ads or we're forcing subscriptions on you." Don't get me wrong, the plan was ALWAYS to monetize the users. It's just that it's come earlier than expected, with way more feet-to-the-fire than these companies were expecting. ESPECIALLY with Wall Street as the other factor in funding (public) companies, where Wall Street exhibits roughly the same temperament as a baby screaming crying upset that it's soiled its own diaper (maybe that's too mean a comparison to babies), and now companies are being put through the wringer for anything LESS than infinite growth that Wall Street demands of them.

Internal to the tech industry, you get MASSIVE wide-spread layoffs. You get an industry that used to be easy to land multiple job offers shriveling up and leaving recent graduates in a desperately awful situation where no company is hiring and the market is flooded with laid-off workers trying to get back on their feet.

Because those coin-purse-clutching investors DO love virtue-signaling efforts from companies that say "See! We're not being frivolous with your money! We only spend on the essentials." And this is true even for MASSIVE, PROFITABLE companies, because those companies' value is based on the Rich Person Feeling Graph (their stock) rather than the literal profit money. A company making a genuine gazillion dollars a year still tears through layoffs and freezes hiring and removes the free batteries from the printer room (totally not speaking from experience, surely) because the investors LOVE when you cut costs and take away employee perks. The "beer on tap, ping pong table in the common area" era of tech is drying up. And we're still unionless.

Never mind that last part.

And then in early 2023, AI (more specifically, Chat-GPT which is OpenAI's Large Language Model creation) tears its way into the tech scene with a meteor's amount of momentum. Here's Microsoft's prize pig, which it invested heavily in and is galivanting around the pig-show with, to the desperate jealousy and rapture of every other tech company and investor wishing it had that pig. And for the first time since the interest rate hikes, investors have dollar signs in their eyes, both venture capital and Wall Street alike. They're willing to restart the hose of money (even with the new risk) because this feels big enough for them to take the risk.

Now all these companies, who were in varying stages of sweating as their bill came due, or wringing their hands as their stock prices tanked, see a single glorious gold-plated rocket up out of here, the likes of which haven't been seen since the free money days. It's their ticket to buy time, and buy investors, and say "see THIS is what will wring money forth, finally, we promise, just let us show you."

To be clear, AI is NOT profitable yet. It's a money-sink. Perhaps a money-black-hole. But everyone in the space is so wowed by it that there is a wide-spread and powerful conviction that it will become profitable and earn its keep. (Let's be real, half of that profit "potential" is the promise of automating away jobs of pesky employees who peskily cost money.) It's a tech-space industrial revolution that will automate away skilled jobs, and getting in on the ground floor is the absolute best thing you can do to get your pie slice's worth.

It's the thing that will win investors back. It's the thing that will get the investment money coming in again (or, get it second-hand if the company can be the PROVIDER of something needed for AI, which other companies with venture-back will pay handsomely for). It's the thing companies are terrified of missing out on, lest it leave them utterly irrelevant in a future where not having AI-integration is like not having a mobile phone app for your company or not having a website.

So I guess to reiterate on my earlier point:

Drowned rats. Swimming to the one ship in sight.

[davestone13-blog]

The Good News From Last Night's RIOC Board Meeting

Last evening’s RIOC board meeting was fraught with malingering disagreements and official bullying, but there was good news. Let’s look at that first. by David Stone The Roosevelt Island Daily News The End of the Palace of Versailles Bike Ramp Delivering the best good news of the night, right on the heels of unsightly bickering, Acting COO Mary Cunneen recommended terminating the contract for…

[wizarddykefag]

Hahaha hey guys psa if ur drunk and have to wake up early and want to take diphenhydramine (like benedril) to sleep. It can cause you to stop breathing!! I was fucked up and looking at the warnings to see if it was safe and it said nothing about alcohol but my sober friend read the whole thing and it’s further down. It’s honestly bullshit on the manufacturing side. If something can cause me to stop breathing while I sleep and I’m intoxicated MAYBE I’m only looking at the “warning” section?? Can we put marginalized people on EVERY TEAM rn??

[dravidious]

You are COOL and AWESOME!

Hey check out this card that's SUPER good in my Okinec deck

My Okinec deck wants to play Okinec on turn 4, then follow it up with a big swing on turn 5 to get tons of counters. I'm already running Inspired Charge, but this is basically a better version of that because it puts a creature on my field AND buffs itself with its own ability, which normally wouldn't matter at all, but Okinec gives it 2 +1/+1 counters so it's basically a 6/5 with a free Inspired Charge attached. Absolutely absurd value.

[miggylol]

[ID: A tweet and accompanying graphic. The tweet by Nathan J Robinson reads: "The Wall Street Journal editorial board tried to list all of Walz's terrible radical liberal policies and ended up making him sound fantastic"

The accompanying graphic is a screencapture of part of the Wall Street Journal article. It reads:

Funding "the North Star Promise Program, which provides free college for students with a family income under $80,000," including illegal immigrants.

Creating a state system for paid family and medical leave, capped at a combined 20 weeks a year and funded by a 0.88% payroll tax.

Mandating that public utilities generate 80% carbon-free electricity by 2030, ramping up to 100% by 2040. He's a fervent believer in "climate action."

Subsidizing electric vehicles by "requiring EV charging infrastructure within or adjacent to new commercial and multi-family buildings," as the Governor's office bragged.

Passing one of the nation's most permissive abortion statues that has essentially no limits and no age consideration for minors.

Declaring Minnesota to be a "trans refuge," with a law saying that the state will ignore a "court order for the removal of a child issued in another state because the child's parent or guardian assisted the child in receiving gender-affirming care in this state."

Establishing automatic voter registration and letting Minnesotans sign up for a permanent absentee ballot option.

End ID.]