All Americans Deserve An Ont In Every Pot

Today's question that nobody is asking: Why do we have taco Tuesday but not taco Thursday?

Heck, I like tacos any day of the week. Nature's perfect food.

Map Game: What's Your US Level?

Fill in your map here

For clarification, I chose orange if I spent the night there, yellow if I went and did something there (for example, if you went to Casey, Il and looked at the world's largest golf tee and then went home, instead of staying the night and seeing the world's largest mailbox the next day. You can only cram so many “world's largests” into a single day, you know*) and blue if I just drove through. I got 123.

Free Market? Never Heard Of It

‘We’ve No Choice’: Apple Says iPhones Will Switch Over To USB-C Chargers To Comply With New EU Law

There's another site I visit that is mainly populated by right and right-leaning Gen Z types. These are the “pendulum swings back” young folks who are repelled by the excesses of the Left. It's interesting to see how that is playing out. There's not much knowledge of classical liberalism, and some tropes of the left have sunk in, like corporations are evil. There's a disturbing amount of antisemitism. There's a massive amount of hatred for LGBTQRSTUVetc and Antifa. A lot of recognition of actual real problems we have, but as I said, not a lot of in depth knowledge as to how limited government and the free market is the answer to them. In any event, I posted the following:

Garbage. Why can't the customer just pick? You pick the phone you want, and if the cord is a big part of your preference, chose the one that uses the cord you like. This is none of the government's business.

It also is a great way to throttle innovation. No phone company has any incentive to design a better charging cord. If they do they can't use it, and if it is so much better that the EU mandates the new cord, you'll have to give away a competitive advantage to your competitors.

I got a lot of down votes. Not everyone, but most. They can't seem to understand how the market got us from dozens of different charging ports 20 years ago to just a few today, and they just can NOT seem to grasp the idea of leaving people alone to make their own decisions. No, “It's a problem (What, that Apple has propitiatory cords? I don't even see how that's a problem)” so “Government must fix”. One guy even told me “Imagine your gas tank had a proprietary hole for only specific nozzles. Wouldn't that mean you'd have to go to company approved gas stations to fill up? None nearby? Oh well guess you're out of gas or should live nearby where your company puts the most stations, this state doesn't make those stations only these other ones from this brand? Looks like you're not traveling or living there”, then got mad when I told him he was describing electric cars. It's kind of disturbing to see how successful the long march through the institutions has been. We can agree on problems that need to be fixed, but without basic civics education in common, it's very hard to discuss solutions, because to them we're speaking a foreign language.

I've Been Hacked!

Apparently somebody hacked the New York Post and really went for it [screenshots].

They started changing headlines, and the Post's automated systems started tweeting them out, headlines that call for violence and other crazy stuff.

ETA I see Ace posted about this after I wrote the ONT. Please follow his guidelines when commenting:

They're (the headlines) also Not Safe for the Blog. That's why I'm linking the account that's posting them, not posting the actual hacked headlines themselves. Some are racist, some threaten violence.

Please don't repeat the headlines. You can allude to them -- "the one about AOC" -- but don't actually repeat them.

Hurricane Who?

This article is a month old, but it's fun to consider in hindsight.

The Left Is Hoping DeSantis Botches Hurricane Response. Here's What They Didn't Count On.

Well, they were and he didn't. I don't think I've seen better response to a natural disaster in my lifetime. Did you notice how quickly all the Hurricane Ian coverage vanished from the pages of the mainstream media? Videos of an army of bucket trucks swarming in to restore power and supplies being efficiently distributed to those in need do nothing to feed the narrative, so into the trash bin they go.

Damn Racists

With People Like This, Who Needs White Supremacists?

I'll give you one guess as to the race of the person responsible for posts on facebook threatening to “kill every negro” at the Lee County Fair. C'mon. Just one guess.

More to the point, was there a shortage of systemic and institutional racism or microaggressions? Was there not enough historic oppression? We have people in this country who can make a racial crisis out of a No. 2 pencil, so Mr. Smith’s contribution was completely unnecessary. I would make a crack about it being the icing on the cake, but then someone would ask if I meant white or chocolate icing, and no matter what I said, I would be called a racist.

Once again, actual racism has become so rare that even a low-level criminal in Louisiana feels the need to create it.
But this act is obviously the result of American racism, somehow. And I am sure Mr. Smith will have a book deal in the works soon and will be making an appearance on The View once he is released from the clink.

Bottom Up Vs Top Down

The Blue Church vs. The Red Religion: The Battle for How We Make Sense

This is, I think, one of the biggest revolutionary events due to the information age, and we're still right in the middle of figuring out how it's going to turn out. It's fair to say that the “blue church” is losing ground, but I'm not sure how the “red religion” is going to play out.

For most of our lifetimes, society has deciphered reality through a top-down process, which Hall calls "The Blue Church." This paradigm depends on a small number of trusted people to broadcast sensible narratives to a large number of people whose job is to listen. You can see this in the relationship between a news anchor and his audience or a professor and her students.

…

Unlike the Blue Church, this new sense-making system uses a bottoms-up process of understanding reality. Often taking place in online forums, this new system uses collective decentralized intelligence with little mediation by gatekeepers. Each individual node of the network is responsible for both sensing information and broadcasting it. Once absorbed, other nodes can choose to amplify the signal

As of this moment in time, I'm not sure that the red religion results in a further fragmentation of society, rather than a more unified one where lies can't be controlled and disseminated by elites as “the truth”. Even in the article there's a sentence where the author mentions “foreign actors” using the decentralized nature of the red religion to “spread lies, sow discord and promote conspiracy theories”, which is the blue church narrative to protect its wealth and power. Interesting times.

Tonight's ONT has been brought to you by ravioli:

*This is a lie. We went to Casey and saw all 12 of the “world's largests” in about an hour. There's not a lot to Casey.

posted by WeirdDave at 09:55 PM

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