Welcome Humans! I Am Ready For You! Fish, Plankton, Sea Greens And Protein From The ONT!

Once again it's Thursday night, and that means it's ONT time! Anyone feel like a potion of hospital?

Gee, I Wonder If Anyone Will Have Any Opinions On This?

More young Americans are dying – and it's not COVID. Why aren't we searching for answers?

Life insurance actuaries are reporting that many more people are dying – still – than in the years before the pandemic. And while deaths during COVID-19 had largely occurred among the old and infirm, this new wave is hitting prime-of-life people hard.

No one knows precisely what is driving the phenomenon, but there is an inexplicable lack of urgency to find out. A concerted investigation is in order.

Deaths among young Americans documented in employee life insurance claims should alone set off alarms. Among working people 35 to 44 years old, a stunning 34% more died than expected in the last quarter of 2022, with above-average rates in other working-age groups, too.

“COVID-19 claims do not fully explain the increase,” a Society of Actuaries report says.

Hmm. I wonder if anyone would possible have any strong opinions about such a statistical bump. Anyone? Ya think?

The Future?

Capitalism is dead: long live Technofeudalism

But what if our preferences are no longer formed by the market, as they were in Hayek’s day? The year after he died, I was struggling to connect my father’s computer to the fledgling internet when he asked me a killer question: “Now that computers speak to each other, will this network make capitalism impossible to overthrow? Or might it finally reveal its Achilles’ heel?” It was a couple of years after the collapse of Soviet communism but also the beginning of the centre-left’s decline. The threat to capitalism posed by an organised working class had entered a recession that has never ended. Could the internet do to capitalism what the proletariat had failed to do?

It has taken me years to answer my father’s question — in the form of my new book, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. In it, I argue that our preferences are now shaped not by markets but by machine networks — what I call “cloud capital”. Amazon’s Alexa, for example, is the portal to a totalitarian, fully centralised system of preference creation and satisfaction. First, it trains us to train it to dictate what we want. Second, it sells us what we now “want” directly, bypassing any actual marketplace. Third, it succeeds in making us sustain this enormous behavioural modification machine with our free labour: we post reviews, rate products. Finally, it amasses huge rents from capitalists who rely on this network of cloud capital, usually 40% of sale price. That’s not capitalism. Welcome to Technofeudalism.

He raises some interesting questions about how our choices are both created and catered to in an online world.

Musical Interlude

I am not a musically inclined person. Subconsciously, I guess I know how well the score for this scene enhances the dialogue and visual effects, but now that he's pointed it out, I can't believe that I didn't realize exactly how much this scene is made by the score.

Getting Hammered

You thought the Tide pod challenge was stupid?

Viral ‘bone smashing’ trend is so horrifying it could ruin your face

The latest dangerous viral TikTok trend is supposedly convincing people — mostly young men — to break their bones to achieve a chiseled jawline.

“Bone smashing” is the practice of repeatedly hitting one’s bones, typically the cheekbones or jawbones, with a hard object like a hammer, to create micro-fractures in the hope that the bone structure will heal in a more attractive shape.

The hashtag #bonesmashing has 261.9 million views on TikTok as some users are claiming to take part in the trend to create a chiseled jawline — but the majority of the videos appear to be from users advocating against the practice.

I don't know if this is real or not, but even if it's a joke created by the weaponized autists of 4chan, I'm sure SOME folks are going to try it. The pants wetting hoax they started had people in real life soiling themselves, and some people did eat Tide pods. Someone's going to hit themselves in the face with a hammer.

Only the ‘Far Right’ Is Standing Between You and the Death of Free Speech

The international establishment media wants you to know that Edwin Wagensveld is “far right.” there is virtually no mention of him that doesn’t include this Homeric epithet, so that all Right-Thinking People, that is, those who are still credulous enough to believe the media, will know that this is a man to be shunned and ignored. Yet it is Wagensveld and others like him who are smeared as “far right” who are standing between ordinary citizens and one of the left’s most sinister agendas: the destruction of the freedom of speech.

Going even farther than most of its establishment media colleagues, Morocco World News recently called Wagensveld, a Dutch human rights activist, a “far-right Dutch extremist.” He deserved the double whammy of media smear terms because last Sunday he once again tore a copy of the Qur’an, in what Morocco World News called “a new provocative Islamophobic act,” in front of Turkey’s embassy in the Netherlands

“Free speech” isn't needed to protect your right to say things that people like. Its only purpose is to protect the right of people to say things that someone else doesn't like. Anyone who says “I believe in free speech, BUT...” doesn't.

AI Art

Wanna play with the Bing Image Creator? You can do it right here

I think that the more you give it in the way of prompts, the better the results are. For example “Angry blogger ace of spades” gives this as one of the options (it usually generates 4 pictures for you):

While “chad blogger (It just can't figure out “Weird Dave” ) sits at his computer and posts memes while an unruly mob watches” got this, along with another version where y'all are Muslims for some reason.

It's a wild technology, and it's pretty fun. It also potentially nasty. It has filters, it won't let you prompt “Muhammad eating a ham sandwich”, for example, but people are smart, they'll always find ways around. I saw one earlier which mush have been from a prompt something like “the Holocaust as a Pixar movie”. It was outrageous, profane, disturbing...and looked exactly like the poster for a movie about the Holocaust made by Pixar would look. Strange days indeed.

ETA Moron poster Robert did "Angry blogger Ace of Spades holding a pudding cup seductively"

Tonight's ONT has been brought to you by life in Texas:

Now the folks filming this are obviously from California (or Austin, same difference), because everyone else knows what hogtying a calf is. C'mon down to the MoMe in a few weeks and experience Texas for yourself!

posted by WeirdDave at 09:56 PM

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