baltakatei

The ability to force any two conscious beings to feel empathy. Like in the 2015 novel ::: spoiler Title Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky :::.

If it weren’t Docker-dependant, I’d imagine this would be a good FreedomBox app.

High gasoline prices.

<marquee><blink>Under Construction</blink></marquee>

Pay no attention to the ex-Intel CEO behind the curtain.

Buying a house increases the switching cost of moving to seek new job opportunities. Since we’re no longer in the days of pensions renting makes sense. Imagine buying a home in Detroit before inscrutable politics and macroeconomics caused it to decline; buying a home means you risk holding the bag, especially if you don’t know how to manage risk from climate change in the coming decades.

Pisces. Albeït. Melancholy. Queue. Colonel.

Hamas is crazy as Crazy Horse was “crazy”. You know what both have/had in common? They are/were fighting displacement of their friends and family due to colonizing powers. The only difference is the latter’s people suffered almost complete annihilation while the former is a work on progress. If the British didn’t insist on making Palestine their reservation for Jews, then Palestinian freedom fighters wouldn’t have had to fight Zionists violently encroaching upon their native land.

Brb, gotta go buy some cat food.

“I’d like to raise a family. Let’s see what a 4-bedroom condo costs in the city with decent schools and transit. 2 000 000 USD? Hah. No kids it is, then.”

Another one that’s not corporate

Isn’t it owned by a company called Jetnet?

Justin Ling. (2023-01-27). “The Flight Tracker That Powered @ElonJet Just Took a Left Turn”. wired.com. Accessed 2025-10-16. “A major independent flight tracking platform, which has made enemies of the Saudi royal family and Elon Musk, has been sold to a subsidiary of a private equity firm. And its users are furious. ¶ ADS-B Exchange has made headlines in recent months for, as AFP put it, irking “billionaires and baddies.” But in a Wednesday morning press release, aviation intelligence firm Jetnet announced it had acquired the scrappy open source operation for an undisclosed sum.”.

I really enjoyed Chokepoint Capitalism (2022), the book he co-authored (read: had someone else back up his frequently repeated anecdotes with reputable citations in a proper Bibliography) with Rebecca Giblin. 90% of the interview can be found in that book already with 10% being new slogans and anecdotes that can’t be found in that book.

Step 2: stay dead

Sunlight is always doing this. It’s just that we call overlapping projections of a boring white-filled circles “dappled sunlight”.

Next up: the modifier letter apostrophe U+02BC ( ʼ ).

Or my Steam library.

couldn’t they have put people in personal heavens

From Agent Smith’s monologue to Morpheus in the first movie:

Agent Smith: Have you ever stood and stared at it, marveled at its beauty, its genius? Billions of people just living out their lives, oblivious. Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world. Where none suffered. Where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this, the peak of your civilization.

From The Animatrix, Neal Gaiman’s Goliath, and across the three movies, I recall that the machines did try putting humans in paradise. Their goal was to use human flesh minds to perform calculations they could not, so, to an extent, if the human could be tricked into thinking they were in paradise with a small fraction of their mind, the machines could occupy the rest (presumably to control fusion reactors, but mostly to augment the machines’ cognitive abilities). The narrative implied that human minds consistently rejected utopias and paradises, spawning rogue entities like Neo and Trinity who possessed destructive abilities the machines couldn’t comprehend but could empirically measure.

Basically, human cognitive abilities most valued by the machines also were inextricably tied to chaotic destruction of whatever medium the humans occupied. Like how uranium is useful for generating electricity but turns its container radioactive, melts down if unmoderated, and can create thermonuclear weapons.

I long for mixed used housing without an automobile parking requirement in an area with ubiquitous mass transit.

Never let a crisis go to waste. — Machiavellian leaders

It’s better to compare yourself to a version that is successful together with your neighbors. At that point, you realize the stereotypical understanding of “success” is equivalent to “beating down your competitors until you alone stand above them”. Shared success is indistinguishable from being ordinary.