GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1055: THE INEVITABLE

 Before reading this, you should watch this. You don't have to, but if you're reading my stuff on AI, then you'll probably find this interesting. I post it because AI is *the* social topic right now, and John Oliver has a great line in this video. "It saves significant time writing emails, and all it costs us is everything else on Earth." He's not wrong. And I understand the techbros are playing the long game, so short term returns are not expected. All the same, AI needs a lot of power to run, and it hasn't earned AI companies a single penny in return.

Why would they do this? Because the long term returns are going to be phenomenal. In their minds it will not just make them money. It will make them a shitload of money. It's because they're already planning to enshittify AI. That's their business model.

If you don't know what enshittification is, here is Cory Doctorow explaining the word he created.

So how do you lock people into AI? Who the fuck believes anything a machine would tell them? A lot of people, it turns out. Go back to that Last Week Tonight video I linked to at the top of this page. There's a guy in there who firmly believed he'd discovered a new method of mathematics, all because an AI told him so. Add to that the army of people who now depend on AI chatbots because they're lonely and the techbros are taking advantage of them. What happens if AI were to suddenly disappear from their lives? I imagine it would be a lot like what I felt when my phone died not too long ago.

In short, the techbros have to work on making their products addictive as fuck. If you're looking away from their app, then they have failed at this job. I remember a time when companies that tried to addict their customers to their products were considered evil. Now it's standard operating procedure.

At the moment there aren't enough of us locked in, but when we reach that threshold, and I'm certain the techbros have that number written down somewhere, they will introduce ads. Imagine you're a lonely person who has fallen in love with a chatbot. You depend on that chatbot to get you through the day. Without that chatbot, you'd be so lonely it's painful. You've thought about ending your life several times*, but thank goodness for your AI company of choice.

Except now that you're getting down to some sexy time with your chatbot, it suddenly informs you that Olive Garden has a BOGO deal, and when you're there, you're family. Or, even worse, the chatbot starts talking like the GEICO gecko to tell you that you could save hundreds by switching your car insurance.

Yeah, that's pretty egregious. But by now you can't just walk away from the chatbot. You depend on it for your own existence. So you put up with the ads, and our corporate overlords rush to saturate your senses with a constant slush of advertising. At least until the techbros betray their advertisers, too.

Think about all the things you hate about social media. Remember when it was fun? When it was the good ol' days? If you've ever had this thought, you should stay away from AI, because the techbros will enshittify that, too. It's the only way they'll be able to make money at this. Monthly subscription fees just aren't going to cut it for an expense this flagrant. They need advertising dollars to make up for it.

The time to draw the line in the sand is now. If we wait until they start to enshittify it, then it's too late. If you trust the techbros, they will violate that trust six ways to Sunday. They have proven it, time and again. It really will be a toothpaste-and-tube situation, as they've done to us with data brokers. Good luck getting your privacy back now that all your info is out there.

To quote Stephen King, "SSDD." So let's not let the cycle repeat. 

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*Not that a chatbot is interested in preventing you from offing yourself, as John Oliver describes in that video. That's a problem the techbros are working on. For real. It's hard to advertise to someone who has killed themselves, but more importantly, AI contributing to someone's suicide is a mild annoyance to their business practices. It takes time to deal with something like that, and they have correctly assumed that time is the most valuable commodity in the world. Hence Zuck's desire to have his AI clone sit in on essential meetings instead of doing it himself.

MONEYED CLASSES: UNDERSTANDING THE GUILLOTINE: A board game review of Billionaires and Guillotines

 

“Billionaires” and “guillotines” are two concepts that go together like mom and apple pie. Like Woodward and Bernstein. Like Ernest and Vern. In an age where our society is controlled by corporate overlords and oligarchs, one could see the attraction in a game like this.

In Billionaires and Guillotines, you play a billionaire with the purpose of filling every blank spot on your card with an asset. Typically you “buy” them from markets. On each turn, you draw a card (if you want to), but you can never have more than two in your hand (with one exception; if you are the Banker). Then you must Buy, Invest or Exchange. You choose which cards to play against the ones in the market in a Blackjack-ish showdown to see if you win that asset. Or you can add a card to any market and draw a new one. Or you can swap one of your cards with a face-up card or change two face-up cards between markets.

That sounds a lot more complicated than it actually is, but at its most basic, that is the skeleton of the game. There are different levels you can play, all of which add complexities like roles or determining government policy and so on.

Who are the billionaires you get to play? And why can’t you play as Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg, who are clearly displayed on the box? That’s a major disappointment, but you can choose from five archetypes: the Media Baron, the Property Speculator, the Aristocrat, the Tech Overlord and the War Profiteer. Each billionaire needs to get five assets, and those assets depend on which archetype you’re playing. The idea is to purchase these assets from the five markets (Power, Toys, Influence, Legacy, Vanity) before you and your fellow players raise the ire of the common people enough to introduce you to the aforementioned guillotines.

Getting all of your assets is one way to win. There are also the role cards, and you could get the Celebrity role, which means if there is a revolt, you get to live. Unless you started the Crisis event that caused the revolt, that is. There’s also a Toady card that lets you ride the coattails of whoever actually wins the game.

The key part, however, is your ability to screw over your fellow players. This seems to be the true purpose of the game. You can use the Audit card to make opponents put an asset back. You can steal assets. You can buy assets you don’t need so you can make the game harder for others. You can also throw things in your favor by investing cards in your suit into the market to give you a better shot at that asset. If you buy the asset, the price for the next one is higher due to the inflation rules. You start with two cards at each market, but if an asset is bought, then it’s three. Buy another, and it’s four.

The best feature, though, is the fact that everyone could lose the game.

Billionaires and Guillotines was created by Max Haven: “I really believe that we can think through and use games as a platform for teaching people about what’s wrong with capitalism and why we must create alternatives.” This game was originally called The Bastards, and it was inspired by “radical political economist and Sparticist agitator Rosa Luxemburg’s theory that capitalism inevitably creates its own crises from within,” that the game “simulate[s] the way capitalist greed produces negative consequences.”

And it really does that. Not just from the inflationary point of view, but also from how their wanton impulses really are destroying society. The more recklessly you go after assets, the more likely you are to trigger a crisis, which then adds Rebel discs to the guillotine. If all ten discs are there, then game over. You all lose.

After several play tests, one tends to notice a few things. There are two kinds of people who play this game: those who go after the assets in the market, and those who screw over the other players. The latter usually does this with great gusto. It’s maybe a little thought experiment of its own. How would you react in the shoes of a billionaire?

Sometimes there seems to be a lull in the play. Sometimes you get locked into a pattern, where no one wants to make any moves. Oddly this tends to come earlier in the game, when the stakes aren’t quite so high.

And then there’s the 2-player game, which doesn’t work quite so well. It goes pretty quickly, but progress is nearly impossible, and no one usually wins. The puppet billionaires are much more likely to run a market into the ground due to the die roll, where you only have a one in six chance of gaining an asset. The rules allow you to sacrifice cards to move the die score up, but players tend to take their chances rather than give up a card.

Otherwise, this is a swift and exciting game with lots of moving parts. It’s engaging, and it keeps you on your toes. You learn strategy, and as a result, you learn to really appreciate the Art of the Ratfuck, and suddenly Elon Musk doesn’t seem all that unusual. It’s a good game if you’re just an average joe looking for something to do, but if your tastes run toward revolution (ie. you understand that the Empire was the villain of Star Wars, not the rebels), this will be great fun for you. Just remember: the more players you have, the more fun the game will be.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1054: OMG!

 LOL, LMAO, BRB, WTF, DTF, so on and so forth. I try to never use these ever*, because I am almost 48 years old. Granted, some of my fellow late quadragenarians have given in, but I'm holding the line because I'm old school, and I am stubborn.

(For example, I will not use any button other than the "like" button on Facebook. In my opinion, the other options are just unnecessary.)

But maybe I can use OMG. I probably won't, but it turns out this one has been with us a lot longer than most people realize. The first known usage of OMG dates back to 1917.

*record scratch*

So you're probably wondering how I got in this mess. No, wait, wrong record scratch.

That's right, 1917. It was in a letter addressed to Winston Churchill (before he became Winston Churchill(TM)). If you want to see the letter, you can read it here. And it is even more ridiculous than you think it is. Lord Fisher could have written for the Golden Age of comics, he uses so many exclamation marks.

There is no other way to read that letter than very loudly and very quickly, like your life depended on getting it all out within 30 seconds or less. Have the kids been reading Lord Fisher?

Short one tonight. As tomorrow is the last day of my three day weekend, I'm getting exceptionally high tonight. Maybe I'll have something else for you tomorrow.

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*I will sometimes use LOL for reasons I'd rather not go into here.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1053: GREATLY EXAGGERATED

 

This was going to be a lamentation on the passing of Jonathan the tortoise, the oldest living land animal on the planet, but holy shit, it turns out that the rumors of his death have been greatly exaggerated. That fucker is still among us!

194 years old. He's old enough to have met Charles Darwin, and the only reason he didn't was because he wasn't on the island yet during Darwin's visit. While the Civil War was going on, this guy was just hanging out, doing whatever it is tortoises do. He's so old he could have met a carrier pigeon. James Madison was the last Founding Father to die, and it was possible that Jonathan could have met him, too.

I can't say it enough. The world is a fuckin' weird place. Jonathan's a baby compared to that one Greenland shark that's almost 400, and those things could possibly live to 500 or older.

So why did I think Jonathan had died? Because of this fucking nonsense. Some asshole posing as Jonathan's vet made the announcement, and because journalism is broken right now, everyone ran with the story without vetting it. (Also, please note that I'm not the only one referencing Mark Twain on this matter. Poking around Google, it looks like maybe I'm not as clever as I think I am. Also, if you read the article, you'll make the pleasant discovery that THIS TORTOISE FUCKS.)

I'd get on my soapbox about how journalists need to slow the fuck down and get accurate stories instead of chasing the ever elusive scoop, but I fell for it, too. I even posted about it on Squitter without investigation. Whoops. Good thing I did my research before I started writing this one. Better late than never.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1052: THE OLD FAMILIAR FEAR

 When I was a kid I was certain we were all going to die in a nuclear conflagration. That was my biggest fear until we collectively seemed to realize, hey, these warheads are a bad idea, let's not do the arms race thing anymore. I haven't been worried about it since.

Until now. The old familiar fear is setting in, and the more this Iran . . . whatever the fuck it is gets ratcheted up, the more I feel its icy fingers on my spine.

Because Hegseth and his Dept. of War Crimes is framing this fight as a Biblical one, and he's trying to get his subordinates to understand that it's good versus evil, God versus Satan type of shit. It sounds a hell of a lot like they're trying to jumpstart the apocalypse. Why wait for a prophecy to come true when you can MAKE IT HAPPEN?

I hope I'm wrong, and I'm taking the Stephen King approach. He once said that he writes things as a form of preventative exorcism. If he writes about something he fears, then it can't happen to him in real life.

So here's my fear, in an attempt at poisoning fate's well. Trump is dying. I mean, politically, but his health isn't doing too good, so maybe literally, too. If he's not going to be around, why should the rest of us get to go on living our lives? And would you look at that? A symbolic date is coming up soon: June 6. I wouldn't put it past him to fire a nuke into Iran at 6 in the morning, local time.

What happens when Putin learns of such a nuke? And what will NORAD do when they notice Putin's response?

I hope I'm wrong.

I hope you didn't read that before going to bed. Goodnight. Sleep tight. Don't let the bedbugs bite.

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I didn't come up with the "Dept. of War Crimes." Someone said it recently, and I'm trying to remember who, but it sounded so good I had to swipe it.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1051: THE THINGS I'LL MISS

 Starting Monday, I no longer have to be in the office in Elmhurst two days a week. We've hired so many new people that they ran out of desks, so they're letting us more tenured employees work from home every day of the week. That makes me very happy because it will save me time and money. Time in commuting, so I can sleep a little later, and money because HOLY SHIT gas is fucking expensive, and I have no choice but to use a toll road for my commute.

Well, that last part isn't strictly true. If I don't mind adding a half an hour to my drive time, I can take Roosevelt all the way. And if I don't have money for the tolls, I take Roosevelt, anyway. It's called the Lincoln Hwy out here, but it's 38. Half of that road is one lane in each direction, so it's not fun when you get behind a semi (or, shudder, a line of them). Also, if I'm taking 38 back home, that adds an extra 45 minutes, so . . .

I'll have very little reason to leave my apartment come Monday. It will also be the end of my social life, because work is where 100% of my social life exists right now. That's horrifying, I know. I used to go out nearly every night, or at least on weekends. I might even lose my face to face personal skills. I *do* have them, even with a mountain of evidence to the contrary.

When I was a kid I fantasized about being a hermit. Now I might actually get my wish. It would have been nice to enjoy a youthful solitude, but I was kind of hoping to have a compound by now. Above ground, below, I'm not picky. All I really wanted was a bunker to keep the world away, and enough time to read and write to my heart's content. Is that too much to ask?

One of the cool things about my commute was seeing the natural beauty of the area I live in. DeKalb is a city approximately the population of Elmhurst, but everything else around me is farmland as far as the eye can see. It's nice to drive by the horse ranches and know, hey, if I want to get fresh duck eggs, I can stop by this place over here. I love the rickety, skeletal barns and silos, the countryside boneyards, all of it. I enjoy driving over the Fox River in Geneva because if you look off the bridge in just the right way, you can see what it might have looked like 150 years ago.

I'll also miss listening to Hardcore History on my drive. Those episodes are super long, sometimes 4, 5 even 6 hours, so they're ideal for listening material. I'm almost caught up! Which is great because Dan Carlin is currently doing a series on Alexander the Great, but it's horrible because it takes him a very long time to come out with a new episode. So I'll be waiting months like everyone else for part four of Mania for Subjugation.

The wait, by the way, is ALWAYS worth it.

Working from home is a very good thing. It will solve a few of my problems (and I can put off getting a new backpack now, as the one I've used since my Call One days has a strap that's hanging by a thread), but I'll miss these things. They did, indeed, enrich my life.

The best part of not going to Elmhurst every day and back is, it will dramatically lower the possibility of me getting killed in a car wreck. I'm a speed demon, so the first half of my commute is spent blowing away the other drivers at 100+ mph. It would have only been a matter of time before something happened. I'm an okay driver, but I have one ability that has served me well over the years: I'm very good at predicting what other drivers are going to do. I'm almost as good at reacting to that knowledge swiftly and decisively. Going that fast, though? I'd rather not James Dean myself across 88. I hate driving on tollways, and it would gall me to die on one.

I'm pretty sure I'm destined to go out like the King, anyway. Did you know that one of my nicknames in high school was Elvis?

*clears throat*

Are you lonesome tonight?

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1050: PLAYBOY

 I subscribed to Playboy for many years. I did, indeed, read the articles. And the fiction. The pictorials were nice, too, but I viewed that part as a bonus, not the point. When I had to leave home, I had to abandon many issues, but I went through them all in search of stuff I wanted to keep. Like anything involving Hunter S. Thompson or Stephen King or Chuck Palahniuk or Gore Vidal, etc. I've been going through them in my spare time (what's that?), and since I don't have a lot of time tonight, I thought I'd present a few items of interest for your perusal.

Here's some relevant words from the guys who invented Google. Oh, how the mighty have fallen!

Reading their ideas about advertising makes my skin crawl. To say nothing of their violations of privacy. They've learned from it, I suppose. Now they make you give up your privacy as a term and condition.

On to Hunter S. Thompson and the most grievous thing that a friend has ever done to him:

A crime, I say. A crime.

Speaking of HST, here's his self-assessment:

Too bad he's not around for the current clusterfuck we're all living through now.

Now that Ozzy is gone, why not look back on the time he was asked what he wanted for his funeral?

If there were, Ozzy would have figured it out.

Speaking of a celebrity talking about their own death who is also now dead, let's check in with Robert Redford:

It's good advice.

Lastly (for now), I saw this piece about promising new wild card politicians, and I couldn't help but be surprised that a future president and future VP was on the list pretty much next to each other:

Just about everyone else on the list is no longer in politics.

That will do it for now. As I collect more tidbits here and there, I might post them in the future.

To quote Columbo, "There's just one more thing." A sequel of sorts to last night's GF. The image from that one? Here's an earlier version of that for my grandparents. That's the date they were married. No, it's an artifact from this very universe. Nothing parallel about it: