OctopusNemeses

Not really anymore for me. A few times this past year they snuck in the return shipping cost at about $10-$15 USD. The page showed the cost refunded then added back. I don't know but it fooled me.

With this hardware shortage insanity, I won't be surprised if they get more aggressive with return shipping fees.

They actually evil. It's that simple. We're brought up to think humans have innate morals that ultimately prevail. Some just don't have it. The current president has shone a light on this. Unfortunately right and wrong has to be taught.

Being stuck inside a system does not make one a hypocrite to criticize it from within the system. Nor would one act of self immolation achieve anything but dying pointlessly in a fire. The prison guards will merely shovel your remains into a bucket. People like you will continue to goad other miserable prisoners into more pointless acts of self destruction for short term personal gratification.

We're so deep into the technological surveillance state that people like you can't even see that there was once a world outside these prison walls. You've accepted your fate. Maybe you we're born into it. Maybe it's been so long that you've forgotten it's not normal to have all this forced upon us. In this world where surveillance state technology is required, smartphones are now integrated into critical needs of daily life. From government to financial institutions to workplace. You cannot live without it short of going inawoods Ted K style. At which point the prison guards are likely to descend upon your log cabin with the full military force of the state and corporate apparatus.

Ultimately these acts of immolation achieve nothing against the system itself but demonstrate the futility that we're all stuck inside a prison. Seems like you thought you had a really clever retort there. You don't. It's you who are the fool.

one of the most human spaces left on the internet

Journalism once again demonstrating they are about 10-15 years behind on the times. Did they forget reddit completely broke back in 2016 when the_donald left the place in a permanent troll state.

I'm not going to read the article on account of time right now but I'm guessing it's written as if reddit was invented yesterday and the prior 20 years of reddit history is didn't happen.

It hasn't been human since the early 2010s. Reddit was botted to death long before LLMs.

Big tech propaganda. There has been zero push back. At least until the last few years.

The entire zeitgeist from film/TV, news, academia, politics, everything has been propagandizing the world on how tech companies and the people behind it are basically modern day gods.

In film/TV the nerds have been the stereotype of the benevolent good natured but awkward super genius. The news has made them out to be the superstar businesses that are infinite money printers. Tech in academia is seen as the most prestigious departments. Politicians are all afraid of being labelled as tech illiterate. That's why nobody can ever make any sort of legislation on tech companies anymore. It's why "disruptive" (aka destructive) tech companies are allowed to break every single legislation ever made. Because all any techbro has to do is threaten to accuse politician for being afraid of technology. Nothing makes a politician shut up faster.

It came as no surprise that all the big tech heads were at the front row of the inauguration. We live in the dystopian cyberpunk future. For most people it seems they don't even know. They're completely entranced by it all.

Bogeymen are imaginary. Political troll farms are real.

The bot accusation is a rhetorical cudgel in itself. What I mean is the bot swarms aren't configured to speak of the before times.

Another thing is that it's as if easily half the population of actual human posters have no knowledge of the time before. Could this be true on a technical basis. I know internet adoption grew fast more recently in some parts of the world. But how does the data line up? I haven't looked.

So the real human components of the bot swarms so to speak are living a sort of allegory of the cave. They have no knowledge of the world wide web as a whole. They only know the slice of internet they started using in the bot swarm era. For them it seems to be nothing but a battle grounds of social, political, commercial warfare. Basically this is the big tech media platforms.

It doesn't seem to compute for people much more than a shallow saying, "it's all bots". Yeah of course every says that all the time. But how is it all bots? How much if any do they know of outside the few apps on their phone. People don't seem to have much knowledge of the before times very much. Or the internet outside of social media at all.

People hardly ever make old references. Nobody understands old colloquialisms. That seems like it could be a litmus test for someone who is a real human being.

Something nobody talks about is how the internet transformed into a whole other beast around 2015 to 2016. Nobody talks about it because all the bots (used loosely to mean bad actors of human or otherwise) control discourse. It's masses of undefineable swarms of bot posting at any give moment in any given part of the internet.

You're not my neighbor. And you just did exactly what I called you out for. Like I said, scripted responses. I'm sure you felt smug about it. Btw 30k isn't 100k. See how that works? Or can you not handle someone trying to tell you something up on that high horse.

Let's cut through the bullshit. They're trying to equate their six figure salary to 30k. They're trying to leverage social media to validate their mental gymnastics.

It happens far too often. Especially on reddit. Whether they get affirmations or refutations they use either response to further cement their position. They love nothing more than to have some poor to try to refute them so they can be condescending to the lowly poors about how financially illiterate they are. And it gives them an opening to further contort their argument out loud about how they make so much money yet are as poor as those with the lowest income. In other words it's out of touch rich people shit.

This kind of comment chain happens so much it's basically scripted.

The distractions have been working like a well oiled machine. This whole Epstein thing is their finest work yet.

The secret police are disappearing people. The government is shut down. All anyone cares about is something right now completely inconsequential for aforementioned reason.

Those guys knew it wasn't ready for a demo.