Notices by Graydon (graydon@canada.masto.host)

@WarnerCrocker @glook I'm not sure why matters at all, compared to what.

I'd agree that the degree and type of faith varies, including a bunch of people who want the primate band status and don't care about the means. I'd also point out that the folks on the supreme court are notionally reasoning from divine kingship rationalizations, so there's going to be feedback that rewards the theological justifications.

(The universe doesn't have a moral arc. Its contents are subject to selection.)

@glook @WarnerCrocker There's been a two generation effort to replace the basis of legitimacy. (Out with constitutionality, in with theocracy.)

What we're seeing is most of the state aparat (at least the armed parts) moving to being open about constructing legitimacy based on theocracy.

Since it's a white-supremacist theology that (necessarily) does community by exclusion (no civil anything!), it's a divine imperative to remove non-white people from the United States by any means.

@clacke Used to be it was pretty reliable about keeping a track with the major caveat that there's a thicket of Android battery saving overrides that really really really want to turn anything that isn't Google Maps off. One can avoid those but it will probably take a few tries to find them all.

@clacke I would be a titch cautious that people who are not understood to be you by OSMAnd+ can access the URL, but yeah.

@clacke When you click download, your default option is "Save as new track"; that's the shareable thing.

From this I can deduce that this is not a primary use case and there's an expectation you generally don't want to remember your route, but it's there.

@clacke I am pretty sure you can save a named route whether or not you've walked it.

So... Pick your start points and end points and set up the route.

In the top row of icons about profiles, the leftmost thing is a caret; it's pointing up. tap it, and it points down and you get the route with more information including an elevation graphic.

Under that graphic is "Details"; click that.

You now have all the details; in the top right there's print-download-share icons.

@clacke If you have tracks turned on (which it is NOT by default), you should have a tracks bucket under My Places and you can export those. (It's been some while since I've done this, but it was there a decade or so ago, so I'd suppose it may still be there.)

@cstross I think that's certainly an LLM hazard.

The core hazard as I see it is not a single specific "this is a bad idea" but that the LLM push is a continuation of the American imperial value extractor built around IP controls. No amount of negative consequences to other people will cause or permit not using LLMs. They're going to get made compulsory unless or until there's a collapse of the empire or they somehow start having intolerable costs to Apple, Google, and Microsoft.

@bsdphk @cstross No feedback involving a tax is useful until the general problem of making corporates pay taxes has been solved.

My general take on this is that the limited liability corporation is a tool of conquest and should be abolished as part of the alterations to the social machinery acknowledging we live on a finite planet and need to close all the loops to keep the "live" part functional and factual.

(It's also the case that it's not clear ANY 3ʳᵈ party data retention is legitimate.)

Having a reserve currency is younger than the Great War.

(reserve currency = the ratio of ~gold to economic activity is unworkable for a metallic currency, but we have to use something as a reference.)

Lots of the current value of USD arises from its position as the global reserve currency. Losing the position involves losing that value, and it's unrecoverable, arising as it does from a history of conduct.

A disorderly loss of reserve currency status shall be a new thing in the world.

@cstross A sound plan, especially as the implied wind speed is nigh-guaranteed to put precipitation right up one's nasal passages.

(Just out of a couple-three days of extreme cold warnings hereabouts; the text included the observation that it hasn't been the cold in several years, please take this seriously, and I kept wanting to go "yeah, yeah, I remember what cold is like" at the hypothetical meteorologist who wrote the warning. I imagine it hits very different when you DON'T remember.)

@cstross @alessandro one consequence of "natural scale is global" is that no one has even the theory of a control mechanism.

The folks with the billions, just like they are intensely aware of what climate change is doing (if they want to get the real data they can), are intensely aware that they don't know what's going on. It frightens them for materially well-supported reasons.

@alessandro @cstross Today the very rich are determined to exalt themselves free of any need for their fellows to rule without constraint.

It won't work; it is not able to work. But they are determined to have their selfish god and be told that all their sins are virtues.

"All my sins are virtues" is relatively cheap in blood when it starts; you could have changed history, and thus our present, with 20 deaths in the 70s. Restoring a policy of facts will be more expensive than that today.

@alessandro @cstross the new ruling class wants to delegitimize all sources of authority which are not THEIR sources of authority.

Because they're an alliance of cults (there's no distinction of mechanism between a grift and a cult and most people don't have the philosophical tools to think about this at all), they're really against facts, democracy, or letting outsiders exist. Standard cult. (which is a primate band formation hack.) It's not just unity it's uniformity.

@alessandro @cstross the other thing which by and large and on the whole people will not think about is that democracy arises from rifle regiments in the 19th century; you HAVE to let the majority of the male population in on the good thing because you need them to mobilize to be a Power or Great Power. This runs ~1860 to 1915; from 1915 to about 1970, you need industrial mobilization to be a credible Power, so not rifles but rather similar. (And all politics remembers breaking empires.)

@cstross This is bad, but it's not inherently unstable nor inherently likely to fail nor inherently something that diminishes the might of the empire. (redirect it, sure.)

The 1920s US had a major round of "there will be genocide until an unambiguous white majority is restored"; the 40s US set up the post-war institutions on the basis of highly inclusive principles.

The difference now is the combination of the (ambiguously controlled) panopticon and the ongoing agricultural collapse.

@cstross The machinery of empire is fine.

(No one is giving up fossil carbon, agriculture remains totally dependent on fossil carbon. The core mechanism of control is as strong as ever it was.)

What we're seeing is a change of ruling class from people with established political and social ties to factions in the imperial heartland to mammonites exalted by wealth and whose social ties are synthetic/cultic. (The analogy with Constantine's conversion is not distant.)

@cstross @jdnicoll You know the "rather than go to therapy" meme?

It does seem a lot like a willingness to invent a religion to deal with their fear of death once the ancestral religion stops working because it's factually poorly supported.

(I'm doubtful there's enough Christianity in there to qualify as a heresy, and otherwise I'm agreeing with you.)

@cstross @jdnicoll I don't think publishing consolidation/being at the peak of the mammonite surge helps at all, but this has always happened; on the writing side, reading is so much faster than writing there's an inherent supply problem, and on the business side there's this major cultural shift going on. (I think "never been lost" was your observation; "grew up swimming in the sum of human knowledge AND the malice of morgoth" is as new a thing as printing was in Gutenberg's time.)

@cstross @jdnicoll The whole "singularity" as technology is abject nonsense, but culturally? Either "only facts" or "never facts" are really distinct from what has come before, and I think the disjunction is getting sharp enough that the ability to market is in question.

(There's this obvious analogy to feeding an LLM its own output to the eventual fate of marketing. Tough thing to demonstrate rigorously, but the feel is there.)