Notices by Urban Hermit (urban_hermit@mstdn.social)

@bitprophet
Also: "my favorite fascist has his own! And it is appalling! You can tell it to make nudes of anybody!"

"This is the future! Invest another million dollars in anything that billionaire does! He's a genius!"

"I should buy another one of his armoured trucks. People are getting testy about being told what to do. I should go to a big tech conference and give a speech on how using our products is inevitable and resistance is pointless."

"I wonder if I should donate to the ballroom?"

We need to prosecute Trump.

We need to piss on his grave.

We need to strip all his kids and his surviving wife of their embezzled money.

We need to teach children that he nearly killed them to make oil company executives and coal plant owners a little bit richer.

Because if we sigh and say "thank God it is over" it will happen again, and worse.

@Brynawel @Em0nM4stodon all cats secretly run on Linux at the kernel level.

That is why they are considered "difficult, but rewarding for people who take the time" and the few unpleasant functions they must preform are 'sand boxed'.

The ballroom is not for soliciting bribes, I mean 'donations', on federal property. It is not, I repeat not, a place where I pressure a room full of billionaires to pay me back if they want to keep their federal contracts or ever get federal contracts again, after I make them listen to an hour long speech about how great I am. It is not for that, because soliciting donations from public property is specifically illegal, although if the President does it, it is not illegal.

@Andres4NY @paninid
I used AI to rewrite my resume, pretty much because a friend of mine almost forced me to, and I excruciatingly went through every proposed change and argued with it.

In my opinion, "more professional" to it just meant adding more fluff words to say the same thing, and since I am "older", it was already too long.

And it of course agreed with me. Because I was right, or because it always agrees in the end? Acting like it even has an opinion in the first place is a mistake.

@Andres4NY @paninid
I got a chance to either slightly modify or defend every word and every sentence in my resume.
I guess that is useful.

But I also discovered that AI is blandifying, fluffing up, and averaging out everyone's' resumes. The people who have to read this slop at the end, after their AI spits out a dozen of the most average and repetitive resumes? I can't imagine how random that must feel, selecting among the most average of the average.

@Numerfolt @Andres4NY @paninid you have summarized it far better than me, "some of this is just bullshit".

I write well and have few problems filling a page. My mastery is connotation, when space is limited every word is doing 2 jobs, what it means, what it implies.

I found Chat-GPT was changing words and implied experiences or skills that were not true. So my resume was now less accurate and also made minor chores sound like big accomplishments. To someone familiar with those jobs - bullshit.

A quote from my quote app, from MLK Jr., about the arrogance of Western culture.

Marco Rubio, a Cuban American, who recently went to Europe to praise right wing movements and the superiority of western culture, gets personally criticized by a 59 year old quote - because warnings against arrogance are timeless.

Let's be clear:

The Trump administration will not be any less awful once Musk is pushed out, they will just commit awful crimes and horrible ideas more slowly.

Musk is not needed by Tesla to impose more stupid ideas to run that company into the ground faster. His last stupid idea, spray painting CyberTrucks flat black so people will not see how badly the stainless steel is corroding, is not the kind of thing that will dominate market share.

He might as well hole up somewhere and get baked.

If a man is stupid enough to be a Nazi, he is not really bringing value to anything, anywhere.

Same for bigots. All risk, no reward.

@kevinleecaster.bsky.social there are not a lot of people in the center not voting. Most are people at the edges, disillusioned with their party, who have dropped out of the process. Of those, I am betting a ton are Democrats who wanted universal health care, or a higher federal minimum wage. The growth market for Democrats is to re-acquire their people by being more effective.

Some things should be illegal, not 'encouraged' with complicated tax cuts to billionaires.

Bold is the way.

@AG7GM CEOs have bought "confirmation bias on demand" and they think it is great. In the meantime they're asking it to do bar graphs and the AI produces graphics that look vaguely barish, but are completel bullshit with smaller numbers on bars twice as high and other middle school level mistakes. Because the machine that assures you it can does not even know the meaning of the words it is saying.

If 1980s ELIZA was worked on continuously ever since, I would expect it to be better than this.

I just looked it up and the 2025 winter solstice is tomorrow, Sunday, December 21st, and my daylight tracking app says tomorrow will still be 2 seconds shorter than today.

But a happy solstice to you all, and congratulations on making it halfway through the darkness, and may everyday be brighter, if not warmer, yet.

#PodcastCommenting

So, the express purpose of CEOs is to kiss ass and manipulate dictators, anything to get sweetheart deals and increase 'shareholder value' aka make rich people richer?

I guess we had previously been suckers in the US by trying to elect competent and fair leaders, stupid us. All our CEOs were not earning their ridiculous salaries, yet they were still getting paid rim job money.

Minimum wage should be indexed to the maximum wage.

Probably to the average of the top quartile. Ranked by state. My state has an income tax, so the data is already out there.

Private sector raises top wages, the government makes them raise the minimum wage of their workers. Low to average wage workers are the economic engines of the community, not international hoarders.

Mega wealthy might move overseas? So they wouldn't be interfering in local politics? Don't threaten me with a good time.

Thinking about this, because I have had to accept some hard choices and some of the people involved believe that stressing me will make me do things.

I'm autistic. Stressing me is not a motivator. If anything it makes me freeze up. Is this an Autistic response, or an everybody response? And if everybody works worse when stressed, why is it the first thing anybody uses to try and motivate people?

@Lana if he is not hung in that ballroom, and left to hang for several days, so that all who want to can come and see and testify to it finally being over, then history has failed us.

We now know, that if someone is an ignorant, arrogant, apathetic narcissist they can go completely senile and continue to ramble nonsensically with vigor and confidence, because they never had any self doubt, nor did the reaction of the audience mater in any way, all along.

Their ranting, with a mind full of holes, is indistinguishable to themselves from who they already were.

Fascinating and dreadful.

@georgetakei not seating a new Representative and playing with the days the House is in session is practice for January 2027 after the midterms.

I wonder if Johnson has the balls to push this one all the way to the supreme court now to see what kind of precedent he can set?

What kind of dirt could the Trump team, and specifically the CIA, have on SCOTUS members and Johnson to have them so thoroughly by the balls?

@inthehands #6 and #8. Otherwise I like real efficiency.