Congratulations, <megaCorpName>! You have completed the Regulatory Capture research tree, and have unlocked State Capture!

Well, when did your whole life start?

It would definitely subvert my expectations

Tangentially:

George RR Martin says he is three quarters of the way through The Winds of Winter

George RR Martin is asymptotically approaching the completion of the next book in the series, while simultaneously aging in linear time, which presents fairly obvious problems.

So cool that they’ve burnished their international image with that whole comedy festival thing 🙄

So uh… Israelis, just to be clear, this is how you make most of the rest of the world kinda hate you.

I’d even take some sabotage by enterprising Ukrainian agents that caused some sinkings

I mean… sure, but to say Russia is not involved in Belarus is akin to saying a hand is not involved in a sock puppet.

This is… not meaningful, compared to what Russia pulled with all the Boeing and Airbus airframes they just… appropriated when the sanctions sunk their teeth in.

I guess you’ve been missing the news. They’ve been going ham on that all summer and autumn.

The Andrew formerly known as prince

Aborigines/First Nation peoples in Australia

How about just arrest and prosecution and actually serious sentencing for sexual assault? Because that’s, you know, not extrajudicial.

You got an article you wanna link to, or what?

Honestly though, anyone surprised by this is a fucking idiot. This was in the plan that they wrote and made publicly available years ago. You are not allowed to be surprised by this.

Inb4 orangeboi congratulates the junta or something like that

Which is my implied point. I started coming across services offering LLM posts designed to push grassroots engagement on Reddit around the same time too - pretty obvious writing on the wall

It’s INSANE. The bot flooding started to become notably - and noticeably - bad around the time the API exodus happened. And it’s only accelerated. And most people seem to just be pretending it’s not even happening.

Hey, straight up: good fucking riddance. We’ve got enough problems with malignantly idiotic conservatives and racists and fascists. I won’t shed a single tear if they want to move to a (more) authoritarian country.

Nonce is such a great insult, honestly