Category: Politics

Quarterly inventory – 2025 Q3

Dear FutureMe,

Today would be a good day to do a quarterly inventory.

How is your personal life going?

How is your work life going?

How is your Volunteer Service life going?

Future Me

Personal Life

Financial Milestone

On Thursday, September 25, I paid off my mortgage. That is to say, I’d asked my mortgage holder, Rocket Mortgage, to send me a payoff letter for the 25th, and I took it to my banker, who wired the money over.

I’d been on an aggressive payoff schedule, so from now on, I won’t be out that $2,000 per month. Hallelujah!

Nextcloud feature add

By default, Nextcloud does not include file indexing, so there is no file content search. I was pretty sure that during a volunteer service planning meeting that I had written down notes of who was going to be doing certain tasks, but I could not find the file with those notes. I added Elasticsearch to my Nextcloud server and configured a Full Text Search – Files app to use Elasticsearch. Later I might add tesseract-ocr and scan images too.

This quarter was really shitty, politics-wise.

Second, on the morning of August 27, 2025, Robin (Robert) Westman murdered two children and injured twenty-one at the Church of the Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It disappeared from the news quickly.

First (but we wouldn’t hear about it until later), Iryna Zarutska was killed in a way that exposed just how broken the government is.

Iryna’s murder also exposed just how much the government has put the mass media on a leash. She was murdered on August 22, 2025, but for seventeen days, the mass media didn’t report anything, until the horrific video of her murder circulated on social media. Her murder didn’t fit the government narrative, so there was a news blackout. Then, when social media exposure forced their hand, several mass media organizations reported not on the murder or murderer, but rather that MAGA had its panties in a twist about a white girl being murdered.

Third, Charlie Kirk was assassinated. Again, the mass media response has been contemptible. As I said before, Wikipedia couldn’t remove Mr. Kirk’s assassination from their front page fast enough. They had Robert Redford’s death of natural causes on their “In The News” page for twelve days, while Charlie Kirk’s assassination was up for five days. Over on Reddit, the woke folk are demonstrating just how hypocritical they are and that they don’t mind telling lies to support their position.

Fourth, the news broke about 22-year-old Logan Federico who was executed by 30 year-old Alexander Dickey: he dragged her from bed, forced her to her knees, and executed her. He then went on a spending spree with her credit cards. Alexander Dickey had been arrested 39 times with 25 felonies. The murder was committed in May 2025, but the fact that the murder is only getting news attention now exposes how news media downplays stories that don’t fit their narrative.

Congressmen Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna have a bill waiting for one more signatory that will force every member of Congress to go on the record about whether they want to expose who the child rapist customers of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell are. The Republicans in Congress are fighting this as hard as they can, which is reprehensible. My congressman, Vince Fong, through inaction1 is showing that he also wishes to protect the child rapists.

Caffeinated Kool-Aid

I’m on the fence with this.

On the one hand, inflation is still terrible, and my caffeine fix became so overpriced that I quit. Coffee is fine, but during the summer months, I’d rather drink something cold. Iced coffee is fine, but I’m not getting much caffeine (but plenty of ice, which takes a while to melt). I got the thought of going to a “Dollar Store” and indeed they do have G-Fuel energy drinks at $1.25. That is still expensive, but it isn’t ridiculously expensive. I considered ordering the cans online. The G-Fuel website wants far too much money for the cans; but … what they really want to sell me is powder. This makes sense: water is costly to ship, and every household has running water.

And I do like the idea of multiple flavors. So I placed an order online. The flavors I got were lingonberry, raspberry lemonade, blackberry apple, strawberry citrus, watermelon mint, and blueberry lemonade.

In theory, one tub of powder can make 40 servings. There was a sale, so each tub was $18. That’s 45 cents per serving, which is great. Even if their shaker bottle is holding two servings, that’s still 90 cents, and 24 ounces of drink instead of 16.

Although I’m not really a fan of Sucralose, I do like “sweet” with no calories. The powders come with caffeine, vitamins C, E, B12, and B6, and some have niacinamide (vitamin B3).

On the other hand, as a brand-new, never-before-ordered, first-impressions-matter customer, at the end of the order, their website popped up an offer: would you like to add some hydration packets?

I foolishly said yes.

They ripped me off big time.

This is how you treat new customers?

Yeah, I no longer want to order products from you anymore.

I still have plenty of the caffeinated zero-calorie Kool-Aid type powder on hand. I do like the flavors and energy lift it gives me. But I’m sore that they chose to rip me off. Did they really think I’m such a chump that I wouldn’t notice?

Music Player Demon

I currently have a Raspberry Pi as my MPD server, and three clients. The script I wrote to populate the list isn’t nearly what I want it to be, but it runs without me having to deal with it. Two of the clients are full blown Fedora 42 KDE Plasma Edition workstations, so I have the Cantata program on them and can mess with the songs in the list all I want manually. I do enjoy having background music all the time, and once per hour a voice announcing, “The time is nn AM” (or PM).

Supercuts Subscription

The last haircut I got from a barber who rents a chair in a barbershop was $35. It was a low quality haircut, and the guy rushed the job. Then a friend of mine told me about Supercuts having a subscription service, which is a good deal. The Supercuts hair cutters / barbers don’t rent a chair; they get paid hourly whether there are customers or not. They get minimum wage, which is $16.50 per hour at the time of this writing.

In Walnut, California, Moxie Management Group “… is a franchise of Supercuts with 78 locations in California.” They offer a subscription service of $22 per month for as many haircuts as you want, plus $10 per month to include beards. So for $32 per month plus tip, I can get a haircut every week? Versus $35 per <whenever> including tip?

The math turns out to be about the same, except that on the all-I-want program, I’m going to the barber 52 times a year instead of 26. That’s a win for me.

Work Life

In previous Quarterly Inventories, I’d say something like, “If $18,000 fell out of the sky and into my lap, I would retire tomorrow.” Well, that dollar amount was based on how much of my mortgage I had left.

Today that is now zero. 🙂

I did drain my cash-on-hand pretty low to get the mortgage to zero. My financial advisor had told me that she wanted me to have $25,000 in the bank on the day I retire. I’m hoping to retire on 2026-07-19, but I don’t know if I’ll be there by then.

It does make my attitude toward work a little better, though. If Microsoft cannot figure out how to get Copilot to properly form a PowerShell to do text matching, that RSN2 will be Not My Problem.

Volunteer Service Life

Ringtones

Heh. At one of my meetings, I signed up to be the timer. We tell people they get to speak for three minutes, and here’s what the time expired warning sounds like: <I play the alarm ringtone>.3 Fun for me is to buy an MP3, take a snippet of it with Audacity, turn it into a ringtone file, and sync it to my phone. The more popular / recognizable the song, the more people laugh or smile. You could call it a variation on the game Name That Tune.

A friend said I should use Run DMC’s “You Talk Too Much,” but that seems a little too harsh to me.

But it is fun each week to come up with a new soundbite.

The Events Calendar

Sugar Calendar is no good. We bought The Events Calendar, and now I need to migrate everything to it.

  1. Isaac Asimov wrote the Three Laws of Robotics, and Number One is “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” Vince Fong is fine with inaction because he thinks doing nothing will let him off the hook. This is an incorrect assumption on his part. ↩︎
  2. Real Soon Now, popularized by BYTE magazine columnist Jerry Pournelle about when Microsoft would ship a product or update. It generally means any time period from two weeks to four years. ↩︎
  3. I set the timer for 3:30, because many a time, three minutes exact isn’t quite enough. ↩︎

Today, I received an email from twelve years ago

Twelve years ago today, I sent an email to myself via FutureMe.org

I included a link to a YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yw1Tgj9-VU

That was the link to Linkin Park – In The End (Official Music Video) for a really long time. But when I try to visit it now, Google denies it, saying I must log in, first.

What is weird is that I can remain logged out and search for “Linkin Park – In The End (Official Music Video)” and YouTube does show it to me, but at a different URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVTXPUF4Oz4

The email I sent was about Edward Snowden and his (then) recent whistleblowing activity.

Edward Snowden was a part of the NSA, but his trust fell apart. He had to blow the whistle, but then flee to Russia, to escape USA persecution.

It should have been the ultimate shame of the USA government that they were not trustworthy enough for their own citizen to face an honest trial in the USA.

me, September 15, 2013

I, too, had seen the YouTube video of the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress that every American wasn’t getting the terrorist treatment. Here’s another copy of the video – the spicy part begins at the six minute mark. Shortly after, Edward Snowden blew the whistle.

Nothing has really changed, though.

The government still surveils everyone without a warrant. They still subvert elections.1 They still use taxpayer dollars to astroturf Reddit to push narcissism like it is a good thing. C’mon, liberals: band together to fight your imagined (insane) oppression! Only your clicks can save our self-esteem!

Well, that and the occasional premeditated murder. Hooray for those murderers, though! Amiright?

Wikipedia couldn’t get Charlie Kirk’s assassination off their front page fast enough.

Almost all the major media vilified Charlie Kirk after his death. He was popular, talked sense, and held people’s attention (and they don’t). It wouldn’t be so angering if they weren’t flat-out lying about him. They happily pervert what he says to make it malicious, and then they hold him up as malicious to justify their vilification. It is the classic straw-man argument.

Not almost: all the major media suppressed the Iryna Zarutska story for two and half weeks, because it didn’t fit their narrative. And when they were forced to acknowledge it, they used it as a platform to decry the conservatives for getting uppity about wanting to not be murdered.

You don’t hate the media enough.

The only good news is that Banksy made a splash, with a recent painting. What sort of perverse world do we live in where this is good news?2

Jeffrey Epstein was taken care of, and Ghislaine Maxwell is in prison for trafficking hundreds (if not a thousand) children to absolutely no-one. Half of Congress wants to protect the child rapists, and Congressman Vince Fong has still not signed the resolution to expose the child rapists.

If I’d known then what we know now, I’d have started giving away “Make Orwell Fiction Again” hats twelve years ago.

I somewhat would like to send another email to myself via FutureMe.org for another twelve years in the future.

But with the state of the nation today and the direction it is going, I’d have to generate unimaginable horrors to temper what the future could look like.

  1. As it turns out, Russiagate was fraudulent and an authorized government action. The suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story by Twitter and Facebook was done at the behest of government actors protecting their desired candidate. ↩︎
  2. The good news is that with this, the UK government was confronted with their behavior. ↩︎

Another letter to Congressman Vince Fong

To the Honorable Vince Fong,

I request, as a constituent, that you sign the discharge petition to release all the documents the government has about Jeffrey Epstein and the crimes he and his cohorts committed.

If the women in your life were subjected to the horrors that Epstein and his cohorts committed, you would want that evil stopped. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and this petition is the step needed to bring this evil out into the sunlight so the process can begin.

Please step up and do the right thing and support this petition.

Respectfully,
David Gerisch

Sent today around 10:25 AM

Jay Leno joke, today not funny

One of my favorite Jay Leno jokes revolves around Congress taking its annual recess. After they would do so, Jay would say “Congress has just begun its summer recess; the realm is safe, once again.”

It is quite funny, because it says Congress does more harm by being in session than not.

Today, however, with Speaker Johnson calling for a recess to avoid a vote on H.R. 581, tweaks the joke in a horrific way:

“Congress has just begun its 2025 summer recess; the pedophiles are safe, once again.”

I’ll note that my Congressman Vince Fong did not vote in favor of H.R. 185, nor has his office replied to my email and request for response.

I just sent a letter to my Congressman

Honorable Vince Fong,

I request that you support House Resolution 185 to advance responsible policies. This bill may also be known as the “Epstein Files Transparency Act”.

I am certain that you understand that the damage done to children who are raped is profound and lasts a lifetime. You seem to be someone of good character, so I think that you might agree that no amount of “the ends justify the means” can excuse away the horrific acts by Jeffrey Epstein, his clients, and collaborators. As someone who believes in the rule of law and the fundamental advantage that the USA has because our judicial system is not easily bought off, these perpetrators need to be brought to justice as proof that the system still works. I request that you publicly support this bill, that you vote in favor of this bill, and support your other members of Congress who also support this bill.

Thank you for your time and attention to this.

David Gerisch

That’s the letter I sent, via https://fong.house.gov/contact

One of the interesting things I’ve read was a question put to people who had experience in both the USA and in other countries. The question was “What is the biggest difference between your home country and the USA?” The answer was that the USA follows the rule of law more than other countries do. Here in the USA, we simply assume that the judiciary cannot be bought, and that is mostly true. In many other countries, it is far less true than what we have here in the USA. Someone cannot cheat their neighbor out of property or money and simply expect that a large bribe will make the judicial problem disappear. That doesn’t happen here (mostly), and if someone tried it, the newspapers, radio, and television would have a grand old time running the story. This is the primary reason I never want to see government subsidies for mass media: once the newspapers / radio / television got hooked on that government subsidy money, they’d be thrall.

Time with family can be hard

When I started this blog, I had three goals in mind:

  • Learn WordPress, and have content to play with for things like upgrades, migrations, and figuring out how WordPress works.
  • Provide technical tips, tricks, and recipes for doing computer things, primarily on Linux.
  • Writing content that expresses my opinions.

If I’m honestly looking at my own motivations, that last one holds the most appeal to me.

I’m old enough to be a grumpy old man, but I’m also old enough to know that opinions without solutions are terrible reading. No-one wants to listen to a whiner.

In fact, one of the defining moments of my life was when my dad was exasperated with me, and he exclaimed at me something I needed to hear at that time:

Anyone can whine about things; useful is providing a solution.

My dad, when I was about thirteen years old and whining about something big time

So, I’m up north with family for Christmas vacation. Dealing with family can be hard. I have two solutions: have another community I can escape to (my volunteer service community), and have my computer I can escape to.

Yesterday was day four of cabin fever with the whole family. My brothers and mother had exhausted watching all the movies and YouTube they could stand. They wanted to do something, anything, that wasn’t watching more television. YouTube is simply television without the cost overhead of paying writers, producers, and talent. My brother’s television set comes with YouTube, with embedded advertising. It sucks, mightily. YouTube also has the problem that it gives a platform to total con-men who are looking for marks to prey upon. This really isn’t any different from the television preachers who pitch salvation for dollars.

And I get it: if my life were that empty, I’d be easily preyed upon, too.

At this point in my blog, I’d like to do a 4,000-word essay on the problems of American life where our government and media conspire to drive us to be consumers of crap to fill the void in our life, instead of healthy and useful. But all that would really boil down to is this:

As an aside, I really like Stephan Pastis’ comic strip, and buy his page-a-day calendar every year. Most days are at least mildly amusing, and some days produce actual laugh-out-loud moments. Some days are profound. Not that I’m trying to convince you to buy stuff to fill the void in your life….

So, back to my family. We all suffer from a lack of purpose in life. I’ve got it the least bad: I’m still employed with a place that pays me well, and (although I hate my job) I’m working toward my retirement.

Mom never did take my step-sons in as her grandkids, and neither of my brothers got married and produced kids either. So my mom tends toward self-pity, having gone through the trouble of raising us boys, but not getting the benefit of grandchildren. She does take care of Frank, the man she partnered with after a year of being a widow. So that gives her purpose. She also had to specifically decide to go out and socialize. She has friends she visits to play Majong, and a club called Gadabouts, and Red Hat Society club.

One of my brothers was forced into retirement early, and hasn’t found the motivation to get a job. He’s actually a superb cook, and this last week he has been cooking all our meals. The meals have been delicious. But in his off-time, all he does is watch videos and sleep. Clearly, he is depressed. I hope he can find a purpose in life.

My other brother has always had a rough life. He works in a low-end job, and tends to get restless, irritable, and discontent with whatever job he has. The longest stretch where he was happy was in Death Valley, where he worked from 2003 to 2021. But the HR lady there went woke, and as soon as the trans asshole showed up and started their bullying, the HR lady sided with the trans asshole, and my brother quit. Now he’s up here in a cold, dismal town where it rains nine months out of the year. In his off-time, all he does is watch videos and listen to re-runs of Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM. I hope he can find a purpose in life.

So how do I find purpose in life?

Volunteer service is the obvious win for me here. The particular people I spend time with consider ourselves a fellowship; this is a good name for our community. Although I had to go through hell to face the fact that I needed help, once I got into this fellowship of help, my life turned 180° around. I can help because I’ve been through the same hell that all newcomers are going through.

If I didn’t have this, I hope I would have found a church fellowship to be a part of.

I do have a circle of friends on the Internet. We met on Slashdot more than 22 years ago. Back in 2019, one of our friends died, and 21 of us went (most of us flew) to Seattle to attend his celebration of life. Although I still communicate with these friends, it isn’t daily like it used to be. Half of them came down with TDS, and the community split in two. But at one time, there were more than 80 of us. This digression brought to you by:

There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance—that principle is contempt prior to investigation.

William Paley (1743-1805)

Half of my circle of friends on the Internet have contempt, prior to investigation, regarding God.

I thank God that I am not one of them. I have plenty of evidence that something out there, supernatural and surpassing understanding, is an active agent in my1 and other people’s life. Point being, that if I weren’t in the fellowship I’m in, I would hope I would become a part of a religious fellowship.

Volunteering down at a soup kitchen would be good for my soul.

Any sort of volunteering would be good for my soul.

I also have plans (or perhaps they are dreams) of writing a lot of code when I retire. Priority 1 is obviously more exercise. After that, I want to write some code to lay out Factorio blueprints, and build the software that manages the tree structures needed to lay out connected pieces in sensible ways. Ultimately, I intend to write a flow charting-based integrated development environment based on Nassi-Shneiderman flowcharts. I’d like to use the IDE to write a video game loosely based on the book of The Legacy of Heorot.

Back to my volunteer service: there are two different offices which are either directly related or tangentially related; I plan of volunteering at both after I retire2. They also need a newsletter editor, and I’d love to write a system in LaTeX to import the various documents and format them consistently. I’m not terrible with Perl, so I think I can work up a nice system of opening files with LibreOffice, converting them to plain text, formatting them the way I want, and then adding back in whatever italics, boldface, super- or sub-scripting elements were in the original. I already do the website for one of them.

So yesterday, everyone was frustrated that this time together had gotten so boring. But I’m not bored because I know “This too, shall pass.”, and, I have other outlets.

I hope, dear reader, that you too can find other outlets.

Volunteering my time and effort gives me a high-quality purpose in life. My self-worth goes up when I am helpful.

I hope you can find ways to grow your self-worth and purpose.

Merry Christmas.

  1. When I let Him. ↩︎
  2. One of them is a 501(c)(3), and for the next five days, I am president of the board of directors. That, plus $5, will get me a coffee at Starbucks. Not that I’d ever go to Starbucks, they’ve gone woke. Anyway… the other is probably also a 501(c)(3) but I haven’t tried becoming a board member yet. Having a day job is not conducive to being of service there. ↩︎

I am glad that Donald Trump won a second term as President of the USA

It was obvious that the 2020 election was stolen because of government interference – censorship – with the Hunter Biden Laptop story. There were some photographs on that laptop which would have put Barack Obama in an extremely difficult position, were he to be asked if he still supported Joe Biden for president. Hunter (Joe’s son) was enjoying corrupting Barack’s daughter – does Barack still support Joe for President?

No matter how Barack answered the question, the Democrats would have lost ten to fifteen percent of their voters. That would have made the election a landslide in favor of Donald Trump.

There was all loss and no win for the Democrats if that question got asked. To avoid that question being asked, our government colluded to censor the Hunter Biden Laptop story during the election.

I remember friends trying to share that story via Twitter and via Facebook, and their attempts to share were denied. These two companies have1 become censorship tools of the deep state. Google has since joined their rank.

But Julian Assange got it right: as Trump was forming his new government, he got hustled by deep state wolves in MAGA clothing. In Donald’s interview on the Joe Rogan podcast, he made the point that it is really difficult to know who to appoint. With a lot of the candidates, there isn’t a visible list of accomplishments. You really don’t know who is going to be good in a position. There are an influx of partisans telling him who to appoint, but they aren’t necessarily trustworthy either.

I am hoping that here in his second term as President, that Donald Trump nominates Ron Paul as Director of National Intelligence, and tells Ron that he can fire anyone he wants, and still have full support of the presidency. I personally think that the CIA should be decimated2, and hope that Ron Paul would be willing to do that. Doctor Paul might be a better fit for being over the Medicare department, because he is a medical doctor, and he has decades of experience fighting government largesse. So perhaps Edward Snowden should be pardoned and then made Director of National Intelligence. I’d like to see someone in charge who was bothered so much by how our intelligence agencies have strayed from their path. Both Doctor Paul and Edward Snowden fit that bill.

Another hope I have is that Donald Trump appoints Robert F. Kennedy Junior as Secretary of Health and Human Services, which would put him in charge of the FDA. Make America Health Again is a wonderful idea – probably the best idea. It could also make sense to put RFK Jr. as Secretary of Agriculture, since this position is over the Forest Service, and RFK Jr. is an environmentalist. Secretary of Agriculture is also in charge of food inspection and safety. But I think he would be best for our country directing the FDA to become a protector of the public instead of stooges for the pharmaceutical industry and the processed foods industry.

I am hoping that Donald Trump appoints Tulsi Gabbard as Secretary of Defense. I’d like to see Tulsi as our first female president. I actually wanted her as Vice President, but I admit that JD Vance was a great pick. Because Tulsi was active military and deployed to the Middle East, she has real-world experience in the horrors of war. That’s the Secretary of Defense I want. I also think that were she Secretary of Defense, when it comes time for JD Vance to pick a Vice Presidential running mate, Tulsi would be a perfect fit. That would then set her up to be our first female President.

I want our first female President to be someone honorable, not someone who slept her way to the top.

Another Cabinet pick I would like to see is Elon Musk being appointed as Secretary of Transportation, if only to get smart cars running on smart roads, quickly. It seems to me that this will be one of the best environmental moves; reducing as much as possible the amount of fuel used to transport food, goods, and people.

Of course, I’d also like to see Elon appointed Secretary of Government Efficiency. This position doesn’t exist (yet), but it should.

Although I think that Jack Welch destroyed General Electric by instituting a yearly rank-and-yank firing policy, I do think that the entire US government would benefit from a rank-and-yank performed at least once, and probably once per decade (randomly). Because Jack Welch pitched the idea to do it yearly, it destroys the company it is implemented in. But once in a great while? Yes, I can see how it would be good for an organization. Especially for government where it can be so difficult to fire bad employees.

Anyway, I am happy Donald Trump won the election. I know that there is still danger that the deep state will try to assassinate him before he takes office. But at least now, JD Vance would then become President, and he seems like the kind of guy who would not be cowed by the deep state. If an assassination of Donald Trump happened, I think JD Vance would prosecute whomever for treason with zeal to the fullest extent of the law.

  1. “Had” in the case of Twitter, because it was rescued by Elon Musk. ↩︎
  2. The term decimated has a specific definition: the Latin deci means “ten” so after decimation one out of ten are left. 90% gone, 10% left. With that, the CIA will be too busy to do their warmongering treason and censoring treason and could only focus on information collection actions. ↩︎

Ballot Measures: Just Vote No

If it was such a great idea, your representatives would have voted in favor of it, passed it, and then told you how great they are for getting it passed.

The only reason the ballot measure is being put in front of you is because when given the opportunity to put their name on it, your representatives shuddered at the idea and opted-out.

If this terrible idea passes, it’s your fault, not theirs.

That I am aware of, there was a single ballot measure that was a good idea: California’s Proposition 13 of 1978.

Prop 13 limited the taxes that the government could collect, so zero representatives were going to vote in favor of it: it had to come from the voters and be put in front of the voters. Governor Jerry Brown was warning everyone ahead of the election about what a disaster it would be, if it passed.1 It turned out to be the best idea ever.

Why was it the best idea ever? Because it limited taxes to a stable metric: property values. Before Prop 13, collected taxes were highly variable both by time and location. After Prop 13, Sacramento knew with high precision how much money was going to be coming in.

That didn’t stop the bureaucrats from spending foolishly; but it did remove the excuse that they overspent because revenues fell short this year. They overspent because they wanted to overspend.

Anyway, when your ballot has measures on it for you to approve, and they aren’t a grassroots movement to limit government reach, just vote no.

  1. After the election and it passed with an overwhelming majority, Jerry Brown tried to claim he was in favor of it all along, adding evidence to the old adage: “How do you know when a politician is lying? His lips are moving.” ↩︎

Reddit + Google partnership seems like a bad idea to me

Exclusive: Reddit in AI content licensing deal with Google

The problem is that (if you live in the USA) your and my tax dollars are spent by national security agencies polluting Reddit with content from sock-puppet accounts to promote certain agendas.

This means, that by design, Google will be training its AI on untrustworthy sources.

Nothing about this plan is wise.

I know that Google does plenty of stupid things accidentally, but this seems willfully stupid.

Dystopian Future

Dear FutureMe,

Just saw this new video of a dystopian future: ROSE | Short Film by Omid Pakbin

It is well done. Omid says he got the entire film done for $8,000.

I’d like to post it in the politics channel of some of the Discord servers I’m on, where my Circle-Of-Friends-On-The-Internet hang out. Well, I’d like to, but being on OpenSuSE, the Discord app is broken because the publisher has a new version out, and they don’t publish to the OpenSuSE repositories. I have to wait until a community member packages it for me. I have a running list of when Discord is working versus not working here: Discord app update – hooray! 🙂

As of this writing, Discord has been down since the 12th, and today is the 17th.

Anyway, if I’m still alive in 2028, how close did Omid nail it?

We already know that China is implementing the social credit score system today.

Seven days after Biden was elected, a guy, Douglass Mackey, was charged and found guilty of a tweet in the 2016 Presidential Race. Yes, in 2023 he was sentenced to 7 months in prison for a 2016 joke tweet. “Social Media Influencer Douglass Mackey Sentenced after Conviction for Election Interference in 2016 Presidential Race“

Recently there was a hearing on weaponizations of the government, where testimony was provided that after the 2016 election, federal officials said “something had to be done”. In their view, an outsider presidential candidate was such a threat that they needed to implement some censorship regimes: and they did so. Both Facebook and Twitter (pre- Elon) censored the Hunter Biden laptop story so that it wouldn’t spread and change the 2020 election.

There have been several hearings about weaponizations of the federal government to implement a censorship industrial complex. The censorship industrial complex was proposed in 2018, and was in force at Facebook and Twitter for the 2020 election. We wouldn’t know about Google unless a whistleblower comes forward; but their deplatforming of certain people on YouTube is obvious censorship.

Google, for weeks, was scrubbing news about the biggest denier of Pizzagate being found to be a producer of child porn. Today, they no longer say “this story is developing therefore it is too new to report on”, but they don’t link to much that makes Slade Sohmer look bad. They (mostly) only link to news that it’s all conspiracy theory.

So Google is on board with the censorship industrial complex. Facebook is too. Twitter / X under Elon appears to be the only social media company against it. Rumble will gladly host people against it, but they aren’t gaining much traction.

Bruce Schneier also points out that spying on people will only get worse with AI.

So the question is: just how close to truth is Omid Pakbin’s video going to get? It’s a great movie short: less than twelve minutes long. Very high quality, and amazing that it was pulled together which such a low budget.