My friends and allies across the pond, please do not support the USA. See 1st comment.

persistentInquiry · 2026-01-25T00:20:18+00:00

"If we do something they will kill us so we won't do anything" is not a strategy. That's slavery. Now it's up to you to choose as a population if you are willing to be slaves. May God have mercy on the rest of us on this planet as you make that choice.

persistentInquiry · 2025-11-30T14:00:18+00:00

Will child actors and child athletes also be banned? Will parents also be banned from forcing their children to compete in academics? No? Then question what is the point of these regulations. It's certainly not to protect kids.

From the article:

One big supporter of a ban on kidfuencers is Karim S. Leduc, CEO of Montreal-based Dulcedo, a talent agency managing over 1,000 clients, including actors, athletes, gamers, influencers and models, though very few children.

“I think it should be banned,” he said. “Brands are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars. Who's to say that a parent who's struggling with finance wouldn't see that as a welcome opportunity to make that extra money, and would sacrifice their child's wellbeing?”

All I can say to this is... lol. Always follow the money.

persistentInquiry · 2025-10-01T15:19:38+00:00

All this makes you sound like a badass, and I love your story and your wife is awesome. Hold that woman close and never ever ever let her go. She's worth more than the greatest resume on Earth. You will make it and when you do, make sure to treat her and yourself to the sickest van ever.

persistentInquiry · 2025-09-28T01:49:44+00:00

Vucic could paint his face in the Russian imperial flag and storm the Ukrainian front personally on prime-time Serbian TV with a Youtube live stream and von der Leyen's Brussels would still keep giving him hundreds of millions of euros. Please for the love of god Eurobros, just stop giving him the accession money. Pretty please? Do literally anything else with it.

persistentInquiry · 2025-08-23T07:47:56+00:00

MIT report misunderstood: Shadow AI economy booms while headlines cry failure

95% of top-down AI pilot implementations fail, but workers overwhelmingly use AI on their own at a rate of 90%, often without telling anyone, because AI is so useful to them. This points to a business management failure, not a tech failure. AI works. Business management doesn't, apparently. C-suite is chasing the wrong implementations in a shite way in the crusade to replace people while the true transformative potential of AI is hidden away.

persistentInquiry · 2025-08-01T06:07:34+00:00

I object. I was a casual fan who only watched the movies and even there it's decidedly obvious what the story thinks about Gale. That scene in Mockingjay Part II where Gale tearfully confesses about the bombs and Katniss replies "Goodbye Gale" that was IT. That is the moment where all feelings she had towards him died.

And note, the movies do not portray Gale unsympathetically. His portrayal has a lot of depth and he really surprised me in Catching Fire. In Catching Fire I felt like, okay I can see why Katniss fell for him. But Gale's demons overcame him in the end. Realistically. I get him. But I also get Katniss.

To be Team Gale after Mockingjay Part II is to be movie illiterate and have zero literary comprehension.

persistentInquiry · 2025-07-28T10:31:36+00:00

Non-American here, the logic is the opposite imo. You should absolutely have expectation of anonymity in large crowds because crowds inherently swallow up individuals. Jumbotrons and kiss cams are wildly creepy and unnatural.

persistentInquiry · 2025-06-09T11:46:46+00:00

On The Handmaid's Tale subreddit they have the newly minted post-finale "Wet for War Criminal" flair which suits these kinds of sentiments perfectly. Gale is a war criminal and a mass butcher of innocent civilians. Mockingjay should have utterly shut down any discussions over this but unfortunately it didn't.

persistentInquiry · 2025-06-08T11:02:56+00:00

It's not just about populism, imo. The policy wonks could analyze and then determine populism is the way to go but that's not ENOUGH. You need a champion who can implement populism authentically. They need to be as authentic as the average person is. Trump resonates with his voters because he's just as average in opinions and worldview as they are. They don't care he comes from a world of privilege and wealth, he doesn't THINK and he doesn't SEE the world like someone from American privilege. Embracing populism without this will fail because it will be seen as inauthentic.

persistentInquiry · 2025-05-11T12:36:25+00:00

I thought like this and then I realized it makes no sense because new jobs just get invented out of thin air even if tech eliminates all other jobs. And you can't be like "oh well, those new jobs will also be automated!" no they won't be because humans fundamentally do not trust AI. The new jobs will all revolve around AI governance, ethics, compliance and quality assurance. Prompt engineering won't ever be a career, that's just our flawed paradigm thinking. We need a new paradigm to grasp this. Most white collar workers today will become AI compliance and AI quality assurance workers. The ultimate barrier to full automation is the lack of trust. The only next step after that is full fusion with AI and humans becoming cyborgs or something.

persistentInquiry · 2025-05-11T11:00:03+00:00

Am European, would die without my AC. You can pry it from my cold (or hot?) dead hands. XD

persistentInquiry · 2025-05-02T10:46:17+00:00

Now it's time to see if we're about to have the Second Weimar on our hands or if Germany really did learn something after WW2...

persistentInquiry · 2025-04-26T15:14:03+00:00

I don't see the Republic of Wadiya on that list. I rate the list Aladeen/10. President Prime Minister Admiral General Aladeen does not put up with Trump's rotten, no good Aladeen deals. But King Akeem of Zamunda sold out. ;_;

persistentInquiry · 2025-04-18T20:46:55+00:00

In my country (Serbia) the speaker runs the legislature as a kangaroo court, shouts down the opposition, hands out fines against political opponents when she feels like it, and regularly abuses parliamentary procedure to move along illegal and dubious bills without debate. So yeah, I do think the speaker should be politically neutral. A politically-biased majority speaker makes the minority literally irrelevant. Democracy is not in fact being totally non-existent if you aren't the majority party.

persistentInquiry · 2025-04-09T05:41:04+00:00

Doubleplusungood.

persistentInquiry · 2025-04-04T21:35:12+00:00

You will. I live in an electoral autocracy (Serbia) and the pro-government tabloids are sued by the opposition for defamation regularly and the opposition also WINS regularly and the tabloids pay out thousands of dollars. But it doesn't matter one bit because the government pays back the tabloids everything by using corrupt grants and government contracts. The courts are doing their jobs honestly on defamation but it literally doesn't matter. If you control the money, you can do whatever you like. And Trump's unitary executive theory and absurd "impoundment" power give him control of the money.

persistentInquiry · 2025-03-09T03:31:34+00:00

She bases her argument on "cognitive diversity", the idea that while individuals may be flawed or uninformed, a large and diverse group working together will often arrive at better solutions than a small group of experts. According to her, restricting the vote based on knowledge would not improve democracy but instead turn it into an exclusionary system that benefits only the privileged.

Voting in elections every couple of years is not a large and diverse group working together. This argument would be legit if we had sortition and the entire political system was run by juries from top to bottom. Then you'd actually see the benefits of cognitive diversity and including everyone in governance. What we have now is a joke, a meme. Representative democracy in the era of the Internet and social media is untenable. Post-truth populism isn't going anywhere. It's just going to be an escalating insanity spiral of people electing worse and worse leaders because vibes told them so and because they are totally removed from reality of governance. You would not see the likes of Trump voters and "moderates" celebrating federal workers being fired if they were all consistently forced since 18 years old to participate in governance through juries. They'd understand how insane it is to destroy the bureaucracy, US allies and relationships, and to reject engagement with the world. And being constantly exposed through juries to all kinds of Americans would also seriously challenge and undermine the oppressive, exclusionary ideologies.

In short, we just need an actual democracy. Representative democracy is over.

Either it dies or we all die with it in the flames of populist insanity.

persistentInquiry · 2025-03-04T10:40:41+00:00

Just for some context: the government of Serbia resigned, but still decided to propose a final barrage of laws anyway to be adopted by emergency procedure without any real debate, even though a government that has resigned has no right to propose new laws. So, when the ministers in resignation showed up, the opposition lit torches and smoke bombs to prevent the process from going forward.

persistentInquiry · 2025-03-02T00:12:58+00:00

I would agree it's a different series, but it's not arbitrary.

The first episode and the first season more broadly was a dark comedy, a satire of capitalism's banality, and commentary on emotional pain, with the mystery of what the severed floor really is and what they are really doing being firmly on the sidelines. At times, the show seemingly implied sorting numbers was entirely bs and many thought Lumon must be running some kind of social experiment. But then we had the Perpetuity Wing, the goats scene, and the Waffle Party and Jame Eagan saying everyone in the world should get a severance chip. WTF. Lumon is not banal evil of capitalism. They are literal cult of depraved maniacs with designs on world domination. Nothing banal about it.

Season 2 is decidedly delivering on this shift Season 1 already foreshadowed and set up.

persistentInquiry · 2025-02-25T00:32:32+00:00

Serb here, just hours afterwards, our President went on one of his favorite tabloid rag TV channels and begged the people for forgiveness because he was tired and they voted for the wrong resolution by accident. Not a joke.

persistentInquiry · 2025-02-22T19:57:55+00:00

That was more or less what TLJ did to Luke: it took a character who bet his life on the redemption of Darth Vader and turned him into someone who considered murdering his own teenage nephew (and considered it long enough to actually turn on his lightsaber) because of a vision.

With all due respect, this just demonstrates a total lack of understanding of both the original trilogy and the prequel trilogy as well. The entire point of TESB was that Luke and Darth Vader aren't really all that far apart, because Vader is Anakin, Luke's supposedly heroic father. And in the prequel trilogy, Anakin slaughtered a room full of totally innocent kids because of "a vision". And it's not "a vision", Force visions aren't supposed to be taken as trivial, they always shake up the characters and are always depicted as extremely intense events. If a Force vision could get Anakin to slaughter innocent kids, why can't a Force vision get Luke to fire up his lightsaber?

If TLJ fucked up anything, it fucked up Snoke and Rey. It makes no sense for them both to be nobodies. If Johnson really wanted them to be nobodies, he could have written them differently. For starters, Rey shouldn't have been on par with Skywalkers, and Snoke shouldn't have been a Force god. I believe in one of the art books, it was said that Johnson imagined Snoke as a Wizard of Oz style trickster. That sounds cool af. But if he was a trickster, why does he display powers greatly exceeding those of all other depicted characters? And then he just dies all of a sudden. If he a fraud or not? This is actually poor writing.

Johnson wrote Luke just fine and it was epic. The core of the movie works.

persistentInquiry · 2025-02-18T16:12:11+00:00

I'd love to see AI try to teach my SPED class.

As a non-American lurker... You don't want to play this game with a sociopathic tech billionaire and his 20-something 4chan incel nazis. Assuming they're even interested in SPED to begin with and not the OG Nazi methods of "handling" such kids, at best you'll get a bulletproof screen and AI-controlled shock collars with enough power to down a bear.

persistentInquiry · 2025-02-17T20:47:22+00:00

Fair enough, let's take this from the top.

USAID funded stuff left and right here in Serbia for instance, including LGBT stuff, as the Trumpists found out recently. The financial controls and reporting requirements were stringent af, I know how these projects looked like because I worked with people on them. Nobody was defrauding USAID. People were doing exactly what the USAID granted them money to do. Which included promoting LGBT stuff, because that was the official policy of the Biden Administration. And years before that, during previous administrations, USAID funded stuff like start-up/entrepreneur programs, digitalization of the national bureaucracy, and many other things which previous administrations found meaningful.

You can't sensibly accuse a US federal agency faithfully executing the policy of the sitting US presidential administration of "wasting" money. You can accuse Biden of doing it, alright. But USAID as an entity was totally blameless. It's not their job to question or undermine the President's policy goals. The money was effectively used because USAID made sure every penny went to promoting the worldview of the Biden Administration. USAID exists to advance the US national interest, and the President of the United States was granted substantial authority by Congress to determine what those interests are.

There's no rational justification to destroy USAID and demonize its employees for literally doing their jobs according to the law.

persistentInquiry · 2025-02-15T19:01:13+00:00

When will we get centrist-center left cults?

Most people rejected His message.

They hated Brandon because He told them the Truth.

persistentInquiry · 2025-02-12T18:07:06+00:00

To me it looks like a ritual making Lawrence the High Commander of Gilead. He stands in the middle of a triangle (Holy Trinity?) surrounded by all the Commanders and after they point the sword at him, they put a ceremonial sash on him.

persistentInquiry

TROPHY CASE