I miss the OG Prey. That gravity was fun.

If you document that you gave it, you need to have seen them take it. If they’re being stubborn and are competent, document that you educated them on the consequences and that they still refused.

They have windows in the basement?

“Swing state” is such a misnomer for any of them. They have one drunk Tuesday and never live it down.

You’ve hit the nail on the head here: we’ve been conditioned to believe there is no alternative. And frankly, reimagining an entire way of life is really intimidating. But the current way of living is not sustainable either.

I think of this as akin to Moses wandering the desert for 40 years (the ins and outs are contested among scholars, of course) — the purpose of wandering was to shed the lived memory of Egypt and allowing a new generation to start over with the knowledge of what happened before, but not the suffering of it.

Ultimately I’m against retreating into nihilism, nor do I think rationalizing cosmetic changes to the status quo as truly progressive is a solution either. We are forced to work and live in the “wrong state of things” so to speak, and we can either try to drag this out for generations or have some kind of “snap” that allows for a significant do-over with the fresh wounds of The Now very much on our minds.

You’re not totally wrong with “burn it down” in the sense of bureaucracy. The sociologist Weber felt they were actually efficient systems up to a point, and even necessary for democracy, but then became the worst nightmares that we could never undo. And as we see much more recently, Graber argued that any time you asked the government to streamline, it would just increase regulations, paperwork, bureaucrats needed for the aforementioned, etc.

So we have this necessary evil to start the kind of system we wanted in place, it’s only getting worse, and any candidate with smart ideas who wants a chance gets sucked right into it. “Reform” only reproduces the problem in a slightly different direction. Like Akira or a T-1000 I guess.

There’s a quote variously attributed to a bunch of people that’s along the lines of “you can’t reason someone out of a corner they didn’t reason themselves into” — not to say your friends didn’t necessarily come by a faulty logic to get themselves there; rather that there’s some innate values that were interpellated by the rhetoric of the so-called redpill, and you’re unfortunately seeing an aspect of them that was always there but perhaps in different forms. It’s not worth your time to argue with them, and sadly, may not be worth your time to be in that environment either.

I am also reasonably sure — not 100%, but reasonably — that Siri has something to do with the transcription process for visual voicemail.

It’s so British you’ll shit the Queen.

65 is also, coincidentally, the age after which the majority of strokes occur in the US. Not to say we don’t have people who aren’t awesome senior citizens (far from it!) but the stakes are so damn high for people who are in government positions, especially when you have 6-year terms or lifetime appointments and your party really, REALLY wants to hold that seat.

“Here’s our millennial expert on technology to explain it to us. Thank you for being here.”

“No problem.”

“WHAT”

“Where the stars at night are big and bright… because our power grid shit the bed again.”

As the saying goes, an injury to one is an injury to all.

Tried to catch a knife I dropped, forgetting the old maxim: “a dropped knife has no handle.”

Nah it might be a real weight off their shoulders

Nonsense. This place is refreshing, like the bold taste of New Coke.

Taking it further, I miss a built-in preamp