the united states of america has declared war on affordable goods

Now that cyle IS our product engineering team, I can finally put my feet up, and relax. 

yup, it’s all me now, folks. all of you can retire early. 👍

seven years

eight years

nine years

my reign as product engineering ended today, one month shy of 10 years.

very funny to me when people act like animal farm and 1984 are revolutionary anti government texts that the Powers That Be dont want you to read when they have literally been a part of every standard middle/highschool english lit cirriculum in the usa and beyond for decades. precisely because theyre such convenient primers to propagandize that Commies = Bad. the government is quite literally making kids read them

also, animal farm is not just anti-communist, but anti-revolution in general. the whole point of the story is if you overthrow your oppressor the new order will just become the same as the one it replaced! the story offers no suggestion of how the animals could have overthrown the farmer without the pigs becoming exactly like them, it just seems to begin and end with "never overthrown your oppressor because you'll end up right back where you started anyways." bleak and ugly story.

Not to be super English major about it, but Animal Farm was NOT an “anti-revolution” story. According to Orwell, it was inspired specifically by the Russian Revolution that led to the Stalinist regime. The story of animal farm is essentially what happened to the Russian people: they had a revolution against the tyrannical ruling class, only for the very people who had promised them freedom to turn into tyrants themselves.

The moral of the story is not “don’t have a revolution,” it’s that you should always be suspicious of those who promise you this utopian idea of freedom while still aiming to maintain power. The pigs never wanted to actually make everyone free, they just wanted to be the ones in charge. The novel details every small instance of the farm sliding further and further into fascism until it’s too late for anyone to do anything about it.

And 1984 doesn’t have much to do with communism at all. It’s about totalitarianism and fascism. There’s nothing pro-capitalist about the book. A totalitarian government like Big Brother’s could exist in either a capitalist or communist society. The point is the control they have over their people, and how important the flow of information is to that control.

George Orwell literally risked his life fighting fascists, so I think it’s pretty unfair to reduce his books to “anti-commie” propaganda. He was intensely critical of any state that maintained too much power over its people, and at the time, one of the worst examples of that was the recent communist revolution in Russia, which deposed a monarchy to install a dictator in its place.

#tell me you haven't read 1984 or animal farm without telling me you haven't read them#talk about pissing on the poor holy shit

#y'all know they end up on banned books lists like every year right?#right?#sniff yall are so stupid dot jpeg

Like, even the Wall Street Journal thinks Trump has fucked up.

And they are run by Jeff Bezos.

people will be like “don’t worry it’s all in your head!” like babe… yes… that’s the problem… how do i get it out of there…

(Largest tax hike source; Stock market source)

The office of the President has no inherent tariff authority, and only has this "emergency" power through existing Congressional law; under that law, Congress could cancel the "national emergency" via a simple majority vote in each chamber.

Trump is all like "Australians sell their beef to us, but they won't buy any of ours 😡"

Which.... yeah? Of course???? Why would we import external beef from so far away when we produce more than enough to meet our own needs??

Not to mention that USA still has both mad cow disease and foot and mouth disease, but Australia doesn't -- AND America has increasingly lax commercial-level health and safety standards, meaning the risk of pathogens like MCD/F&M spreading through the US are significantly increased, and we don't have either here in Australia, so of course we don't want to import beef from a country that could conceivably spread the diseases to us???

But even aside from that. There are not that many Australians. But there are a lot of Americans. AND Australians eat an average of 23.4 kilos of beef per year but we produce 2.2 million tonnes. We produce WAY more beef than our population eats. So of course we don't import much????? And of COURSE it's not from America, which is both significantly further away than our current importers (primarily New Zealand and Japan), AND which has significantly lower health and safety regulations than we do????

Meanwhile, Americans average aprox 37 kilos of beef per person per year, but produces around 12.4 million tonnes. USAs population is 12 times larger than ours but only produces 5 times more beef than we do, AND consumes more per capita than we do. Of course USA imports large quantities of beef. Because their domestic production doesn't meet their domestic demand. Meanwhile Australia's production vastly outweighs our domestic demand, so of course we don't import American beef?????

Thats...... that's how imports and exports are supposed to work???? You export excess of what you have to someone who has less of it, and in turn, they export to you the produce/products that YOU don't have. This is fucking basic??????????

"Waahhh, Australia won't import American beef 😭😡" yeah???? Of course we don't????????

PLUS!!!!! Overall, Australia imports 34 billion dollars worth of stuff from America per year. Meanwhile America only imports $16 billion from us.

Putting tariffs on a country that imports more from you than they export to you is uhhhhhhhhh, FUCKIN' STUPID. If america tariff everything we send to them it's on all of $16b worth of stuff. If we tariff everything of theirs then we'll be slapping taxes on more than double what they can tax us.

Trump is such a fucking moron.

Play your roles!

it is absolutely essential to have friends you can have extremely insane pervert conversations with. this is kind of what makes life worth living

you haven't unlocked platonic pining yet? wow ok fake yearner

the refrgeratorrrrrrr

ur payin eighty dollars for this?

genuinely, what the fuck is the point of this?

you may think it took the terror fandom a lot of effort and dedication to become the #1 producer of erectile dysfunction fics but let me tell u. it wasn't hard

no can do i'm afraid

I assigned a writing prompt a few weeks ago that asked my students to reflect on a time when someone believed in them or when they believed in someone else. One of my students began to panic.

“I have to ask Google the prompt to get some ideas if I can’t just use AI,” she pleaded and then began typing into the search box on her screen, “A time when someone believed in you.”

“It’s about you,” I told her. “You’ve got your life experiences inside of your own mind.” It hadn’t occurred to her — even with my gentle reminder — to look within her own imagination to generate ideas. One of the reasons why I assigned the prompt is because learning to think for herself now, in high school, will help her build confidence and think through more complicated problems as she gets older — even when she’s no longer in a classroom situation.

She’s only in ninth grade, yet she’s already become accustomed to outsourcing her own mind to digital technologies, and it frightens me.

When I teach students how to write, I’m also teaching them how to think. Through fits and starts (a process that can be both frustrating and rewarding), high school English teachers like me help students get to know themselves better when they use language to figure out what they think and how they feel.

. . .

If you believe, as I do, that writing is thinking — and thinking is everything — things aren’t looking too good for our students or for the educators trying to teach them. In addition to teaching high school, I’m also a college instructor, and I see this behavior in my older students as well.

-----

This! This is what scares me the most about AI! Physical exertion is difficult if someone isn't used to it, and it gets easier the more often it's done. When it's done often enough, it becomes a habit. Mental exertion is exactly the same. Thinking is a learned skill just like a sport is, and an entire generation is growing up without that most critical skill.

An unthinking populace is a more easily controlled populace.