IT Crowd was three British goofballs doing elaborate running gags over 24 episodes.

BBT was four creepy bigots and a nice blonde woman doing pop culture references and calling one another stupid for 279 episodes before spinning out an 80s nostalgia prequel series.

It was the difference between a few cherished cleverly crafted comedy routines and endless derivative slop.

with AI you can give it very precise requirements on what you want to see

Setting aside the fact that you could do this already with a sufficiently well-tagged library of traditional pornography, you’re neglecting two big caveats

1. People’s porn tastes are so rarified that they need exacting specifications in order to enjoy it

2. AI consistently and faithfully delivers on queries, rather than pumping out a bunch of vague approximations full of uncanny valley graphical artifacts

There are people who would pay to have porn videos created to their taste.

And they can already do that with Cam Girls, for infinitesimally less than it costs to run a high end AI model.

Now people who have such extremely specific desires don’t have to shell out thousands for a private video from their favorite star.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good

The high price is what makes the luxury good appealing. If everyone can get it, then it isn’t what a handful of high rollers are after.

The real “money in AI porn” isn’t reshuffled budget-tier bulk content. It’s the promise of exclusive ultra-high-end luxury taboo. And the end of that road is just the porn version of Star Citizen. Someone who has baited a bunch of 4chan stogies with more money than sense into putting up $40k for the opportunity to have a five-way with Leia Oregon, Jessica Rabbit, and Rhea Ripley in six months to a year, once we’ve tuned the prompt just right.

But that’s not any kind of industry. It’s just scams.

The average techie does NOT fit the mold of “tech bro”.

Largely because Techies actually understand technology while Tech Bros mostly just know how to repeat something they half heard on Joe Rogan in the middle of a sales call.

If we continue to lump that large majority of nerds in with that group;

Bros, traditionally speaking, aren’t considered nerds. They’re more often thrown in with jocks.

Mate, you can use AI for porn

A classic scarce resource on the internet. Why pick through a catalog of porn that you could watch 24/7 for decades on end, of every conceivable variation and intersection and fetish, when you can type in “Please show me naked boobies” into Grok and get back some poorly rendered half-hallucinated partially out of frame nipple?

just the fact that it’s an automated goon machine should tell you that we are not going to live this one down

The computer was already an automated goon machine. This is yet one more example of AI spending billions of dollars yet adding nothing of value.

Sure. But this is an argument for piracy far more than quality.

If you’ve got the money to burn and consider emulation a hassle, you’re still buying a new Switch (tariffs pending)

Haha. Not in the US, thank you Mr. Trump very much.

That’s still just Nintendo with extra steps.

I mean, if you were bearish in 2023 I couldn’t really blame you. But shorting is an expensive hobby.

This isn’t the first time in the last century we’ve had a big economic crash and a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment cresting into a paramilitary response. Hoover’s Great Depression and the OG Immigration Quotas system, Eisenhower and Operation Wetback along with the Recessions of '53 and '58, Nixon’s Stagflation and border closure with Mexico, Reagan’s S&L crash and closing the border with Mexico, Bush Jr’s Great Recession and border crisis…

Pretty much every Republican Presidency delivers two things.

The last three years have produced some of the most outrageously good returns in the market’s history. Like, throw your money in the S&P and get 25% ROI any-idiot-can-get-rich levels of good returns.

What the hell have you done with your portfolio that you missed all of it?

Why is this happening? Why did the stupids get so powerful?

This isn’t unique to the modern moment. Your parents called their elders stupid. Alphas will call Millennials stupid. But if we want to get to the real disparity between ideologies - the reason so many people are getting MAGA pilled in the face of seemingly obvious disaster - it really does just boil down to our mass media poisoning our brains.

Fifty years of misinformation, con-artistry, and industrial scale commercial fraud has given birth to a population that is simultaneously desperate for a White Knight to come save them and so steeped in cynicism that they accept idiots and assholes in power as the best we’re capable of doing. Whether its Trump or Biden, Bezos or Musk, Wolf Blitzer or Alex Jones, there’s this baseline understanding that “My guy might suck but the other guy is so much worse”.

And the deadliest poison of them all is the pride - the implicit assumption that you can’t trust anyone but yourself because you’re surrounded by morons. We’re increasingly alienated from one another and exposed to manipulation by computerized algorithms A/B testing us for our biases. Divided from one another, with our hatreds toward The Other inflamed while our access to basic necessities increasingly gated, we’re pushed into deeper and more vulgar polarized camps micro-managed by demagogues and other influencers.

“The Stupid” is just the fear - of our looming poverty, of our dangerously polarized neighbors, of declining health and diminished free time. It’s not idiocy, its anxiety. We’re acting rashly because we all seem to know we’re being boxed in for the slaughter and none of us trust anyone else to recognize that we need to work together to escape it.

Chaos is a Ladder.

But its a ladder that periodically collapses when you’re halfway up and leaves you splayed out on the sidewalk in horrible pain and with five digit hospital bills.

How many people have suffered physical harm from ordering food adjacent to a service animal?

These rules seem arbitrary and capricious. If the dog is well-trained, the owner is able to meet its needs on the go, and nobody else is explicitly being bothered, there’s no compelling reason to block it from any of these establishments.

All of the above hold true for therapy animals, for instance. This isn’t about the animal being well-trained, it is about both the pet and the person to be comfortable and happy, without impinging on the comfort and happiness of others. Locking well-behaved pets out of all of the above establishments does nothing to improve your comfort or happiness. It only serves to inconvenience others.

War + Poverty is a consistent recipe for fascism

Dating apps are rigged to give men and women bad experiences so they (largely men) become desperate enough to pay $25 a month or whatever to have an unfair advantage.

It gets worse, as the engagement mechanic populates the apps with a particular kind of guy who is obnoxiously aggressive, persistent, and convinced that this is a game they can brute force with time/money. So women end up being introduced to a string of guys who believe they’ve “won” a date by “beating” the game while women are left fishing for profiles that don’t look completely gross or insane.

And that’s before you get into end-users who are straight up escorts or pimps or predators, fully internalizing the idea that site participants are just resources to extract.

It isn’t merely about giving people a bad experience, but to give them a cheap thrill that keeps them coming back to the apps without ever finding a fulfilling relationship that would render the website superfluous.

The internet (and other players!) likes to hate the players, not the game, and the only “comfort” many young men have is Tate and Co.

Tate on one side and Estee Williams on the other. Men are told to treat women like a commodity - interchangeable, disposable, and ultimately hostile to your personal interests - that you rent out when you’ve accrued enough surplus wealth. Women are told to embrace submissiveness, obsess over superficial appearance, and pursue men based entirely on their socio-economic status in pursuit of the same kind of passive incomes that Tate is selling.

These conservative icons put men and women into an inherent contradictory position, with the idea of two people coming together as collaborators (much less romantic partners) is fully alien. You’re purchasing a man’s income with your looks. He’s purchasing your looks with his hustle-money. You’re both purchasing the other’s status, with an eye towards a higher rung on the ladder. Neither one of sees the other as a life partner.

A Beautiful Mind - Bar Scene John Nash’s Equilibrium Game Theory

As the Buddha said in the Vasala Sutta, “Not by birth is one an outcast; not by birth is one a brahman. By deed one becomes an outcast, by deed one becomes a brahman.”

Why did the noble Japanese Buddhists boil Portuguese Christians alive? Was this one of those Brahman Deeds?

The Buddha goes on to criticize the various things that brahmins do

Much as Jesus critiqued the Pharasises. And yet modern Christian Dominionists have far more in common with Pharasises - even Roman Pagans - than the fishermen and slaves and prostitutes that were it’s original disciples.

The “liberal” in the USA is not a leftist in the same way a Tankie isn’t.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie

The term “tankie” was originally used by dissident Marxist–Leninists to describe members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who followed the party line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Specifically, it was used to distinguish party members who spoke out in defence of the Soviet use of tanks to suppress the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the 1968 Prague Spring, or who more broadly adhered to pro-Soviet positions.

Now, the modern day use of the term has shifted much farther to the right. Any form of resistance or dissent - particularly when it comes into conflict with the NATO military apparatus - qualifies, whether you’re a FARC guerilla or a Wikileaks editor of BDS advocate.

Palestinian rights organizers getting dragged of a university campus earn the label. Food Not Bombs charity workers earn the label. Internet slacktivists excited about the latest Deepseek patch earn the label. So, in that sense, sure. You don’t have to be a leftist to get called a Tankie.