Silicon Valley turtleneck was just the Mao Suit of its era.

Jeff Bezos saved hundreds of billions of dollars by downsizing his wife.

We are heading towards a crash. We are very much already in one, and have absolutley no way out.

I think this is what folks lose track of when they talk about “the crash”. We’re all waiting with baited breath for the financial system to topple over. But the financial system is increasingly just a dozen private equity firms bidding up one another’s baseball cards. They can’t “crash” in the traditional sense until a sufficient number of them refuse to contribute more to the pot, and so long as everyone has easy credit there’s no real reason to do that.

Incidentally, JPow and Trump (and every Fed Chair/President going back to Bernenke/Obama) have both been militant in keeping Fed Interest Rates at historic lows going on nearly two decades.

Literally we are living through the gilded 1920’s again but with an American Hitler.

I mean, the parallels between Trump and Coolidge Eras are in abundance. War on Immigration. A finance/tech sector that’s eating the industrial economy. Massive spike in white nationalism paired with a full blown Red Scare. Deficit hawkery that never touches the national security state. Global ecological crises compounding into massive famines and agricultural failures.

We are a country being lead into disaster by the least competent people imaginable.

Part of the problem is that we’ve lost track of a consensus on what “competent” looks like. I see plenty of people (rightly) insist guys like Trump and Speaker Johnson and governors like DeSantis and Abbott are criminally incompetent. But then these same people get fully behind Gavin Newsom and Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris, seemingly without recognizing that they’re pushing the backside of the same privatization / national security state coin.

What do you do when blue state bastions like California and New Mexico are turning out Crypto Shills as quickly as any captured conservative enclave like Wyoming or South Carolina? What does competency look like in the wake of Biden’s squandered four years or Obama’s or Clinton’s corporately compromised time in office, for that matter?

How do you talk about climate change or even scratch the surface of our US-backed genocides in Gaza and Yemen and Afghanistan or talk about housing policy or college debts or union organization when half the elected liberal contingent is just a commodity that’s traded on the stock market?

We’re all waiting for the dream to end in a sudden shocking economic turn. I don’t know if that’s necessarily what will happen. What if we’ve just pivoted our economy towards a monetization of human suffering? What if this system is stable and enduring? There is no crash because there’s nothing left to be broken into and fleeced.

the world is rotten

The chef is rotten. The world is beautiful. You just can’t see it from inside the steamer.

Wake up, Hustle, and Grind. Ain’t no time for time off. You think Elon Musk became a billionaire while chasing tail or doing drugs or spending all his time playing video games?

You are well aware that those are retcon? None of this existed before “A New Hope”.

Lucas had reems of material he used to turn out multiple screenplays before he ended on New Hope.

That’s a big part of where those changes in the re-releases came from.

George Lucas is the perfect example what happens when you don’t do world building.

If you get into those coffee table books about the making of the first three movies, you find lots of world building.

All the bounty hunters on the deck of Vader’s Super Star Destroyer in Empire Strikes Back have canonical backstories, for instance. The cosmology of the galaxy - with Corusant at the center of the Empire and Tantoine way out in “Hutt Space” - was laid out by Lucas far in advance. “The Clone Wars” wasn’t just an off-handed reference, it was a thing Lucas had defined as the WW2 precursor to New Hope’s Vietnam. Hell, the fact that the first movie released was “Episode IV” should say it all.

One reason you got so many derivative works following Return of the Jedi is that Lucas dumped his director’s notes to the public as merch when production initially stalled on the Prequels.

Florida is well on its way

Learn about early American history, specifically the Revolutionary War and the period shortly before it.

The Regulator Movement in North Carolina, also known as the Regulator Insurrection, War of Regulation, and War of the Regulation, was an uprising in Provincial North Carolina from 1766 to 1771 in which citizens took up arms against colonial officials who they viewed as corrupt. Historians such as John Spencer Bassett argue that the Regulators did not wish to change the form or principle of their government, but simply wanted to make the colony’s political process more equal. They wanted better economic conditions for everyone, instead of a system that heavily benefited the colonial officials and their network of plantation owners mainly near the coast

During the American Revolution, many prominent Regulators became Loyalists, like James Hunter who fought at the Battle of Moore’s Creek Bridge. … The Regulators notably were never against the monarchy - their issue was with local corruption and elites abusing them.

Dunmore’s Proclamation was formally proclaimed on November 15. Its publication prompted between 800 and 2,000 slaves (from both Patriot and Loyalist owners) to run away and enlist with Dunmore. It also raised a furor among Virginia’s slave-owning elites (including those who had been sympathetic to Britain), to whom the possibility of a slave rebellion was a major fear.

Later British commanders over the course of the American Revolutionary War followed Dunmore’s model in enticing slaves to defect—the 1779 Philipsburg Proclamation, which applied across all the colonies, was more successful. By the end of the war, at least 20,000 slaves had escaped from plantations into British service

Shays’s Rebellion was an armed uprising in Western Massachusetts and Worcester in response to a debt crisis among the citizenry and in opposition to the state government’s increased efforts to collect taxes on both individuals and their trades.

When the Revolutionary War ended in 1783, Massachusetts merchants’ European business partners refused to extend lines of credit to them and insisted that they pay for goods with hard currency, despite the country-wide shortage of such currency. Merchants began to demand the same from their local business partners, including those operating in the market towns in the state’s interior. Many of these merchants passed on this demand to their customers, although Governor John Hancock did not impose hard currency demands on poorer borrowers and refused to actively prosecute the collection of delinquent taxes. The rural farming population was generally unable to meet the demands of merchants and the civil authorities, and some began to lose their land and other possessions when they were unable to fulfill their debt and tax obligations. This led to strong resentments against tax collectors and the courts, where creditors obtained judgments against debtors, and where tax collectors obtained judgments authorizing property seizures.

Just remember that the American Revolution was a bourgeois revolution that failed to address many of the underlying economic conditions plaguing the colonies from the outset. Yes, the American merchant class beat back the British Monarchists. But no, that wasn’t a happily-ever-after for the proletariat of the nascent nation.

Celebrate the Birth Of Your Country By Blowing Up A Small Part Of It

Inflation, in absolute terms, is a larger benefit to people with higher interest rates.

Fair enough. I’m more thinking in a discrete sense… “saving money” versus “owing money”… rather than implicitly how much less are you paying.

That’s a historically unusual artifact of the financialized housing market in a country where the population outpaces new available housing units while the economy continues to grow.

Go to Italy or - God forbid - Iraq or Ukraine or Myanmar, and you’ll find record inflation combined with falling real estate values. Buying a home in Lebanon or El Salvador or Bulgaria in 1975 wasn’t a good move. You had to be a certain proximity near the US/EU money printing machines and a distance from the US/Russia bomb dropping machines to get that arbitrage to work.

inflation is good if you borrow money

at below the rate of inflation

Inflation going to 2% to 6% when you’ve got a credit card with a 30% APY is of very marginal benefit.

Why should your fantasy game be limited by something like “health”.

One way of escalating drama and tension is by injuring a main character. The scene in Terminator 2, where Sarah Connor has to knock the T-1000 into the blast furnace with consecutive shotgun blasts, isn’t nearly as cool without her doing it with a wound in her arm. Frodo collapsing from exhaustion gives us the incredible moment of Samwise shouldering him and carrying the guy, ring and all, up the slope of Mt. Doom. Tinkerbell fading away after hearing “I don’t believe in fairies” is what gets the audience on their feet applauding her by the end of the third act.

And particularly for folks invested in the coolness of their characters, some conflicts are much more fun when the outcome isn’t anything either storyteller or player could have anticipated. A totally unexpected David v Goliath moment, where a scrawny guy fells a giant with a lucky shot, will be the kind of story people talk about for years - whether David or Goliath or both are PCs.

To write good Fantasy (of SciFi), you have to go through a process called “World Building”

I think this is more implying that you don’t have to work from the same framework for every fantasy world. Not everything has to be set in Arthurian Medieval Times with Crusader-Era social sensibilities. The menagerie of mythical creatures isn’t a prerequisite or delimiter (dragons / unicorns / etc are not a requirement nor are robots / cthulhoid horrors / woolly mammoths disallowed). You need internal consistency (to a degree) but you aren’t forced to adhere / omit any genre trope.

I would say, at an absolute bare minimum, you need some kind of fantastical or supernatural element to make it “Fantasy” as opposed to “Historical Fiction” or “Science Fiction” or some other category of fictional prose. Although, the genre of “Magical Realism” does make even that distinction a bit fuzzy.

many literature teachers / professors don’t even know about the idea of World Building

You don’t necessary need to go through the whole work of World Building if you’re just banging out a short story or novella. Even serial writers don’t necessarily bother going deep on the background material until they feel the need to expand the scope of the setting. I mean, look at the Star Wars setting. George Lucas didn’t have Jabba the Hutt defined as a big slug monster until the third movie. In the original film, there was a cut scene in which Han confronts Jabba, who was just a be-feathered chubby gangster.

If you’re just spitballing or cranking out bits of fiction in brief, World Building can be superfluous. A story that takes place entirely in a single house over the course of a long weekend doesn’t need the kind of scaffolding that a Long Walk to Mordor requires.

If they don’t taste like peppermint, I’m sending them back.

Even republicans don’t want fascism.

A “Trump Boat Parade” in Jupiter, Florida, on Sunday was joined by neo-Nazis waving swastika flags, shouting “White Power,” “Heil Trump,” and “Make America White Again!”

What’s been truly revolting is in watching how many liberals have jumped on the fascism bus. Kristen Gillibrand is fully in bed with the Silicon Valley techno-fascists. Richie Torries can’t get enough genocide, whether its via our migrant concentration camps at home or our outsourcing of genocide to the Middle East via Israel and Saudi Arabia. Sitting Democrat NYC Mayor Eric Adams has gone all in on MAGA, after receiving pardons for his chronic misuse of public office and funds from the President. Gavin Newsom is flirting with Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon as a podcast host. Half the 2026 Texas Dem Congressional slate is fully in favor of turning the US/Mexico border into the new Iron Curtain. The Florida Democratic Party wants a Bay of Pigs 2.

It’s Italy in 1924 all over again. Oops! All fascists.

You probably think computers are supposed to solve real problems

It’s crazy to see how much of our society hinges on having access to the internet.

Paying bills, applying for jobs, registering for any kind of public or private service, long distance travel or communication… A technology that was supposed to make life quicker and easier has become this firehose of annoying digital chores, scams, and red tape.

Lemmy wants to rail on Windows 11 AND they talk shit about your average person not understanding filesystems.

At some point, it just becomes exhausting to hear people explain-o-brag about their ability to navigate the command-line, like typing “dir” into a cursor field makes them the hottest thing since Alan Turing.

Millennials will tell you they are tech geniuses, then throw up their hands when their dishwasher breaks or their check-oil light comes on. The need to be cluelessly smug rivals any 90s-era Boomer.

All the girls who were used to constantly being in demand suddenly… aren’t. And they’re HORNY. And not in a very good way. In a very sad/depressing way.

Had a friend who joked that if anyone questioned whether she was still hot, they only had to count the rings.