No one's anti-tech: we're all posting here! People are anti- the seven richest men on earth forcing out something that enormously empowers themselves & a tiny cohort of already empowered people, at the expense of everyone else. Empowerment is TO resist, not to go along. Laws and regs ARE power.

People on here argue far too much about what ought to be done, and do not spend enough time exploring what is happening (most of which never gets mentioned here) or discussing what's most likely to happen next. Every discussion seems to get derailed into shout-fights about what ought to be.

The divide seems to be already manifesting itself but what I see is not quite that: it's between people who actually have to do work, create things, make order out of chaos and so on, vs. the admin-exec-oids whose work consists of attending meetings and receiving or generating various reports.

Being an account on here that people don't really need to follow because all of your better posts will be bounced or quoted into their feed, is the Bluesky equivalent of when George Bernard Shaw was so famous that a postal letter addressed only with a hand-drawn caricature of him reached him.

Counterpoint: for all its weaknesses "The Star-Spangled Banner" at bottom asks a question: "Is the USA still standing? Is it still here? Are its people still brave and free? Will it live another day?" It's the only national anthem I know of that does this. I find that profound.

Do not complain about the weather! The weather is not real. It can't actually hurt you.

***Wait, I've just received updated information

By a large margin, the most interesting word in that post is "communities"

I presume the "AI tool" was not some LLM chatbot but one of the face recognition, etc. things that have been around for years. The chronic use of the marketing term "AI" for widely different things is a cancer of our discourse. By coincidence I just used "AI" on my maps app to find a Dunkin Donuts.

I have thought for a long time that discourse on here would greatly improve if people quit hate-reading the same three USA prestige news media outlets and quit posting hot take quote-responses to whatever just appeared on those three sites.

Having read the Narnia books when I was a kid, one thing it took me a while to grasp is how uneven Lewis is. All writers are uneven of course, but Lewis really does veer between passages and themes of unusual brilliance, to ones of bathos and shallow lecturing. Same thing happens in his essays.

Someone on here said that LLM/Chatbot for writing is quickly developing a social acceptance pattern similar to television circa 1960: People who celebrate it and use it indiscriminately in the middle of their life are considered low class; the better class use it discreetly and keep it out of view.

Back in 1980-2000 when a coalition of liberals, leftists and small-town conservatives were angry about Wal-Mart, a lot of (before-the-concept) MAGA types made it their whole personality to loudly support Wal-Mart, shop there for everything and tell everybody. Am I wrong that this doesn't happen now?

For significantly more than a century, whenever Americans got the money the first thing they did is to put a lot of empty space around themselves. Empty space around us means wealth, status, independence. Apartment dwellers (other than a young couple saving for a house) are unproductive hangers-on.

Wow, I'm writing and then pre-emptively discarding a lot of draft Bluesky posts and replies lately. Have I been shamed into submission? Lost the spirit? Grown up a bit?

My brother, who worked at a TV station in the ‘90s, was briefly given access to a U-Matic broadcast video tape containing the Star Wars Holiday Special and the Pamela Anderson sex video. The tape case had a label reading “Not to be removed from the Seattle Seahawks locker room”

On Henry James, by Christopher Beha, 2014

"We crossed the river as usual, and suddenly the seasons had changed."
-- Enokido Yoji