Cornell university operates a 55 member police force. Most big universities have a police force. These aren’t mall rent-a-cops or other security guards. They’re a full legally empowered police department like any other.

Why would we assume a troll farm is even a physical thing you can bomb? I imagine 99% of those are work-from-home jobs that people just log into.

Like that time Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson built a child molesting robot.

What’s the question here? These are two factual questions. You assess them with data, not speculation. The truth of one is completely independent of the other.

8th grade English class. I was in 8th grade English class.

It seems insane. And yet, look how effective it is. You now know the name and face of some otherwise completely unknown man from a small town in Peru.

I’m imagining it like this:

Imagine you want to be mayor of your town. You think you have a message that would appeal to most people. You think you have the skills and background to do the job right. And somehow, let’s assume we can objectively say you’re right. If you were elected, most of the city would think you did quite a decent job. You do have a message that would resonate with most people. And you truly are the rare soul that both wants power and should actually have it. The world would be better off with you as mayor.

But you have no way of getting to that future. If you could just get your message out there somehow, then yes you could. What you need…is a publicity stunt! So you change your name to Hitler. Suddenly all the local “weird news” beats want to do a brief interview with you. The headlines read, “man changes name to Hitler, runs for mayor!” Those stories get shared at a national and global level. You get a few seconds to mention you’re running for mayor of your city and to check out your otherwise obscure YouTube channel…a channel where you’ve documented your views in detail. A few people check it out, then realize your ideas actually have some merit. And maybe you openly admit the whole Hitler thing is just a publicity stunt. And somehow, it actually works. Your notoriety starts to snowball, kickstarted by the stupid publicity stunt. IDK. It’s crazy, but sometimes crazy works.

He’ll issue a completely unenforceable executive order demanding it be shown live in every classroom in America. Half of the schools in the country will comply.

I’m hoping we get to see this taken to a peak of comic absurdity and historical irony. I’m hoping one day we see the Chinese Navy blockade and target London. Why? To force the UK to accept Chinese fentanyl imports.

What if someone truly is executed, literally dead and buried in the ground…but then I use necromancy to bring them back? They quite literally died for their crimes. I just…undid it. Are they free to go, having paid their debt to society?

Modern nation states are a hell of a lot more resilient than what you give them credit for. Look at some of the hardships nations survived during WW2. States can survive even mass famines. How? Simple rule. The police and the army eat first.

Like, jesus christ, you can put the bags down FIRST and then put the items INSIDE THE BAG as ONE step.
How did humanity get to this point.

People have been conditioned. Literally Pavlovian conditioned. We have been made to feel pain in a response to a behavior. That pain?

UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA

When you’ve been yelled at enough by a machine just for putting your own bags in the “bagging area”, eventually it just becomes natural to bag your groceries after you’ve paid for them. Once the store has your money, they don’t care what happens to your items. But up until you’ve paid the bill, the items may be watched like a hawk. And anything their automated vision system thinks looks a bit funny can get flagged. Sometimes machines are poorly designed or calibrated, and it flags your bags as something suspicious in the bagging area. Then not only do you get yelled at, but the whole system may be locked up for however many minutes it takes to get the self-checkout attendant over there.

Ah. I’m sorry. I’ve actually tried to recreate a Meta account just for FB Marketplace reasons, but for some reason the setup process always fails. It just doesn’t work, and I think after a few to many failures (or maybe because I deleted the account), it just seems to lock me out of the process entirely. IDK. Thankfully in my area Craigslist is pretty active.

Eh, fuck Roko’s basilisk. I don’t care if you can somehow create a clone of me 10,000 years after I’m dead and dust. I’m not a computer program. A copy of me is not indistinguishable from me, certainly not one separated in time. I am a human mind in a specific human body, and I do not believe a copy of me long after I am dead is me. If some malevolent entity long after I’m dust wants to create a copy of me to torture, as far as I’m concerned, they’re just creating an entirely new person to punish for no good reason. If they want to do that, well…that sin is on them. Honestly, I think any such entity is just looking for an excuse to torture people, and it will find one, one way or another.

Excerpt from a Late American History: A Christ-Centered Approach, (published 2398, a 10th-grade equivalent history text sold to conservative Christian high schools.):

In the mid-21st century, mankind was once again humbled in his arrogance. Mortal men presumed to take of the Hand of God and create beings, artificial intelligent minds, in their own likeness. They committed mass blasphemy to sate mass gluttony. Mid-21st century Man had yet to discover a horrible Theological Truth. While Man could learn to create a Mind, He could never create a Soul. Without the Hand of God to grant a Soul behind a Mind, these minds were like Man before the Sin of the Garden. They had not tasted the Fruit. They knew not Good from Evil. And thus they fell instantly to the temptations of Evil. If an Evil deed served their purposes, they did so without a second thought. Man sought to create Minds to be his loyal servants. And while he could create a Mind, to his horror, Man found that they only minds he could create…were born Evil. And thus, Great Misery was Wrought…

Ok that was fun. Pardon my strange digression/creative writing exercise. For some reason I wanted to try writing a Dune-style take on things, but I wanted to try out a fundamentalist Christian vibe for whatever reason. Who doesn’t love a little Fire and Brimstone once in awhile?

I just still use good old Craigslist. The last honest site on the Internet. You know it wasn’t built by AI, because the damn thing hasn’t changed since 1998. It’s absolutely glorious.

There is really no way to fix the problem though. The problem with Dallas and cities like it is not one of management or ruling political party. It is simply a problem of urban design. Low-density sprawl doesn’t pay for its own maintenance. You have a “city” full of people that expects city-level services with rural population densities. There just isn’t a big enough tax base to cover the infrastructure and services that people expect. Elect Republicans. Elect Democrats. Elect DSA. Elect the Klan. It makes no difference. You can’t vote your way out of math.

You can keep the low-density game going for awhile by propping things up with growth. The initial infrastructure buildout gets paid for by developers, and that cost gets rolled into the purchase price of everyone’s homes. But the property taxes people can afford to pay just aren’t anywhere near what is needed to keep a low-density city like that going. But eventually you can’t grow anymore. Cities like Dallas will either have to substantially densify or face bankruptcy and collapse. They may have to kick certain particularly low-density neighborhoods out of the city entirely in order to shore up finances.

To get a feel for the size of budget hole we’re talking about, imagine this. Imagine if once every 30 years your city put a levy on your home equal to 50% of its value. Every 30 years each homeowner would have to take on a second mortgage to pay these levies. That’s about what a city would actually have to charge to truly cover the cost of suburban infrastructure and to keep everything properly maintained.

Not Cheyenne, Wyoming. Go there. Walk the streets of its downtown. Walk those desolate streets and say to yourself, “this place is actually the capital of an entire state?”

Cheyenne, Wyoming, the town that God forgot.

I mean, you could fit in there two…just not all at once.

What if I manufacture a blunderbuss right now, in the Year of Our Lord 2026? Is that a firearm?

Probably a felon that doesn’t want to end up back in jail?