Or alternatively, have your friends worry about you. Say you unavailable as you were drunk/high/intoxicated out of your mind. As times goes on, cite inebriation by ever-more exotic and illegal substances.

Earth, 2150:

As the last embers of organized human civilization crumbled in the hothouse Earth catastrophe, a handful of astronomers remain in cloistered study, pouring over the data from the last of the great space telescopes, built at the height of 22nd century science. What have they learned? We are not the outlier. In the light of other Suns we find them. Dead world after dead world. Once bastions of life reduced to wastelands of ruin by technological civilization. The majority of Earth-like worlds around Sun-like stars are tombs, rendered unto sterile husks by the actions of their own offspring.

To firmly tease such a conclusion out of such ephemeral evidence as a stellar spectrum was truly a feat of the astronomical art. It required techniques undreamt of and inconceivable by 21st century scholars. But, the last of this civilization’s great astronomer’s found a way. And the conclusion was damning.

Intelligent tool-using life is a terminal disease for life on a world. Once a biosphere has dreamed up a species like ours, that world’s days are numbered. There are many forms that extinction can take, some more exotic than others. But most are through mundane causes like self-induced ecological collapse. For every one case of a civilization destroying itself in a science experiment gone wrong, there are a thousand cases of simple ecological catastrophe.

We are dying. We are alone. We are surrounded by the dead.

There’s a reason we abandoned monarchy. Zuck is effectively the king of meta. Literally. The founding corporate structure is designed so he literally can never be fired. And if you give anyone absolute unaccountable power, it’s only a matter of time until they drive things right off a cliff.

That’s just a consequence of shitty bathroom design. In civilized places, bathroom stalls have actual walls and doors that go to the floor and ceiling.

Don’t even wait for the drainage district to do it. What’s Tesla going to do, sue you for blocking their illegal dumping?

It’s like anything. I can cook my own food. That doesn’t mean I don’t go out to restaurants sometimes. I could use an LLM myself to write a novel. But it wouldn’t be the same novel. And there is some skill in prompt writing. Even then, just the sheer time to generate a novel-length coherent work from small snippets of chat windows is still a large investment of time.

Of course, we know how this will actually go down. AI generated works are going to be much cheaper to produce. Therefore they’ll be me more profitable if they can sell at the same price. Barnes and Noble thus has a strong incentive to not carefully label AI works as AI-generated.

Ideally they would all be in their own section. AI-generated works are only allowed in the part of the store that is labeled as such. That’s the proper way to do this.

But that’s not how it will actually be done. Buried somewhere in the fine print inside the back cover of the book will be a long paragraph, one sentence of which mentions the work is AI generated. Or the inside back cover will have a QR code labeled “notes on this work,” and there will be a hundred page long legal disclaimer that briefly mentions the book is AI generated.

This isn’t really true. The courts have held that there needs to be some human involvement, but that involvement can be pretty minimal.

Those homes are made wood. They are flammable.

Fuck it. They should just order people released if the government isn’t going to follow court orders. And if the administration doesn’t released those the courts ordered released, they courts should let private citizens storm jails and free the wrongfully held at the point of gun. All they would have to do is say, “the courts will not hear any cases relating to private individuals using force to enforce lawful court orders.”

Then it would be perfectly legal to go and simply shoot your way into prisons to free the unjustly held.

The Constitution was dismantled a long time ago. The 4th Amendment’s been irrelevant for decades they cut so many holes in it.

Is a deliberate misspelling of googol any better for a company name?

So? They need to be oppressed. I think we should start talking a hell of a lot more about overtly stripping the rights from religious freaks and TERFs. Oppression is a tool of politics, and we’ve been unilaterally disarming ourselves for far too long.

We’re currently in a one-sided war. The bigots can tirelessly work to strip the rights of everyone else, and they can sit comfortably knowing that no one will ever come after their rights and their liberties. After all, good liberals like yourself don’t want to get their hands dirty, and they hem and haw and, cluck and peck at the ground, saying “wait, wait, we can’t stoop to their level. They go low, we go high!” Then they maintain the moral high ground while the lives of vulnerable minorities are destroyed one piece at a time.

Fuck that. Here’s an idea. Let’s declare conservative churches as inappropriate for children. Kids shouldn’t be exposed to the filth that’s in the Bible after all. There’s murder, bestiality, genocide, incest, and any number of disgusting things in that book. Maybe by law you should have to be 18 to read it. No more baptism for anyone under the age of 18. Hell, let’s not even allow kids in churches until age 16.

Or here’s an idea. Let’s declare denying your kid gender-affirming care to be legally child abuse. Frankly, this isn’t even a stretch. I want to see liberals pushing to take queer children out of the homes of religious bigots. There should be a form where kids can go online, out themselves as a queer kid living in a bigoted home, and have child protective services immediately come and find them a supportive place to live. Bigots don’t deserve to be parents.

Or how about we pass a law that says trans people can sue cis people who make them uncomfortable in bathrooms. Do you harass a trans person or confront them about being in the “right” bathroom? That trans person should be able to sue you for an absurd some plus attorneys fees for a violation of their rights.

We need to start stripping absolutely every right we can from these animals. This is the only way we will ever see the right stop trying to take away everyone else’s rights. Rights are meant to be a peace treaty - you let me live my life and I’ll let you live yours. The problem is right now, conservatives are fucking over everyone else’s lives, but no one is fucking with conservatives. I want them to feel the fear of their victims. Only then is there any hope of actually declaring a cease fire and ending this game of attacking rights of all sorts.

Is dehumanization a tool of oppression? You’re fucking right it is. And we have some people that are in dire need of oppression. Conservative Christians love to masturbate about being “oppressed.” It’s about damn time they learned what real oppression felt like.

They don’t feel. They’re not even human. They’re animals.

UK standard of living has been declining for years.

There’s ultimately really no reason for them to completely dismantle democracy. Republicans know they can lose big in 2026 and 2028 and still regain power in just a few years. It’s already guaranteed that whatever Democrats get elected won’t really do anything to change the circumstances that resulted in Republicans winning. And they will not prosecute Trump and his co-conspirators for their crimes. And Democrats don’t offer the working class anything, so the Republican message of “we’ll make other people’s lives worse to make your life better” resonates with people. They’re the only party actually offering to help people.

There’s just no reason for Republicans to abandon democracy all together. They’ll happily tilt the scales heavily in their favor, but completely abandoning democracy would mean civil war. And they’re already doing quite well in our existing flawed democracy. Why risk it all when you’re already winning?

Ultimately living standards are declining because of increased wealth inequality. And Democrats aren’t going to do anything to fight that. So Republicans at most will be out of power for another cycle.

Republicans don’t need to destroy democracy. They’re already in complete control in our current system. And Democrats, if elected in 2026 and 2028, are already promising to do everything in their power to make sure MAGA returns to power in 2032.

Important meetings and decisions should be made with remote workers present and with their full participation. If your team frequently cuts people out and is prone to forming cliques of in-groups and out-groups, return to office won’t help you. Those same middle school politics happen in entirely in-person offices. People get cut out and isolated whether remote or in person when management decides their input isn’t valuable.

I like the way my office does it. All the engineers and drafters are on the ground floor. The sales guys work in a loft at the back of the building. We keep them in the attic like they would keep dementia patients in the attic back in the olden days.

You’re talking different neurotypes here. Why should we prioritize the neurotype that prefers in-office vs the neurotype that prefers out-of-office? If anything, shouldn’t we prefer the working style that saves the company money and is more productive on average?

It also has to with the tyranny of distance. People end up trapped in shitty jobs that aren’t right for them. They end up in roles where they aren’t doing the things they want to do or where their talents truly lie. Economically, this causes them to be much less productive than they could be in a position that’s a better fit for them.

And the main reason people end up trapped in jobs is the tyranny of distance. Maybe there’s only two employers in your town that can really use your specific skills. For someone who owns a home, moving costs tens of thousands of dollars. And often you can’t find out a position won’t be a good fit until you actually work there for awhile.

Work from home overcomes much of this tyranny of distance. It allows employers and employees to find much better matches for each other, unconstrained by physical distance. And for this reason, shitty employers hate it. Shitty employers thrive on transaction/switching costs and employee lock-in.