Commentators seem unable to grasp that your typical middle class American family lives a life which, to the sufferer, ironically resembles the stresses of poverty.

Income just barely meets expenses, very little leisure, both parents working, harried and insecure. https://t.co/vNJR38PKkd

— Empty America (@Tierra_Y_Cielo) December 6, 2021

Kevin Drum, Yglesias, Krugman, et al. are all involved in a propaganda operation to convince people their precarity and the fragility of modern life is actually ok. It’s a way of tamping down dissent and attempting to preserve predatory capitalism.

More people are calling them out now but it won’t be enough. The psyop is working and will keep on working.

It's a travesty that we've fucked up computing so hard for everyone. It's a damn shame about the state of user interaction with computers. Gonna make this my 99 theses and pin it to Twitter I guess

— Rage Against the State Machine (@mgattozzi) December 6, 2021

Great thread. We who are old enough to remember what computing might have been, could have been, really mourn what it has become. Those younger than 35 or so don’t know any different and in some ways that’s better: they don’t have to mourn what they don’t know we lost.

So much potential squandered so that so few people could get obscenely rich; meanwhile, people buy propaganda that computers and browsers have to be locked down “for your own good.” Deep down I think most people know that this is a lie, but are also aware that they cannot change it — so it’s easier to just believe the untruth and move on.

I am going to try my very best to buy Olivia Rodrigo tickets on Friday morning.

Unfortunately, so will everyone else in the universe. I haven’t been to a concert in a long time; will be nice to join others who refuse to live in terror of life.

I am once again thinking about this X-Files promo shoot from the 90s. pic.twitter.com/InHdusZ6PC

— ℍ- (@HBarletto) December 6, 2021

It was a different time.

her smirk when she asks "should we just send [a covid test] to every american?" makes me sick dude. yes, that is exactly how available rapid tests should be. jesus christ https://t.co/LaemB1AEEs

— molly mary o'brien (@missmollymary) December 6, 2021

The US has never really given much of a crap about Covid and all our systems are broken anyway (as demonstrated above). Things that other countries do as a matter of course and quite easily we claim to be “impossible.”

Hi! I'm from the future! Here's a slide from a pitch deck for a hot new startup. pic.twitter.com/HRVl3XskQa

— Zach Holman (@holman) December 6, 2021

This is the same sort of thing you could say about having a real server vs. containerized BS.

My prediction is that Omicron is going to be 50-80% less severe than Delta in symptoms/IFR, etc.

People for some reason believe that Covid can become infinitely more transmissible and infinitely more deadly at the same time. While you’ve heard a lot of foofaraw from epidemiologists about how it’s perfectly possible for a virus to evolve to be more deadly and more transmissible (and they are right), they have also overstated their case quite a lot to avoid giving people hope (I guess?).

The reality is that viruses have no plan and aren’t doing anything for our benefit. This includes the fact that they don’t get more deadly just to spite us. Again: no plan. SARS2 in my opinion was already nearing its co-attractor for transmissibility vs. severity, so it would have to trade off one for the other. It appears to have traded off severity in Omicron.

Evidence should firm up over the next few weeks but I betcha I will be right.

It’s time for a new phone. Mine just isn’t cutting it anymore. Its battery lasts like 10 minutes when I travel.

Unfortunately, every single phone on the market fucking sucks and has no headphone jack, which means they are essentially unusable. I don’t know what I am going to do because I will be deeply unhappy with any new phone. I hate that I even need a smartphone but they’ve become an inescapable part of modern life; in certain trendy restaurants you can’t even look at a fucking menu without a phone that can do QR codes. Went one place recently like that. I asked for a paper menu and they did not even have one.

I hate this and want to destroy everything to do with tech even though I am in tech.

The future of eternal lockdowns and ever-worsening restrictions is terminally insane. It’s predictable but also just dreadfully sad because it’s so unnecessary.

Living in fear is just what we do now, I guess.

Not me, though. I got shit to do.

Europe Turns to New Restrictions as Omicron Cases Rise.

Another huge mistake in a series of them. But the plutes need more cash; guess we haven’t harmed enough people yet with relatively poorly-effective measures.

Lots of scary headlines about Omicron and kids. This is your reminder that the media did the same thing with Delta, even though the data never bore out any real justification for that pic.twitter.com/FTTIRJNwPK

— Mason ‍♂️✂️ (@webdevMason) December 4, 2021

This also occurred with the now-forgotten Alpha variant. It was supposed to have kids dropping dead by the millions, the vaccines (still in development) would not work against it, etc. The “experts” and media, as Mason points out, also did the same with Delta and now it’s a repeat performance with Omicron.

Reality is that the vaccines will work against Omicron, it won’t cause kids to drop dead by the millions, and it won’t change much in itself (though the lockdown lifers and the plutes will use it as an excuse to take away more from you).

The left can make no progress because all they are worried about is not offending anyone. This is incompatible with changing the world. It’s why they are stuck, locked in place, fighting meaningless skirmishes in a misdirected war.

They think far too small. I want to alter so much it’ll offend the very structure of the universe itself; they will be forced to rename the Fine-structure constant to the Mike-structure constant after I am done.

“Entanglement shows that reality is definitely other than how we had conceived of it. Even if we know all that can be predicted about one object and another object, we still cannot predict everything about the two objects together.”

–Carlo Rovelli in Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution

That is partially the basis of Nancy Cartwright’s philosophy. Beware strict determinism, even though physicists bang on about it constantly despite knowing it must be false. They want it to be true; but wanting the universe to be a certain way does not in fact make it so.

So far Omicron seems like a big nothing? I mean it’s just preliminary but worst case it seems somewhat more transmissible and that’s about it, most likely case is that it’s somewhat more transmissible and less virulent, and best case is that it’s a lot more transmissible, much less virulent and the vaccines work roughly the same on it.

No reason to panic.

Goddamn I love having money. The mook who said money can’t buy happiness probably never had any money.

Money is like a magic wand for life. I am so, so lucky, and I realize this every day. I don’t take it for granted but I still love it.