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Ebola is still spreading in several countries in central Africa. How did the outbreak manage to spread so far and infect so many people without being detected? This guy!
This guy, in violation of Congressional funding allocation, withdrew tons of international aid. The end of USAID was orchestrated without warning, without a wind-down plan, leaving critical infrastructure to simply collapse.
Consider this an apology for the previous sadpost:
AU where BEFORE it’s too late, Nate turns to crime specifically to fund Sam’s treatment. Pulls together a crew of people he knows are good because he’s chased them all before. Does a heist, gets the money, Sam gets better.
But now Nate’s discovered he likes crime and can use it to help people. So he keeps doing it, but he has to engage in wacky hijinks to keep his family (and Sterling) from finding out.
#on the one hand: breaking bad but everyone he recruits is too competent to get dragged into that level of danger #and nate's still a righteous crusader so he still keeps to that moral compass #so it's fine they're all fine this is just leverage but nate's got more chill #on the other hand: nate who chose to become a criminal BEFORE internalizing that you could be both a criminal and a good person #is a nate who leaves his morals at the door every time he steps into his role as mastermind #nate has always been a Good Man the same way batman doesn't kill people #it's not some innate thing it's a CHOICE #he is following his internal rulebook to the letter #and the thing is. nate is a Good Man but he is not a good man. he follows the rulebook because he's decided to intellectually #not bc he like. feels bad about it when he does something mean #it's because that's what it means to be a Good Man: you follow the rules. you do what's right. you bring about justice. #but in this au nate has deliberately decided to put the rulebook away #so he has DECIDED that he is no longer going to be a Good Man #and oh buddy. at that point all bets are off. #he would pick his morals back up and put them on again every time he went back home to his family and his regular job #and then whenever there was a new client for a con he would slip his morals off like a heavy coat and hang them up by the door #and then he'd roll up his sleeves and unleash hell #and that strict division would be unsustainable over time & would slowly drive him absolutely insane #(also. a Good Man would not cheat on his wife. but sophie is right there; and nate is not a Good Man right now.) #(sophie wouldn't go for a true committed relationship with him...but sophie wouldn't be showing her heart so truly to this version of nate) #this au edges dangerously close to the one where nate ford really is just a mob boss running the meanest crew this side of the atlantic (@aethersea)
Okay, I'm going to have to disagree with a few things - I don't think Nate is capable of bending his own principles. Shifting, yes, slowly and with great difficulty - the distance from "I'm Good so I can't be a criminal" to "I'm a criminal but I can be Good". But that shift coincides with a total breakdown for a reason. The man can't bend or flex at all. He relies entirely on "certain point of view" thinking to keep from shattering on his own rigid self-image and rules. His secrets all get preserved by distance; I'm not sure he could hold himself equidistant from his family and his crew without breaking. (And I definitely don't think he could split ethics into "Good mode" and "Not-Good mode". If he cheated on his not-an-ex wife, sooner or later he'd spiral into a well of Catholic guilt that would probably render him useless but definitely metamorphose him into a very, very different man than the one we know.)
And I don't think he'd ever be able to keep Maggie from finding out for long. She's incredibly sharp and knows him very well. I feel like Second David Job scenario would play out within half a dozen jobs *at the very least*, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if it happened by the second or third job.
That said, the idea of him breaking in time to save Sam, and of trying to have both family/respectable IYS job and Robin Hood crew thereafter? Totally fits for me. I'd love to see whether his marriage with Maggie would survive the difference between his self-righteous crusade and her more conventional ethics. Would she stay in the world, begging him not to go where she couldn't follow? How much would Nate waver from the life of crime when he has a living son who might find out and be ashamed of his father? Would Sophie, and the rest of the crew, start interfering to try to pry Nate away from his family, and would they start succeeding, or just blurring the lines further between the sides of Nate's double life? (I will admit that I'm very curious whether Sophie and Maggie could end up falling for each other and dragging a blushing Nate into a polycule. But mostly bc I'm very fond of Maggie and Sophie's canon relationship and a polycule is the only way I can see them getting along with Nate still married and Nate/Sophie still in the cards. Mostly. Also a bit bc I like their canon relationship when they team up against Nate, because they both recognize that that man needs some pragmatism to ground his ideals.)
Also wondering if Nate and Sterling would be friends, ex-friends, rival coworkers, or what. I suppose ideally all of the above. Given how willing Sterling is to work with the Leverage crew when it suits his own ends in canon, how long till he has a reason to engage them in this version?
In the end, the most fun question is whether Parker, Hardison, and Eliot will be able to successfully conceal from Nate how much crime they teach Sam once they inevitably adopt him as their favorite kid brother and mascot.
Random thing for people to consider is that since Laika is the saint of one way trips should Felicette be known as the saint of safe landings since she did make it back to the ground safely
tu LANCES félicette ? tu lances son corps comme la fusée ? oh ! oh ! prison pour les scientifiques ! prison pour les scientifiques pendant Un Mille Ans !
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Gemini is better than search because Google enshittified search
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Write a critical AI book, and you become everyone's confessor for their AI sins. People in my life keep telling me about their guilty AI pleasures, in search of an explanation, absolution or7 condemnation:
Their most common confession: "I only ever use Google's A7I-generated search summaries these days. I no longer click those blue links beneath it, not even to verify the summary." People know that the summaries are full of "hallucinations" (that is, "defects" or "errors") but the summaries are right often enough that many people have come to rely on them, to the exclusion of actual websites, made by actual people, on the actual internet.
Everyone knows this isn't good. The reason there's a web for Google's Gemini AI to summarize is that Google – the thrice-convicted monopoly search company with a 90% market share – directs people to websites, and when you visit a website, you generate revenue for the site, which pays for its maintenance. Most commonly, you generate an "ad impression," but you might also buy a subscription, or generate an "affiliate fee" by purchasing a recommended product.
When Google strips all this away by harvesting an "answer" and displaying it at the top of the page, the bargain between Google and the open web breaks down. Google is extracting 100% of the value from the websites it summarizes, and giving nothing back in return.
This is a marked reversal from Google's founding ethos. In the old days, Google measured its success by how little time you spent on its site. The ideal Google outcome was for you to visit its page (or even better, just a search-box in your browser), type a few words, and get "ten blue links" back, the top one of which was the correct link to locate the information or resource you were seeking. The point of Google was to serve as a conduit, a trusted intermediary that neutrally adjudicated the relevance of every web page for every web user from moment to moment.
Everyone dunks on Google for its high-minded motto, "Don't be evil," but over the years, the company's mission was far more important: "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." That was the pole star that googlers followed for the first couple decades of the company's history…until, that is, the company saturated its market and its growth stalled out.
That was when Google started to panic over its plateauing search revenue, this being an inescapable consequence of 90%+ market-share. The ensuing power struggle pitted googlers who were committed to technical excellence against the company's most ardent enshittifiers, who pointed out that by making search worse, they could increase revenues. After all, if you need to search two or three times to get the answers to your questions, that means the company can show you two or three times as many ads:
Where once Google measured its success by how quickly it could send you away from its site and out into the open internet, today's Google is a sticky-trap full of ways to keep you inside its walled garden.
A decade ago, tech had three major approaches:
I. Google's: let you do anything you want, but spy on you while you do it;
II. Apple's: strictly control what you can do, but leave you alone to do it in private; and
III. Facebook's: control everything you do, spy on you from asshole to appetite.
Today, tech is undergoing a form of carcinization, in which every company is turning into a Facebook-crab: maximally surveillant and maximally controlling.
Apple has added surveillance to its walled garden:
While Google has turned its free-range, internet-wide surveillance system into a walled garden that tries to keep you away from the open internet as much as possible.
Now, in Google's defense, the "open internet" kind of sucks these days. Any piece of useful information you seek out on the open internet is liable to be buried under half a dozen pop-ups, pop-unders, and dickovers:
Even after you clear these away, the actual information you're seeking is further buried in word-salads that anticipated insipid AI prose by half a decade. Think of all those omelet recipes that appear beneath 2,500 words of cod-Proustian remembrances of "the first time I ate an egg."
The major advantage of AI search summaries is in shielding you from all this nonsense. But where did all that nonsense come from in the first place?
It turns out that this is largely Google's fault.
Google and Facebook monopolized the display advertising market, entering into an illegal, collusive arrangement to rig the bidding so that advertisers paid more and publishers received less:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue
The Google/Meta duopoly suck up 51% of display advertising revenue – more than triple the historic take for advertising intermediaries (buyers, brokers, agencies, etc). As ad revenues for web publishers cratered, the "ad load" on web pages went up. This set up a vicious cycle: increasing the number of ads decreases the number of readers, driving publishers to increase the ad-load even more to make up for the losses.
The major brake on this is ad-blocking. In a world with ad-blockers in it, publishers contemplating an increase in ad-load have to confront the possibility that they will induce ad-overload in their readers, who will install a blocker that stops them from seeing any ads:
Google has been looking to kill ad-blocking for a decade, and now they're on the verge of making it happen in Chrome, the dominant web browser they use to reinforce their search monopoly:
Google long ago did away with ad-blocking on mobile devices (reverse engineering an app is a felony, which means an app is just a web-page skinned with the right kind of IP to make it a crime to protect your privacy while you use it). Part of Google's argument for killing ad-blocking for the web is that this puts the web on an even footing with apps – which is a very weird way to describe a race to the absolute bottom:
To top it all off, this decade has seen Google make a series of changes to its search prioritization that favored low-value shovelware sites over carefully researched, reliable alternatives. Search for product reviews and you're apt to get a "site reputation abuse" result from a once-reliable outlet like Forbes filled with useless and even dangerous reviews, which are ranked far above independently maintained, rigorous competitors:
This has only gotten worse with AI search, which preferentially draws from spam sites to produce decontextualized, highly confident recommendations for substandard, overpriced junk, at the expense of recommendations for good products:
It's not like Google doesn't have the ability to sort the good from the bad. Kagi.com is a $10/month paid search engine whose results are vastly superior to Google's. But Kagi doesn't have its own search index: instead, they rent access to Google's index, but apply their own (much smaller and less resourced) team's algorithm to rank the results for your queries. In other words, Google could deliver good search results, they just choose not to:
Gresham's Law holds that "bad money drives out good." It refers to a counterfeit coin crisis in Tudor England, where people preferentially spent counterfeit money in order to make it someone else's problem; meanwhile, everyone hoarded their good coins. Soon, virtually all the money in circulation was bogus.
By downranking quality material in favor of low-effort spam, Google set up a web-wide version of Gresham's Law, where bad webpages drive out good ones, and since so many of those webpages contain product recommendations, they're greshaming the world of real products, too, so the bad is driving out the good there, too.
This is the problem that Gemini search summaries solve: in its role as the web's most important gatekeeper, Google remade them as an ad-festooned cesspit of garbage text and cynical shovelware sites. Now Google proposes to wipe out the publishers whose content they stripmined by breaking the web's bargain: that search engines are symbiotic with publishers. Google has turned fully parasitic, sucking the last drops of juice out of the open web before discarding its husk.
my fav relationship ship dynamic is where it doesn't matter if you call it platonic or romantic or queerplatonic because they always act the same in every type of relationship. and the way they act? fucking weird.
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There's a Chinese meme that the Yellow River doesn't need rituals to present sacrifices because if it's hungry it'll come onto the shore and eat the sacrifices itself.
#some netizens also say chinese people like unification because only a powerful unified dynasty can survive the yellow river and sometimes #also the chang jiang when they decide to flood and change directions and kill and displace millions #also only large dynasties have the resources to do hydroengineering to try and control the yellow river #yellow river be like: if you don't hydroengineer you die #but if you do you might also die heehee #“we call these our mother rivers not because they are gentle but because we are too scared” tags on above post
So I just simultaneously did, and possibly didn't lose my job today :)
Very much did in the sense that I literally do not know where my job is at the moment. But, for the time being I haven't been let go because nobody else including the store owner knows where it is either.
So, I don't wanna risk doxxing myself by posting pictures but goddamn am I tempted because this is not a believable event. This is a cartoon problem. For looneytoons.
But yeah, so, I work(ed?) at a kiosk selling boba tea, right? Freestanding kiosk in the mall with full water and electrical hookups and multiple fridges and sinks and a mini kitchen and the works. Fully functional tea shop. Very important to note that it was there last night, The work chat was discussing another issue last night at closing time. I'll get back to this.
It's been showing signs of being on the way out with how business is being handled lately and I've been considering other options, which is probably why I'm not as torn up about this as I should be, but maybe it just hasn't set in yet, but that's not the point. The point is there's been a lot of shit breaking and not being replaced and nobody mentioning anything about it until I walk into work in the morning and have to figure out why shit like the fucking cash register isn't there today. So I'm kinda used to having to ask questions about big things that nobody bothered to update me on. I was out for two weeks recovering from a surgery, so I came to work this morning assuming there'd be some kind of bullshit, yeah?
So, the question I had to ask the chat this morning was:
Not a text I ever thought I'd have to send in sincerity, but there it is. Because what I found instead was a fenced off patch of discolored tiles and a few holes in the floor where my entire place of employment used to be.
And the answer? Nobody knows! It was there last night when the mall closed, and every single trace of the structure and all its contents including drink making supplies and our safe and cashbox was gone when it opened again. And when I say nobody knows, I mean everyone from last night's closers to the actual (former?) owner of the store jad no fucking clue about this until getting that text from me this morning. For once I am actually the first to know. 🎉.
So. I guess I didn't so much lose my job as had it stolen. Not by AI, but good old fashioned hands-on human beings picking it up and carrying it away somehow. All mall security would tell me was that they were instructed not to tell me anything and have us contact our management. Who also don't know anything. And later on I came across some construction workers around the gravesite of the kiosk discussing filling in the holes, asked them about it, and was told that they "weren't at liberty to say".
So, not only is my job gone in the most literal physical sense of the word, but it was taken in some kind of super secret kiosk extraction in the dead of night without any warning or witnesses and nobody is allowed to speak of it. The store owner said she was gonna figure it out 10 hours ago and still no word back.
I don't know what else to say aside from I've been laughing all day and I'm gonna have a hell of a time explaining Schrodinger's Unemployment to the benefits office.
Update that is not an update because I'm basically certain this isn't what actually happened:
My mother in law thinks the FBI took it.
Not any of the other stores around the state. Just the one little kiosk.
Why? Because she loves a conspiracy and is just a little bit extra.
Also because she was around for the massive crackdown on Yakuza-owned businesses in Waikiki (in her homestate) that did actually involve the FBI seizing stores (no confirmation of making kiosks cleanly disappear in the middle of the night though).
Still no word from my job on what's actually going on, but the most likely theory so far is that maybe the kiosk was on lease and got repossessed? The mystery continues
(also shout out to the person who proposed Carmen Sandiego)
According to the owner, based on what she's been able to find out, the kiosk was not removed legally and they're starting a potentially long process of legal action. I hope she gets to sue the shit out of whoever did it but for now at least I know for sure I'm unemployed.
Really hoping for more details in terms of who/why/how, so I'll keep updating if I learn anything.
For now the summary is: An unnamed entity that is most likely mall management (on account of mall security cooperating with them) stole an entire kiosk and all the contents including money and machinery with barely a trace in the middle of the night grinch-style, with zero warning or explanation, and ensured the silence of both security and the construction crew, in an action that was definitely preplanned and illegal, and as far as I know nobody knows its whereabouts.
So now I'm officially out of a job. Because my workplace was literally stolen in the night.
Actually fuck it let's share some photos cause I wouldn't be inclined to believe this myself. It's not like anyone can stalk me at my job now and I'm not gonna have to see any coworkers that might find my tumblr.
Enjoy the unintentionally funniest text I've ever sent in my life
Aaand a close-up:
The last remains of a once Very Much Solid And Immobile Workplace
I hate when king arthur has all these fussy little steps in the instructions and you're like "no way do these fussy little steps matter" but you try it and they do. they matter so much.
I thought you meant Camelot quests and I was like "that's fair, 'never pick a four leaf clover on the last Wednesday of the month' IS a fussy little step that shouldn't matter" but then I was like "wait isn't that also a flour company"
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I love how Sense and Sensibility has a melodramatic Gothic hero who traveled the world as a soldier and had an angsty backstory and even during the events of the novel participated in a duel. But all of it's off-page so every time he appears he's just Some Guy. Kind of serious, doesn't talk much, pretty boring. His biggest passion is flannel waistcoats
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