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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9 March 2025 (awful.systems)
submitted 1 month ago by blakestacey@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

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[-] jax@awful.systems 11 points 1 month ago

another cameo appearance in the TechTakes universe from George Hotz with this rich vein of sneerable material: The Demoralization is just Beginning

wowee where to even start here? this is basically just another fucking neoreactionary screed. as usual, some of the issues identified in the piece are legitimate concerns:

Wanna each start a business, pass dollars back and forth over and over again, and drive both our revenues super high? Sure, we don’t produce anything, but we have companies with high revenues and we can raise money based on those revenues...

... nothing I saw in Silicon Valley made any sense. I’m not going to go into the personal stories, but I just had an underlying assumption that the goal was growth and value production. It isn’t. It’s self licking ice cream cone scams, and any growth or value is incidental to that.

yet, when it comes to engaging with this issues, the analysis presented is completely detached from reality and void of any evidence of more than a doze seconds of thought. his vision for the future of America is not one that

kicks the can further down the road of poverty, basically embraces socialism, is stagnant, is stale, is a museum

but one that instead

attempt[s] to maintain an empire.

how you may ask?

An empire has to compete on its merits. There’s two simple steps to restore american greatness:

  1. Brain drain the world. Work visas for every person who can produce more than they consume. I’m talking doubling the US population, bringing in all the factory workers, farmers, miners, engineers, literally anyone who produces value. Can we raise the average IQ of America to be higher than China?

  2. Back the dollar by gold (not socially constructed crypto), and bring major crackdowns to finance to tie it to real world value. Trading is not a job. Passive income is not a thing. Instead, go produce something real and exchange it for gold.

sadly, Hotz isn't exactly optimistic that the great american empire will be restored, for one simple reason:

[the] people haven’t been demoralized enough yet

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 6 points 1 month ago

Brain drain the world. Work visas for every person who can produce more than they consume. I’m talking doubling the US population, bringing in all the factory workers, farmers, miners, engineers, literally anyone who produces value.

Okay, I mean, that's coherent policy, I really don't like the caveats of "produces more than they consume" cause how do you quantify that, but yes, immigration is actually good...

Can we raise the average IQ of America to be higher than China?

aaaand it's eugenics, fuck, how does this keep happening

[-] cstross@wandering.shop 3 points 1 month ago

@V0ldek @techtakes Also, WHY would anyone sane want to move TO the excited snakes of amurrrica this century?

[-] istewart@awful.systems 4 points 1 month ago

The Maoist version of Misesian goldbuggery, absolutely fascinating.

Isn't this guy still mainly relevant for jailbreaking the PS3? Pretty sure he flamed out during the Muskification of Twitter

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 4 points 1 month ago

Back the dollar by gold (not socially constructed crypto)

Gold, the best substance in existence outside a societal context. Extremely nutritious and tasty. Great for making tools. Easy to form into clothes, which are warm and breathable too. Ideal building material. Obviously the main reason gold is valuable is its usefulness as non-corroding coating for electronic connectors, not that it's a socially constructed status symbol.

this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2025
18 points (100.0% liked)

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