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956 Worldwide

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Everything posted by 956 Worldwide

  1. That article is just about the groundwork for a UNSC resolution to authorize the force. Not the composition of it. I am very, very skeptical you will see any Western forces actually inside of Gaza.
  2. I would 100 percent support Hellfire drone strikes on Indian call centers. No one spans my phone to sell Venezuelan fentanyl.
  3. Dude, Apple is the enshitifier par excellence (I type on an iPhone). Here’s a vignette: I’m being issued a new credit card, and it’s going to be a pain in the ass for me if I decide to renew my Spotify subscription. Why? Because I can’t renew it via the app. Why can’t I renew it via the app? Because the App Store takes a 30 percent (30 percent!) vig from anything sold via an app in its App Store. So Spotify can either lose the massive global iPhone market, or it can pay the 30, or it can make the user experience shitty and I will have to go via the browser to renew (I’ve forgotten my password) and honestly I may just say fuck it at this point. And here’s the thing— Apple doesn’t charge all apps the same. Apple wants me to use Apple Music and there I can subscribe via the app. And sometimes Apple picks winners— Uber does not pay a 30 percent, but smaller ride shares do. Competition! And of course I’m totally locked into Apple. Two factor authentication. Photos. Shit in the cloud. When I need a new phone I for sure want to just image my iPhone to the new one; trying to move to Android makes me shudder. And— key point— my choices are Apple and Android, basically, for a functioning OS. And also it’s a felony to jailbreak my iPhone to move shit. Remember, iPhone is supposed to be easier. User friendly. Seamless. Unless I want to use a streaming service I like more than Apple Music. Then it’s not, and that’s enshitification. Pure rent-seeking; and we could regulate this shit and say “Apple, you basically have a monopoly on apps. You have to extend them all the same terms of use and fees.” We could say “we aren’t going to make it a felony for people to move their own data from one phone to another.” And this is everywhere. Getting commercials on Amazon Prime streaming— after you cut the cord and bought a sub— is enshitification. The entire Amazon search is a grift scheme designed to have sellers compete for how much they will pay for product placement and you the buyer have to work harder to find what you want in a sea of drop-shop slop. That’s enshitification. I am sure it’s creating shareholder value but it’s not creating value. And back to AI— what OpenAI is doing is getting OpenAI in EVERYTHING. Walmart, your bank, whatever. And then once it’s there and you can’t get a toilet plunger at the Wal-Mart without it Altman will jack up the price and reduce support and add on features to make it even more impossible to dislodge. And that’s where the shareholder value comes in. This is not “creative destruction.”
  4. Always remember that mobile providers could stop this if they chose to.
  5. I’ll come back to this. You’re not wrong, you’ve identified accurately that nearly all start-ups (especially tech) come to play with a built in enshitification model. The issues is that this is a fundamentally predatory business model that suffocates innovation and uses rent-seeking strategies to preserve monopolies and cartels. The model is: make something good for cheap, burn through VC cash till alternatives/competitors are broke, impose artificial costs to prevent customers from leaving, then make money by making the thing worse for everyone. And it’s allowed to happen because of policy and regulatory choices.
  6. Well the American consumer is giving itself measles so I am pretty sure it can be talked into an 8MPG vehicle. They can take out seatbelts, too, and really get that cost down.
  7. Yes, this is the lifecycle of enshitiffication on all online platforms. 1. Create something useful or enjoyable for a targeted set of people. 2. Continually cast a bigger and bigger net so that corporate customers see the value— to do this you have to get the 80 iq set on the same platform as the geniuses and the working stiffs. 3. Shift the utility to respond to business customer desires rather than users. Platform is overwhelmed with corporate, paid content and activities. 4. Stop providing services to the businesses now that they are captured. Platform reaches end-stage shit: slop, optimized ads for shit, thirst traps, scams. The Oatmeal cartoon above really spoke to me. The old weird internet was great because even if something was shit or crazy, it was all there intentionally; someone made the choice to create the page or write the article or even make the ad. Those old weird “one trick” banner adds and pop ups were the first creeping inkling of non-humans controlling what we see. Generative AI is where this all ends: robots continually reheating stuff that has already been created in worse and worse ways in the service of idiots who cannot fully finish and express an idea. It’s really a nightmare, and it’s empowering the worst type of people who imagine themselves creative. “I have a great idea for a movie, but I just don’t have the time to write a script.”
  8. Relevant to the text scandal.
  9. Their letter to the admin is over two pages long and I have no idea why because templates exist for this.
  10. Love Perini although it’s been some years. Someone order the peppered strip and someone order the pit-roasted prime rib. Bread pudding is a yes, and I love their rib appetizer. It’s great and it’s an experience.
  11. And if anyone is looking for a smaller SEC guy more recently, Trayveon Williams balled out at A&M. 1st team SEC and second team AA, came in at 5’8 and 200 at the combine. Holds the school season rushing record (1760 yards). I have no concerns about this kid’s height and neither do any college coaches.
  12. My usual fajita marinade is super basic- neutral oil, lime juice, salt, pepper, garlic, comino. This one was fantastic and it’s going in the regular rotation.
  13. I stayed in Townsend last year and loved it. Also to check GSMNP off the list. As mentioned upthread— some breweries and decent food, easy access to good hiking in the park. Quiet and nice. My kids bugged us to go to Gatlinburg then looked out the windows at the unwashed masses and we just kept on going, LOL.
  14. It’s the feared Waffle SS.
  15. https://en.safa.news/post/2487/Jerusalemite-prisoners-enters-his-36th-year-in-occupation-prisons Sorry, 1983 and six people dead.
  16. Was reading Al-Jazeera today and they have a list of the “political prisoners” Israel released along with sentencing information and then you Google the first guy and he blew up a bus and killed 7 people in 1986. lol, never change! https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/features/2025/10/13/explainer-who-are-the-palestinian-captives-israel-released
  17. Typing “I love Hitler” into my Young Republican Telegram chat while denouncing soft censorship on campus.
  18. I once had a non-core family member tell me that hurricanes helped the economy by getting construction companies to work. I said if that were true, we could just knock over houses, break some windows, and flood a bunch of businesses to get ourselves out of a recession, but the thing is he was really dumb.
  19. Thanks to AI we can finally use the Internet to get our rocks off, truly groundbreaking stuff. https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/14/sam-altman-says-chatgpt-will-soon-allow-erotica-for-adult-users/
  20. Elton’s X is rediscovering the need for account verification from first principles and there’s a real metaphor there for his “genius.”
  21. Is Tory Blalock really 5’12? Cause to me he looks more like 72 inches.
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