Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 3rd November 2024
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.
In a previous post of mine, I noted how the public generally feels that the jobs people want to do (mainly creative jobs) are the ones being chiefly threatened by AI, with the dangerous, boring and generally garbage jobs being left relatively untouched.
Looking at this, I suspect the public views anyone working on/boosting AI as someone who knows full well their actions are threatening people's livelihoods/dream jobs, and is actively, willingly and intentionally threatening them, either out of jealousy for those who took the time to develop the skills, or out of simple capitalist greed.
I thought the Raytheon ads for tanks and knife missiles in the Huntsville, AL airport were bad, but this takes the whole goddamn cake.
Ah, Huntsville. Where the downtown convention hall is the Werner von Braun Center.
🎶 the man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience 🎶
Raytheon can at least claim they're helping kill terrorists or some shit like that, Artisan's just going out and saying "We ruin good people's lives for money, and we can help you do that too"
Grift tech that claims to do awful shit that ruins everyone's lives, but really just makes Stanford grads sit around pretending to invent something while funneling VC money directly in their bloodstreams.
You'd think these would overflow the evil scale and end up back into being ethical but really they're just doing the same thing as the non-vaporware evil companies with just some extra steps.
You don't get it, this is a likely bribe
Help me out, the coffee isn't working today and I still don't get it. How does bribery fit in?
Ads are used to influence customers, right, but how many people on train station are about to buy a fighter jet or a tank? (Maybe it's a part of recruitment strategy) If they wanted to influence DoD or elected representatives then there are more direct options
Instead, remember that ads are paid for, and nobody needs to know how much, and that money probably is much less tightly controlled
yep, and alongside: go-nowhere hype-du-jour businesses are a remarkably good vehicle for pushing money from A->B for many of these people
? that's raytheon, a large company with multiple state customers that delivers what it says in spec, not anduril
Ah, thankyou for bearing with me, I see what you mean.
I just assumed there must be a large military office nearby and they were targeting the procurement personnel who do the actual contract and tender work, plus maybe the manufacturer headquarters is nearby and this is part of one of the more revolting symptoms of a highly militarized capitalist culture. I didn't get quite as far as drawing the connection to targeting politicians and staffers who likely can't put a meeting with missile sales reps on their publicly documented calendars, but that makes a lot of sense.
there's another thing in american context specifically: generally keeping defense manufacturers in state is a popular decision among voters (both parties) because it brings DoD contracts (lots of money) and well paid both blue and white collar jobs. this in turn influences back procurement decisions (a bit) (hey, my state has a factory of this junk obsolete since it was on drawing board (like A10), can you put some money in it? closing that factory would lose me an election)
this is more clearly seen in nuclear weapons manufacture, against all logic it's spread around the country with little reliable logistics between these sites
My sense growing up in Huntsville was that the airport ads for defense contractors were kind of like, e.g., Exxon sponsoring a pavilion at EPCOT. The intent wasn't to push any specific consumer towards buying any specific product, but to pump out a positive image for the company generally.
And a lot of those contractors' people fly through Huntsville on business. (For those not in the know: The airport is just down the highway from Redstone Arsenal, which is where we brought all them Nazis we recruited to help us beat the Commies to the Moon. The only reason Huntsville exists as more than a sleepy/dying cotton mill town is the space program and missile warfare.) There may well be deals along the lines of "advertise here and your people get the cushy lounge".