Louis Ingenthron @LouisIngenthron@qoto.org

@nazgul I think this gets the root cause analysis wrong on the cotton gin -> slavery thing. The cotton gin itself did not cause people to do anything; it enabled what they wanted to do anyway. The *cause* of the increased slavery was... slavers.

It's important to differentiate, because in a less fucked up world, we could have had the happy "and then everyone worked less" story in reality. Any time-saving invention can result in either "less work" or "more production". The only reason we didn't get "less work" is because we never do that: our society is fundamentally set up to prefer scaling production up whenever possible, instead of just producing the same things with less work, and it's also fundamentally set up to require everyone to work full-time.

*That* is what we need to fix. Making humans do things that could be automated, just for the sake of having them employed, isn't a solution. It's just turning the fine adjustment knobs on the "exactly how shit are things" panel.

(To be clear, this is not to imply that AI is good at everything people are currently slapping it on.)

#ChristmasCarol #nobillionaires #unionize

Great piece on the Cybertruck’s design

… which distills every malign trend in US trucks: Massive weight, jacked-up height designed to lethally throw accident victims beneath it, noise baffling so perfect you can’t hear the outside world

Cars are rolling buckets of externalities: They greatly improve the life of their riders, while making the lives of everyone *outside* them worse

The Cybertruck is a tone poem to this impulse: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2023/12/02/how-to-build-a-car-that-kills-people-cybertruck-edition

You can't make this shit up. #Texas GOP refuses to disassociate from nazis and antisemitic 💩like Nick Fuentes, who was recently caught visiting a key #GOP operative. Great analysis from @justinmiller @TexasObserver:
https://www.texasobserver.org/texas-gop-extremism-nazi-ban-policy-language?utm_medium=social&utm_source=mastodon&utm_campaign=audience

Rules to help journalists avoid the mistakes of 2016 in 2024:

- Ban repeat liars from live interviews

- Never put a lie in the headline

- Use a truth sandwich when reporting on lies

- Don’t take the bait (stop rewarding drama with visibility)

- Abandon the social media algorithm (don’t let Xitter dictate the news cycle)

Any others?

https://framelab.substack.com/p/trump-2024-has-the-press-learned

Hello, FBI? I would like to report a cold-blooded murder