Fayanora: The Djao'Mor'Terra Collective

You should sign this petition to protest YouTube's new AI-powered age verification system. And here's why:

AI has proven again and again that it doesn't work right, and the ways it can mess up can be horrible. AI based age verification, which has no transparency at all, is going to hurt a lot of people. Customers and content creators alike are going to be kicked off for unknown reasons, reasons which may include "user is not white," "user looks younger than they actually are," "user has facial scars or burns," "user is disabled in a way that affects their face," "the AI just glitched," and many other reasons. We should boycott YouTube until they stop this nonsense.

Furthermore, companies are already finding that it's easier and cheaper to hire humans to do things rather than AIs, because AI keeps failing in weird and expensive ways. Recently, an AI being used as a programming tool deleted petabytes of the programmer's data for no apparent reason, data which was unrecoverable. What if YouTube's AI glitches and deletes entire channels for no reason?

Then there's the privacy issue. Companies like YouTube have far too much data about us as it is already, and now they want even more, including your face, credit card information, and maybe videos of you naked in your home. They aren't satisfied with the billions of dollars they're making in ad revenue, so they're trying to make you a product they can sell.

"But I have nothing to hide!" Of course you do. Data leaks are a weekly phenomenon nowadays. Do you really want to risk your nudes, your credit card information, your home address, or other important data being leaked online by giving that information to a service that is supposedly ad-supported and thus supposedly free to use? It's bad enough when that stuff happens to sites where you paid money for something; we can't let it happen for free sites like YouTube.

And lastly, YouTube already has a special version of their site aimed specifically at kids, where comments are disabled. They claim they're doing this data mining to protect the kids, but they're lying to you. This age verification won't work properly, it won't protect kids, it won't even keep kids out of places they shouldn't be. And why are we giving that job to corporations like Google anyway? That's meant to be the parents' job.

Well, it's only four days into March and already Trump and Musk have done enough damage that the US has officially been downgraded from "flawed democracy" to "non-democracy."

Imagine telling people 30 or 40 years ago that you were a time traveler from a future where one of Russia's puppets had destroyed democracy in the US in just three months and that he and a South African tech billionaire friend of his were busy carving the country up like a Thanksgiving day turkey, while the Republicans who voted him in were still cheering him on. They'd accuse you of writing the worst, most ridiculous, most unbelievable science fiction novel ever. Republicans of the day would sue for libel over it. Even the Democrats and leftists would probably scoff at it for being unrealistic.

This is what the process of getting a job should look like:

Me: I want a job.
Them: Why?
Me: Because I like being able to eat and pay rent.
Them: Are you currently wanted for any crimes?
Me: No.
Them: Have you ever been convicted of sex crimes, kidnapping, or murder?
Me: No.
Them: Do you have any questions?
Me: Yes. What is the pay?
Them: $25 an hour.
Me: Cool. I really want this job now!
Them: Okay just give me your name, contact information, and SSN, and you're hired.
Me: (Gives them those things.)
Them: Here's your hours. Do they look acceptable to you?
Me: Yes.
Them: Then congrats! You start Monday.

Imagine, if you will, a town in a fantasy setting. One day, they find a large oval shape that's golden and scaly, and bringing this object into the town square starts bringing the town added prosperity. After a couple days, people start lighting fires under this object; doing so gives the town even more prosperity.

"That's a dragon egg, you fools. Destroy it now before it can hatch into a dragon that will kill us all!" warns one person, who does a lot of reading and has read of other towns where the same thing has happened.

Nobody listens. "It's harmless!" they argue. "It brings us prosperity!" others say. Some even say "dragons went extinct a long time ago, it can't possibly be a dragon. What do you think we are, stupid?"

Other townsfolk who read a lot of history agree with the first person that yes, that's a dragon egg. First, it clearly is an egg three times the size of the largest cow. No way anything other than a dragon could lay that!

Says one of the believers, "So what if nobody's seen a dragon in centuries? I haven't seen the ocean my entire life, but I still know it's real, because I believe historical accounts."

"Don't listen to them, they don't know what they're talking about," says Malekith, leader of The Cult of the Dragon, a doomsday cult wanting the egg to hatch and the dragon to wreck havoc on the town.

"Of course he's gonna say that, he's the leader of The Cult of the Dragon!" the believers warn.

"No he's not. He's harmless, like the object."

"It's a dragon egg, and he's a dragon worshiper. He wants the egg to hatch and kill us all, which is what's going to happen if you keep lighting fires under it. You need to destroy it."

"Nonsense! Nobody would want that, even if it were real. You're over-reacting."

And so on and so forth, ad nauseum, for years. The believers try to destroy the egg, but it's been too well protected from the start, even before the dragon-worshiping cult got involved. Now it's not even visible anymore, not directly. But it's still in there, it's still being fed with fire. And even the townsfolk who might have been on the believers' side are too scared of the poverty from before, too scared of those bad times returning if it should be destroyed. It's a far off problem anyway, they rationalize; it takes years for a dragon egg to hatch. 'I'll be long dead before that's a problem,' they think. Then they tell themselves, "But it's not real anyway, it's just a harmless good luck charm."

As the years go on, and the people who know history keep trying to get the egg destroyed, the maturing egg's powers start hurting the townsfolk. The people who protect the egg get more and more power and wealth and good luck, while those who oppose it fall on hard times and become poor and fraught with bad luck. Those who help the egg claim that those who oppose the egg are just sore losers, or jealous. They're called evil for siding with bad luck, wicked for wanting the town's most important, most precious object destroyed. The people who oppose the egg are attacked verbally whenever they speak up; they are mocked, ridiculed, or just told "this is just the way things are, get used to it." For years and years it gets worse and worse.

Then one day, the egg hatches, and the dragon emerges. It unfurls its great wings and burns the city to the ground, eating people and livestock as it goes, until the town is nothing but burning rubble, piles of bodies, and a handful of survivors.

"We told you it was a dragon egg," they say to the corpses of those who protected the egg, and to some of the other survivors.

The survivors move to another town. All is peaceful for a time.

Then the townsfolk bring home a very large egg, and the whole process starts all over again.

~

(This has been about capitalism/fascism, in case that wasn't clear.)

PS = The person I was arguing with who inspired this parable said some nonsense about the problem being "unfettered capitalism." My dude, it's a dragon egg; there's no other kind of dragon egg but the unfettered variety.

🎶 God yeet these fucking billionaires into the fucking sun,
And shoot them in their hearts and heads with several kinds of gun;
Kill their heirs, return the wealth they wrested from the poor,
O tidings of revolutions won, and parasites gone,
O tidings of revolutions won...🎶

Prices of things sometimes make no effing sense at all. Even in WinCo, where things are usually cheaper, most name brands of soda pop are like $13 now. Meanwhile sugar free cherry 7Up is the same price as Diet Dr. Shasta: $3.98. I cannot for the life of me figure out why most brands are over three times more expensive than that 7Up and the store brand Dr. Pepper knockoff were. Nor can I fathom why anyone would pay so much for name brand soda when it's so much more expensive. Usually it's only 7 or 8 bucks, maybe 10 bucks, for the name brand.

Especially perplexing since I know store brands are made literally by the same factories as the brand names, bottled in the same places. It's a scam. The same companies sell the name brands to the rubes willing to pay for the brand name, and also the store brand for the poors. Same exact product, just a different name and packaging.

Sure, some knockoffs are inferior to the name brand because they genuinely are different companies. Whoever attempted to replicate Corn Nuts as a generic bulk item for WinCo failed miserably -- Corn Nuts are delicious, but the generic corn nut knockoffs in the bulk aisle are entirely inedible, like eating crunchy, stale lard that's also slightly rancid. But soda pop is definitely a scam, all or at least most of the store brands are made by the name brands in the same factories as the name brands. Same product, different packaging and different name.

There's an ad on Hulu where MasterCard is doing this thing where customers can round up purchases to donate a few cents per transaction to donate to some anti-cancer charity, and it makes me so angry. I can't believe the brazenness of their virtue signalling for profit. I know it's not a new phenomenon, not by a long shot, but it's just the latest iteration of a vile, scummy practice that's been going on for years, appealing to people's better angels for profit when they themselves have no better angels at all. All it is, is asking their customers to bankroll their tax write-offs. They don't give a fuck about charities except for the positive propaganda of it and the tax write-off. They no doubt spent 100 times more for those ads than the program they're advertising is ever going to raise for the charity. And charities are generally corrupt anyway, so an even tinier percentage of those funds they raise with their scummy scam are going to actually help anyone.

Seriously, I miss the days when they'd just donate to charities directly and boast about it for their PR stunts, at least then they weren't coercing customers into directly bankrolling their PR stunt slash tax write-off, and they weren't wasting enough money on ads about it to feed everyone in a small city for two weeks.

I know I sound calm in this post, but I'm angry enough about this BS to spit red-hot iron nails. I'm having to keep calm to explain things properly and without having to censor a bunch of swears FB could nail me for, since I originally wrote this post for FB. But I can say here what I can't there: I hope everyone on their board of directors, the CEO etc, all get ebola and bleed from every orifice, and then die.

For those of you who share my passion for worker's rights, you should be aware: I just got back from QFC (a Kroger store) and there was ONE EMPLOYEE in the ENTIRE store. At 9 pm, when they're open til 1 am, and on a Monday (holiday no less, even if a relatively minor one). ONE. WOMAN. For the ENTIRE store. It's not a huge store, but it's not a convenience store, either. It's way too much for one person to handle. Hell, I'd say it's too much for four people to handle without more help. She was mostly having to mind the self checkout things, which were full when I was there. She also hadn't had any of her breaks, which is illegal. To top it all off, the digital coupons weren't working right and had to be input manually, so it would have been easier for everyone involved for them to just have her running one of the registers. This poor dear was having One Of Those Nights, because Kroger is too fucking cheap to hire enough people at a living wage to actually run a store.

If you supported the Kroger employees strike back whenever that was, this shows Kroger is still abusing its employees. I knew the union backed down too readily from that, I can't say I'm too surprised by this. We need to make noise about this kind of BS, not let these assholes get away with it.

LinkedIn is encouraging child labor with a commercial on Hulu I keep missing the chance to take photos of, featuring a dancing redheaded girl trying on different clothes as she works at a dry cleaning place. I don't know how old she is, but the fact she looks 13 or 14 at the oldest has me thinking they're deliberately encouraging child labor.