FBXL Social

It isn't like there wasn't enough warnings not to rely on these companies.

A lot of well-read individuals have predicted civil war by now in the US and throughout the west.

I think the thing they haven't considered is the biggest strength of liberal democracies: Buy-in.

If these were monarchies, obvious oligarchies, or tyrannies, people certainly would have revolted by now, but people who hate what's going on are going "Ok, let's keep trying to vote the buggers out".

The "Civil war" in the US for now was giving the Republicans the whitehouse, the senate, and the congress. The "Civil war" in Canada for now was kicking Justin Trudeau out of power.

However, we know from history that revolts do happen in liberal democracies. It just takes longer, and when it does happen it's ugly. The US civil war was one of the bloodiest wars in history, killing more Americans than either of the world wars. The collapse of the Weimar republic led to a global world war. Spain collapsed when it became clear none of the elites intended to allow democracy to continue. Lebanon collapsed when the balance of power it maintained no longer represented reality on the ground. Czechoslovakia collapsed when the nearby German regime became too powerful and dangerous to ignore. None of these examples ended well for those involved.

So that's an explanation for why we haven't seen the things we expected to see, and also why it could still happen, and if it does happen it'll be uglier than we feared.

Patent for "A thing wut does security"

According to Bloomberg, the auto industry tariffs are going to add $2,000 to the cost of a new automobile.

So how about the other $50,000 most new vehicles are overpriced by?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-19/auto-tariffs-seen-hiking-car-prices-by-nearly-2-000-per-vehicle

And at first the big company does the work really well for free, and over time it degrades and you have to buy more and more potions but you've already levelled it up so you're stuck between starting with another corporation at level 1 that does the work really well for free, or staying with the same corporation at level 99 that doesn't work very well and is really expensive to use.

I think this is getting too real for me irl

9 years ago, I watched the Epic Rap Battles of History between the eastern and western philosophers. In it, Nietzsche has a line where he dumps on the classical philosophers.

I left a comment: "Nietzsche was a philologist. I doubt he'd deny he's a student of the classical philosophers."

Then, 6 years later, I saw it again and forgot I left that message and was going to leave a comment to that effect, then instead I left a comment to myself: "Good point, 6 years ago me."

The irony of people who blindly follow the orders of some random blocklist because they want to avoid "nazis" is humorous. Like thoughtlessly hating certain people because you're told to by some faceless list has nothing to do with what happened in Germany in 1938.

I don't have many lefties following me, but here's a bit of reality check for US lefties who talk about "how you don't need to pay for anything with Canadian Healthcare"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPQ2bhtRVqM

Skullagrim is Canadian, and he's selling his sword collection to pay medical bills.

"That can't be! He's in Canada, and not even a scrub province like Alberta!"

It isn't a magic lamp, of course there's limits -- and he's running up against them. The surgeries take forever to get even if they are free, but ancillary services are still mostly private.

Oh noooooooo

To be fair, budget Hawks like me have already seen this movie.

Is that how much a horse typically is? Seems like a reasonable price.

To be fair, both humidex and windchill are common metrics intended to better illustrate the way someone feels heat depending on actual attributes -- either reduced capacity of the human body to cool itself in high humidity or increase heat transfer during high winds.

Something like this is incredibly common in Canada because you end up in those edge cases where it's cold and either windy or not windy, or it's hot and either humid or not humid.

There are actually a few examples of small businesses being owned by the super rich. In fact, something that qualifies as a "local small business" can secretly behind the scenes owned by larger aggregated funds that hold ownership in a bunch of small local businesses. The family that owns the mega corporation Uline owns a number of small local businesses within a fund that holds such things.

As for an example of families who own what look like mega corporations, franchise rights are a good example of that. Yes, the sign on the door says super ultra megacorp, but it's actually a small business operated by a local family who ends up kicking back a portion of the proceeds to the franchising company.

Notwithstanding the fact that publicly traded companies can be held by for example pension funds, meaning that no individual rich guy holds that company, instead it's collectively held by a large number of working-class people who want to retire someday.

Regardless, for the sake of my argument I don't need my hypothetical to exist. I simply needed to have the capacity to possibly exist. There's nothing stopping Scrooge McDuck from opening up a lemonade stand, and people who look rich because they own something big and important regularly end up penniless.

It isn't as straightforward a question as it looks at first for a few reasons.

One of the assumptions built into the question isnt about the companies but about the owners. It's assumed that the small business is owned by a poorer person and the large corporation is owned by a rich person or rich people. What if in one hypothetical situation your small business was owned by Bill Gates and the huge corporation was actually owned by a modest middle class family? In that case it isn't about stealing from a big or small company, it's about the more standard stealing from the rich or the poor.

Another thing is the use of the word "far". Not that it's just more immoral, but far more immoral. Such language suggests that the orders of magnitude are so great that it totally changes the moral calculus of a question.

But what is the telos we are striving towards? Today people might say the telos is sort of utilitarian, so you just want the most people to be the post happy and so stealing from a small organization is going to cause more unhappiness than stealing from a large one (the bike cuck problem). If on the other hand the telos of life is a life well lived, then stealing at all is damage to your honor, your virtue, the amount of sin in your soul, and so the act of missing the mark isn't about who you transgress against, but about the integrity of yourself and both are similar marks against you because the end result is you're living a life less well lived regardless of the direct measurable consequences to the world at hand.

In the end, we can all agree I think that we should steal not from small businesses or large corporations, but from homeless people. They have less debt than any of you and if they're high enough they won't even notice their stuff is missing. As well, they won't harm any customers or supply chains up or down, they don't have an economic multiplier effect, and as one famous fictional character tells us, if you steal enough from them you could even help reduce the surplus population which will have far ranging positive effects!

Ashion fart?

Well that's certainly inconvenient for her.

My original word target for Future Sepsis was 60,000 words, I'm at 65,000 words today. Getting close now!

To be fair, the post was written by an LLM to be confident but wrong.