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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: April 24th, 2024

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  • Its a pretty strategically and economically impactful piece of legislation pushed by, and then signed into law, by Biden, in 2022.

    It basically sets up a bunch of tax incentives and funds to go toward building out domestic computer hardware research and manufacturing.

    Its the kind of thing that would lay the foundation for the US building a lot more of its own computer hardware, instead of importing it.

    So when the Trump tariff apocalypse hits… assuming the CHIPS Act does not get repealed, it will be the only saving grace in terms of possibly lowering computer hardware costs.

    Trump and Republicans are likely to try and take credit for this, if domestic chip fabs start coming online before 2028, pretending it is something they came up with.









  • Unless you really want to split hairs on a per article basis, in general, it is both.

    If your subject for parody is ‘news about current events’, then you can argue that anything presented in the format you would expect from a newspaper, but comically exaggerated, counts as parody.

    If a certain Onion article is fairly clearly a modification or exaggeration of a specific news event, it fulfills another common attribute of parody by having a specific thing it is parodying.

    But sure, some of their stuff falls more into satire.

    Satire more often has a more … thorough and deliberate alteration of a base material or style, with the intention of conveying a more intentional critique of or commentary on the source, a fairly obvious prescriptive moral message, by subverting it in specific ways…

    … as opposed to parody, which, by itself, doesn’t really need to have a ‘message’, it can be just a level of exaggeration that is humorous in and of itself.

    Generally, most of the Onion’s produced content is both parody and satire.


  • No.

    The Onion, and parody in general, aims at being an exaggerated caricature of the truth, something that has a kernel of plausibility in its core, but has elements or scale that is blown out to ludicrous extremes, or is framed in an unexpected way such that it inherently juxtaposes a social approach to a certain realm of topics with another realm of topics, exposing a double standard that larger society has.

    Parody is not just ‘plausible, but fictional.’

    That would … just be a hoax, mis or disinformation, or realistic fiction if not presented as news.

    … The fact that it is so difficult now to tell many parodies from a person’s or group’s actual actions or statements, or complex events… this speaks to an increasingly extreme world, it speaks to … basically the death of a general concept of ‘normal’ from which parody can grow.





  • Its fanboy/girlism.

    If you pirate content from their favorite author/artist/producer/whatever, basically all of their screeching comes down to a hysterical emotional response that you are hurting a person or group that they worship as God.

    They just learn rhetoric to justify their emotions as a side effect, a consequence of wanting to be able to argue against the bad mean people that are hurting their favorite creatives.

    They are naive, ignorant or misinformed, immature… usually believing in some kind ‘just world’ type worldview where everything is fair and square actually if you just follow the rules.

    They don’t understand that the actual ‘losses’ from piracy are far, far smaller than whatever the RIAA or game studios say it is.

    They don’t understand that the people who actually create or perform the art basically get paid a tiny fraction of what their labels or corporate overlords make.

    They don’t understand that some people are actually poor, and the poor deserve art as well.

    They don’t understand that when a reasonable cost forma product with reasonable ownership rights exist, a great, great many will prefer a streamlined but slightly costly method over a complex but monetarily costless method.

    They don’t understand that you don’t really own anything which you can’t use or view or listen to as you please without relying on some proprietary other system which may just poof that ability out of existence one day, without refunding you.






  • This immediately reminded me of ‘ear candles’

    https://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/ear-infection/what-is-ear-candling

    … I have been berated and belittled as a closed minded fool for pointing out to a former friend group that uh, ear candling is a scam, there’s no way it can work, the ‘experts’ doing in person ‘treatments’ are unqualified, charge an absurd amount of money, and can actually harm you.

    … This was the beginning of an insane series of dramatic bullshit whereupon I learned that this friend group consisted of a 350 pound person who demanded everyone find them attractive and healthy, and has panic attacks/seizures whenever someone doesn’t, an antivax nurse, a ‘professional’ astrologer and tarot reader, and a self described ‘leftist socialist’ pursuing an MBA.

    This group of people decided I was an asshole for not paying $300 for one of them to get their… ear… candled…