not intended for direct human consumption

Certainly. But it’s still edible. Dent corn, for instance, can be and is used for cornmeal, masa, tortillas, and so on. The industrial monoculture varieties of dent corn are optimized for animal feed, ethanol, or whatever, but nothing’s stopping us from eating them (except, in theory, the ridiculous amount of herbicide and pesticide that gets dumped on them).

The reason why we’re growing so much corn that’s not intended for direct human consumption is because of a whole shitload of broken incentives and megacorporation subsidies and America’s meat addiction and the nagging worry that if we don’t keep the land in use we can’t justify stealing it from the natives however many generations ago.

Which is part of what the article goes into.

And it’s why the idea that ethanol opposes Big Oil is so ridiculous. Ethanol and Big Oil go hand in hand. Their interests are aligned and Trump loves them both.

If that was true (it’s not) why are we wasting so much land growing inedible corn? Maybe we could, you know, like the article says, use the land for better purposes?

Field corn is edible for humans. It makes perfectly fine cornmeal, grits, hominy, etc. And of course it’s processed into corn syrup, which is technically edible for humans.

It just doesn’t have as much sugar as sweet corn does, so it doesn’t taste good when eaten as a vegetable.

Sharing economy! That’s pretty cool. And pretty straightforward to open source if your community doesn’t speak German 😆

That’s why it’s called planned opposition. If you’re afraid of losing control to a genuine opposition movement, you set up a fake opposition movement that dramatically opposes you on a few big ticket items and generally agrees with you on the rest - or that dramatically opposes you on everything, but has no intention of keeping its promises.

Look, I’d like to be wrong. I hope I’m wrong. But I expect Magyar is going to make some dramatic economic moves that don’t actually change the economy, run some corruption show trials, crack down on political participation outside the two major parties, back down on his pro-EU stances, and quietly take his orders from Orban and Putin behind the scenes.

Private prisons in the US charge the government a fee per prisoner per day. The government pays it with tax money.

The US Constitution allows slavery as a punishment for crime. Private prisons can force prisoners to work in prison shops, or rent them out to businesses, and punish them if they refuse to work. The prisons pay the prisoners less than a dollar an hour and make enormous profits off their cheap labor.

Let me emphasize: this is slavery. This is actual literal slavery. The US government, and the private prisons it contracts with, collectively own almost two million imprisoned slaves, the majority of whom are Black. Slaves who refuse to work are punished with solitary confinement or loss of “privileges” like food, hygiene products, or communication with friends and family outside the prison. United States law and the United States Constitution allow it. And slavery is extraordinarily profitable for the slave owners.

Finally, private prisons are allowed to charge prisoners more or less whatever they want for things like phone calls and purchases from the prison commissaries. A prison can charge $5 for a 15 minute phone call or $10 for a bottle of shampoo. Since prisoners, again, earn less than $1 an hour, these ludicrous fees are generally extorted from the friends and family of prisoners, providing another revenue stream for the prison.

All this is so profitable that private prisons’ contracts with the US have minimum occupancy guarantees. The US government guarantees it will supply a certain number of prisoners to each private prison to guarantee its income. Somehow, despite crime rates falling consistently for decades, the US government never fails to make quota.

FYI, the private prison industry was one of Trump’s biggest donors, and their investment paid off massively - the industry is making billions from imprisoning and enslaving immigrants thanks to Trump’s immigration crackdown.

Oh fucking please. Fidesz got hammered by corruption scandals in 2024, Magyar dramatically breaks from the party over corruption, and somehow builds a massive nationwide coalition in a matter of months? The Hungarian opposition somehow abandons all its beliefs and rallies around a politician who holds all Orban’s political views?

The term for this is “planned opposition”.

Magyar isn’t Orban’s rival. He’s Orban’s chosen successor.

It’s easy to win an election if you own all the candidates.

And y’all fell for it.

I had a theory about multiple accounts being connected to the same person and how they’d use that to hide their insider trading, but I did some digging, and in this case the trader is a single anonymous account which has a pattern of making winning bets - 16 of them - based on things Trump does:

https://www.binance.com/en/square/post/309527584561937

https://x.com/Mrminick_/status/2041170962368844105

So, yeah, you could make money by following this account and doing what it does, presuming you knew it had insider information, and presuming it doesn’t shut down now that people know it has insider information. After all, you want people to bet against you, and nobody wants to bet against the person with insider info, right?

Also, here’s an article with examples of apparent insider trading on oil futures, and explaining some of the ways multiple accounts can be connected to the same (anonymous) people:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/insider-trading-claims-after-stock-and-oil-futures-surged-minutes-before-trump-s-iran-post

For one, some people don’t know it’s rigged, while others think they can guess how it’s rigged and profit off it. I saw it a lot when I followed cryptocurrency scams - thousands of people bought into obvious pump and dump schemes because they thought they could time the dump and cash out before it hit. And even during the old analog days, tens of thousands of people bought into obvious pyramid schemes because they thought they were early enough to make a profit before the scheme collapsed.

The old saying “you can’t cheat an honest man” has a lot of truth to it, and degenerate gamblers are gonna gamble degenerately.

And for the prediction markets and the insider trading, it’s because people can’t. The online stuff uses anonymous throwaway accounts, and the more traditional insider stock trading only gets noticed when (if) the insider publicly reports their stock trades months or years later.

If there’s one benefit to the rise of AI slop, it’ll be pushing people away from mass social media and back to IRL meetups where you can mostly guarantee you’re talking to a real person.

My bad, I misremembered the connections between the Trump crime family and the prediction markets.

https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/us-iran-war-prediction-markets-benefit-who-owns-donald-trump-jr-leading-prediction-firms-polymarket-kalshi-nyt-report-11772336769064.html

I’ll change my title 😆

One more Winstanley quote that goes hard:

And that this Civil Propriety is the Curse, is manifest thus, Those that Buy and Sell Land, and are landlords, have got it either by Oppression, or Murther, or Theft; and all landlords lives in the breach of the Seventh and Eighth Commandements, Thous shalt not steal, nor kill”

I agree. I think Miller and his dweeb crew have “flooded the zone” - done so much outrageous and horrible shit as quickly as possible - so effectively that protesting over specific issues just doesn’t work right now. It’s not that little Donnie has done one or more specific bad things that we want him to change policies on. Little Donnie is going out of his way to do as many bad things as possible, and by the time we organize a protest about bad thing number 67, he’s already moved on to bad things number 69, 88, and 108. “Go back to Epstein Island and put the adults back in charge” is the only rational message for a mass protest right now.

Someday, these items will all be eaten slowly, or perhaps quickly. When will this begin in force? When will it affect our daily lives and health? Will we be able to prepare?

Bypassing the question of whether sugars and oils are edible (?), field corn is perfectly edible for humans. Field corn isn’t sweet corn, and doesn’t taste good as a vegetable. But we can eat it the same way most people throughout history have eaten corn - as a staple crop, as a grain like wheat, as corn flour, cornmeal, grits, parched corn, hominy, maza, etc, etc. We just choose not to.

And calling opposition to ethanol “oil and gas propaganda” is ridiculous. Like the comment you responded to point it out, ethanol is sold mixed with gasoline. The industries are synergistic, not competitive. They have a common interest in promoting internal combustion engine vehicles and opposing EVs.

There are certainly those kind of irrational AI boosters out there. Though I strongly suspect the AI bubble is much like the crypto bubble, in that the true believers are vastly outweighed by fakers who don’t believe their own bullshit and are just hyping the product to make money.

When it comes to the billionaire caste, though, I think most of them know AI isn’t, and probably won’t, live up to the hype.

But the point isn’t to actually replace people with AI.

The point is to replace free people with serfs.

We’re already seeing AI being used as an excuse to replace American workers with foreign workers overseas. That is to say, American companies fire a bunch of well-paid American software engineers, “replace” them with AI tools, and then when the tools inevitably fail, hire much cheaper labor from India.

And the techbro support of Trump’s immigration crackdown has the same goal. They don’t want to bring foreign workers to the United States and pay them salaries sufficient to live in the United States - they want their workers trapped in countries with low wages and low cost of living.

Now expand that to, basically, every other working class sphere of employment. AI can’t replace workers. But if enough businesses can be convinced to fire workers and try to replace them with AI, we will get mass unemployment, economic collapse, and political turmoil - and, as always in a collapse, the ultra-rich will get even richer, because the unemployed working class will be forced to sell whatever they have at fire sale prices, and the billionaire caste will be able to buy up land and houses and businesses cheap, and consolidate even more wealth in their caste.

And when the dust settles, the unemployed masses will be desperate to work at whatever wage and conditions the billionaire caste wants to set.

I mean, if saving seeds wasn’t dangerous to the powers that shouldn’t be, Monsanto wouldn’t have made it illegal.

God, fuck ethanol. Last I checked it literally took 1.5 gallons of oil/gas to produce 1 gallon of ethanol. It turns more fuel into less fuel and pisses away soil fertility doing it.

I read an article some time ago arguing the purpose of ethanol (and ag subsidies in general) is, consciously or unconsciously, manifest destiny - we have to have a “use” for all the land we stole, we have to do something with it even if that something is a complete waste, because otherwise, people might start asking why we don’t give it back. Seems more likely to me all the time.

No kidding. Yes, let’s install cameras that can identify and record every license plate (and face, too, if the camera has resolution for one it has resolution for the other) that passes them.

Surely our government will not use this capability to track the movements of its political enemies.

I’m confident Oakland’s notoriously honest and professional police department will not use them to harass whistleblowers and stalk the estranged spouses of police.

And of course it’s overly paranoid to imagine the “third party vendor” processing all this license plate data could be hacked or compromised or sell the data to other entities.

Christ.