Any electronic device with firmware in flash. The charges will have decayed a long time ago, leaving a paperweight.

Sufficiently diligent far-future archaeologists may dissect and catalogue the devices well enough to develop a taxonomy of components, having their own names for components, CPU architectures and such, but they’d then be left with something like “this was a programmed control device of the Xargx Valley type, variant 13, only with a screen, a speaker, two microphones and a motor actuator. We speculate it may have been a domestic appliance, a children’s toy or part of a transportation device. Alternatively, it may have had religious or ceremonial uses.”

Exiting from consensus reality?

It predates Illuminatus!, which came out in the early 70s. The foundational text of Discordianism, the Principia Discordia, was published (i.e. photocopied and sent out to fellow fringe dwellers) around the mid-60s. Illuminatus!, however, popularised it.

Ah yes, Chesterton’s Balcony

Assuming one accepts the USSR and its bloc as inherently non-imperialistic.

If so, though, good news: the DDR still exists. There’s an uninhabited island off Cuba that Fidel Castro gifted to the DDR, which has not passed into possession of the Bundesrepublik.

tfw your old subculture from decades ago becomes a lot of people’s sexual fetish

If the shepherds were out in the fields at the time, Jesus was born in autumn. Sucks to be Sol Invictus, the Roman sun god whose birthday the new Christian cult usurped, though.

You can instantly get whatever you want, only it’s made from 100% technical debt

Thousands of years later, archaeologists finding the site concluded that it had been a ritual human sacrifice.

They actually sued another artist some years ago who jokingly credited a track of silence to Cage but didn’t actually pay royalties (apparently joking on credits is a no-no).

He left himself wide open to that one

If the rumours are that intelligence agencies have codes embedded in scannable objects that cause their country’s scanners to wave the baggage containing the code through are true, perhaps one should run the US, EU and Chinese scanners in series for maximum security.

And a decade or so before your targeted ads switch from fast fashion, adventure holidays and entertainment to things like lawn care products and orthopedic footwear.

“am I a joke to you?”

Remember: no matter how faulty you are, he will always be faultier.

The US already has a surfeit of third parties: the Libertarian Party, Socialist Party, Green Party and others more obscure. With first-past-the-post voting and the Electoral College, the most any of them can hope for is taking a few votes away from the party whose voters they appeal to most, and helping the others win, thanks to Duverger’s Law. In reality, they’re usually so feeble that they end up as vehicles for cranks or influence operations (i.e. Jill Stein).

Someone needs to tell Carole Cadwallader to move her resistance headquarters out of the Nazi bar. There are a lot of people who’d subscribe to her journalism if it didn’t also involve funding the enemy.

* Yiddish has entered the conversation

Isn’t Balena’s entire business model taking things that could easily run locally and wedging a cloud dependency in to allow them to be profitably enshittified?

Had the world settled on German, someone might be making a similar argument that the world dodged a bullet by choosing a language with phonetic orthography and words composed of logical building blocks rather than a mess like English