@KatrinaNation Yeah, DEI turned out to be just as big of a bust as realists like myself predicted it would be.

@HelPrentis@MorgothsReviewnything you're saying. Here's the view from the ground.

I'm based in Asia. For now. No secret. In my profile. China always will be a presence to be considered. It's gravity cannot be denied.

The following are facts. They are not in dispute.

Since 2021, the EU raised its regulatory entry fees for my tech products anywhere from 200-300%, literally overnight, while simultaneously requiring products which had previously been approved and were already on the market must go through the submission/review process again. Even if it had been on the market for 30 years already? Yup. Gotta resubmit.

At the same time, the number of firms overseeing the regulatory work dropped 70%. There used to be almost 100. Now there's around 25 or so. This removed competition and increased approval times since every product must be re-reviewed by a smaller and smaller number of reviewers.

I worked for an EU firm for 10 years, spanning that transition period. From 2021-2025, everyone I knew in my cluster has left. Complete and total brain drain. Who's running things now? I have no idea. My old colleagues, with decades of experience, are all "consulting" now, or left for a different industry.

In a nutshell, the EU charges fees up to 3x as much as they did in 2020 while taking twice as long to provide, honestly, shitty service. Zero value added. Zero protection for the consumer.

Industry has been screaming, since before 2021 honestly, and the EU's response is - silence. Or the effete snobbish "If you don't like it, don't come". 30% of products on the market in 2020 have left or are expected to leave the EU market place by 2028. That's less choice for consumers.

There was some minor hand-waving the EU did, but it changed nothing. They say they may introduce some minor changes to the regulations by 2029. But the bottlenecks? Still in place. The over-regulation? Still in place. There is no challenge to fix any of this. The same thing will keep happening.

The following is speculation. After working for a decade, this is opinion:

Why? Well, I could write a 10k word essay on that, but at the root, it's "we don't know how to protect citizens so it's cover your ass"

The EU did the absolutely most EU thing possible, which is to stifle innovation by strangling it in the cradle by over-regulating it before it ever reaches the market so that they don't have to deal with the downstream effects.

Compared to that, the US is a dream for entry, tariffs or "unfriendly administrations" be damned.

Profits may be up, but that's the market shrinking as competition leaves. Prices gonna rise. But they won't stop any time soon because no new firms want to push against that barrier of entry, leaving only entrenched firms in place and a wasteland of innovation stretching out to the horizon.

The EU technology ecosphere is fucked. Royally, properly and unquestionably fucked, and there's no one coming to save it until they ask for help and, this is the hardest part, they accept defeat and admit they have a problem.

@seanmdav of communication you’ve listed are simply a repackaging of the Four Turnings.

· From Radio you had hard times making strong men
· Into Television, strong men made good time
· In the 24 hour news cycle of cable, good times made weak men
· And in the internet, where the outrage sells, weak men made hard times.

The kings of the future, the strong men fated by the Turnings to take the algorithm will seize it. By almost any definition, there is very little small-D democracy in the choices that are headed our way. Someone to tear down federal idols and wipe the table clean.

The Darios and Samas of the world may create the path of the algorithm, but I sincerely doubt they will be the ones who will end up controlling it. Something with that power will not be allowed into the hands of feckless frauds like the heads of OpenAI and Anthropic. They’re too weak and, honestly, terrified of being revealed for craving power the way they do in the mirror at home when they’re alone.

No, someone else is coming. Unafraid of their moment, of being the strong man to reign in the hard times. It’s someone beyond the Trumpian cloth. Honestly, a Bessent-type would be the best we could hope for. Intelligent, bold and not a quitter. I’m worried about many other choices, though. I think there’s a lot of weakness in the West, and with that comes darkness.

@aresteanu OK Computer to a Sgt. Pepper-like statement record. Whether you think it fits or not is up to you. I think everyone can agree that it was a monumental achievement. It threw down the gauntlet to all-comers, like the informal rivalry the Beatles had with the Beach Boys.

Thedidn't have any such rivals. Grunge was withering on the vine, Numetal was ascending but still a few years away from peaking. There was really very little creative energy around to match what OKC had presented.

Also, it's not coincidental that ProTools hit 24-bit, 24-track capability in 1997, which effectively removed the need for studios. Now bands, or single performers, could do garage or literal bedroom recording, without the need for studio expertise and put out a record with the same sound capabilities of a studio.

That missing expertise of engineering and producing is highly, highly overlooked in the decline of the quality of music put out.

It's the democratization of the tools of music that destroyed rock. The talent, sadly is mostly missing. Just because you can make a record doesn't mean you should if you don't have something to actually say.

Solo artists, fancying themselves as "visionaries" put out slop without bandmates to critique, argue or collaborate. Everybody wanna be a Kanye West, until it's time to do Kanye West kind of shit.

Solo artists are also easier to control, from a label's perspective, than a multi-person hydra band with several differing opinions and desires for the direction of the band. Even Radiohead has a bit of this.

A few days ago, someone posted the 2002 and 2026 Reading Festival line ups. I'm stealing it and putting the showbills here.

The difference was stark and exactly what I'm saying here. Look at 2002. It's bands. Multiple people onstage, playing together. 2026 is so many solo artists, playing with studio pros or pre-recorded backing tracks. The energy, the mayhem and real art is just ... gone.

And rock has suffered the most because it had the most to lose

@Tyler_A_Harper the Arday affair is interesting to watch, not because of Arday. He’s really clueless and, oddly, loving his time in the spotlight. But ultimately, he’s an uninteresting, shallow and empty vessel. He’s a symbol, not the cause.
The interesting thing is: who’s filling that vessel? And why this one in particular?
Leftoids, and white women in particular, are absolutely at the core of this, and almost every embarrassing incident like it, because they like what it says about them. As always, it’s about them and how they *feel*.
If you look at many leftoids in power now, they themselves were the first recipients of unmerited honors. They were the first generation to get the Participation Trophy. They were among the first beneficiaries of Title IX rulings. They were the ones who got scholarships not on merit but on social balancing, i.e., the thumb on the cultural scale.
And, it turns out, they were shameless about it. They accepted the rewards as if they were earned and not granted.
I remember a ways back, a nephew who came home from a Little League awards banquet empty handed. “Where’s your trophy?” his dad asked. The kid mumbled, turning to leave the room. “Get back here. I asked you a question. I know you got a trophy. Where is it?”
He threw it away.
“I didn’t earn it. They were just giving them out. Everyone got one. I wanted to win one, fair and square.”
Yeah, people used to talk like that a long time ago. But he knew.
People also had pride a long time ago.
There used to be something innate in people that said that the rewards for work, effort and competition were infinitely sweeter than those given out freely. Being given handouts was, frankly, embarrassing. I’m not sure when that changed, but I’ll bet it was Boomers greed that elevated it to the art form it is now. The unhindered avarice of trying to get everything you can or else you’re a sucker.
In SE Asia, and Singapore especially, there is a concept of kiasu which if you want to translate it specifically can be “afraid to lose”. But it describes a pernicious mentality that’s hard to get rid of.
You’ve probably seen it.
Ever been in a premium buffet, like one with steak or lobster or jumbo shrimp? And the first person grabs as many of the steaks or lobster tails or whatever and stacks their plate with it leaving an empty pan behind? Later on, you see all that food sitting on the table, uneaten or in the trash? That’s kiasu.
Think of it more as “It’s not just that I must win, but also you must lose”.
It’s infuriating and extremely low-class behavior. But it’s rooted in low-trust, poor economies where scarcity ruled and you took what you could get for the survival of the family.
Those days of scarcity have left Singapore, but kiasu as a cultural behavior is still very much there. I’ve seen people in designer clothes lining up for an hour in the midday equatorial sun to get a tiny sample cup of ice cream, maybe three teaspoons worth, because it was free. These people could afford whatever they want. But instead of leaving little sample cups for little kids in the hot sun, there’s grown adults queuing and hijacking it to make it about themselves.
Well, kiasu is also alive and well in the West. Women and minorities adopted many of the traits of kiasu and use it against men, and white men in particular.
They feel they’re fighting against a system that was hobbled in order to elevate them at the same time.
They will elevate someone who they think “has it even worse” than them because it both makes them feel good about themselves and insults the men’s sense of honor and system of merit
They will applaud a story, no matter how ridiculous, that ends with their chosen one “winning” because to promote a fairy tale is to deny reality of achievement and effort
They will promote someone “deserving”, especially if they feel it is just and necessary to keep someone else down, preferably a white man.
This is all aimed at the architects of Western culture. It is vicious and about denial. It’s about claiming spoils that were given to them and then crowing like it was won. It is about mocking the meritocracy with the unearned. It’s about elevating the ridiculous to mock reality.
And inside? It doesn’t make them happier. They still have that imprint of pride, the sense of the sweetness of the earned. It’s just buried.
The false accolades? It doesn’t fulfill them. It can’t. It’s the emptiest calories ever. You could get an infinite service of false honor, and you’d never get full.
You can see it in their eyes, hear it in their screeching condemnations. It makes them greedier. It makes them more bitter. Like kiasu, there’s never enough to fill the gaping hole of their desire for achievement they never earned.
But many men were still taught to not complain; to buckle down and try harder. “Keep some dignity, even if it’s just for you.”
For some reason, this is met with the opposite: loud and obnoxious celebration of the ill-gotten gains.
Common, everyday tasks become arduous and insulting. Go to any government office in the West, ride public transit, walk city streets. It’s loud, abrasive and denying any of the ancestral foundations that made the West great. And that’s if you can even understand the language they’re insulting you with.
And if you don’t like it or you say anything as a White or a man? Well, you’re at fault. Even with cameras everywhere, there is a laborious soul-crushing effort to get justice.
Everyone knows, inside, what the score is. But men must suck it up with the good grace of the earned while women and minorities celebrate the beatification of another moron, another empty vessel that they fill up with their rancor and bitterness of their unearned Participation Trophies.
Another Arday.
It’s embarrassing for them. But they can’t think about it when there’s only more want. More need. More to destroy because earning and building is hard.
Why do that when you’re given the world, only to throw it away beside the steak and lobster tails?

@DrunkRepub end stages of the slo-mo collapse of the monolith built by Obama, Pelosi and Reid/Schumer.

It was originally built to get large packages through Congress, by stamping out any individuality and leadership within the DNC. They only got Obamacare through, but the Democrats stayed with the plan, voting as a unified block. But the DNC has been leaderless since Obama left office. There's no one close to being a viable genuine leader in the party.

The DNC took a huge shock when Killary lost 2016. At that point, the entire DNC focus became OrangeManBad and existed only to oppose everything Trump suggested as One Vote. This loss knocked out the main support of a DNC Jenga tower. The whole edifice swayed.

In 2020, the Dems pulled all their political capital to steal the election, making it obvious what their infrastructure was set up to do, yet they still deny it like a 4-year-old covered in chocolate and crumbs insists they didn't ever eat the cookies. This removed political viability as a party and was purely to loot the Treasury and reinforce the NGO swamp in DC.

In the meantime, if they could still get Trump, they had the deep pockets to do so. And they tried.

Money can do a lot of things, and in this case, it wildly over-corrected the Jenga wobble of the Killary loss. Instead of protecting their core, the DNC swayed in the other direction and overtly attacked the country itself, distracting from their previous crimes by committing new outrages.

Problem was, with all this mono-issue voting against Trump, and ignoring of all else, they ignored the fox creeping into the henhouse with them. Starting with Pressley, Tlaib and AOC, the first seeds of the rot. And their weapon of those socialists was getting press coverage.

Now, the fractures in the DNC monolith's base are apparent for all to see. Mamdani is as dumb and careless as AOC is, but he won in the same way she did: via a politically astute team that took advantage of fractious NYC politics. Once AOC's Svengali left her, her stupidity was exposed, but by then she had recognizable face in one of the dumbest voting districts in the country.

Mamdani is the same: his team won't dare leave him exposed in an interview but that won't last forever as broken promise after broken promise mount. In other words, he's not the leader to rise to lead a party to greatness, but grifters can win and leave an impression.

The DSA and its doppelgangers will not sweep the DNC aside, but they don't need to in order to kill it as a viable second party. They will wear the DNC as a skinsuit, take seats in Portland, Seattle, Madison and maybe San Francisco, but there's little appetite for that in the South. They can't get a majority, but they can destroy the monolith voting of the DNC.

Meanwhile, Trump strangled the NGO network, which was a far more critical blow. The DSA simply won't have the money to mount serious national campaigns, because the DNC is broke. There's no coffers to raid.

It's tough to say which is more humiliating for the DNC: being strangled by the Orangeman, who simply refuses to die, or being eaten alive from within by the DSA.

The seeds planted by Obama, Pelosi and Reid could never last, and I doubt those three thought they would bear such bitter fruit. But Obama,and likely Pelosi, will have a front row seat for the destruction of the party they once led. Beautiful. Obama's legacy of ugliness and as the great destroyer is getting closer.

@FloppingAcesamdani.

It's the evisceration of USAID and the removal of NGO-to-DNC money from the national scene.

I've written multiple times about Obama, Pelosi and Reid gutting the Democrats of competent leadership starting in 2010. The party has zero competent leaders. That's on purpmonolithic NPC voting bloc that always, ALWAYS votes party line. They're disciplined, because no one stands out.

If they don't have principle and don't have leaders, what did the DNC have to even be competitive for the last 15 years?

Money. Specifically, NGO money.

No more. The grift, graft and even the Ukraine-to-DNC spigot is shut down. Now the DNC is not only broke, it's in debt. It is defenseless against Republicans in all but the safest seats, but it's doubtful the current crop of DNC NPCs will survive their own cannibalistic primaries.

This is on Obama. This is on Pelosi. This is on Reid and later Schumer. This was always going to happen, but for 4 years, the Democrats looked invincible. They just sold the next 20 years to pay for it.

Thanks Obama!

@DougTenNapelion sounds like a demonstration of how the pervasive takeover of Hollywood has happened. Call it "woke", call it "feminism" or "DEI". Call it "studios still resenting the last writer's strike". It's any and all of those.

But mostly, it's the perverse jealousy that men, and especially white men, are the best storytellers.

Go back to the apocryphal LEGO play study. The results were that boys engage in play where they *become* the characters they're engaging with. They *become* Batman or GI Joe. They immerse themselves in play that lets them world-build around a character with rules and lore and create from there.

Girls were found to take the character and wrap it around themselves. Batman came to their tea party they had with Raggedy Ann and a unicorn. Pandering rules bogged down play by protocol and politics. "No Batman, you don't get any until Raggedy Ann finishes hers first." The girl is the story and they take the elements they want and use it and bin the rest (which is often the most interesting parts).

If that sounds familiar, it should. There's several decades of Hollywood churning out the post-modern dissection of myth and the Hero's Journey to strip mine stories for elements and hang them on the Main Character Syndrome "protagonist" in a Mary-Sue, fish-out-of-water story. Hello? Legally Blonde? That was 25 years ago already.

Meanwhile, movie fans, tired of the destruction of classic IP, mindless SFX-laden sequels and ugly cinema are screaming for ... immersive world-building cinema? "Just give us a story I can get lost in for 2 hours."

Who generates that kind of story? Men. Men who grew up with immersive world-building play style, which happen to be most frequently seen in white lower-and middle-class homes who could afford some simple toys but required more imagination to fill in the blanks that the more affluent kids didn't need filled in. That used to be a description of white, middle-class American boys.

The studios and producers are responding to the external pressures put on them by things like the AMPAS awards requirements. Yes, Supergirl is not going to be nominated for any Oscars. But you can bet that the people at Paramount funding this fiasco to the tune of HUNDREDS of millions have the same damn rules in place for all their pictures so that they can avoid being called "racist".

In the end, whether its intentional or incidental, the effect is the same. The best storytellers are sidelined due to insane protocols to cater to lunatics who never got over Batman upending their tea party.

@p8stiested in the past about this. Tumblr was a containment vessel for mean girls, broken girls and all sorts random mentally ill main characters.

When Yahoo bought it and broke containment, it was like Ghostbusters shutting off the grid. Those ghouls were now free to infest every social media platform. Within 5 years you had rampant HR behavior, DEI and MeToo.

It had to happen eventually, but I credit the enshitification of the internet from 2013-2023 entirely to the collapse of Tumblr

I hate that every time I agree with an account, my first reaction is to check the account location before I like it.

#boardsofcanada #inferno #warprecords I was blessed this morning to get my copy of Inferno with the morning coffee. I can't say how excited this makes me. Like early Christmas. Thank you to Michael and Marcus for this dark gift.

@bocpages it's out, brothers. My CD copy came today

@bocpagesy through is done.

Front to back, I absolutely adore this. Not because it's BoC, not because of the wait.

It really defied my expectations. Such a worthy, gorgeous, well-thought-out album. Even the closing outro track was just spot on.

Will it be everyone's favorite? No. It was much more upbeat and warm in some places, and still retained the uncomfortable parts you'd expect. But for me, this might be my new favorite. Again, first impression.

Please, please, please buy this album if you're a fan. Show #warp, #boardsofcanada #BoC some love. I hope that there's more in the pipeline and I'm willing to wait for it. But this is the best time-filler until then. I'm so genuinely happy.

@bocpages You Retreat In Time and Space would be a beautiful track on Campfire Headphase. Beautiful clear instruments, a deep wah pedal. A gorgeous summer time track. If you're not loving this, you're missing out

@bocpages DEEP TIME

Oh God, Deep Time is Video #05
I'm in fucking tears

@bocpageshrough. My impression: it's smart. On a lot of levels. It's a change from Tomorrow's Harvest. It's deceptively deep. It will have the fans digging through the samples for ages, deciphering what the intentions are.

Everyone knows that BoC are intentional and precise. There's meaning, even when there isn't meaning.

As I've noted so far, I get a lot of late 80s influences in the first half of the album, almost an intentional aging from the 70s golden glow of Music Has The Right...

Is it dark? A bit. Nothing like Tomorrow's Harvest's coldness. There's a lot to unpack, and a lot on life entering the age of machine life.

The Word Becomes Flesh is an obvious metaphor for such a discussion. Clean, almost uncluttered drums, synths into syncopated dialogue samples, and then heavily filtered responses. Almost a dance track.

@bocpagess that late-80s Peter Gabriel world-music feel (there's more than a bit of that in the beginning of Prophecy at 1420MHz). Definitely BoC tho, upbeat and a sense of hope

Acts of Magic is at home on Geogaddi. Building anticipation going into ...

Memory Death, a warm opiate blanket of bass and slow pad swells, drawn by Nepenthe, with a clinical beep keeping time. Again, almost a Cocteau Twins feel

@bocpages DEFINITELY a headphone album. Your phone speakers aren't gonna get you close to where you need to be here.

Somewhere Right Now In the Future is almost like Victorialand-era Cocteau Twins. Of course it's degraded into lo-fi. But it's BEAUTIFUL

@bocpages Overall, *much* more like Geogaddi than Tomorrow's Harvest. Songs have more structure and are less like the ambient soundscapes.

Father and Son is a playful call-response of dialogue cut and pulsed to a rhythmic drum track. Very clean instruments. Call back to early works

@bocpages OMFG
Age of Capricorn is absolutely gorgeous