Thank you!

Honestly, the powers that be probably prefer people have these discussions online. First, most people who post even inflammatory content like Luigi memes are just venting. I’ll make such posts and comments, but honestly, never in a dozen lifetimes am I personally going to attempt to repeat his actions.

Second, the thing about the Internet is anyone can read it. Machine learning is deployed right now at a vast scale to trawl all corners of the web and find any instances of people actually actively planning acts of revolutionary violence. As tools for plotting actual acts of violence, social media sucks. Luigi succeeded because the whole thing was plotted in the one place the NSA can’t probe - the contents of a single man’s mind.

Third, you have to look beyond the Day of the Great Banning that you propose. What happens next? Well, tens of millions of disgruntled progressives and leftists are still going to want a place to vent or make their feelings known. And if the Internet is out, that just leaves good old fashioned IRL organizing. And it’s a hell of a lot more difficult to monitor in person groups that do all their activities with pen and paper than it is for bots to monitor social media for potential threats. Also, when people meet in person, they start discussing en masse various means of fighting back, non-violently or violently. People meeting in such groups can also radicalize each other. Someone who once was content just to post a Luigi meme might instead become radicalized and seek to hold in-person protests to call for his pardoning, hold non-violent actions to disrupt the trial, or in the extreme, even form a violent group to try and bust him out of jail. Fewer people will be willing to go up each step of that ladder, but the potential exists.

Really, social media largely serves the powers that be. It’s like an emergency release valve for society’s collective rage. It doesn’t have no effect, over time it can shift the zeitgeist enough to eventually effect actual government policy. But no one is going to successfully cook up a neo-leninist uprising on any fediverse instance, let alone on Bluesky. In a world of hyper-monitored electronic communication, any real revolutionary acts are plotted in person, on paper, or through entirely private encrypted communications.

It’s a series of highly efficient machines, each optimized to the point of fragility. Think of the supply chain disruptions during Covid. The cost of shipping is so cheap that it can make sense to ship even simple products back and forth across the ocean several times as they move up the value chain. But if one of those links breaks, the whole house of cards collapses. In generations past, commerce needed huge buffers in the supply chains, and the chains themselves were kept simple. In the days of wooden sailing ships, ships arriving late or not all were common. Before computerized inventory tracking and just in time manufacturing, storing large quantities of intermediary parts was also required. These buffers in the systems represented economic inefficiency, but they also produced resiliency.

America is a series of highly efficient industrial juggernauts built on feet of clay. Any good you buy at the grocery store or big box retailer is going to have a huge logistics supply chain behind it. And that chain will be, in economic terms, highly efficient. It will also be very fragile.

My God in Heaven, you live in a Norman Rockwell painting.

I would make the money’s paw consequences similar, but slightly different.

A bad microsoft update somehow manages to permanently brick every windows computer on the planet overnight. Linux is now the dominant operating system, but mass societal chaos results from 90% of computers being permanently bricked.

I’m pursuing a PhD in structural engineering and wood science. Here’s my perspective on manufactured homes, and why they lack the long-term durability of stick built homes.

The problem with manufactured homes is that they’re value-engineered to the point of fragility. A stick built home is built by hand on site. They’re built from whatever generic lumber is available from local lumber yards. They’re built by imperfect human beings using their own imperfect hands. To compensate for imperfect materials and imperfect human labor, they have a lot of redundancy built in to them. The structure of stick-built homes vary more between each home, so every piece of wood hasn’t been optimized down to the absolute minimum. Standardized lumber sizes (2x4, 2x6, 2x8) are used, instead of using custom-milled lumber to produce the absolute minimum cross section for every piece in a home.

But if you’re making ten thousand of the same identical manufactured home, you can optimize the hell out of them to make construction as efficient as possible. Instead of imperfect human hands, you use robots to place every piece precisely, and install every fastener perfectly. Instead of using industry-standard lumber sizes, you get lumber mills to custom mill you oddball sizes for particular columns, beams, etc. Instead of buying 2x6s, you get the mill or mill up your own custom “2x5.358.” You also do a lot more structural engineering. When you’re building ten thousand copies of the same building, it’s worth putting in more engineer hours to wring every last pound out of a building’s frame. On a normal residential home, it’s not worth spending an extra hundred engineering hours just to save a few hundred pounds of wood. But if you’re making 10,000 of the same home, those hours can be worth it.

Manufactured homes are, from an engineering point of view, far more efficient than a stick built home. Like airplanes, they have every extra ounce of material optimized out of their design. But as we saw in supply chains during the pandemic, efficiency and resiliency are often inversely correlated. The problem with over-optimization is that it’s only ideal as long as the building will never face circumstances beyond what the structural engineer initially estimated. Let’s say you design your building to survive a 70 mph wind undamaged. If you have a lot of redundancy, that structure may also be able to withstand an 80 or 90 mph wind undamaged. The over-optimized structure will be a lot more efficient at surviving the 70 mph wind, but if the building ever has to face worse conditions than were assumed during its design…well then you’re in trouble.

Finally, stick-built homes will inevitably be far more repairable and upgradeable than factory built homes. Stick build homes are built by actual human hands on site. Factory built homes may be constructed in ways that, while cost effective, are only possible in a factory environment. That which is built on site can be repaired on site. That which is built from mass market generic components can be repaired with mass market generic components. Stick built homes cost more up front, but they inevitably have long-term advantages in terms of resiliency and repairability.

This assumes an absolute reference frame, which does not exist in this universe.

I just end all my public speeches with “and Carthage must be destroyed.”

I choose to use my powers for evil. I will pop into existence in 2000 BC, 50 yards from the future Apollo 11 landing site. Neil Armstrong is going to make one small step for a man. Then he is going to shit in his space diaper when he finds a 4000 year old dessicated infant corpse just sitting there, completely inexplicably, exposed on the lunar surface.

You’re not really wealthy until you can raise your own legion.

It’s not theft, you’re just borrowing it! You’re just waiting for them to ask for it back!

“What love object bought you?”

FTFY.

We do the same thing, except everything that IS on Netflix, and everywhere else…

Pay a local on-foot letter carrier, cycle aficionado, or hiking enthusiast to carry it around with them.

Fuck these guys. Luigi did nothing wrong.

Exactly!

My theory is that once you have a role as a main character in Star Trek, you’re pretty much stuck in sci fi. The exception to this is if you were already a well established actor prior to Trek. So Patrick Stewart could go back to high theatre, but Colm Meaney ended up mugging Atlantis for a little C4.

Honestly, at this point, I think we need to admit the US cannot be fixed. It’s time to peacefully dissolve the US federal government in its entirety. Grant all 50 states independence, turn the lights off, and move on.

I think the last straw for me is the recent vote for House committee leadership among the Dems. Even the nominally liberal party is so utterly corrupt, so utterly surrendered to vanity, that it is incapable of learning even the simplest of lessons. Both parties have been so completely corrupted from the inside out by money, that they cannot be saved. The only people who can come into power are those who are utterly corrupted by corporate money, and they have zero incentive to repair the damage money has done to the system.

It is possible for a thing to be so thoroughly broken that it cannot be repaired. And we have passed that point as a nation. We simply don’t want to admit it.

The time has come to peacefully dissolve the US in its entirety. We need to grant all 50 states full independence. Then they can come together and form whatever new nation or nations they want.

This nation can no longer be saved. It is time to end the denial.

Oh, one Luigi damaged your world? Institute health care reform, or we’ll send dozens of them, one after the other!

God. How was SG1 so damn good? Every few years I do a rewatch of the whole franchise. It’s a masterpiece.

That’s why I think we should have a crowd funding campaign to build a big bronze statue of the guy. You know, those aren’t as expensive as you might think. Some searching suggests they can be built for $25k-250k. That seems well within the range of a crowd funding campaign. And unlike copy cat attacks or making death threats, there’s nothing illegal about building a statue to someone. At the same time, imagine what a message it would send if 100,000 people each gave a few dollars to build a statue to Luigi.

As far as location, I can think of two. One would be as close to the shooting site as possible. The other? On a main road outside of United Healthcare’s headquarters in Minnesota. I want ever UHC employee to have to drive past a big statue of Luigi as they go into work each day. A durable reminder of just what we think of them.

And if some vandals destroy the statue? We’ll build it again, but even BIGGER.

The key is to publicly wish for his death in a way that no person could actually carry out. Then it’s not a death threat. Wish for him to get cancer. Wish for him to have a heart attack. Wish for him to die from auto-erotic asphyxiation. Wish for him to be struck by lightning. Wish for a giant sinkhole to open up directly beneath his feet, swallow him whole, and close up behind him, as if Hell itself reached up to finally claim him, the Devil finally collecting on some contract signed long ago.

It’s not a death threat if you ask God or the Devil to do the dirty work for you!