Proper hedonism really doesn’t need much. The best pleasures require little material wealth: love, friendship, singing and dancing together, playing games together, teaching, learning, giving, receiving, and seeing your friends and family at peace. For this you need stability, which does ask for a decent economy, but nothing of the sort that would make the planet uninhabitable in a century or two.

The pursuit of pleasure in the 21st century is so desperate because all of these simple pleasures have structurally been made near-impossible with the specific goal of making the working class restless, disorganized, and mutually antagonistic so they are easier to control and more dependent on consumption. Or to put it in modern terms, “to prevent loitering and stop unlicenced black market activity”.

I thought it was an interplanetary sentient race of machines from beyond the Terminus systems.

It’s actually more of a sieve.

The way it works with physical printers is that there’s a very feint pattern in ink that the printer puts on every page, which is too feint to notice by eye. But if you know the dimensions of the pattern you can cut up all the tiles and add them together and get something that is clearly visible. So with a detailed scan, every printed piece of paper can be traced to the printer that printed it.

This is one of the reasons you can’t print in black and white without color on certain printers: if the pattern uses colors, then it can’t do its surveillance job without color ink, so it refuses to work at all.

A similar thing could be going on here. A pattern that looks like noise unless you know what to look for, embedded across the entire image.

Depends, are you a lesbian?

If you aren’t, then I think the post made it pretty clear.

The subway should be suitable for disabled people to use. If that makes the subway a home for the homeless, that isn’t the fault of the choice to make the subway suitable for disabled people.

Homeless people will find some place to stay. If you make places more unpleasant until homeless people find somewhere else to stay, and then you make that place unpleasant until they move away from there, etc., then all you’re doing is spending massive amounts of money to make the entire city unpleasant and still end up with homeless people in the least unpleasant spots.

The post defines it as “petplay”. I don’t know if you’re familiar, but pets don’t speak. A good little girl doesn’t help you file your taxes, she sits in your lap purring quietly, proud that you’re putting the work in despite your anxiety and accepting headpats.

There are lots of valid healthy relationships that don’t involve someone glomping onto their partner the moment they notice they’re anxious and continuing the physical affection until morale improves.

I mean, I think there are.