Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Robert Freetard with a comment on our post about AI replacing workers:
Ultimately the the best positions to replace in a company with AI
The best positions to replace in a company with AI is the CEO and other C* positions.
They do NO physical labor, they cost thousands of times more than other workers, they basically follow the boards instructions (or get removed), An AI with the proper training, a strict logic tree and and as much ethical subroutine as the board would allow would make better decisions than the C* of most corps have over the last 50 years.
In second place, it’s MrWilson (who has a lot of wins this week) with a comment about the NCOSE CEO calling porn a national security threat:
Some porn can be exploitative, but you can’t trust conservatives to actually be interested in protecting vulnerable people since their entire schtick is exploiting the vulnerable, whether its women in a patriarchal society, minorities in a white-dominant culture, immigrants in a xenophobic administration, poor people in a capitalist labor market, consumers in a market where government services would be more efficient and affordable, etc.
They give lip service to banning porn because it’s rides along with hierarchical religious authoritarianism and anti-LGBTQ bigotry. They’ll use obscenity laws to prevent useful education. Teaching children sex education and the concept of consent prevents teenage pregnancy from producing too many poor workers and helps underage girls resist exploitation by creepy dudes who enjoy having naive victims available.
But hey, it’s perfectly okay for billionaires to exploit underaged girls on a private island…
For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with another comment about CEOs replacing workers with AI, this time from an anonymous commenter:
I’ve worked with upper management at small-to-medium sized companies, so I don’t know if the same applies to big, public, fortune 500 sized firms, but in my experience, nobody is thinking about how the business will work in 2 years, let alone 10.
Everybody loves making long-term projections; it’s easy to make them look good. But nobody is looking back more than 13-15 months, so they know that whatever they put in these rosy projections will be forgotten in a few board meetings.
If they’re told that AI can provide 50% of the productivity for 10% of the cost of an employee, they do layoffs, and let the business coast while raking in the profits for a few years. When business starts to suffer, nobody does an autopsy of how they got there. Or it’s a Private Equity owned business, they really don’t care, since it will have been sold off to the next sucker in the meantime.
All that is to say, many CEOs are incentivized to lie and make employees suffer much more than they are incentivized to build a sustainable business model for more than 5 quarters (comparing “same quarter, last year”) at a time.
So the problem (and this existed before LLMs), is that there’s a paper-thin margin between your “Bad CEO” and a “Normal, self-interested CEO just doing exactly what the Board wants and expects.”
Next, it’s an anonymous comment about “violent protests” and the media:
Welcome to 1973, when I was one of those dirty hippie commie (etc.) types protesting against the Vietnam War and Nixon and everything else that was wrong, and for civil rights and the environment and everything else that was right. The narrative then — by the administration and its stenographers in the media — was the same as it was now: all protesters are violent and dangerous, therefore they must he beaten and killed.
But the truth in the street was no such thing. Almost nobody was violent, ever. Protests took place constantly which were barely reported because nothing happened but some singing and chanting and some sign-waving. But if one idiot college threw a rock at some obscure protest: oh my god, it’s a violent revolution in progress, call out the National Guard. See, for example: Kent State, where students were brutally, sadistically murdered.
By the way: then, as now, almost all violent confrontations were initiated by the cops. I saw it over and over again, and at first, I was baffled — because I was naive and didn’t understand why they’d do that. But eventually I caught on: plenty of reporters would run with “drugged-up hippies attack our crew-cut shiny police officers” even though the hippies who were drugged-up were much too mellow to attack anyone. This kind of “journalism” pandered to people who were ignorant and afraid — that is, it sold well.
So half a century and change later, it’s the same old song and dance. Jackbooted-thugs who should be defending the right of the people to express their grievances are far more likely to murder them, and then go celebrate with their Klan and Nazi pals. (Could I coin Klanazi? It just kind of rolls off the tongue.) And Pelley is just another compliant cog in the machine, too weak and cowardly to be anything else.
Over on the funny side, it’s a double win for MrWilson, who hit both top spots with a one-two punch on our post about the return of screwworm flies after DOGE’s cuts. In first place:
Hey ChatGPT, from the perspective of someone looking who watches hentai porn in his mother’s basement, does preventing an outbreak of a flesh-eating parasite that will devastate misguided Trump voters and drive up already high beef prices involve DEI? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with yes or no, followed by a brief explanation about why I am also an alpha male and will get a lot of chicks when I brag about cutting funding to childhood cancer research. Do not use ‘this initiative’ or ‘this description’ or anything mean that would hurt my fee fees while I consume my chicken tendies in your response.
And, with a self-reply in second place:
Hey ChatGPT, it’s me again. Can you tell me what exactly DEI is? My lawyer said they’re probably going to ask me to define it in this subpoena hearing that’s coming up soon. Thanks, bro!
For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with a comment from dfbomb about CBS under Bari Weiss:
CBS coverage is banned in my house because we’re prone to enjoying home-made bread from scratch and if I am watching CBS and smelling toast I have to assume it’s a fucking stroke.
Finally, it’s an anonymous comment about Trump mimicking Denmark’s vaccination schedules:
Trump can’t compare the US to Denmark. Denmark has lots of things that the US will never have.
Like, Greenland.
That’s all for this week, folks!
whoops - thanks for catching that, it's fixed now!
Hi John - sorry if there was any confusion in the checkout process, but you definitely don't need to create a PayPal account! In your cart you should see two checkout buttons, the second one is for PayPal but the first one (the regular checkout button) will allow you to proceed without creating any kind of account
Yup, still available!
can't move it I'm afraid - though I can delete it if you like and you can repost! In the mean time, I'll link to where I assume it was supposed to go: https://www.techdirt.com/2025/11/14/nut-huggers-apparel-plans-to-battle-back-against-bullshit-buc-ees-bullying/
Fixed that too, thanks
yeah sorry about that - fixed now!
whoops, there was an error in the link - fixed now! thanks
Yeah we were blown away by the quality of so many entries this year!
whoops, correct, thanks! fixed
I don't think this is because he "can't admit he made a mistake" - I think it is because this is exactly what he wants, and he wants everyone to know that he will do it to anyone he pleases.
Though it's a broad rhetorical stroke and not really comparable to the acute diagnosis of these specific government actions as kidnapping, I don't actually have much problem with calling taxation theft if that's really what you want to do - knock yourself out But while there are many hopeful visions of a stateless future that I will happily or even eagerly entertain, I strongly suspect that they don't line up very well with yours Stephan
The administration's position is that as soon as these men first arrived at CECOT, America washed its hands of the whole thing and it no longer has anything to do with them. The purpose of demanding a statement from someone with personal knowledge of Garcia's current whereabouts is to establish whether and to what degree the DHS has in fact continued any active monitoring of these people, and to find individual officials who can be held responsible for fulfilling the court order to facilitate their return The purpose of evading that demand is to avoid answering that question, and avoid giving the court anyone to hold responsible But we do know that many of these men made it to CECOT (as there are photos of several of them being held there), and El Salvador says it is proudly holding all 238 of them, and at the moment there's just no particular reason to believe this isn't the case.
At the moment, there is every reason to believe all 238 of these men are being held in CECOT in El Salvador
It's not uncommon for the court to give the government lawyers leeway - but nothing about this situation is common. I think at the very least she could have done what Garcia's lawyers asked: order an official with personal knowledge of his whereabouts to appear before the court. And if it were up to me, order that to happen today.
And all of this happening just after they openly defied her order this morning when they missed the deadline for their response by half an hour
I don't think this administration is actually hellbent on saving money. I think they are hellbent on allocating money and spending any extra money required to finish their project of transforming America into an outright fascist state.
I am not optimistic at all, but this is a real human's life we're talking about - a human being with family that is fighting for his return. You don't get to just flatly declare him as as-good-as-dead.
Noted. Bye forever! 👋
It's still coming at some point, just been very busy
Traffic has been high, which means both more comments and more people voting on them!