Republicans love a good scam

Next up is the dismantling of the ACA. They will roll out these amazingly cheap alternatives. Health insurance for $10 a month!

So the poor and the stupid will sign up. They’ll go to the bar and saunter up to a “libtard” and tell them that trump fixed everything.

Then when they get sick and try to use MAGA super plan plus premium they won’t be able to find a doctor. The $10/month plan only covers an annual trip to a CVS minute clinic. They’ll go on Facebook and write up how the goddamn liberals tricked him. Other faithful republicans will pray for them and tell them that it must be a glitch because trump made things better.

The con will win because it’ll only hurt those without power.

USA USA USA

Exactly this. And when you try to talk about it people look at you like you’re crazy or spouting some insane conspiracy theory.

Dems believe, clearly incorrectly based on recent results, that money wins elections. They decided that if they wanted to compete they’d have to get some of that sweet, sweet donor cash. Those donors aren’t spending money out of the goodness of their hearts, they expect something in return.

So now they are caught in a trap, they can either promote very popular progressive policies and watch the donors dry up or they can do the bidding of the donors and try to convince the voters that they are still somehow promoting the policies they want.

What we are seeing now is the end result of running that latter selection over and over. The millionaires and billionaires donating to the Dems don’t want to fix the endemic problems we face, because the donors handing them checks got their money because of those endemic problems.

When healthcare takes up 1/8th of your GDP, that money goes somewhere, to the people that buy the politicians to make sure that healthcare keeps funneling 1/8th of GDP into their pockets. That’s why the ACA didn’t embrace a single payer or even a public option, it just made it so that everyone had to give the donors their money. Same with rent, those checks go to landlords who buy the politicians.

The real solutions to our problems will never come out of a party capture by the donor class, not because of some tin foil conspiracy but by asking one simple question. Would the people funding this politicians want them to fix this problem I care about? This ask explains why the only place the Dems will take hard stances are on issues that don’t threaten the wealthy. The large umbrella term of identity politics (which is often overused or misapplied, but sometimes it’s accurate) has been a great carve out for the Dems for the last few decades.

Gay marriage doesn’t threaten a landlords wealth, so it’s fine to pick a fight on that topic. But even these have limits. Capitalism is by its very nature exploitative, the only way for the person who has the capital to make profit is for them to pay labor less than the value they generate and capture the difference as profit. So if your identity politics veers too close into empowering a class that’s currently being exploited, shut it down.

It would be great if the lesson they took away was, “money won’t be enough to win, we need to actually fix these problems” but they seem dead set on going “we just weren’t far enough to the right to get those swing voters, we will shift further”

Quick note on this one

Pedestrians are not expected to look out for traffic, but are not allowed to just cross anywhere. So it balances out.

If you end up driving, pedestrians are not allowed to cross anywhere (although some places like New York have legalized crossing anywhere) but pedestrians always have the right of way. You can’t run people over because they crossed outside a crosswalk.

So if on foot, use crosswalks or you could get a ticket for jaywalking. If in a vehicle, don’t hit pedestrians.

Have company that completely depends on people using their brains to solve problems.

Give these people free stimulants for years so you can extract extra value out of their brains.

Stop giving them stimulants.

Brain workers are now cranky and stimulant deprived. Surely this will make them more effective…

Give brain workers stimulants again, because fucking obviously.

I went through a round of layoffs at my last company. They laid off around 15% and then went hiring, people who just had their teams cut in half and their workload doubled and had to say goodbye to colleagues with years of experience were then told to do 3-4 interviews a week to hire new talent.

It was all just a yank of the choke chain. Management wanted labor to know that they could replace you. Our most senior people burned out and I left after staying longer than I really should have to try to help out my teammates.

Layoffs like this are about obedience and control and showing the investors that you are willing to break people to return them a healthy profit.

I don’t think it’s weird to feel exhausted by the pace of innovation, especially when the innovation has nebulous value.

I felt this way with the wave of “smart house” stuff. I’m a software engineer, I spend all day programming and debugging stuff. I do NOT want to spend 1 fucking second of my precious finite life debugging a fucking light bulb. Not one. Oh I can say “Alexa, red alert” and all my lightbulbs turn red, fucking fuck you. I don’t want my refrigerator connected to the internet, I don’t want my toaster monitoring my speech patterns to serve me ads and customize my toasting experience.

To every shitbag manager out there tying to shove this garbage down our throats, fuck off and die. And you might think “you don’t like a smart (whatever) then don’t buy one.” Fuck you too, over time I fucking can’t. Try to buy a tv that isn’t a fucking smart tv, you just fucking can’t anymore. And slowly but surely everything you use turns into some shitty piece of fuck.

The good news is that AI is probably a bubble. We’ve fed the sum total of the internet into our LLMs and we’ve gotten pretty convincing liars that are sometimes right. We are running out of data and 99 out of 100 uses of AI don’t make sense.

I’ve been in the startup scene for my entire adult career and if you talk to people that try to jam AI into their products to make investors happy you’ll hear very similar things every time. It was incredibly expensive, no one used it, and no one liked it.

There are some use cases for AI, but not nearly as much as what’s getting thrown at the wall. AI has been through many winters where progress stalls, the hype dies out, and AI winter begins.

Final thought, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. People are enamored with using AI to make false memories (sorry, there comes a point where you’ve touched up a photo so much it isn’t reality anymore), destroying their ability to use their brains for critical thinking, art, writing, reading. You don’t have to. Those people might deeply regret not having a single real picture of their child. Maybe the clouds made the photo look bad, but now you can’t remember laughing as you ran through the rain.

Our lives do not need to be curated and polished into some technicolor madness. Do what you want and in 20 years people will ask you “how are you so interesting and fulfilled” as they shovel AI garbage into their maw. I see a future that is similar to what happened to social media (I know, I’m using social media right now, we are all hypocrites). People working everyday to present some faux reality to others, jealous of everyone else’s faux realty, unhappy and unable to go 5 god damn minutes without a dopamine hit.

The other day I had to wait for something, I sat and looked out the window at the beautiful trees rustling gently in the wind. I took in the glory of the world around me, I sat in peace and let my mind wander. These are skills too few enjoy these days because they let the future happen to them.

You are in charge of your life.

Why would you complete a game when you can make a constant stream of income and increase that income stream with announcements and drip feeds.

Look at this madness https://robertsspaceindustries.com/funding-goals

As a Bay Area resident, what the absolute fuck? Is delta in favor of veteran suicide. For something to be “threatening” there has to be some sort of articulable threat. Who was the flight attendant white knighting for, the grim reaper?

Fuck delta

It will truly be a shock to the owner class when after extracting every last bit of value out of the planet they realize that they can’t eat money.

They can’t breathe it either.

It won’t protect them from drought or super hurricanes.

The bunkers they are building to ride out the doom they are sowing will be protected by men. Men who today are willing to accepts their slips of paper. But when that paper becomes worthless, they will slit their throats and sleep in their beds.

They are piling up paper that will turn to ash and they think they are oh so clever. They’ve been able to buy off and escape accountability in almost every domain. But the extraction has taken its toll on the earth, the delicate balance that the ecosystem exists in and the damage they have done can’t be fixed by buying a senator or even building a bunker.

It may be the only solace the rest of us have, man seems incapable of holding this class accountable, but reality doesn’t care. The laws of physics will not bend as easily as the law of man, and they will sit there with their bank accounts full of zeroes and impotently slap at the cold cement walls of the prisons they’ve built for themselves and they will know fear.

What stability though? They’ve been there since being established after WW2 and it’s been an extremely volatile region the entire time.

It would at least be a Faustian bargain if they were doing horrible atrocities but that’s just the price you pay for the Middle East being a peaceful and stable area of the world… but the Middle East has been in crisis for my entire life, so what am I missing?

Also America has the ability to project its power in the region without Israel, so what exactly is there to gain?

It is not, in fact, cheaper to impose the death penalty.

I was given the con side of the death penalty to argue once in forensics. I was actually pro death penalty and one reason was that I thought it was cheaper. I went to do research on this because it was certainly a point I’d have to contend with from the pro side.

It is vastly more expensive to execute a prisoner than to imprison them for life. https://ejusa.org/resource/wasteful-inefficient/

Now you might think, hey that’s a link to a group that wants to get rid of the death penalty, of course they are going to say it’s more expensive. Go read the studies, I did, and again and again it is far more expensive to execute.

Why? Because we, pretty reasonably, put a high burden in front of the state before we allow them to kill a citizen. The legal process for both reaching the death penalty and then the numerous appeals to that decision is not cheap. It is a massive cost that the taxpayer has to bear to uphold the ruling and actually carry out the execution.

So it is far cheaper to house a person for life, and this shouldn’t really be that shocking. The prisons are built, the daily care of a prisoner is minimal, we provide them with the barest living conditions and food. The number of people we even could execute is a tiny percent of the prison population, so it’s not like they are taking up some huge amount of space and require us to build huge facilities to house them. If you could thanos snap every prisoner that could reasonably be executed out of existence, you wouldn’t free up enough prison housing space to close even a single facility, even more so when you consider that these prisoners are a handful in each facility.

The danger with “common sense” things that confirm our beliefs is that they can be wrong. The world is more complicated than it seems. I used to believe that it was cheaper to execute than to house. I was forced to argue the other side and because I’m competitive and want to win I did the research. I’m glad I did, it taught me an important lesson in not just believing something because it felt obviously correct.

All told, I’m not really sure I’m even against the death penalty. Some people are irredeemable and their deaths don’t weigh heavy on me. On the other hand, the idea of making it any easier for the state to execute me if they want to is unsettling. The common arguments in favor of the death penalty don’t really hold up. I’m an atheist, so I don’t believe the person is going to some eternal torture, they simply cease to exist. And it’s more expensive. From a practical standpoint I see little benefit for imposing the death penalty, but I understand the point of view of people being so reprehensible they don’t deserve to live even if it’s a high cost on society.

If you would like to continue arguing in favor of the death penalty though, you’ll do yourself a favor to go research the subject. It is more complicated and nuanced than you might think at first glance. And at the end of the day, if the thing you care about is cost, you’d never execute another person. It is far far more expensive to execute a prison than to house them.

Reminds me of this https://youtu.be/zhbL8FFKARg?si=pAPl8FJs_D6B96yH

I heard from the woman that broke Jewish space lasers that “they” have the ability to move hurricanes. And so I guess “they” wanted to protect trumps orange house because “they” are secretly working for project 2025 and there’s probably a level Q drop coming soon to explain how this is all part of the plan but also is part of a different plan that true Americans have to fight like hell against…

God even play acting one of the brainwormed people for a paragraph is exhausting

Seems an effective government would have organized taking this stuff to a landfill that was operating properly and would correctly store the debris.

Sounds like he sent trucks to a non operating landfill, then decided “landfills are just big fields you dump stuff right? It can’t possibly be more complicated than that”

Here’s a video about all the actual engineering that goes into proper waste management. Maybe the people that operated that landfill had roped it off because they knew no one would be there to correctly manage debris drop off

https://youtu.be/HRx_dZawN44?si=cq-0sgZ6FO9CzTFe

More importantly, Anderson has eight vehicles. GEICO is only choosing to terminate the insurance coverage from Cybertruck and is actively pursuing renewal of his vehicle coverage for the rest.

Oh won’t somebody please help the guy with EIGHT FUCKING CARS one of which is a big dumb refrigerator on wheels.

Seriously fuck this guy anyways just for the sheer overconsumption

I suppose you might get to kill people but that doesn’t mean that the law is going to be ok with that. Proportionality of force is a thing. Stand your ground states are doing their best to change that, but that’s a very mixed bag.

If you shoot and kill someone for blocking your waymo and being a creep, in most places you are going to have to convince a district attorney and a jury that you were justified in ending their life. Even if you do that and escape criminal liability, you’ll then have to convince more people not to hold you liable in civil court.

Sounds pretty cool to go “I got a shooty bang bang so if I feel threatened in any way I can come out blasting.” It is true in the moment, but if you place any value on your future liberty, money, and time you might want to consider the ramifications of killing another human being.

Finally, even if society decides you shouldn’t face any criminal or civil penalty for killing someone, you will have to face yourself. Sitting behind a keyboard it sounds badass to shoot someone that’s pissing you off. In the moment you will probably feel justified. Many a young man sent to war or employed as a police officer didn’t think that taking a life would change them, only to find the reality of taking a life is not what the action movies promised. Self doubt, self loathing, ptsd, depression, these are all common reactions to reckoning with the fact that you are the cause of another persons death.

It is hard to feel like a righteous badass as you watch a grieving widow mourn someone that may have even done something stupid or wrong, knowing that their child has no father now and their wife no partner. Are these people jerks and creeps, sure, is the punishment for being a jerk or creep death, rarely. It is a heavy burden to carry to end another.

Yea that’s fair. I agree, it’s shitty to work someone until they are about to get overtime and then swap them out to avoid paying overtime.

I would agree that to “stiff” someone of something is to deprive them of something they’ve earned, like not paying out overtime once someone has worked it.

I wonder why they bother, it’s not like the thing he said isn’t already shitty.

Thanks for the example, have a cool day

I remember when I first heard the “we will build the wall and Mexico will pay for it”. I thought, “oh they must be taking him out of context that makes no sense”. Nope

He is pretty consistently advancing absolutely batshit insane things. I don’t think he actually gets taken out of context that often, not because the media is fair, but because the shit he says is so goddamn insane there’s no need.

Is there something in recent memory where you think there was a headline that misconstrued what he said?

The guy that privately owns twitter claimed to be some sort of free speech absolutist.

For once this is not someone getting confused about the first amendment but simply calling out musk’s hypocrisy.

Here’s an article from a year ago that covers the same idea and includes a bunch of direct quotes from musk about his free speech views that his fans love to idolize while his actions bear no resemblance

https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-promised-free-speech-twitter-hes-betrayed-it-again-again-opinion-1794478

I’ll save you a click with one pull quote

This time, it’s after he clashed with a BBC reporter over the prevelance of “hate speech” on Twitter. “Free speech is meaningless unless you allow people you don’t like to say things you don’t like,” Musk said in a clip since shared across the internet, including by mega-stars like Joe Rogan.

So musk using “free speech” to defend hate speech and then censoring this because it doesn’t align with his politics is of course legal, but hypocritical, and logically implies that hate speech does align with his political views or at least isn’t as offensive to him as this dossier.