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”

The Dems also keep running as Republican Light. But if you are interested in Republican Light you’ll probably just vote Republican.

I think Jon Stewart had a good assessment of this the other night and the fact that the messaging coming out of the DNC is “we lost for running too far left” means they will try again next time too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKBJoj4XyFc

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.

That was also Biden’s platform. It worked then because we were still in the grips of covid

I do sometimes wonder if it’s a skill issue, but that feels like a really dangerously self serving position to take, that people that disagree with me are just too dumb.

I like to think that I’m a relatively smart person, I have a very technical job and there’s very few situations where I don’t understand what’s going on (although there’s definitely plenty). Sometime though I’ll be out and about in my life and meet people that just don’t seem to have any idea how extremely basic, to me at least, things work. How does compounding interest work, how does insurance work, why should I put money into a retirement account. Not fresh adults either, people in their 30s / 40s / 50s who just seem content not understanding relatively basic things.

The world preys on these people, if someone doesn’t understand compound interest then you can really bamboozle them. If you don’t see the value of having insurance because you work out and are “healthy” and then suddenly get cancer or some other disease that doesn’t give a shit about how much you can bench, you are fucked.

There is a part of me that thinks that for a lot of people the world is a confusing and unknowable mystery. I mean, it’s not really, but the amount of effort to figure those things out is just too high for them to give a shit. And I think about how weird it would be to go through life like that. At the mercy of forces you don’t understand, and then some guy comes up and says “everything’s fucked up but I can make it great” and because you already don’t know how shit works you think “awesome, because I’m drowning in medical debt because I didn’t think I needed insurance and got screwed over”

I think about this person I met once, I was building planning and projection software and their job was to perform projection calculations for inventory ordering. I watched, in horror, as they tabbed away from excel to manually add up some figures. This is excel, what are you doing?! I showed them the sum function thinking that they would be happy. Then they looked at me and said “that’s too complicated, I’ll just do it myself”

Wild, that was too complicated. It taught me an important lesson though about how everyone’s bar for complicated is different. I think for a lot of people “how does insurance work” is too complicated. “What’s a tariff and how does it work” is too complicated. So it just comes down to “do I trust the person talking”

Yea I remember this same thing. He won and they were even angrier.

Because it’s not like trump being in the White House is suddenly going to make women not be immediately repelled when they show up, mansplain Joe Rogan, and call her a femoid.

They fell for it again. This time he’s really really gonna make it great. Him and jd Vance have some really novel ideas about lowering the age women can get married and making it impossible to get divorced, so finally they can have a child bride or some shit.

It’s super gross and I hope they end up jerking it to trump fanfic every night crying themselves to sleep.

I have to imagine that media understands this and doesn’t care.

A responsible media, one that cares about the outcomes, would zero in on the salient dangerous parts of trumps agenda. If we had a media ecosystem that actually cared about informing people, they would have actually explained what Project 2025 is, they could have even read parts of it stopping to let experts weigh in.

We don’t have that. We have a capitalist media which like all actors in capitalism chase profits. The media companies know that trump is going to do some weird shit everyday and that by reporting on that weird shit they can get the eyeballs on the cialis commercials, because that’s their real goal. Selling ad inventory and making that ad inventory as profitable as possible, if news or information happens as a side effect, fine, but it’s not the goal.

During trumps first term I used to watch msnbc most evenings, it was the same 4 stories first told by the news, then by Rachel Maddow, then by Lawrence O’Donnell, then by whatever was on after Lawrence O’Donnell. Looking back it was the least information dense thing you could imagine. 4 facts repeated ad nauseam over 4 hours. Now they all had different guests on but the guests job was to do a few things. One, reassure you that this is important and you should pay attention. Two, tell you how outrageous it is so that you’ll pay attention. Three, prognosticate wildly about the ramifications so that you’ll stay tuned for more information.

The populace largely follows this drum beat, but the populace is also to blame. You see it outside the realm of politics too, the average person likes novelty and scandal and gossip. You can see this in things like twitter trends. Something happens, there is a viral video, and suddenly for millions of people it’s the most important thing in the world. It’s new, it’s outrageous, it’s exciting to talk about and be listened to. In some ways corporate media, whose goal is to generate profits, just realized “this is what people want” they want us to cover the story of the day or week and give them that salacious novelty.

Trump just happens to be extremely good at generating the kind of events that are perfect for this formula. He’s a man that will do or say anything to make his base cheer, and often those things are batshit crazy and he doesn’t care that they are batshit crazy because people are clapping.

The story there is that there is a man with a lot of power with no externally observable moral center that is willing to do or say anything to increase his power. But that’s a complicated story, that would take a lot of time and effort and dot connecting, what if someone gets confused or bored and turns away. Then the ad inventory won’t be as valuable because there’s fewer eyeballs. Better to go with whatever weird thing he did or said today, simple, understandable, and it will cause the emotional reactions we know keep people tuning in making our ad inventory highly profitable.

If Biden were more interesting they would do it to him, they try from time to time, oh look he bit a baby dressed as a chicken on Halloween. He just isn’t out in public doing 3 hour rallies daily that the news can sift through for best hits.

Finally there is the staying power. Why does trump end up in this cycle more than others. The way the cycle is supposed to play out is

1. Powerful person does weird / bad thing
2. People are outraged
3. Person is shamed or loses support and then the news can report on the fallout.

Step 3 never happens for trump. His supporters do not care about the thing that’s outraging people today. They will never stop supporting him and he will never feel shame, he feels the opposite, he’s proud of the way he can manipulate this machine.

So the news doesn’t get a step three, but this is the formula, so back to step 1. So for trump you do get this unique media cycle of weird / bad thing -> outrage -> nothing. And that nothing sits in the air like an unresolved chord at the end of a music piece, it’s discordant and unsettling and there is no resolution coming. In fact, it’s the kind of thing that might make people stop watching the news. Better spin up the next thing so people will forget about last weeks outrage and start fresh.

In this we agree.

The democrats are just the blue colored boot of the oligarchs.

Naive is the Democratic party’s current position of favoring those donors over voters.

I understand that they’ve done a cynical calculus and decided to leave those voters on the sidelines. It is a failing strategy that successfully got them billions of dollars and lost the election.

It is not that I do not understand the deeper reason, it is that I reject it as a failure.

The thing that has driven me crazy for so long is this is the situation in America.

There are 70M Americans that will vote Republican and nothing will ever change their minds

There are 70M Americans that will vote Democrat and nothing will ever change their minds

There are a couple million independent undecided voters that everyone goes after

Then there are 100M+ people that sit out the election and no one seems to try to understand what would make them vote. It’s so crazy that we have just decided that there are red states and blue states and that’s how it is. A party that could retain some of either party while activating half the people that sit out would be a force to reckon with.

As the Democratic Party has tried to find some way to win again they have gone after which group? The handful of independents and the 70M republicans that aren’t going to vote for them ever. And the people sitting it out probably aren’t looking for them to shift right, if so they would be republicans.

Honestly I’m not sure American businesses are very smart.

I imagine corpos do want trump, but it seems as short sighted as going after quarterly profits ahead of all else.

Ok, so you own a corporation and want those pesky “water break” regulations that are really cutting into your profits to go away. So you back trump. He tweets out “WORKERS DRINKING WATER ON THE CLOCK, SAD AND BIGLY BAD” and they decide that’s an official act and you can squeeze an extra 15 minutes out of your workers.

Meanwhile, he puts a 20% tariff on all your inputs.

I don’t support, but could at least understand, companies wanting this guy out of some rank greed. But he’s articulated positions that would be awful for most businesses. Every serious economist has looked at his tariff plan and gone “oh yea, that would destroy the economy”

The man personally probably doesn’t give a shit. He wants power and admiration and if someone like Stephen Miller says “hey this plan I have for changing how divorce and abortion work is good for your campaign / presidency” then he will go along with it.

The threat of a man like trump is not that he personally wants to do a bunch of bad things (although he does seem to think a lot of awful ideas with clear history and mechanism of not working, like tariffs, are smart and good). It’s that he doesn’t care about the people around him that want to do awful things.

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.

Bernie supporters also ended up being one of the most loyal voting blocks for Clinton.

A higher percentage of his voters backed Clinton than her voters backed Obama in 2008

From https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/did-bernie-sanders-cost-hillary-clinton-the-presidency/

As a Bernie bro that voted for Clinton in 2016, there is this very small number of very voca Bernie supporters that screech the loudest and give everyone else a bad name.

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.

Yes, I think that’s part of it, I shouldn’t be able to read every letter in your signature. I don’t trust that :D

There’s a reason there’s a print line under the signature line, your signature should be some vague squiggle.

I always hated how I was taught to write the capital letters in my name and then I was sitting in civics class and looking at the Declaration of Independence and stole big parts of my current signature from our founding fathers.

They knew how to write their names with style.

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