It's okay Matt Gaetz picked up where Epstein left off.

You think you have it tough, how are members of the Trump administration supposed to look for dates now?

Pedophilia is not just about age or physical characteristics it's about exerting power over a helpless individual.

Once you're an adult in most countries you at least have some agency. But the reason Trump targets children is because they don't have that agency and he enjoys abusing that fact.

So the difference you're talking about might matter for the purposes of a psychiatrist treating Donald Trump for his particular form of psychopathy but from a practical standpoint he is very much a pedophile.

And he is effectively above the law so it's not like he's going to get treatment. He's just an unrepentant pedophile and a substantial number of the people here voted for him knowing that.

Are going to make it back over the Europe right? Also eventually we're going to need to invade your countries in order to loot them and fill our coffers because that's what failing empires do and our empire is very much on the skids.

Now would be a good time for the rest of the world to stage and intervention and maybe try to stop Russia from getting Trump a third term as president.

The problem is you're ruling class is hoping that if America falls they can't get their currency in as the de facto world currency which would put them in the running to become trillionaires.

In other news I'm using Google text to speech to write this out on my phone and it now recognizes the word trillionaire. A year ago it didn't it replaced it with billionaire and I had to edit the b to be a t...

At least what we most commonly refer to as autism. It's genetic.

There are also some factors in the womb that can cause symptoms we associate with autism specifically things like mild fetal alcohol syndrome. That isn't technically autism though and a actual doctor would know the difference.

The beauty of autism from a political standpoint is that the term is used so broadly in the public that you can create a lot of fear and confusion that is highly useful politically. And you can get parents to vote for things that hurt their kids while promising to help their kids.

Along with gender affirming healthcare it's one of the most effective things the right wing has to rob you of your money and your property right now.

Assuming our country and democracy somehow survives the next 3 years then eventually the current moral panics will run their course. Which makes me wonder what the next moral panic will be.

If you happen to know what that is and how the right wing will use it then you could probably make a hell of a lot of money getting out ahead of that. You can be the next Charlie Kirk or Tucker Carlson or Alex Jones...

It also be a monster but hey, you'd be a rich monster right?

Unless of course they've got some mod points to blow, but seriously fuck you guys.

Nobody here is so stupid that they don't know this is both wrong and horrific and doesn't understand exactly why that's the case.

And I know there are a bunch of trump voters here on slashdot

For the people who weren't just fooled I wonder what you got out of it?

I know a lot of people are enjoying watching random people with brown skin pulled off the streets and sent to African nations they've never been to.

Funny thing is every one of them thinks they're Christian.

There is a belief among the evangelicals that so long as you believe in Christ you are saved and you can basically do anything you want. Faith and not works is what gets you into heaven.

But you know what, do you really have faith if you voted for trump?

I mean if your boss gives you an order you go do it because you know damn well your boss is real and so are the consequences of ignoring your boss.

Jesus gave you all kinds of orders that you ignore. Unlike your boss you don't think Jesus is real do you?

Basically the evangelicals are closeted atheists. It's just an identity they put on. Something to excuse some of their bad opinions. The Bible is a collection of disjointed texts and books and letters to various denominations so it's easy to find a reason to do just about anything you want to do.

But eventually reality is going to come calling for you. We're going to take away your social security and your Medicare. After that you'll lose your house when you mortgage it to pay for your bills. I wonder who you will blame then and I wonder which passages of the Bible you will use to do it...

Meanwhile I have the entire Republican party telling me that fucking 15-year-old girls doesn't make you a pedophile. What a fucking world we're in.

So the backlash is basically irrelevant. Even if valve can get some Linux hardware into people's hands the majority of operating system purchases for computer desktop and laptop hardware or for corporations and business and Linux does not have anything approaching active directory.

So they can ignore any complaints. Because realistically the average user can't do anything about it..

Meanwhile AI has the potential to replace hundreds of billions if not trillions of worth of wage labor. Remember AI is not a product for you. It's not even a product for your boss or your boss's boss. It's a product for the 8,000 billionaires on this planet who are sick and tired of the answer to the question "who's going to buy their products"?

Nobody. Nobody's going to buy their products because they're not going to have products. The goal is to dismantle capitalism and replace it with a new kind of feudalism.

This is probably the biggest sign that the entire price scheme is distorted beyond all reality.
It is now customary to have an $8-$15 "processing fee" when all the processing is done by a smaller team of humans managing an automated system, whereas 40 we paid zero dollars in "processing fees" when there was actual processing being done by 20,000 actual human beings across the country who each got paid to sit at a desk all day and hand you tangible paper tickets.

Now that I think about it that way, on its current trajectory the future of AI is to turn every industry into Ticketmaster/LiveNation. Ticketmaster/LiveNation is the GOAT of profit strategy. Every young business hopes someday they grow up to be like Ticketmaster/LiveNation.

Good points. They seem to run well with my just-came-up-with-it proposal for an auto-depreciating ticket market: https://news.slashdot.org/comm...

But especially to your second point, perhaps the best outcome of a price-decay system is for the venues. Because one of the problems with the current bot-scalping industry is that sometimes events "sell out" in terms of tickets, but actual attendance is below capacity. That means we have both inefficient allocation of resources and lost revenue from the alcohol/concessions for the venue (which is sometimes shared with the artist/promoter on a percentage) and the artist merch table.

Under a price-decay system, you ought to see higher attendance across all events because of all the people who aren't superfans, but would on a last-minute whim think, "Sure I'll be in the nosebleeds, but for $25 each I can bring a couple friends for fun so we can get drunk and sing along with those two radio hits we recognize, and still have money left for a cool tshirt to show off that We Were There".

That makes the total pie bigger for all participants - artists, venue, promoter, fans - EXCEPT the scalpers. It dramatically raises their risk of getting stuck with un-resold tickets because they know they'll be competing with lower prices as we get closer to the event. And the smaller profit margin of those last-minute tickets is not worth the risk of trying to bot-purchase in bulk since you don't have as much time to turn around and resell them. Thus they're incentivized to be more downward-elastic with pricing.

Having a broader range of prices encourages full participation. It's like restaurant wine menus. If you only have your $7/glass house white and then a jump to $25/glass prestige wine, you'll make less revenue. Smart restaurateurs know that diners will upsell themselves if you give them a gradient. Your high dollar foodies are not going to stoop to the cheap glass because there's no psychological cachet to drinking it, thus it is literally worth zero dollars to them. Your low dollar folks are not going to jump that high differential even for a splurge, but if you give them a spectrum they WILL reason themselves from the $7 to the $10 to the $14 glass "as a special treat". You're always gonna sell more of your 2nd and 3rd cheapest wine than your luxury OR your house vintages.

Not unless you give it absurd amounts of computer power that is incredibly expensive.

AI is worth the money when you're replacing workers with it. But unless it can cut your headcount the cost of the competing resources exceeds regular computer software.

Right now I see it being used a lot to do reports nobody reads. The kind that used to be done by hand or if somebody's clever with a script. But if you have that kind of job you have it because you are somebody's head count.

I've said this before but conservatives are about to get a taste of all the efficiencies they keep clamoring for and they are not going to like it. The real thing AI is doing is letting every CEO know that there might be stuff in their organization they can automate.

And they're firing a lot of essential staff too. Really doesn't matter how important you are. It took me months to sort out a prescription because the company that makes it fired all their staff and replaced them with nothing.

We have hard evidence for the improvements to grades you get when you have free school lunch and breakfast. But we can't do that because the Christians won't let us. Specifically the evangelicals.

We could give parents actual support in raising their kids but every time anyone suggests that it gets shut down. Always by the think of the children crowd too.

Doesn't matter if you have the potential to be a useful genius if your parents are both working three jobs leaving you with a television set and no books and your classroom has 45 students in it 10 of which in the back have to stand because there aren't enough chairs and you had sleep for dinner last night and nothing for breakfast.

For about 30% of the country cruelty is the point and for the other 70% we're too busy fighting back against the damage done by that 30%.

This is some absolute drivel of an article.

The problem isn't that we aren't penalizing children enough. Anyone making that claim is just using cruelty for cruelty sake.

When my kid was in high school they had 45 kids in their class and 10 of them had to stand in the back.

We know exactly why kids are struggling. We are actively sabotaging public education in the hopes of privatizing it for profit and so they handful of religious extremists can indoctrinate children in private schools and a handful of racists are hoping they can sneak segregation back in using private schools.

On top of that we still have some leftovers from covid and the chaos caused from that time.

Oh and of course we don't feed hungry children because... I don't give a fuck what you're at reason is if you don't feed hungry children you're a fucking son of a bitch and you're going to hell. Repent already.

Everybody's about America first until it's time to actually put up some money and stop sucking billionaire cock. Honestly it's pretty fucking obvious that America first is just a code word for I don't want to look at brown people when I go to McDonald's. Because I have never once seen a person talk about America first and support free school lunches or probably funding public education or giving healthcare to disadvantaged children.

If anything they seem to get off on the suffering. Like that bitch Teresa used to.

Has been pushing hard for decades to get those religious lunatics into a fervor right? The Republican party actively encourages religious extremism so that they can Farm those people for votes.

It's always about the same thing. Taking all the money and leaving voters with nothing. If you're going to rob somebody blind and do it year in year out like the Republican party does you have to keep offering them something in exchange for all the economic security you are stealing.

It needs to be something intangible since the Republicans are taking all the tangible stuff like money and property and food and medicine and healthcare and education.

And that's why you will see religious freedom bills that give people the right to leave their children unvaccinated risking the lives of everybody else.

They get all the money and you get to skip your vaccines or teach your kids the Earth is 6,000 years old or whatever lunatic nonsense that isn't real you insist is real.

Before 2000 the government paid for 70% of college tuition. By 2003 after several rounds of cuts it was 20%.

Meanwhile here's Donald Trump telling us we need more immigration and h-1bs because Americans are just too dumb. Seriously Google it. That's what he said.

I wish my country would stop proving him right...

The risk of creating a viable competitor is too big so they will do pretty much anything a government wants in order to avoid being kicked out of the country.

It's not about the profit they can make in the country it's about making sure that there is never a viable competitor that could enter into any of your other markets.

Ultimately there really isn't a lot these companies do that's special. The most we survived because they're the ones who when the market was developing survived via survivorship bias. When you're talking infrastructure including internet infrastructure you are generally going to end up with some form of Monopoly forming. At least if you're not extremely careful to enforce competition. And I don't think there's a country on planet Earth that does that