Don't forget the moral panics.

Make no mistake people, especially people here who tend to be better educated and informed, made a trade.

I don't believe for a second there is anyone here on this forum that doesn't know Republicans are bad for the economy. Tech nerds have more than enough pattern recognition to figure that one out.

So you have to start asking why the people here voted trump, and I know they did. Not everybody but I would guess the majority.

And that just leaves moral panics. Woke, dei, trans, those are the current ones but there were plenty before that that people traded there economic future for.

Mind you none of them believe they're going to be the ones personally hit. If they did they would have voted against trump.

Probably one of the most famous quotes from a trump supporter out there is, he's not hurting the people he's supposed to be hurting.

At this point nobody is going to escape the damage. But Trump voters will go to their graves not believing that. Even as they lose their houses to Banks after mortgaging them to pay for medical care.

Somebody got their mod points. My last five posts have been modded down by 1. Man what a sad existence we all have here...

Oh yeah I know, like I said when an empire starts to fail it tries to expand its borders in order to loot.

I'd like to see us turn it around but I just don't see how. Propaganda plus voter suppression means our right wing extremist party can win every election with ease and they're incompetence and evil means we're basically doomed.

The centrists have their heads up their asses and the left wing refuse to give up on 18 to 24 mega voter turnout that's just never going to happen. So there is no viable opposition to the right wing extremists

Is only technically true if you start splitting hairs and it's also something that is only true because of a huge amount of government action and only within the last about 50 to 70 years.

There are so many fucking asterises related to your entire post I almost mistook it for a European comic book.

But sure, let's pretend the human race and human civilization only ever gets better and ignore thousands of years of History. Because that worked out really great for everyone involved as long as you just wait 2,000 years and having to get lucky and get born in the right place at the right time to the right parents so you're one of the two billion people that have a functioning life as opposed to one of the six billion that don't...

It's there so when people are blowing you off you can inconvenience them until they give you what you want from them.

Apart from that you have meetings that exist to keep people employed. And yeah all those people are going to lose their jobs soon in a huge wave of productivity enhancements.

Of course you're not going to see a dime of any of that money in the form of lower prices because companies don't lower prices anymore. Why would they? They have little or no competition.

Meanwhile hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars is just going to exit the economy. That's going to constrain demand and again, prices won't go down, but your boss is going to start laying people off. People like you.

It's like the old part of hitchhiker's guide where all the useless people got fired and the civilization collapsed.

It's called a Chesterton fence. Google is if you don't know what that is.

Then you're breathing tire particulate. We took care of a good chunk of the car exhaust but air quality didn't really go up as much as you would think.

So that got boffins looking into why and they finally solved the problem of, where do your tires go when they wear down?

Think about it do we have to clean the roads of tire gunk? Do we have to wash tire Gunk off buildings all the time?

The stuff has to be going somewhere and the answer turned out to be it's so tiny as a particulate it gets into the air and you breathe it.

This is why electric cars won't solve or even help air quality. We already have plenty of zero emissions gas cars but that doesn't do anything about the tires. If anything electrics make the tire particulate problem worse because they are much heavier and they have tires that wear quicker so that they don't use as much of the battery range.

There really isn't a solution for every single person in the country to have their own personal 2000+ lb transportation machine. But dang gummit we grew up with cars and we will be damned if we even consider any other viable solution to getting around town. Otherwise the Communists win.

And there is nothing more terrifying than fully automated luxurious gay space communism.

Which is what's causing the droughts.

Eventually things will get bad enough that we have widespread wars and we start to see drafts again. If nothing else the American empire like all failing empires is going to have to start trying to expand its borders in order to loot other countries.

That's why Trump has been putting out the idea of taking over Canada and Greenland. It's a classic tactic of right-wing extremists to introduce an idea and then back off and then keep introducing it until the public gets numb to it.

I don't think people realize just how big a fuck up letting Trump get a second term is. This isn't going to be like a regular Republican term where they just crashed the economy and we all take a 20% pay cut.

People are going to keep calling me Chicken Little right up until the shit hits the fan. It's all scheduled to blow up right after the midterm elections when the big beautiful bill goes in. And that's of course no accident.

There is not a single safe career outside of being born rich.

Even healthcare now is under assault. Since Trump's first election we've transferred about $20 trillion with a t dollars to the 1%. And that's on top of the 55 trillion we had already transferred in the proceeding 40 years.

Our economy is just too top heavy. There isn't enough in the middle or the bottom to keep the thing going. There's no circulation of currency or wealth. It's like if capitalism was a machine and we took the oil out of it.

You can run that machine for a little while afterwards especially since there's a little bit of oil left over but it's only a matter of time before the engine seizes up.

Dude this is 2025 we don't have reams and reams of middle running around doing nothing. Every manager I've worked with in the last 20 years has had regular duties on top of punching my time card

Management got it start as a means of busting unions but companies have long since turned to professional Union bustering law firms for that

When you see a bunch of middle management getting fired it's because they're getting rid of the old people and they don't want to get sued for age discrimination.

About the service cuts because they don't think it will affect them.

If you don't use those services well, you're still fucked.

Those services are literally trillions of dollars in your local economy.

What do you think is going to happen to your job when hundreds of billions of dollars just exits the US economy?

That's the thing I wish people would explain to these Trump voting morons. You're not going to make it out of this unscathed. You will probably lose your house in a few years when you are forced to mortgage it and the bank takes it. Then Trump or one of his billionaire buddies will buy it up for cheap and rent it back to somebody or just leave it empty to keep prices high.

I thought you could still register but you had to manually contact the admins. Not that I can imagine anyone bothering.

Honestly the morons here on slash dot know all that.

There's basically two kinds of right-wing slashdotter.

The first are the I got mine fuck you crowd. These are genuine idiots who think that they can put psychopathic lunatics in charge of everything and get away with it. A handful of them are in their mid 60s or even seventies and they will drop dead before the damage they're causing hits them. The rest are going to be homeless and living out of a broken down car by the river. Paying rent for that by the way.

And then there are the moral panics. There's a shitload of people here who grew up with their daddy or their granddaddy or both constantly dropping n bombs. So much so that the word is normalized. And they are absolutely terrified they're going to get a few beers in them and do something racist and lose their jobs. Every time you hear somebody complain about woke that's what they're really worried about.

And of course there's a shitload of people who are really really into transsexual porn and so they get really weirded out by trans girls in public.

Honestly it doesn't matter what the moral panic is those people will fall for whatever FOX News tells them to. The racism will always be a viable moral panic for them but eventually trans will run its course and they'll move on to something else.

There's no stopping them at this point. Between the propaganda and the voter suppression the Republican party and the right wing extremists are unstoppable.

Eventually they'll get theirs unless they die before that happens but they'll go down blaming Hunter biden's laptop and Hillary Clinton's emails.

Because it's not that they're smart enough to know better they're just really really really mean.

Must be nice to be over there in Russia and not have to worry about the American economy collapsing.

The downside is you've got our religious lunatics whipped up into a frenzy and we are about to hand them the launch codes.

You're going to find out real soon whether or not you're a nukes work. Honestly I don't know if ours do either but it doesn't matter because we have more than enough conventional bombs to turn the whole of Russia into a parking lot

And thanks to all that Russian propaganda we have put lunatics in charge of everything except the little bits and pieces we put nepo babies in charge of.

The print industry like a brick now that I think about it. As it rips through white collar jobs you're going to see a hell of a lot less printing.

There is a shitload of people who just make documents out of documents and move them up to chain so that information can be summarized and the CEO can decide what he wants to do next.

All of that is going to be done by AI pretty soon. You might have one or two data scientists programming the AI but the reams of people who had the job of taking the data scientists ugly data and making it pretty for a CEO that scraped by on a "gentleman c" is definitely going to get taken by ai and there's no way in hell those are going to be printed.

That we should be cool with them blowing through billions of our taxpayer dollars so that they can throw shit at a wall and see what sticks.

Remember when your mom told you the measure twice and cut once?

SpaceX isn't going fast because it gets results they're going fast because it gets investors. It builds elon's brand which attracts lots of investors to his various publicly traded companies. SpaceX is in public right now but you can bet your ass that when it's profitable enough to do so, and I don't mean the company's profitable, that it damn well will go public.

Is a fuck ton of smoke and mirrors designed to steal money from small investors. I say small investors because musk isn't quite as stupid as Bernie Madoff or Elizabeth holmes. He knows he can screw over as many hope you Gen x nerds and your parents and grandparents has he wants so long as he doesn't fuck with the rich.

If you look at SpaceX and how it's set up he let the really really rich people in first so that when he eventually takes it public, assuming his scam doesn't collapse before then, they all get in and out safely as you pour your money into it.

Eventually the whole thing collapses but by then he's long long gone with your money.

That's why Elon is having a temper tantrum over the big beautiful bill, it's going to cut his subsidies a little too soon for him to crash Tesla himself and get the money out safely.

What was supposed to happen is the cybertruck would drop and the stock would go crazy and then people would realize the Cyber truck was a piece of shit and the stock would crash but by then Elon would have had his 55 billion dollar pay package. But

But a law firm noticed that they could sue musk over that and Tesla would be required to pay a percentage of the pay package in compensatory damages. And because the pay package was so crazy huge that percentage which was designed to be relatively small with something like 100 million dollars..

I will give Musk credit for this he didn't make the same mistake twice. He bought a new law in Delaware from the legislation that will allow him to get his pay package and he just needs some time to sort out the paperwork.

That's the real reason those subsidies are being allowed the sunset by the end of the year and it's why musk is freaking out publicly that they might go away in September. He's not quite ready to screw over the small shareholders.

And honestly if it was just people dumb enough to invest in Tesla I wouldn't give a shit, but you fuckers tend to take the whole economy down with you when you do dumb stuff. I mean literally everyone was telling you 2008 was coming and you just ignored it and kept voting for pro corporate politicians that let it happen instead of regulating the economy.