This. It is BAD but the Ellisons was just James Bond super villain scale.

Kind of the joke I was looking for, but I just wish the YOB would finish imploding and go away. Unfortunately I feel like it's too late. This trend started a long time ago, and the YOB is only the peak so far. Now that the precedent has been established and the paths to harvesting the government are well established, it's not like they'll stop after the YOB disappears.

Instead, whatever stupid stuff the YOB says today, we wind up discussing it until he says something more stupid tomorrow.

(Heck, notwithstanding his "You're fired" catchphrase, he hasn't even fired Hegseth yet. I didn't expect him to last out this week.)

My insurance keeps going up because private insurance in America has a monopoly on access to healthcare so they can charge whatever they want until the public gets so fed up they demand a single pair of healthcare system.

If things continue the way they're going with voter suppression and right wing extremists buying up the voting machine companies I don't think it'll matter anymore and then that will be the end of that. About 10% of the country will be allowed to have health care and odds are you won't be in it.

And the answer is 0.13%.

What? We're you expecting a different answer?

AI is designed to take shortcuts in order to improve performance. It's already been caught more than once for example appearing to find problems on an X-ray with a very high rate of success when in actuality it had just picked up on a simple pattern where for example something is dumb as a ruler was included on the X-rays that had the problems and wasn't included on an X-ray that didn't...

Not that any of us have any say in this whatsoever. AI bullshit is going to dominate everything whether we like it or not. Just like how the price of ram has increased by 5 to 10 times and we all just have to suck it down.

We have a very small window left to the side of we are going to live in a society where around 2,000 people get to decide how we live. And we need to decide if having the girl that hands us our coffee say Merry Christmas is worth giving up everything else to those 2,000 people.

Not being constitutional has never stopped Trump in the past why should it stop us?

I mean at this point Trump has wiped his ass with the Constitution so many times it's going to take a full rewrites to get the shit stains out.

Assuming We don't have a third term of Trump. He might be too senile. Multiple doctors have mentioned that it's likely the bumps and bruises on his hands are from an IV drip for an Alzheimer's medication. And if he's that far along he's not going to make it to 2028.

He's trying to solve the affordability crisis he created.

To deal with the affordability crisis. It doesn't work because if you get hit in one of those by an American SUV you might as well have gotten hit on a motorcycle. Hell you might be better off getting hit on a motorcycle is a small chance you wouldn' Get thrown clear instead of grinded into paste

The other problem is they aren't fast enough for freeways. Even the ones that can hit freeway speeds can't accelerate quickly enough to safely merge.

And of course there are much lower profit so nobody is going to want to make them. If a competitor company started to make them then it would get bought out and shut down similar to how Microsoft buys out and shuts down anyone that threatens their windows or office Monopoly...

It's a completely unworkable solution to a problem Trump created himself.

Joe Biden was on track to do the kind of trust busting we needed to do in order to start getting prices down. He had already gotten inflation to around 2%. But Trump wanted 2 trillion and billionaire tax cuts and to get that he needed to raise taxes on you. So he did tariffs. Basically a national sales tax so he could pick your pocket and put the money in his pocket and the pockets of his billionaire buddies who bankrolled his campaign. Meanwhile he's gotten millions of dollars from the trusts Biden was going to bust. So you can imagine what happened to those investigations...

Affordability is a political problem and we aren't going to solve it by electing convicted felons with multiple credible rape accusations.

Are the same people who want put these back doors in your devices so they can monitor "criminals".

I'm not saying we ease off to Chinese, we got to keep that cold war going somehow or people are going to start trying to cut the fence budgets and redirect them to education and we can't have that now can we?

But maybe ask if you're the dog the tail is wagging.

The ONLY free market is the black market. That ends up with plenty of organically formed limitations even for the top crime lord - who still might suffer a while before Trump pardons them.

Government defines the rules of the market, the corporations are an extension of government, defines the currency needed to function, defines and enforces property rights...

American cars are subsidized and heavily protected; if not, they'd be gone years ago.

Free healthcare isn't subsidizing a company. A better power grid isn't. A pro-business power grid is somewhat a subsidy but nothing outside norms. Infrastructure like roads, communication, water, etc. isn't subsidizing. Indirectly, everything can be spun as subsided.

I know an old school Republican. They would pray for rain to suppress bad turn out. Since Nixon days (his time period) they always wanted lower turnout over all. They won't have a voting holiday, they didn't like laws forcing employers to let you out of work, they only liked mail in voting (before Trump) because more of their (old and poor lazy rural) people would use it; he heavily resented black churches being political by promoting voting (while his church did the same with color handouts of anti-abortion material.)

The suppression is almost entirely one sided. If you knew anything you'd realize. Furthermore, rank voting is superior and more republican states have it simply because it stopped vote splitting from harming them. Where vote splitting now harms the other side they fight like hell against rank voting; also rank voting increases turn out - which they don't like unless it turns out their voters. There is no fair fight; they lie about the other side then do the same feeling justified. Shocked when they finally realize they were the only one playing dirty. At least for the moment they realize this before going back to conspiracies that then justify their old hate pattern. Seen it play out multiple times.

Don't be sucker.

Our population was so fucking stupid Trump squeaked out a victory; the media and billionaires shouldn't have been able to put a gold polish on that turd.

Let me correct that for you:
"Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashingâ¦Simpletons can't grasp Nuance."

I mean it's for streaming and you can live without that but you can expect prices to go up now. They will pay for this buyout by jacking up prices.

Sure you can sail the seven seas for Netflix but you can't do that for food. I mean you can but eventually you will probably get caught and thrown in prison...

Fun fact Joe Biden was in the process of breaking up several of the trusts that were artificially raising food prices. Like the egg producers that were colluding and the beef slaughterhouses of which there are only four viable ones left...

You can imagine what happened to that work after Biden lost the election. Meanwhile Donald Trump got 5 million from one of the beef slaughterhouse companies.

Oh and don't expect other big corporations to save you. They just Sue the Monopoly trusts every few years and get a chunk of money from them to make up the difference. They do not pass those costs savings on to you.

But hey, If you go to Starbucks the girl who hands you your coffee might say Merry Christmas. Seems like a fair trade for a 20% increase in your grocery bills every couple of years...

Legally that makes sense. Although, I really think AI's paying content producers for providing access to their information is the right way to go, long term. If NYT is going to hire reporters to go places and find out stuff somebody has to pay for it. AI is great partially because it bypasses the horrendous mess the Web has become, but that's too good to last.