So you have so many people going into gig wars to try and keep a roof over their heads that all the incentives are rapidly going away not just electric car incentives.

The best part is that squeezing the bottom like this will inevitably increase crime and then the increase in crime will get used for more of the kind of economic policies that cause the squeeze and so on so on so forth.

Capitalism is falling apart and socialism isn't an option. I don't know what we do.

And one that you need to live. So it's no surprise people are trying to constrain competition for that limited resource.

Stopping immigration especially in countries where birth rates are below sustainability will create a permanent recession like Japan has. I don't think that's really up for debate we've seen it play out in Japan to the extreme and in South Korea to a lesser extent.

But the problem is if you do not have enough places in society for the people who are already here and can vote they are going to do terrible terrible things when they are not just left out in the cold but facing homelessness and starvation.

We could of course try to spread the wealth around but after a hundred years of Cold war era propaganda that's just not on the table and I refuse to pretend that it is anymore.

Capitalism is breaking down and socialism isn't on the table but we do not have a third option. The best you can do is buy time and if you're going to do that you need to constrain immigration. Even if your economy takes a hit even if people are doing worse off they at least have a place in society. They are at least needed enough that we can justify giving them food and enough shelter that they are informing roving bands of bandits

Billionaires control 90% of the media in america. No joke and no exaggeration. I don't get to define the terms. They have control of the media they get to define everything.

l think this comment wins the thread.

The time has come for a European University CSE department group to reverse-engineer HDMI 2.1 and publish a compatible implementation on Github.

There's a solid history of this category of work going back 30 years.

They have certain legal protections for compatibility and public interest work.

This 1990's licensing model is antiquated and obsolete.

IEEE and ITU have abdicated their responsibility so sombody like Valve needs to do for transport spec what AV1 did for codecs and linux did for operating systems.

"A rising tide lifts all boats" is common among free marketeers and communists but opposed by fascists.

There is a government contract to go with this and it'll go to somebody well connected, probably Elon Musk. That was what Doge was all about. They caught a bunch of things and turned them into a juicy government contracts. The 250 million Elon spent on electing Trump was money well spent.

Everything is a grift now. Capitalism is collapsing and the only thing left is crooks trying to get the last bit of what you have out of you before the collapse.

We really need a third way. I get that nobody in this country is going to get behind socialism. Not after almost 100 years of propaganda.

But it's pretty obvious capitalism is collapsing too.

So we can't have capitalism and we can't have socialism so what's it going to be?

And we better figure out something fast because the clock's ticking and right now the third option is a total economic collapse. They're already talking about using AI to deny people Medicare and let the AI companies keep the savings. So even if you are retired you better start thinking about it

> Is there a huge difference between a criminal organization and a multinational corporation?

Yes, huge difference.

The common-law criminals running corporations get statutory protection from liability for the crimes they commit under corporate letterhead.

A regular mafia has individual liability.

Twitter did a much better job with the bots. It did have a tough time because you can't algorithmically police right wing extremism without having it go after American Republican politicians. So right we extremism had to be manually policed. In other words racism and Nazis and whatnot. Musk solution to that problem was to just let the racists and the Nazis take over.

Now ordinarily that would be the company would rapidly go out of business because of lost users. But musk has been pumping money into it, largely with the help of the Saudi royal family. Essentially turning it into a propaganda arm of American billionaires and the Saudi elites. At least if you are consuming content on the platform besides a handful very specific people posting to it.

The real problem is that computers are just too good at figuring out relationships. That's why you can't kick Nazis off your platform using algorithms. A computer will very quickly figure out that the dog whistles the Republicans or whatever your local equivalent is are saying are dog whistles referring to racist or Nazi stuff and it'll go after those dog whistles because the computer knows that when a republican talks about welfare Queens it's no different than a Nazi talking about rounding up black people and gays. The computer knows the dog whistle and you can't program an effective algorithm that doesn't figure it out right quick.

And y'all won't allow socialism. So what's the actual alternative?

Can't have capitalism anymore because the billionaires won't allow it and they have more than enough power and money to do away with it.

And we can't have socialism because well, that's socialism!

So what exactly is the plan?

Trump's trade war that he started so he could offset billionaire tax cuts with tariffs is crashing the economy. Manufacturing is down 20%.

We can't stop the trade war because the only way Trump could ram those billionaire tax cuts through is using the budget process and that required a revenue neutral approach on paper and if you're going to cut 2 trillion dollars in taxes for billionaires you can't really do revenue neutral.

So to get there he made up numbers around the tariffs. If he does away with the tariffs the economy will start to recover but the next budgetary cycle he will lose those tax cuts for billionaires.

As a direct result you need to suck at the fuck down and stop buying so much food. And if you have kids make sure one doll per Christmas.

I think that would require voters to radically change how they vote and who they vote for.

Even before that could happen you would have to completely remake the supreme Court to remove or dilute the six extremely corrupt judges currently running it.

Doing that would most likely require a super majority for the Democrat party in the Senate.

I just don't see voters doing that. Too many of them are concerned with nonsense like trans panic or whether the girl handing you your coffee says Merry Christmas.

Also the Republicans are consistently promising to bring back jobs and to eliminate immigration in order to make the job market better for americans. They are lying but the Democrats don't have an answer for that. Democrats are far too terrified of being called racist to reign in work visa abuses and believe too heavily in the studies showing job growth from immigration. There are alternatives of course to have immigration and a good life for citizens here already but again, voters aren't going to accept those alternatives because they involve too much redistributing of wealth for a society raised on Cold war propaganda...

I honestly cannot think of a solution because basically everyone and everything is working to destroy capitalism. Billionaires have had it with capitalism because they don't want the dependency on consumers and workers anymore. Technology is bearing down hard on capitalism too destroying jobs faster than they can be created. But we don't have any alternative to capitalism Socialism is simply not tenable.

We need to figure out some third Way for everything is going to collapse and I simply don't know of a third way...

Seriously really think about how this headline is written and what it's trying to communicate and what it's trying to make you feel.

Of course Democrats would oppose the deal because it's a massive amount of consolidation and in general they oppose things that would raise prices for consumers. It's a core part of their party platform.

But using the word unravel here implies they're doing something bad. And it takes the focus away from the increased costs to consumers.

The news media is actively manipulating you for a specific purposes. In this case they are actively trying to undermine any attempt to prevent this merger.

As more and more media is owned by billionaires we need to start questioning it more and more often.

The fact that you're reading this means it didn't backfire.

And they keep demanding better working conditions. And yeah we can use the police to beat the hell out of them when they do but then every now and then somebody films the police when they do.

So the real problem with Farm labor is going to be that nobody is going to want to pay people enough to have people who want to live on a farm if you're not picking up refugees from war-torn countries. And a lot of people don't want those refugees anymore for a variety of reasons.

Otherwise you've got to pay people a premium because they are living out in the middle of nowhere and it's backbreaking work.

And then there's all those little social issues nobody wants to deal with like I mentioned above with the unionization and needing to treat people decently.

Now given that a modern civilization needs about 2% of its workforce farming there's no particular reason we couldn't do all that but if you're a billionaire you just don't want to. Frankly at this point the billionaires have had enough of employees and consumers and capitalism in general. They have never been big fans of capitalism preferring monopolies and oligarchy to competition and free markets.

So it's no surprise that there's a automation push here too.

Billionaires and autocrats have sabotaged both systems. We are going to have to figure out a third way or we are going to descend into techno feudalism and that is going to suck for everybody but about 5000 people on the entire planet .

if you are reading this you are not one of those 5,000