Everyone talks about the poor when they bring up Obamacare subsidies but there are millions of middle class small business owners using those subsidies who are going to pay a small fortune if they can even pay at all.

There are almost certainly some people here who do contract gig work that depend on the Obamacare subsidies. Many of them voted for Trump and are very frightened and confused because they cannot comprehend why the great man that is Donald Trump would do this to them.

If you go to the Reddit forum leopards eating faces you will find reams and reams of Republican voters who are about to lose access to healthcare that they need to live doing social media posts directly to Trump expecting a direct response from Trump himself as if he's reading their social media posts.

It goes Way beyond parasocial into the realm of madness. It's not just that they think Trump thinks about them is a group they think Trump knows and cares about them personally and individually. And they are so confused and frightened right now because they are being betrayed by someone who loves them.

True, the Republicans are planning on cheating in the midterms in order to hold on to the House of Representatives and then cheating in the 2028 general election in order to prevent Democrats from winning then.

If Johnson can hold the Democrats off until then and if the cheating works then they win. The Epstein files never get released and Trump and all the Republicans in there are safe.

Nobody's going to care about any of the Democrat names in the Epstein files because those people have won since retired. The problem with the Republicans in the Epstein files especially Trump is that they are active members of the party holding office today.

The current Republican party is filled with pedophiles not just the Republican party from the 90s.

Obama was sworn in January 2009. The financial bullshit started in 2008. Let that sink in.

Their government builds up local industries and squeezes out foreign industries. They're not doing this out of the kindness of their hearts or because they care about their workers, the Chinese government could not care less about anyone or anything except themselves and power they are fascists.

A century or two ago European countries and America engaged in heavy duty colonialism using military force. After the world wars we stopped using military force and switched to economic Force. China does that now projecting power with economic power instead of military power. What the cool kids call "soft" power.

The problem with America doing what China does is the people in America who claim to want to do it don't really want to do it they just want to use populism to seize power and loot the country.

Furthermore if you're an American the only reason you're enjoying the relatively decent quality of life you might be, might be the operative word here given the state of the economy today, is because we use a complex series of economic tricks in the form of our country's national debt to artificially inflate the value of the dollar in order to bring in trillions of cheap imports that traditionally have kept costs low by effectively extracting tribute from other countries...

So it's not really practical for us to go all hypernationalistic unless we are either going to do drastic changes to our entire economic system designed to benefit working americans, which let's face it we're not going to do that, or unless we're going to accept extremely low qualities of life like the Russians outside of Moscow and St Petersburg do.

It's a cultural problem where the sort of fixes that would be needed if we didn't want to be dependent on a bizarre economic colonial system that leaves us tied into other countries economies can't be done because culturally we won't accept those fixes.

We are not for example going to spend trillions on infrastructure that benefits working Americans or institute universal Health Care so that we can compete with countries that either have it or that have a enough of a population that they can dispose of anyone that gets sick or restore our higher education funding so that young people can get advanced degrees or any of that.

All of that would be the s word and we can't have that here in the land of the free. We should all be plumbers or something.

So China is going to keep running rings around us because we aren't capable of adapting to the current situation.

So can the party currently holding a majority in 3/3 branches of the government. Mike Johnson sent everyone home early so they couldn't vote on the Epstein files.

I see you've read my sig.

Goes back to the old joke

Q: How many software engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: None. It's a hardware problem.

Q: How many hardware engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: None. We'll just work around it in software.

Apparently, somebody remotely bricked the editors a long time ago.

Yo dawg, I heard you like dupes, so I duped your dupe, and put it in the dupe.

I have an adapter so that the cassette player actually plugs into an Alexa Auto box. It's handy. I can also play my old Bill Cosby cassettes without giving the bastard another penny in royalties.

Maintainability, first off. There are very few people out there who can maintain antiquated systems like that, and they charge an arm and a leg.

Reliability. Analog cameras fall over and die every few years, while I have personally worked on IP cameras that were over 20 years old. Older IP systems are generally locked into a limited selection of cameras, most of which have probably been discontinued. Backup solutions, even just for the config, were lacking in older systems, having to figure out what camera is what and what the settings should be after a failure is incredibly time consuming.

Flexibility. Newer systems can be adapted more easily to changes, like a special display of recovered crown jewels or a new emergency exit door.

The big one: Integration. If an alarm is triggered in the access control system a modern integrated video system can automatically pop up the camera, set a bookmark in the recording, start recording at a higher frame rate, and if it's a PTZ (pan/tilt/zoom) can automatically point at a preset location.

In addition, if Mike Johnson were to call the House back in session, they'd have to seat the new Representative from N. Mexico, and she's said she'll support the discharge petition to put a vote to the whole House on whether to compel the Justice Dept. to release the Epstein files. They only need one vote for the petition. la Presidenta does not want that. This has the effect of protecting the pedophiles reported in those documents, and his name appears in them.

I think by now the Justice Dept. has had enough time to think of a cover story for all the redactions they will have, and to get rid of whatever they can without anyone noticing.

Was that in Alaska? Set up security for a hospital there which rotated through IT staff with amazing rapidity. Their corporate owner would only pay Lower 48 wages based on their headquarters location somewhere in the deep south. I saw their entire IT staff quit en masse and move to a new employer twice in the same year.

At some point they got a new switch which wouldn't fit where the old one was so it needed longer patch cords. Rather than buy a new box of 3-6 foot patch cords someone opened the box of 30 foot network cables and used those. There was a giant hair snarl of cables laying on the floor literally knee high between the punch downs and the switch.

We put the camera system in first, and a week later my co-irker got an email from their security head saying, "This system just paid for itself!" with a video clip attached. It was the camera which looked at the front lobby door, which opened and a big COW MOOSE walked into the lobby. She wandered around for a moment, walked back over near the door and when it opened again she left.

One night some gang banger was brought in with a gunshot wound, and shortly afterward his enemies showed up intent on finishing the job. The one poor (unarmed) security guard had to run to every external door in the building with brass keys to lock them. When we finally put the access control system in a few months later one of the first things we did was give them a one-button lockdown. The security head later told our salescritter that the savings on insurance would pay for the whole install in about two years.

Republicans could end this tomorrow if they broke the filibuster which they easily could and have done so before in order to steal supreme Court seats.

This is about stopping the Democrats from getting a win right before the midterm elections. It's the Republican party making your life worse so that you will blame the Democrats because they think you're stupid.

Well? Are you?

The race to surveil and market every human being on Earth. This only works at scale when we dedicate massive computing and energy resources to this bullshit. And governments and billionaires agree, this is what they want for us.

You as the target of this AI gets no choice. You don't get a say in the company board, as you don't hold voting shares. You don't get a say in your government because you didn't pay for a million dollar plates at a Mar-a-lago luncheon. And you don't get to refuse as a consumer because you're not buying AI or marketing services, you're the product.

Welcome to the new feudalism. Your just a peasant that is bought and sold with the land. It just happens to be virtual land now, and they call you a user instead of a peasant because it sounds nicer. But what rights do you have? In a way fewer because your peasantry status is not even generally recognized. Denial is a powerful tool for warping reality.