Large corporations have been out maneuvering the government and by extension the voters for the last 50 years.

There is no compromise here. The corporations won and they won again. Prices will go up and options will go down.

The basic problem here is every time the Democrat party tries to stop one of these ultra big mega mergers because they suck for consumers all the corporations have to do is hold out for a republican Congress and President and they can get it through.

And no matter how many times this bites them in the ass voters never learn. Every year things get worse and every year the voters send the Republicans back to Congress to back the corporations. Sooner or later it blows up like it did in 2008 and we get just enough Democrats to keep things going. But that's just not going to last for very long.

I've said it before but capitalism requires a referee and we keep firing the ref.

They can't move to Nashville because the actors won't move with them. They can incorporate in Nashville but who the fuck cares anymore? If you're not going to pay taxes in my state why would I care whether you incorporate in my state?

Every single time we suggest that companies stop screwing us over we inevitably get told that they will just take all the money and leave. Then they don't do that because the only reason they're here in the first place is some other thing like well, California is a nice place to live and the people who they need to work for them want to live in california, and then they don't leave even though they threatened to.

If there is a cheaper place with less regulation that a company can move to and still have the same resources available they're always going to do that immediately and no amount of appeasement is going to keep them around. More importantly if they're not contributing anything to your community and they are just taking let them leave.

There is plenty of other things people can do in California that are productive besides make movies. But again that's all a moot point because they're not going anywhere no matter how many threats they make.

I mean not physically. Like I said they might try to incorporate in another state in order to do bad things to people but who cares again because they are still going to have to hire Californians because the people they want to do the work want to live in California.

The project leads got bored and they would screw it until it started to kind of suck...

Juk was probably the best example of that. It was quite possibly the best MP3 player software in existence. I remember back in the day using it to tag and organize hundreds and hundreds of... Completely legally obtained mp3s and doing it quickly and easily. It was fast, feature Rich and had a great ui. Apple even cribbed some features from it for iTunes it was so good.

If I remember correctly the developers of KDE had a falling out with the developer of Juk but I'm not sure. It's been probably 20 years now. The point is that it got ripped out and replaced with a another media player which of course sucked.

That more or less happened a couple dozen times while I was using kde. It's open source so in theory I could recompile everything and run the software but that got to be very difficult very fast. Frankly I just didn't have the patience for it. Compiles wouldn't work because libraries would get shuffled around and you could shuffle them back around if you wanted to but it took time and it broke every time you upgraded anything.

Basically the Linux equivalent of dll hell.

So there's a good chance that the reason KDE didn't click with you is because every time you came to it it was in one of the downswings. If you come to it during one of the upswings when it's running good apps and good software it's fantastic but it never lasts.

With commercial software you get something called resume driven development where changes get made so somebody can put it on their resume. And the result is shit software. You get basically the same thing with open source but the difference is instead of being driven by resume it's usually driven by boredom. Changes made because the dev team are hobbyists and it's boring just maintaining software and code.

It doesn't matter if it smells like a scam if you've been unemployed for 6 months and you've run out of things to sell.

We have 25% functional unemployment. That means a quarter of the population even if they have a job cannot support themselves. Some of them are living with relatives some of them have six or seven roommates and the rest are homeless living out of cars or under bridges. We have half a million homeless people working full-time. Probably more that's an old statistic and the economy is in freefall.

You're going to start seeing more and more breakdown in places. Eventually the combination of incompetent leadership from known child sex predators combined with a massive push for automation in a world where if you don't work you don't eat is going to start eroding the tax base and the consumer spending bases to the point where we will not be able to maintain an economy. At least not a consumer based economy like we have now. Change will be inevitable and we aren't going to accept people sitting around eating bonbons and playing Xbox without working but we're not going to have anything useful for them to do and we're not going to let the government give them something useful to do.

When the tax base collapses police and fire will get shut down.

And remember no matter how good a shot you are you're going to run out of ammo before the world runs out of desperate people with nothing to lose

For extremely minor criticism of Trump in the 2024 election. You could lay in the Biden as much as you wanted but if you didn't sane wash The Donald you were looking for a new job sharpish.

I guess what I'm saying is when it comes to journalism AI is the least of our worries. 90% of all media is now billionaire owned. Anytime journalism starts to take off again they swoop in and buy it out start firing people. All they have to do is wait for inevitable downturns in the economy and sooner or later some people will sign a deal with the devil just to try and keep things going and convince themselves it's better than shutting down.

And honestly if they do shut down that's fine too. As long as you can't get good information the billionaires are happy.

It was AI is quickly becoming the new fake news.

Something something party told you to reject your eyes and ears...

Trump's policies are destroying the economy. The tariffs are a massive tax on the American people that he is using to replace taxes billionaires used to pay. That's causing inflation as is that stupid war with Iran that he was hoping would cause of terrorist attack on us soil he could ride into a midterm win and maybe even a third term.

This means interest rates just went up and have a quarter percent and won't be going up another quarter percent.

The goal of raising interest rates is to trigger a recession by causing layoffs. This forces Americans to blow through their savings and take pay cuts resulting in lower demand which is supposed to reduce inflation. It's balancing the books on your back.

All this means the economy is close to collapsing because of what Trump is doing.

Spending on AI slop is propping up the stock market. If the stock market collapses that's the final thing Trump has to point to to say that the economy is okay to people who are disconnected from the economy.

We have a ton of old folks who still vote Republican and who are basically not connected to the economy anymore. They are retired have a lot of money saved from when Democrats used to be in charge and kept the economy strong and don't need to borrow money for things like a house or a student loan because government subsidies paid for theirs. As the saying goes I got mine fuck you.

But they're not 100% insulated from the economy. Things are getting bad enough that they're starting to be affected. We have also massively cut the subsidized healthcare they depend on but most of that's going to kick in after the midterms. Still most of their money is sitting in the stock market because that's how they stay ahead of inflation.

Trump and the Republican party need those voters so they need to keep the stock market going and they need to keep the economy just barely functional.

This is why even though AI is intensely unpopular Trump keeps pushing it. He needs it to prop up the economy in response to all the insane stupid things he's doing and to protect the baby boomers and older Gen x just long enough for him to throw them under the bus with the rest of us after it's too late for them to do anything.

Why would Al Lewis be able to fire generals?

We didn't fire a bunch of competent generals or run them out of office for various political reasons. I'm also extremely at ease because we didn't put a secretary of defense in, excuse me Secretary of war, solely because he was the only candidate who would not rule out ordering the US army to fire on American citizens.

We literally elected the king of debt. 1/4 of all US debt is Trump. That's 10 trillion dollars in debt.

And we did it twice. But I need did you hear how she laughs? And let's not forget, Trump low prices, Kamala high prices.

Well too bad you're going to get a regular old Nazi from planet Earth.

Apparently his family has actual ties to Nazis from his original country too. Can't say I'm surprised but here we are

They are talking about imaginary Doomsday scenarios to distract from actual major problems coming down the pike.

There's the obvious massive amounts of water and electricity being used at a time when we keep disrupting energy markets for stupid reasons and we're in a constant state of drought for well understood and equally stupid reasons.

But the big problem is AI is a massive automation push. In a world where if you don't work you don't eat we are doing everything we can to eliminate work.

Eventually it's going to erode the tax base and the spending base. There won't be enough money in the economy to sustain it. And it will start to collapse.

And remember no matter how good a shot you you're going to run out of ammo before the world runs out of desperate people with nothing to lose.

No one fed it to me I figured it out myself.

It wasn't hard. The isps are pretty open about wanting to do away with net neutrality and what they're going to do if they pull it off.

Companies have these things called industry groups where they get together and talk about all the nasty things they want to do to us. It is generally out in the open because a lot of folks, yourself included, don't like to think about all the nasty things that they would do to us if we didn't have a huge number of laws against that and a shitload of bureaucrats policing them.

Incidentally you have also been trained to hate bureaucrats. That is on purpose. White collar crime is not enforced by a gun and a badge it's enforced by a clipboard and notebook paper.

It is hardly a surprise that a criminal would put effort into undermining or bribing whoever is enforcing the law. It's really obvious when a cop is on the take it is less obvious when a revolving door makes a bureaucrat look the other way or worse and honest bureaucrat enforcing the law gets fired and replaced by a corrupt one by a political appointee...

That was the entire purpose of the law it was to maintain the status quo which is net neutrality.

The purpose of the law was to put isps on notice that they would have a fight on their hands if they started violating net neutrality. And while they have poked at the edges laws like this have mostly prevented them from doing the really nasty stuff.

What you have here is called a chesterton's fence. It is a fence that you don't take down unless you understand why it was put up. I'm not talking about net neutrality I think at this point we all know it. I'm talking about this specific law. You don't take this law down without knowing why it was put up and I explained that above so I think it's safe to say we don't want to take this law down.

I am of course taking for granted the Trump is wrong but I think that's one of the safest bets in human history. The Man known as the king of debt who is bankrupted everything he's ever touched and is only not homeless because he was laundering money for the Russian mob is not someone I would seek legal advice from.

But thanks for the useless outrage porn. They will sue and they will win because the letter of the law is pretty fucking clear here and Trump does not have the authority to do this but they will waste a huge awount of energy fighting Trump.

Voters will get angry at democrats for doing nothing but not at Republicans for actively harming the country.

This is something Democrat strategists have been complaining about. Specifically if you're a republican you can get up on stage and yell God and country! And get votes.

The exact same thing does not work for democrats. Democrat voters could care less about your religious affiliation or how stupidly patriotic you might be. Democrat voters expect results and that would be fine if the Democrats could deliver results but it's really hard to do that when the other party is actively sabotaging the country and has been since newt Gingrich created the contract with America as a unified policy of blocking the Democrats from doing any good while doing active harm whenever the Republicans happen to get any power

And because we have all been conditioned to revile partisan politics when you point this out people just dismiss it. Almost as if someone was actively trying to do that for a reason ...

I'm not a conspiracy theorist I'm a conspiracy analyst.