Honestly it just smells like a scam to me. Like those man camps that have been floating around for a while. Wealthy people aren't smart they're lucky and ruthless.

Sure but you CAN use it to bribe the president. Progress!

I'm so tired of everyone trying to scam me. Everyone trying to get me to work harder for less and give them what little I have for nothing...

/. has video ads now and they're scams because of course they are...

What if serious students of computer science or baling because there's no jobs and they still got to eat.

Yeah if you're one of the absolute top guys who can help Peter thiel spy on everybody sure there is still work for you.

There is a lot less work for somebody who can maybe score their masters but that's as far as they're going to go and they could be building a better tomorrow for you but they're not because they've got to put food on the table first.

How much are we losing out on because of how we've structured things?

To derail the conversation. It's a common tactic the right-wing uses. You tell why to get the conversation about correcting the LIE instead of about the fact that right wingers are murdering millions of children and the conservatives are letting them do it.

The goal is to throw a lie out and wait for it people in the center and the left to waste all their energy correcting it. We fucking love correcting this information because we are nerds and the happiest time in our life was when we were in school and we were rewarded with praise for being right all the time.

They are exploiting that mental vulnerability that we on the left and the center have.

20 seconds on Google and yeah you can find it the number is in a millions and it's going to push around 20 million if Trump or JD Vance wins in 2028.

I don't understand why you would tell such an obvious lie. Do you think we're stupid?

That I would have to explain to anyone why it's a bad idea to integrate pretend money with no government backing and virtually no regulation that is primarily used for money laundering directly into our financial system...

I wish I could get the libertarian types to understand you can't not have government.

People are going to organize. They're going to form groups. Those groups are going to need a mechanism for making decisions. People are not going to be able to spend all day monitoring and processing the daily goings on of that process. And those groups are going to get larger and more complex because there are a lot of people with a lot of different goals and beliefs.

Government is an inevitability. It's like when we discovered the atomic bomb. We are stuck with it barring a fundamental shift in human physiology.

So if you don't form a government somebody else will and you just won't be part of it. And they will use it against you just like with nuclear weapons.

So you can't just say you're going to deregulate all the financial markets and make everything free. You're going to have to have a complex series of regulations because you're going to have to have rules and those rules are going to have to be spelled out in advance and then you're going to need government to enforce them. You have to protect people from themselves because otherwise when they go down they're going to take you with them.

And libertarians want to pretended that's just not a thing and that they could be an island any of themselves...

I wouldn't care except well we've already established that people doing dumb shit bring everybody else around them down that includes me

And the only thing that matters to Trump now is the stock market. You have a shitload of old people who are completely disconnected from the regular economy that anyone that works for a living depends on. Those old people are the ones who put Trump back in the White House and or why gas is $5 a gallon and inflation is out of control and we're about to get another massive round of interest rate hike fueled layoffs.

The one part of the economy those old farts care about is the stock market because that's where they're retirement savings are and that's how they stay ahead of inflation. So if the stock market crashes those old people will finally turn on Trump. Because suddenly their savings get wiped out and inflation hits them like a brick.

So even though it's very unpopular Trump is pushing AI because everything now for him depends on the stock market and appeasing those old people until he has enough voter suppression in place that he can throw them under the bus too.

The Epstein class has a plan where they will live in the temperate zones that are left over after runaway climate change devastates everything else.

Where they might run into a problem is we may actually have enough usable nuclear weapons to render the entire planet completely uninhabitable even with the best bunkers in the world. And that assumes nobody cut corners on their bunkers. If you don't have a spot in your bunker for every single person who built it corners are going to be cut...

And of course we are in the process of handing the nuclear launch codes to absolute religious lunatics. JD Vance in order to get the votes he needs to take a shot at the White House has been courting the Armageddon evangelicals who want to destroy everything to bring back Jesus...

But assuming things don't get out of hand for the Epstein class they're going to be just fine as our civilization collapses and they will have automated killbots to keep us at Bay. Periodically they will conduct a mass cull of the little people to make sure that we don't develop enough technology that we could do something about their killbots. Basically they'll bomb us back into the Stone age every 100 or so years.

That's at least the plan guys like Elon Musk and Peter thiel have laid out for themselves. Honestly I think they have a good shot making it happen. I've been trying to get the left wing folks I know convinced that they need to do something about county level voter suppression but all they want to hear about is AOC for president and how much Chuck Schumer sucks.

How much of that was buzz the movie got from all the Free press.

The reason most movies lose money is that the advertising budget is as much or more than the cost of making the movie even with all the Hollywood math involved. And the advertising budget is real it's harder to do Hollywood math when you're reporting on that stuff since the studio is paying another company instead of companies that kind of sort of owns...

I'm happy to see the movie released but it didn't need much of an advertising budget because of the controversy. And it would be hard to replicate that.

Because it didn't achieve any of their goals.

I believe that the actual fundamental goal of the attacks on Iran was to trigger a second to 9/11 that Trump could ride into midterm election wins and maybe even a third term. Trump saw what a terrorist attack on us soil did for Bush Junior's numbers and I'm sure he wants that.

The problem is I ran has pretty good control over their non-state actors so they didn't take the bait. So we are basically stuck in a war that's causing hyperinflation.

This is also why Trump is suddenly so pro AI it's the only thing holding up the stock market around all the stupid shit Trump keeps doing. He desperately needs the stock market to stay high because the baby boomers and older Gen x that put him in the White House really only give a shit about the stock market because that's where all their savings are because that's how they stay ahead of inflation. As long as the Dow keeps going up those voters will keep backing Trump because their money stays ahead of inflation no matter how much Trump fucks up everything..

This is kind of the problem we have now. There are tens of millions of older voters who are completely disconnected from the broader economy because they are retired and they have a bunch of savings. Eventually the stock market will come crashing down and they are investments won't keep Pace with inflation anymore and they're going to be good and proper fucked but the goal of the American right wing is to shut down elections through voter suppression by then so it won't matter what they think anymore.

Again all of this is incompetence. None of these people are achieving their goals the way a psychopath like Dick Cheney did or somebody like Karl Rove. They are killing a lot of innocent people, Elon Musk is the greatest mass murderer of the 21st century for example having killed 8 million children and he's on track to knock out another 9 million at least. But again that's incompetence.

I've got a bunch of weird bots that follow me around on this forum. They absorb a mod points and mod me down every chance they get and if I get modded up you will find a bunch of posts from the bots that are pretty clearly AI slop rewriting some of my comments.

Basically there's a hobbyist around here training a shitty AI that runs on their GPU.

As hobbies go it's pretty pathetic. I mean sure fine if you want to play with AI research that's fine but using it because you worship Trump is just sad. Also whoever is doing it is pretty fucking bad at it. But you can get off the shelf software and just tell it what to do and if you spend enough time on the prompts it'll do it. And to a certain class of person who has always thought computers were cool but didn't know how to work them really, the kind of guy who never learned how to touch type, does somebody like that it must seem like the coolest thing in the world.

If guys like that weren't being weaponized to ruin the country it would be just something to be sad about but they are so...

We know it was just basic incompetence and a complete disregard for human life. This will of course provide an excuse and change the conversation though.

It also fits in with the current narrative the big AI companies are pushing because they would really like a very specific set of government regulations that coincidentally are good for the existing players but would prevent any new players from entering the market now that they have become established and that they are close to doing their IPOs...

Whatever the case at least we got them to admit that they murdered 123 children.

The war can't end until after the midterms because Trump lost because of course he lost everything Trump touches dies. This means we're going to have to pay Iran reparations to the tune of $300 billion US taxpayer dollars. That's $300 billion of your dollars going to Iran.

Trump can't do something that weak and pathetic right before the midterm elections. He'll do it right after.

That'll give the 77 million people who thought it was a good idea to put the king of debt through bankrupts every business he runs in charge of the country he promised to run like a business.... I honestly do not know how our species is going to survive the next 25 years.

We've danced this Charleston multiple times. The wealthy say they're going to leave a nice place if they don't get to live there and get everything they want for free and people's tax the wealthy and then the wealthy don't leave because of course they don't. This is happened over and over and over again.

It's not wishful thinking it's history and common Sense. If you want such a goddamn pussy you would stop letting the wealthy push you around and stop worshiping people who hate you like Elon Musk and Donald Trump and instead you would take their fucking money away from them and with it all the power they have over you.

But you are a fucking pussy and so I have to live in this shitty world for pussies too weak and lame to make it through a day without some weird daddy figure they can worship and frankly I'm fucking sick of dealing with your shit. Grow a pair of balls already.

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.