There was a ton of good journalism going on over there in real time. Naturally he chased off everyone except the right when extremists and their propaganda Mills as soon as he bought the site.

But up until then Twitter was a great place for independent journalism without corporate propaganda. I don't think that is unrelated to the purchase...

So last election Joe Biden had a moment where he was listening to a question from someone off camera. Several news outlets reported this as him staring into the distance...

Donald Trump stopped a town hall meeting 20 minutes in and then proceeded to awkwardly dance to his iPod playlist for the next 40 minutes. This was reported as a cozy event that brought him closer to voters.

I think people have figured out that the news media is now 120% corporate-owned without them even having to know about the dozens of journalists who got fired last year for honestly reporting on the election. I watched again and again as famous journalists got dog walked from The Washington Post and the New York times and Newsweek and even USA today because they spoke ill of the chosen one Lord Donald...

So yeah I get most of my news from social media and the rest of it from AP links over on fark.com. Exactly what other options do I have if I don't just want to suck down corporate propaganda?

I eagerly await your reply.

They don't need to be saved they're doing just fine. Just because a company isn't making all the money in the world right this very second and growing at the exact same rate it did always and forever doesn't mean the company is on the verge of death.

I know our civilization is structured around endless growth but suggesting that intel, a very profitable company, needs to be saved by cutting 20% of its staff at a time when their products are selling extremely well seems more like a suicide pact than anything else.

This isn't the 1940s or even the '50s there isn't nearly as much bloat as people like to think there is. MBAs have been optimizing everything for 50 plus years. Even those famous IBM firings back in the day had nothing to do with bloat if you dig into it they were just firing older workers and using bloat as an excuse to do it.

Come to think of it with how many baby boomers are at or near retirement age and how many older Gen x there are out there I wouldn't be surprised to find Intel is just cleaning house right now. Technically illegal but like I always say it's not a law if it's not enforced.

On the GPU side they definitely could. I'm not entirely sure why but they sell their mid-ranged card for $250 letting scalpers buy it up and sell it for $400.

On the CPU side things are tougher but not that much. There are still data centers ramping up constantly. And yeah a lot of them are deploying AMD but a lot of them ain't.

They do have a lot of weird odds and end businesses they've bought into over the years but not 20,000 employees worth which last I heard is the target for their layoffs.

No they're going to cut important production employees resulting in a net loss over time. But short-term they will get an influx of available cash letting them pump the stock for a bit so the CEO can hit his bonus targets this quarter

It's because the expectation is that the money saved from the layoffs will be going into stock BuyBacks.

So when you see big layoffs you buy the stock and then you know that the company is going to buy it back from you for a profit.

That's great if you are rich and can weather the recession that's coming. Not so great if you are literally everybody else in the country.

The real problem here is we have structured every aspect of our economy so that the 1% benefit at our expense. It's a house always wins set up.

Unless they have hit on some major new automation or they are getting a whole shitload of work visas for cheap overseas labor then there's plenty of demand for their products and no reason for them to be laying off workers.

What this feels like is them trying to bump the stock with layoffs. I don't see how it would last and they would be able to keep up with demand so that it would translate into lost sales. I mean their gpus are flying off the shelves as fast as they can stock them for Christ's sake. And while AMD is eating a bit of their lunch there is still plenty of demand for Intel CPUs.

This feels like what Walmart did where they fired so many stockers they couldn't keep their shelves stocked and they were losing money because people would show up to buy something and it wouldn't be where they could buy it.

But I guess it will give them a short-term stock bump. And they can use the short-term cash savings for stock BuyBacks.

We used to have all sorts of laws that would discourage that sort of thing and our economy was much more stable when we did. The baby boomers grew up in that economy and it's a huge part of why they built as much wealth as they did. That's in all the government programs they benefited from that are gone now.

I can tell you right now that it wouldn't take much of anything to get 10 Democrats senators to cross the line.

With Clinton there really wasn't any risk of the rule of law there. It wasn't Clinton ignoring Congress it was Clinton dodging questions during a obviously politically motivated interrogation. There was no risk of the Constitution being fundamentally undermined so most Democrats would just shrug and vote on party line.

If Biden stop the weapon shipment to Gaza he would be openly defying congress. That would immediately hit the supreme Court and they would order him to resume weapon shipments. If again he ignored those orders we would have what's called a constitutional crisis.

There are only three resolutions to a constitutional crisis. The first is President becomes king. The second is Congress agrees with the president and changes the law. And the third is Congress impeaches the president.

The Democrats aren't going to accept #1. We both know Congress is not going to change the law and stop sending weapons to Israel so that's means no #2.

That leaves #3 and that's the end of it for Joe biden. He gets impeached.

The key difference here is that Clinton didn't really trigger a constitutional crisis. The entire thing was just political away for the Republicans to tarnish Clinton's record. Basically harmless politicking.

I use Israeli weapon shipments as an example because it's the most recent and most obvious but pretty much everything Trump is doing falls into the same category except that the Republican party could care less about the rule of law. They are far more concerned with the possibility that Elon musk would use his money to conduct primary elections against them ending their political careers...

When I first connect to a business for support they hand me over to a barely functional chatbot. If that doesn't work they escalate me to another chatbot with more computing power behind it. If that doesn't work there's usually at least one more layer of chatbot before a human being. Sometimes two.

The entire thing is miserable as a customer but because we've had 40 plus years of market consolidation I don't have a lot of options. I could shop at boutique places but they are usually 20 to 30% more not because they are small businesses but because they have to eke out a niche in order to survive and so they tend to sell more expensive stuff for specific purposes.

The end result is that any company I do business with has managed to use chatbots to reduce my interaction with their customer service reps by somewhere between 20 and 50%.

They will get impeached. The problem with Trump is that the Republican party will not impeach him for the crimes he's committing.

The left wing went nuts over Gaza during the election. Every time I turned around they were talking about genocide Joe.

What those useful idiots didn't realize, apart from the fact that Putin was handing them talking points, is that Joe Biden could not legally stop the weapon shipments to Israel and if he tried he was just going to get impeached for violating the law.

It didn't stop the left wing from wasting 12 months screaming about Joe Biden and later Kamala Harris instead of trying to draw attention to the voter suppression that gave Trump a second term.

But the point is Democrats are held to a higher standard because they aren't fascists.

That's what they call it. It's part of project 2025. Trump does a never-ending cavalcade of illegal actions and it forces reactions from his opposition. There's so much of it that nobody can keep up and in the meantime voter suppression is being ignored so Trump can easily win a third term.

It's possible his mind or body will be so broken in 4 years that even the news media we have today can't sane wash away his senality. But he comes from a long lived family that is good at hiding senility so I suspect we are in for eight more years of trump before he finally dies and one of his sons takes over.

So what he's doing is reselling existing cell phone service. Ryan Reynolds owns a company that does it called mint mobile and you can get basically the equivalent service for about 1/2 what Trump is asking.

On the other hand if you want actual unlimited data it is available here but you're going to pay $70 to $90 a month USD. That's not what Trump is selling for 40 bucks though I can tell you that much.

This is a common thing with the right wing they will take something and repackage it and sell it to other right wingers for about twice the average cost. You can buy a lot of shitty coffee and even shittier beer that way. Hulk Hogan for example is currently Hawking some really crummy beer.

It's not a law if it's not enforced.

Instead of being in a full-on panic state is what freaks me out.

It's that kind of centrist thing where everything is collapsing and we just kind of say it all work out because it always has before.

The right wing has fear in a way that the centrists and the left wing do not. They're terrified of woke and trans and all sorts of other things and it makes them take action in a way that we never do.

I don't know if there's a solution either because there is some evidence that fear just causes people to become right-wing. Then again the centrists and the left wing can't stop bickering long enough to do something about voter suppression so I don't think there is any hope left.n

Remember the Nazis won their elections.

Missouri is a deep red state where the population is 40% black. It does not take a PhD in political science to figure out something is wrong there. We just don't like to talk about it.

What needs to happen is that the left wing of the Democrat party needs to pressure the centrist wing into using their raw political power to crush voter suppression at the county level. The Democrats usually control the governor's and Secretary of State and even the AG and those three have more than enough power to do it.

The problem is the centrists do not like wielding power. Centrists have an incredible tolerance for boredom and they are very good at countering the banality of evil if and only if they are pressured to do so. Otherwise they just kind of hang out in committees doing the day today administrative work needed to keep a country or a state functional.

The left wing for their part do not want to fight voter suppression because they have this stupid dream they picked up when they were 12 that reams and reams of 18 to 25-year-old progressive voters are going to turn out someday and turn America into a Democratic socialist government like Norway or Sweden or France even.

If you're on the left wing you don't really want to counteract voter suppression because those voters are mostly casual guys and they are likely to vote conservatively. Not right wing, conservative but that's not what you want on the left. You want to see your dream realized. And you aren't going to acknowledge that voter suppression coupled with propaganda means that dream isn't possible.

The real problem is that the anti-fascist party in America requires two groups of people to work in tandem and do things they don't want to do. The centrists need to wield the power they have and the left wing needs to pressure the centrist into wielding it.

I've watched the two of them bicker uselessly for 6 months now and it's what made me give up and switch to screaming into the void instead of actually trying to make positive change. I don't think we can stop King Trump at this point..

I'd be happy to be proven wrong but I just don't see a way out of this mess.

We didn't even have the show of it this time. There was absolutely no effort made to pretend Donald Trump was going to use the presidency for anything else but personally enriching himself and his billionaire buddies.

I never once saw Trump or any of his surrogates give a coherent policy. Not once today say they were going to even bring back jobs. They just vaguely hinted at Joe Biden and Kamala Harris causing higher prices. I literally saw signs that just read TRUMP LOW PRICES KAMALA HIGH PRICES.

Anyone who voted for Trump last election either did it entirely on vibes or because of one of the two major moral panics, woke and trans.

Because of that and all the sane washing Trump didn't even have to bother pretending he wasn't going to be corrupt.

And if you took away the voter suppression he still would have lost but just barely. Because the propaganda can keep our elections at around 3 to 5% margins. Mix in a little voter suppression and it's basically impossible for any opposition party to beat the billionaire party.

So bad things are going to happen now and we can't stop them anymore. Every single institution designed to protect you has now failed. The final line of defense was the voters figuring out Trump is a crook and they couldn't do that in numbers needed to beat voter suppression so here we are.

I just really wish I had died before the shit hit the fan. That's the American dream now. Get in get out before things get worse.