I think we are at the end of History. I think we're going to go into a permanent dark age in the form of techno feudalism. Other that or going to handle launch codes to some religious lunatics and they're going to wipe us all off the face of the Earth.

I don't see a third option and I hope I'm dead before the worst of it.

Like there is a huge automation push going on right now it is almost guaranteed the cause of minimum 25% permanent unemployment and our civilization is still hung up on if you don't work you don't eat.

I mean for fuck sakes here in America we won't feed hungry children. We say it builds character. Even though objectively it does not it just creates a variety of health and mental problems. Also about 40% of the country believes we have to let netanyahu wipe Gaza off the map to bring Jesus back because they misread the last book of the Bible. If that was a couple of percentage points I'd be a little annoyed at the crazies but it's 40 fucking percent...

I do not know a way out of this mess. I do not know what you do when a third of the country is less concerned with their access to clean drinking water and electricity than they are with what bathroom people use.

Our species is too simple and tribalistic and our technology developed way too fast our brains couldn't keep up. We are going to Fermi paradox ourselves

They don't have a prayer of pulling this off but that's not the point it's supposed to trick people into buying into the stock again in the wake of that mean stock blow up.

One of the problems with our civilization is that our economy is currently run entirely by scammers and grifters.

It's going to blow up soon and Jesus fucking Christ it's going to be bad and there's nothing I can do about it and there's nothing you can do about it because the country is full of Marks and suckers.

I'm reminded of an old phrase, the forest voted for the ax because the ax was made of wood.

It's not at all uncommon for right wingers to go harass Muslims at places of worship.

One of my all-time famous stories is a bunch of magats showing up with rifles at a mosque and then realizing they just showed up at a Nation of Islam mosque and turning tail and running when they noticed the guys out front with guns.

Religion is harmless when you don't give it any political power and you don't let it rip people off. At that point to devolves into a social club with a bit of spiritualism.

The problem with Islam is there are several theocratic dictatorships using it as an excuse to do terrible things. But China does equally terrible things to its citizens without any of that. So it's really just a matter of convenience not necessity.

Ask for Christianity yeah I'm kind of freaked out how here in America we are becoming a theocratic hellscape and I would like to do something about that. And I am continuously pissed off that televangelists are continuously successful at stealing money from people when they are at their most vulnerable.

For the televangelists that's a matter of teaching critical thinking more but that's tough to do because the theocrats are going out of their way to make sure we can't do that...

But you will find plenty of people protesting Christian theocracy, that was a big part of the new Kings protest.

They aren't just litigious they are known to hire private investigators and outright thugs to hassle and intimidate people.

It's not so much that this is dangerous anyone taking part in this knows damn well what they're getting into.

This is what the cool kids call getting into good trouble. It's protest meant to draw attention.

That said Scientology is really on the ropes right now with collapsing membership and because of the internet it's difficult for their silly brand of nonsense to get much play. So there were probably better targets and better things for the protesters to do but it might have been personal if one of their friends or family members got stuck in the cult or themselves personally.

I know there are a lot of EX Jehovah witnesses trying to get people out.

Correct but also useless virtue signals, that's like saying never shop at a grocery store

So I mean he's basically an anchor baby right? Clearly we should eliminate his birthright citizenship.

The big push was going to come when the steam machine hit but that's dead in the water for at least 5 years. Ordinarily somebody would step in and make more memory but because we don't enforce antitrust law nobody can take that risk because you know that if you try one of the big memory manufacturers is just going to drop their prices and run you out of business.

It's possible that America becoming a basket case will force Europe to switch to Linux. But there's going to be a lot of money thrown at European politicians to stop that and even without that the world is taking a huge global economic hit and Microsoft can just give free software and support to Europe for a little while and with the economy and freefall everybody is going to be looking to cut costs anyway possible so little things like national security are going to be less important versus immediate economic security.

Also the billionaires are still in charge and they still want to surveil us and so an open source operating system where you can turn off that surveillance is going to face a lot of challenges. And like it or not a large percentage of people who claim to be libertarian when it comes time to pull the lever at The ballot box don't vote for freedom they vote for whatever little moral panic or pet issue they're obsessed with. Or they get confused by entertaining propaganda and the end result is the same.

If you want a viable competitor and more options you are going to have to change how you vote and you're going to have to get some of your family members to change how they vote. Because at this point it's not a technical issue it's a political issue.

Of course except for politics nerds nerds in general really really really hate being told that there is a problem you can't just fix with technology. Hell even the politics nerds will quote Harry Selden at you.

I absolutely think it's just the latter, they just have a bot that finds items on Amazon, figures out the sell price to squeeze a small profit and just basically middleman transactions, they don't ever have to hold or touch products.

It's just shitty behavior in this particular case since my wife started buying more from eBay specifically to not buy on Amazon but it seems unavoidable. It just feels against the entire spirit of eBay as a platform but I suppose they still get their cut so why should they care, it's only the integrity of their platform eh? They get a nice buyout like listed here so who cares? 21st century business.

The thing about eBay that irks me especially now is when you order something and it just shows up from Amazon anyway.

Frankly that should be something that gets you banned from selling on the platform.

It's needed for the Purnell Maneuver.

Bezos went from "Democracy Dies in Darkness" to "Democracy is Overrated".

We're that much closer to Mars-grown potatoes!

You haven't said why that person is wrong, you're just asserting it. That poster is completely accurate.

Propaganda is something that a state puts out. This is a post by an actual user. It's not somebody from a state, unless you can confirm it.

The proof is in the pudding. The Iranian government has sponsored and been responsible for multiple actions of terrorism over the past few decades. It is an extremely fanatical Islamic death cult.

Since it's pretty clear you do not understand what propaganda means, I think we can take the rest of your claims just as seriously.

Not to mention the tax cuts Trump is still a damn good deal for them. Fun fact next year a shitload of rural and suburban hospitals are going to be shutting down.

That's because the Republicans didn't really have the votes to have ram those tax cuts through so they used a process called budget reconciliation that allows them to bypass Senate rules and pass legislation with a simple majority.

But that process requires everything be budget neutral on paper and no matter how crazy they did the math they couldn't make that work without cutting Medicare and Medicaid.

Now from Medicare they mostly are using dirty little tricks to cut around the periphery but from Medicaid they've instituted work requirements that are basically impossible for the kind of person who is living on Medicaid to meet so that they just get kicked off. There's also a shitload of other dirty little cuts to the program.

And for everyone thinking so what I'm not a dirty filthy, socialist on government healthcare why would I care? Your hospital relies on the money from Medicare and Medicaid to stay open and keep the private equity vultures fed.

Now if you win one of those major cities, the kind that Fox News will tell you is currently on fire because of antifa stormtroopers, then your hospital has enough other business to stay open.

But if you're in the burbs or the sticks you're in trouble. Now the rural folks don't have a lot of options here. Rural people are either too stupid to understand they're being screwed or they know they're being screwed but they can't do anything about it because there's a guy who basically owns all the property in their county and if they want a job or a place to live they go through him. Turns out rural people aren't actually very self-sufficient, decades and decades of poverty will do that to a man..

But still they're expecting it. It's the people in the suburbs that are going to be shocked when their hospitals start closing. It turns out that having a huge amount of sparsely populated land is nice as far as property values and comfort but not so good for your tax base. So there isn't actually enough of a base in most suburbs to sustain their services and they actually rely heavily on subsidies from the inner cities and the federal government.

Well we just took down that chesterton's fence and y'all going to find out what it's like for your hospital is to start cutting services and closing. There is a fund to try and counteract some of it but it's a tiny fraction of what's needed and is mostly going to get sucked up by corrupt political insiders in the Republican party.

Anyway if you're in a suburb or the sticks I highly recommend you don't get sick for at least next 10 years. It'll take that long for the Democrats to have a prayer in hell and doing some of this damage.

What do you mean? We've been told the war ended many weeks ago - so there can't be anything preventing Amazon from repairing those data centers now.

Maybe it's lazy union tradespeople or something.