For billionaires. Meanwhile you and I got about 25 bucks a month but thanks to Trump's tax cuts for billionaires and the big beautiful bill for billionaires he has raised the national debt by 25%. Think about that a quarter of the debt is because of trump.

We elected the king of debt to be president because he promised to reduce that and we elected a billionaire rapist pedophile because he promised to protect us.

Honestly at this point if I wasn't being dragged down with the rest of them I would be happy to see these fuckers who voted for Trump get what they deserve. The better half of me knows that stupid people don't deserve to be taken advantage of but fucking Christ there should be limits to stupid. Like some practical limit to how stupid you are.

Not that I'm terribly fond of China what would it be a dictatorship and all but it is annoying how the Epstein class is busy trying to make me angry at them for no particularly good reason. They're all good reasons to be upset with the Chinese government what would the human rights violations and all but now this is bullshit.

Yeah but Federal regulations override state regulations. Supremacy clause which is what they're relying on. They have control of the supreme Court thanks to decades of bribes and so here we are..

Even if you're not stupid enough to gamble because you know you have to lose because of course you do you're going to be negatively affected by this because tens of millions of young men will gamble with money they don't have to lose and that will increase crime and cause a ton of other problems.

This is a classic chesterton's fence where you don't take the fence down without understanding why the fuck it was put up. Gambling is highly addictive so it needs to be carefully regulated. Criminalizing it isn't a good idea either keeping it locked away to one state and then heavily regulating it in that state more or less seem to be working. And we just pissed that all away.

Six of nine judges are completely on the take. Google the phrase luxury motor Coach sometime.

It should be a bigger deal that the Chief Justice of the supreme Court is a corrupt sellout but well here we are. Half the country is quaking in their boots because 34 trans girls might play sports and one of the most powerful men on the planet is openly taking bribes and they shrug their shoulders.

I don't know how a species like that survives the next 50 years let alone the next millennia.

You can take real eyeballs and put them on people's tick tock videos and you can easily monetize that because there's so many scams and social media influencers trying to make money there. Plus I bet you can show them literally anything without any age restrictions because the feeds would run with the application's account. You might even get ad revenue from it. Although there's usually very little money to be made doing that the real money on video platforms is either patreon or scams.

Nothing childish about it. Why would a psychopath waste time on something that does not directly benefit them?

It was a bunch of finance Bros and tech Bros jacking up the prices on everything you buy to the point where you can't afford video gaming anymore.

Right now we're just barely able to skate by because there's a glut of old hardware floating around that could be sold for cheap. Like how Sega mega drives are available in third world countries these days.

In a few more years that's basically where we're going to be at. Video gaming will be a luxury like it was in the early '70s. And you certainly won't be able to afford it in your retirement.

They're talking about it openly if you're listening but you have to really be listening.

Basically they want to create a national sales tax because that puts the tax burden for paying for the military and the police and everything onto people who spend most of their income buying things. That's you.

So this is just a way to make you the working Man pay the taxes for the people who own things for a living instead of working for a living.

The idea that we have people who own things for a living in our economy and aren't just retired because they're not able to work anymore is one of the fundamental problems with our economy and our civilization. You can't have a capitalist society built on labor value and work and then have the wealthiest and most successful people not actually doing any work because they just own stuff for a living.

I mean you can but it pretty quickly devolves into some form of feudalism or fascism take your pick.

But then that's not capitalism anymore. So I guess that dovetails back to you can't have a capitalist system and what the wealthiest people skate by without actually doing any work.

On the other hand Elon Musk works 100 hours a week and is history's greatest inventor so... Lisa Simpson said so herself and would she lie?

In 2026 the only effect this has on me is where the patents are held.

Problem is we have fundamentally broken the economy for people that work for a living. When you completely break that social order then it doesn't matter and nothing matters.

When literally all of the benefits of the future go straight to the top and stay there and it never trickles down then it just doesn't matter if the work is done in Canada or if the work is done in america. I suppose it sucks when the work hasn't done at all but then again at a certain point it doesn't matter because if you make a new medicine and I'm American and my insurance company won't pay for it or I get laid off because some idiots started a trade War so that he could raise taxes on me at a real War so he could win a midterm election and I maybe get laid off because of the cratering economy well I'm not going to have health care because we cut all the social services to make way for you guessed it tax cuts for trillionaires.

Seeing people especially Centrist types complaining about brain drain really kind of pisses me off. Seen the left wing do it though really pisses me off because it's the kind of line goes up bullshit they should know better than. I don't see anyone on the left anymore talking about getting the benefits of modern automation and society to The working Man except in platitudes that they quickly discard. And I say that as a left winger.

So bottom line why should I care where the research is done? If by some miracle I make enough money that I can access it it makes no difference to me which billionaire is profiting from it whether it's a Canadian billionaire or an American billionaire and if the shit hits the fan for me and I lose all access to healthcare and technology and Christ maybe even a place to live then fuck it let it all burn.

You can't keep abandoning large swaths of the population and expect everything to be honky-dory. I find most people are hoping to die of old age before the shit hits the fan

You can keep trying to beat the machine but you're not going to in the end.

They're going to keep trying this and they're going to gradually improve it to the point where they can automate some tasks and where they can drastically improve performance. Also AI is going to take people who normally could not compete with you for jobs and provide them with a crutch that lets them compete. That will drastically increase the number of people you have to compete with in the job market.

This is what's driving me nuts about America we completely lack any sense of nuance or complexity. Either the AI job apocalypse takes all of our jobs and we are all broke and homeless or it's nothing to worry about carry on.

Instead what is likely to happen is that we're going to hit a tipping point where automation hollows out the middle class and we don't have enough people with disposable income to drive a capitalist economy causing a collapse into tax base and a general spiral into abject poverty for 95% of the population.

Long-term if the technology works out for the Epstein class they will replace everyone except a handful of engineers and a handful of thugs to keep the engineers in line. There's a well understood process for doing that used by guys like Vladimir Putin and Kim jong-un. It's a more advanced version of feudalism. What the cool kids called techno feudalism.

But short-term we already have a major crisis on our hands. The only people with significant disposable income in the US economy are the baby boomers and they are blowing through all that money on our healthcare system and just living their retirements and making it to 80 or 90 years old because of various drug cocktails. Current estimates are that only about 30% of the wealth held by the baby boomers will be passed on and most of that will go to a handful of individuals this proportionately.

So right off the bat in about 5 or 10 years we are not going to have the disposable income needed to keep our economy functional without major systemic changes we are not willing to do. Basically some form of socialism and wealth redistribution.

Instead it seems we're going to pretend they'll be magic future jobs that nobody can describe but somehow save us. But I don't see how we get there when virtually all of the energy on new tech in our society is being spent automating jobs away not creating new things. Literally trillions of dollars are being spent to free the Epstein class from the shackles of capitalism and having to sell their products to us and employ us.

It's not a doomsday scenario it's not cool like that. It's a gradual wearing down and breaking down of the social order and a return to the worst kind of societies where everything is built around glorifying and exalting a handful of kings and queens.

So we've spent the last 40 some odd years automating everything we can get our hands on. We didn't automate meat cutters and burger flippers though. There's some people playing around with that but it's mostly for advanced robotics research. We focused on high paying jobs because of course we did.

So the guy doing mining making 100K a year got his job automated away and now he can go work at Walmart selling cheap crap made with the stuff pulled out of the mine.

The problem is that you're replacing 100K worth of income and economic activity with 30k.

This is why we have consistently seen the labor participation rate drop and this is why we keep having to cook the numbers on unemployment. This is why we have to pretend driving Uber is a full-time job and one the people are choosing instead of turning two out of desperation.

There's a concept called functional unemployment which is when you technically have a job but you can't support yourself on that job. I don't mean you can't support yourself well I mean you're working homeless or you are mooching off of family if you aren't somehow homeless. That's about 20% of our population.

Go to Google and search for the phrase "70% middle class job automation". You will find a study about that and about how automation has devastated the American middle class.

And here's the thing it didn't have to, but it did. That's a concept I think people have a hard time with especially people who dabble in progressive ideas or at least futurism. The idea of that well it didn't have to happen so it couldn't have happened. We could have created an economy where the benefits of that automation boom made it to everybody.. but we didn't. And we're not going to because every time you suggest doing that a bunch of old farts screams socialism in your ears.

It was a rare book dealer. What's probably happening here is there's a group of researchers who did the same thing that the rare book dealer did. Again both things can be true at the same time.

If you would bother to Google The articles involved you would know that. But like a lot of people around here I'm sure you're Google is broken. Either that or you're using AI to Google instead when which case yeah you don't know what you're getting...

I mentioned this to the other guy but yeah they were destroying rare books. A rare book seller caught them by sneaking an Apple Air tag into one of his books that he shipped to them. That's the only reason we know about this.

Both things can be true. There can be a ton of books that nobody wants and to get thrown out and Amazon can be buying those books in addition to Amazon buying rare books to destroy for their AI model. Because of course they're going to want rare books if they have rare books in their model and they're competitors don't that is a competitive advantage.

And I guarantee you they're not going to stop destroying rare books they're just going to be quieter about it. And they will check the books for Apple Air tags

So they want as much data as they can get and they were actively seeking out rare books. They had gone to a rare book seller and they were buying them to destroy them. Because of course they want rare books if they have rare books in their model their model will be better than somebody who doesn't have rare books.

The way we found out they were destroying rare books is that the rare books seller got a huge order and he got suspicious so he snuck an Apple Air tag into one of the books and monitored where it went. That little bit of citizen journalism is the only reason we knew.

I haven't looked into it but I wouldn't be surprised to find that Amazon is going to keep doing this they're just going to be using shell companies and freight forwarders.

Rare book sellers aren't going to want to sell to people who they know are going to destroy rare books. Especially for such a stupid fucking reason.

I am a little surprised there are this many Americans upset about it though. It could just be I know a lot of idiots but a lot of the people I know would cheerfully show up to a book burning party if there wasn't social stigma still associated with that. And frankly I'm surprised at stigma still exists after the last 16 years.

Muskrat wants to build data centers because that's what gets all the investors excited and he's not going to be able to do that in Texas. Remember he mixes his various business arms in ways that are normally illegal.

If he says he's going to bring a spaceport then everyone will welcome him but if he came bearing data centers they would tell him to go fuck himself.

You can't do it in Texas because they have simply overrun their electricity capacity and they are in danger of shutting down hospitals. Also Texas is much closer to becoming a blue State than Louisiana and so there are political considerations with letting a trillionaire bring in extremely unpopular businesses.

Give it a few months or maybe a year and you'll be hearing about how they're building a data center where they said they were going to build the spaceport.