You can't grow crops for yourself because the wealthy claimed all the land and if you try to use it to grow crops they will just shoot you.

That was a major problem in Venezuela where the ultra wealthy claimed all the land and wouldn't let anyone use it but didn't use it themselves so they had food shortages. The thing that really pissed off America about Venezuela was when Chavez seized all the land and gave it to people to farm. Rich people are supposed to be able to monopolize resources and then refuse to use those resources in order to artificially limit supply and raise the value of their assets. That's the American way.

The wealthy are planning to set themselves up as kings. Kings do not sell products and they don't care about the economy they just make sure they keep their armies Fed so that those armies can put down peasant revolts. If you look at Russia Putin has allowed every place except the two big cities to completely collapse and he just doesn't care because he controls the central military. Every time an oligarch starts to get big enough to be a problem that oligarch just gets assassinated. Basically standard Royal Court intrigue shit like you saw in France.

We are heading into techno feudalism. We needed to stop it in America in 2024 by electing Kamala Harris but we didn't.

I suspect this is pre-recession layoffs that they are pawning off as AI in order to prevent investors from noticing that they are doing pre-recession layoffs.

They're blaming AI for the layoffs in order to try and prevent investors from going crazy when they see all the layoffs.

We had just barely recovered from the damage done from the first term of Donald Trump. Literally the only time in history when things have been this bad is the Great depression and Trump's first term.

Creating a national sales tax while withholding tens of billions of congressionally approved funds and all the chaos that goes with that right after biden's soft landing was guaranteed to immediately cause a recession. GM is literally doing layoffs because they can't get parts because the orange ones trade war has completely disrupted supply chains ala covid.

There are interest rate cuts but they are only there because Trump did so much damage to the job market. That means we're going to get stagflation. High inflation and shitty job numbers.

Automation and AI hurt but not 20%. There's a court case to end the illegal trade wars since Trump is abusing emergency Powers but it's about to go to the supreme Court and we all know how that's going to go. They essentially crowned him King.

We were warned repeatedly and we voted for him anyway. I don't blame the idiots who thought about cheap eggs. They were just panicking confused and ignorant. But the folks around here who are trumpers piss me off because I know you guys know better. I know you guys knew this was going to happen and thought you could get away with it.

Maybe some of you will. Then again a lot of you guys retired to rural communities after selling your homes for fat sacks of cash and your hospitals are about to close.

It's possible this is a hedge against AMD putting out genuinely useful integrated graphics. The 780 is okay for fortnite on the lowest settings but not much else. And the 8060s requires a very expensive purchase because it's not really for gaming or even video encoding it's for AI use as a workstation for programmers playing with their models.

AMD is clearly avoiding putting decent graphics in their integrated gpus so that they don't cannibalize their GPU market which is I suppose understandable. Once you hit GTX 1080 grade performance or roughly equivalent to a 5700 XT that's enough for most people. Especially if you support modern upscaling techniques. You can get most games to 60fps with that if you're willing to play at low or medium settings. Borderlands 4 and stalker 2 excepted

But it would be just like Nvidia to want to nip a potential competitor in the bud.

I see absolutely no way that could be a problem.

Jokes aside modern techno feudalism can probably contain them. At least as long as they mostly have food.

The problem is factory automation has gotten so cheap that we are at the point where borderline slave labor probably isn't worth the cost.

From what I can tell the Chinese government has been ordering companies to hold off on factory automation for just that reason but I think they're hitting the point where it's getting harder to do that.

One thing I know for sure if you get enough young men without wives and jobs it's only a matter of time before you have a world war. The only problem with that is we have nukes now. I mean the only problem besides the horrific Carnage and all that but that's never stopped Us in the past.

Is just now starting to dip its toes into serious competition in the GPU market you would think maybe a $5 billion dollar investment from a competitor would get a little more scrutiny from regulators...

I am not saying that the investment would get blocked but it's not unusual for these kind of large investments in markets with very little competition to come with some caveats. Antitrust law is fairly broad for a good reason.

If you sit down with a table full of Nazis and you realize you're at a table full of Nazis and you don't get up and leave congratulations you're a Nazi.

You don't get to make your bed with Nazis and then say you're not a nazi. And you don't get to do the same with right wingers and pretend you want the right winger. You are the policies and people you support whether you like it or not.

Keep having the day you voted for.

This doesn't mean they can't do hypocritic things this means they are physically incapable of experiencing the emotions of shame and self-awareness that form hypocrisy.

If a republican accuses someone of hypocrisy it's because they recognize a pattern that they don't actually understand.

This is why Republicans can engage in perfect double think where they hold two ideas contradictory in their head at the same time.

This is because the Republican party is a fascist party and frankly it has been for at least the last 30 years debatably since Nixon.

The change happened when Barry Goldwater lost. They switched to using classic fascist tactics so they could have the power and money they wanted. Anyone who cares about America was gradually sidelined.

Because he hired people that were readily corruptible.

Believe it or not it isn't that hard to hire people who aren't easily corruptible. There are lots of competent people who enter public service to actually be in public service. Revolving doors do suck but they aren't universal.

It's about the culture and yeah when you've got Trump at the top then shit's going to rot from the top down.

But I think you're mixing up a class action lawsuit from a private attorney with the actual FTC bringing a suit. Those are very different things with very different outcomes. If you have somebody who is planning on leaving a government position for a cushy private job in a quid pro quo they don't usually bring lawsuits they usually just rubber stamp things behind the scenes quietly.

So my point is if we are seeing these kind of lawsuits from an administration we already know is corrupt then it is likely that the administration itself is fishing for bribes.

With what we just saw with Jimmy kimmel, regardless of what you think of him, it's pretty clear the FTC is for sale and is a wholly owned subsidiary of King Trump.

So if they want this to go away all they have to do is buy some more Trump coin just like the United Arab Emirates did.

Seriously the UAE gave Trump 2 billion dollars through his cryptocurrency nonsense. And it didn't even make the news. Never mind that plane guitar gave him

We are at the point where Ticketmaster is going to do a calculation whether they should bribe Trump or fight it in court. Maybe they will fight it maybe they will bribe maybe they will do a little bit of both. But the fact that that calculation is going on is fucking insane and we should all be freaking the fuck out right now

One of the things that makes TV so crazy cheap is that the TV manufacturers have deals when they let guys like Roku put ads on the TV.

For me it's a okay because my TV is really just a monitor for the living room PC and handful of consoles hooked up to it. So I don't really care that if I used it for Netflix I get a bunch of ads. The TV itself never gets connected to the internet.

Where it becomes a problem with some of the appliances is that they sometimes don't have proper controls so you have to connect them to the internet so that you can access an app that lets you control the appliance.

There have been a couple of washing machines like that where there are features you just can't access unless you install the app. And yes when the app inevitably stops working you can't access those features anymore.

Just one more thing you have to watch out for while buying crap now. At least with TVs because I'm just using them as a monitor that hasn't been an issue.

I suspect it's like when people invested in amd, it's there to make sure that companies don't end up with one supplier for x86 CPUs.

Nvidia is still heavily dependent on x86 CPUs to pump data into their gpus. That is changing a bit with arm but it's still a thing.

It also helps Nvidia when the European governments come sniffing around about antitrust violations. I say European because God knows American government's not going to do anything. We might shake them down for some bribes for the current administration but that's about all.

China has a large population they can tap for slave labor. America has one too but it's only about 2 million strong in the form of our prison system and it keeps going down every year because crime keeps going down. Besides prisoners we are generally not okay with slave labor. China has about 11 and 1/2 million that they are perfectly okay pressing into labor.

This is in addition to their prison population.

And of course there's plenty of little bits of nasty traffic and going on but then again America has that too from Mexico and South America but there's a huge push to kick those guys out of the country. That won't help the trafficked individuals but it will reduce rivian's access to cheap labor.

Despite what you were told in grade schools slavery never went away we just do more steps to get there now. America has slaves but China has more slaves. This means the actual labor costs are quite different than what gets reported to stockholders and the public

True but eventually Joe Biden stepped in and fixed their water. It took a ridiculous and frightening amount of time, mostly because it's a black majority Community that's not kid ourselves, and fuck Obama for not declaring an emergency they are and just doing it.

But it's not like China where they've had the problems for literally decades and absolutely nothing is being done about it.

Also Flint was different it wasn't because of industrial runoff it was because of simple stupid corruption. The contract for the water plant was handed to a completely incompetent boob who didn't put the proper water treatment chemicals to prevent the lead pipes from leaching into the water supply because they didn't want to spend the money on it and thought they could get away with that.

That's very different than letting rivian just pour poisonous chemicals in the groundwater so they can save some money on water treatment.

If I had to guess they probably won't let you run the Mac OS software emulator on the phone. So if you have desktop Macintosh applications you want or need to run then you're not going to be allowed to do that. Even if there's no particular technical reason why you can't Apple wants your money twice.

Apple would have to merge iOS and Mac OS for you to be able to run the apps back and forth. I don't think software developers would want that either because they're going to want to sell you the software twice too if they can.

All that said Apple might still merge the platforms in order to pull off with Microsoft tried with Windows 8 which is to create a single unified platform with a single unified user interface that users can easily go back and forth from.

That's kind of a holy grail of UI design if you could pull it off because it would lock your users in completely. Mostly because users have a really hard time going from two different devices.

On the other hand it was a complete disaster when Microsoft tried that so who knows.