I'm not saying that as an insult that's just a literal fact.

It is extraordinarily expensive to train a police officer. Much of this expense is because of corruption. Most of the training that we give them these days is pseudo-military training that looks cool to idiots. Think gravy seals. But we still have to pay for it all and the city has to pay for it.

The upshot to that is doing the actual job is incredibly boring. It's mostly pulling people over and giving them tickets. Something like 70% of police officers will never even draw their sidearm.

However the job pays reasonably well given how bad the economy is and has a clear career path to retirement. Along with a lot of opportunities to make extra money on the side.

So the problem cities had was people would go through all the training get bored out of their mind at the job and quit and go do something else. So they started to do testing to detect people or too smart. People who would get bored.

I haven't done it myself but I have friends that have applied to be a police officer and been turned down and when they looked into it it literally came down to they were too smart and the algorithm said they would quit the job after 6 months to a year haven't gotten all that expensive training...

As a result we intentionally select dumb people to be police. As an added bonus if you need them to bust heads at a union meeting they're all on board...

Dumb people tend to be violent because when you're not all that bright you quickly run out of options. Like the old saying goes, War is the continuation of political policy by other means...

So you get a lot of police officers beating their wives. You get a lot of cops shooting people they shouldn't be shooting. That sort of thing.

And you get a lot of cops spying on their exes.

They're a well known and well understood solutions to this problem. Other countries have done them. But America generally isn't up for that

Do not generally make it a habit to admit to their crimes right? And people who sympathize with criminals also do not generally let people know that they sympathize with criminals.

What I'm saying is that your cop buddies aren't likely to tell you that they think it's cool to spy on ex's using police resources. But based on a lot of the statistics we have about them at least 40% do...

If nothing else getting ammo to win a divorce is something you can get a lot of people behind regardless of how the information is obtained.

As for defund the police that was largely a scam and something pushed on you by right wing media. Whenever somebody on the left wing says something blisteringly stupid you can bet Fox News and oan will be there with a megaphone to make damn sure you hear it over and over and over again.

You will not hear any of the perfectly reasonable reforms and solutions the left wing proposed. Funny but those always seem to get buried...

That's driving up RAM prices for the next 10 years then yeah we could have the year of the Linux desktop. Not from Qualcomm but from steam.

Microsoft completely shit the bed on Windows 11 and steamos can run a hell of a lot of games with it only being held back by anti-cheat software that could easily be ported over and has been by some companies.

That would bring millions and millions of people to Linux for the better performance on 16 GB machines.

The trouble is video cards. Valve made the steam machine but it's an entry level set up selling for $1,100 because of the cost of the ram needed for the video card...

We've got 10 years of ram shortages already scheduled somebody should be entering the market to supply more RAM and they are not. That's because anyone who tries knows that the big three will just run them out of business with a short-term price cut.

Basically all of computing is being held back by monopolies and antitrust violations. Which is absolutely nothing new. I mean Christ it was Microsoft before it was ram producers...

Whatever you do and whatever hobbies you enjoy politics intrudes on it.

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...