There is absolutely no commodity here or anything approaching something regulated by futures trading. This is obviously just gambling.

These gambling businesses are draining about 60 billion a year mostly from Young men. There will be long-term social consequences and if you're not really old and about to die you will experience them. Like it or not you and I all live in the same society.

The message will get refined over time.

When the Republican party in the right wing first started trying to get us to have a freak out over a trans girls they focused on how icky they were and how they were going to rape your daughter in the bathroom.

That didn't really work. Voters demanded that the Republicans stopped going on and on about trans girls and do something about the collapsing economy and out of control inflation. A few of the Republicans that ran on trans panic lost their elections.

The Republican party though refines their message and their tactics. They knew they had something because their focus groups indicated that people didn't really like trans girls...

So they tried something else. In this case two things. First rapid onset gender dysphoria. A bullshit belief that your kid was going to suddenly turn trans because they saw it on TV. Basically the 2020 equivalent of violent video games turning you into a killer.

The second was trans girls in sports. Two trans girls were allowed to compete long before they should have been and they smashed records. That really struck a nerve because it hits on that basic concept of fairness that all animals have. Nobody even remembers that both girls were stripped of their titles and records and adjustments were made. To this day people are still bitterly angry.

Those two worked. They've created a huge moral panic that has swept multiple Republicans into office. Some of the most extremest Republicans you can imagine. Meanwhile gas is up a dollar a gallon and inflation is out of control. But at least nobody is transing your grandkids right?

What's worse is when you point this out it really pisses people off. People don't like being told that they have been made a fool of. It's much much easier to just get angry shout a few things maybe post a few comments and tell yourself that you were right. You were always right.

Meanwhile the price of eggs keeps going up and the price of gas keeps going up and we are about to see food shortages because of the war in Iran

When the work week was established it was a compromise between workers and the ruling class. Even back then there was a push to work fewer hours.

In the old days you worked a farm and you would wake up early in the morning and do your farm work and when the work was done that was it. No more work.

Factories and modern Capital brought a system of endless work. Where you could just work and work and work and work. People who remember the time when you did your work and when you work was done that was it there was no more work remembered that and were kind of pissed that they lost that.

After a hell of a lot of violence there was a compromise of 40 hours. But we seem to have forgotten that 40 hours a week wasn't the goal it was the compromise.

The ruling class though, the Epstein class. Those guys didn't forget. They've been chipping away at the gains made by the labor movement since the 1970s. More importantly they now have a standing army over us in the form of militarized police. The founding father's new damn well did a standing army was bad news. They created a shitload of checks and balances to try to keep that under control and more were added later. And we pissed all that away because of a minor crime wave...

And now we have ice which is something like the third largest military in the world. And they're running around with masks and fully automatic weapons yanking people off the streets and disappearing them for weeks on end. Sometimes forever.

We always like to blame the kids because we're old farts and old farts hate kids because kids backs don't hurt all the time and kids have their whole lives in front of them whereas we're staring down the barrel of eternity..

But no the problem isn't that young people don't care about truth. The problem is virtually all of the news outlets have been bought up by a handful of billionaires and those billionaires not only don't care about the truth they are actively opposed to it. So the last thing they're going to do is buy a bunch of AP stories and run them and pay the AP for real journalism. They want AI generated slop propaganda that tells you how great having an Epstein class is.

So for example they don't want journalists reporting on all the dead bodies in Iran from the civilian infrastructure we are targeting. And they don't want journalists explaining that when Trump said he would attack Bridges and power plants in order to get leverage during the negotiations that it became a war crime because you aren't allowed to attack civilian infrastructure just to get a leg up and negotiations, they have to be legitimate military targets.

Stuff like that is why the AP needs to go. Now billionaires don't do things out right and directly because you would notice and get pissed off. Instead they buy up all the newspapers and TV stations and then just stop buying content from journalist outlets. And then the predictable happens that the associate press can't make enough money to survive and here we are.

And most people don't put two and two together and realize that it was downstream impacts from the Epstein class season control of our media that killed journalism. Instead we blame tiktok which is to say young people because tick tock is associated with young people...

When you know damn well they're not going to happen. It makes it look like you are getting out ahead of all the problems you're causing even though if there was the slightest chance of us actually taxing them they would spin up dark money super packs so fast your head would whirl.

Throughout all of human history everything you have has been taken from the Epstein class with that best the underlining threat of violence.

Unfortunately violence doesn't really work anymore because you cannot beat a standing army. Fuck over 200 years ago the people who found it America knew that and they didn't want standing armies because of it. But you have to have a standing army or somebody else with a standing army comes over here and takes your stuff.

Honestly I just saw a story about how the police are using the data generated by people's routers to track where they're moving in their homes and who is entered their homes and where people who are being tracked have moved in the homes. I mean Jesus fucking Christ what do you even do with something like that?

Honestly don't think this civilization has a future. People are too fucking stupid. Every single system designed to protect you is collapsing and every single right and privacy you have is being taken away and about 40% of the country is deathly afraid that trans girls are going to play in women's sports. Sports they have never once given one rat's ass about..

I get it it's a moral panic it will eventually burn itself out but Jesus fucking Christ it never should have happened in the first place. It's like when we all freaked out over mortal Kombat or when we all freaked out over Satanic music lyrics or when we all freaked out over comic books or when we all freaked out over Penny dreadfuls or when we...

Seriously at some point we should fucking figure out the pattern.

You have the burden of proof backwards. Mr. AC made an assertion that the Associated Press "went full on Activist Group long ago". It's up to you, AC, to show evidence for that assertion, which takes more than another assertion that "there's a LOT of black-and-white undeniable shit."

OK, if there's "a lot" of undeniable shit-- show it. I'll help; here the AP website.

The associate press along with reuters are one of the last bastions of reality. The Epstein class needs them to go away. That's what this is really about.

90% of our news media is billionaire owned propaganda. They spent the last 50 years buying everything up and what they couldn't buy up they sued into oblivion. Gwaker was a muckraking operation that did real journalism funded by that muckraking. That's why Peter thiel took them out. It wasn't because they outed him or anything, literally everyone on the planet already knew Peter thiel was gay and as a member of the elite he didn't have to fear persecution the way normal gay people do. But Gawker would often report on theil's dodgy business dealings. So they partnered with hulk Hogan to shut them down and we lost a shitload of journalism. Teen Vouge was also doing real journalism and they got bought up and their journalists fired. Independent journalists were also making good money on Twitter and of course musk bought them and shut that all down

Over and over and over again any attempt to get the truth out is being silenced.

A few years back someone noticed that if you wanted propaganda it was free but the truth was paywalled. Now you can't even pay money to get the truth.

There are a handful of hobbyist journalists but they simply do not have the time and resources to do the kind of work a professional journalist does. It takes a lot of time, effort and money to build the kind of contacts that make journalism work.

It's another reason why our civilization is going to collapse and there's not a lot we can do about it.

On the plus side as long as you're okay with the propaganda you'll have a good five maybe 10 years without getting triggered before it all collapses. And if you're a older baby boomer you get to die before the shit hits the fan. As always, I got mine, fuck you.

The people who are afraid of journalists actually doing real journalism, uncovering and reporting truths that the people in power would rather were not made public, have waged a long war to discredit journalism, as well as funding a plethora of fake news sites. It seems to be working.

Artemis II is breaking Apollo 13's record by about 4100 miles. The primary reason they're going further is because they're passing much farther from the moon, about 4000 miles, compared to 158 miles for Apollo 13. The moon is also a little further from Earth, accounting for the other 250 miles.

Wasn't there an 80186? That literally nobody built anything with? Like, it was almost a proof of concept?

I think you're confused. I'm not saying EVs shouldn't be taxed in general. I'm saying they shouldn't be taxed due to the oil crisis. Governments should encourage, not discourage, the use of alternate energy-sources when one of them has supply-chains that are threatened.

And I made no claim that treating EVs (tax-wise) like ICE vehicles is "punitive"(*). But taxing EVs more than ICE vehicles because of the oil crisis certainly seems to be so. But see below...

You make a good point about road taxes, but not much else. The virtue of taxing gas consumption is that at least it correlates somewhat with road use and environmental impact. Perhaps we need something else for EVs, but I can't think of what it could be right now.

(*) please note how it's spelled.

Right now it is a terrible time to have a PC. Windows 11 has forced many to buy a new PC if wanted to stay with Windows. After years, Intel has competitive CPUs especially for laptops, but RAM pricing has made everything expensive. At the same time, MS seems incapable of releasing updates that don't break computers. Lastly, Apple just released a $600’budget laptop that upends the PC laptop market.

Hey, people are willing to pay for porn . . . Allegedly, from what my friend told me.