The hardball/no hardball train left the station a while ago.

The "I'm going to save democracy by blowing up a portion of it" line of messaging and action the Dems have taken up in the last decade is the thing that's both new and considerably more unpalatable than the regular back and forth.

Here's another example of how "fuck the republicunts" works in action. In my home state of Massachusetts, one may request a mail-in ballot by filling out an online form and then typing in an arbitrary mailing address. To authenticate oneself to the form, all that is necessary is your name, the town where you are registered to vote, the address at which you are registered, and the registered voter's date of birth.

There is no evidence that any ballot fraud has occurred under this system. And as far as I can tell there could never be evidence of such fraud. But considering I have to click through five captchas and give over my credit card just to be able to buy cheap shit on amazon, this quintessentially blue state prioritization of access over authentication is at best incongruous.

And here's the thing: if they made you show six forms of id to vote by dropping a stone into a jar in person, Massachusetts election results would probably look much like they do now. But it's the fucking hypocrisy of saying a transparently unsecured system is secure that leads me to conclude the dems have shit for brains or at least think the public does.

Idunno dude. Maybe got lost somewhere in between the race-bating nutjob...I mean wise latina...Obama appointed at his first chance.

Not saying it wasn't hardball (and one hell of a gamble) but you gotta get out of your own head and understand when it is you're spooking your adversary into thinking he's got little to lose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

and the subsequent explanation that seemed to strongly imply Hawaii put a borderline retarded individual in charge of emergency alerts for the state.

Of course. What better way to restore the people's faith in OurDemocracyTM than by openly planning to manipulate the machinery if government for narrow partisan gain?

Look guy, I didn't just fall off the turnip truck, at least not this morning, and when I came up in the 90s and early 2000s the Dems at could at least claim with a straight face that they were some kind of adults in the room about stewardship of national institutions and traditions. But that eroded with Obama playacting as revolutionary and it almost completely disappeared during Trump 1.0 and the summer of 2020.

Trump 2.0 is in many ways a similar disappointment to Trump 1.0, but given the proferred alternative in '24, and given the likely proferred alternatives in the pipeline, I wouldn't change my vote, and I'll vote for JD Vance's head grafted onto Ken Paxton's crotch before I vote for a democrat ever again. Last time being 20 years ago when I voted to reelect Ed Rendell in Pennsylvania.

I didn't say that's what they did. I'm saying if someone were to do that, it ought to be a firing offense, and I'm implying it's the sort of thing you might do if you have no qualms about talking that kind of trash at random strangers on the internet

Yeah. There's definitely a constitutional right to scrawl cartoons of your 9 to 5 supervisor as a subhuman animal on the breakroom wall...but only if it's about politics.

If I'm you're boss, and you are openly opining on why the business model that I am paid to make succeed is bad/immoral/unethical, then how on earth am I supposed to trust your work?

Or is the next democrat president going to pack the supreme court so that it identifies a constitutional right to corporate sabotage?

and subject to considerations and incentives of politicians rather than X mission success and success alone.

If a private actor were to lead with their own subjective considerations rather than mission success, they would either make it work or they'd fail entirely on the merits and demerits of their judgements.

If a government actor leads with politics and falls flat, you and I pay for it and if the politician gets reelected in a landslide for giving away our taxes to his or her constituents...well then, who's to say it was a failure at all?

Student loans are a but one example. Running the money printer to the tune of 25 trillion in the last 25 years is another. Look under any rock and you'll find many more but far less spectacular examples of government actors getting side-tracked by politics and wasting time and money in the process.

The one of the more innocuous examples I'll cite is the wall of text in my kid's public school teachers' and administrators' email signatures telling my about all the many rights public education and comminication in the obscure language of my choice I have that I need to be reminded of every time my kid's principal tells the parent-teacher organization thank-you for organizing some activity or other, or my kid's teacher sends a reminder about show-and-tell.

This is in contrast to analogous emails from the private daycare we used where all emails contained the necessary communication and no extraneous mandatory fun in the signature block.

Might as well spread the joy around developing challengers (not like that!). It's not like the prime mover in New Space is going to need any part of NASA's whopping $40b annual budget.

Selling your body scans as a VR skin. AI enhanced, naturally.

A relic of the medieval church's tithing practice that unfortunately got carried along to the new world from the old, analogous to the way that encephalitis mosquitos made it to our shores.

Personal realized income taxes are directly proportional to economic output and are the least distortive way to generate revenue.

I don't even understand what died in Britain this time. Surely even before today it was up to the parents to purchase a phone or a tablet or any type of a computer and give it to their children. There is no way for google or anyone to know who is using a phone or a tablet. Today with AI I suppose it is possible to use filters to attempt automatic detection of the person who is livestreaming and allow AI decide if this person is old enough and if not the livestream will then be terminated (or prevented). This will teach children a few things. First of all it will teach them about VPNs, it will also teach them about disguising their identity to the computer, who is looking at them, while they are showing themselves off to the world. They will find new and creative ways to get around these restrictions, they will not 'innocently play', as politicians are promising. There will not be a return to the "good old days". Parents will set up phones and tablets for their offspring because it is easier than to parent and that will be that.

I did not!

says ftl isn't a thing and the answer to Fermi's paradox is that everyone is out there but too far away to hear.

Alienz! would imply necessarily that there is quite a bit about the way of things that we don't even know that we don't know.

Possibly it is discoverable in the foreseeable future or just as possibly it requires an inordinate amount of dumb luck to stumble on the conditions of time and place in space where such a discovery (if it even exists) is possible.

Whole lot of very big ifs. Not a whole lot of reason to just believe the way one might just believe that a better chatbot is just around the corner or a vaccine for the common cold is sitting in a test tube somewhere just waiting to be tested and commercialized.

The latter extrapolates within the known unknowns. The former is predicated on the existence of specific unknown unknowns.

You are suggesting quite a few things, except you don't like to actually say directly what it is that you want to happen. Here is one thing you said: "Elon Musk should be a wealthy man, no doubt about it but a trillionaire or hell even a $100B is a failure of our economy, our culture, our society or our politics." - 100B is not Musk anymore, it's more than Musk, who I consider to be a con artist.

What you are implying to calling 100B owner a failure of economy and culture and society and politics is that it should be impossible for some reason for a person to accrue enough ownership of private resources to be at that level. It is your inadequacies that are showing here and it is your word play that we are debating. What you are suggesting is oppression and tyranny, nothing less, which is what is required for a person not to be able to accrue any amount of wealth regardless of how it is obtained.

How about this: "I mean, he does. He also still is one person with 24 hours a day, does he actually provide enough productivity to justify tens of millions every day?" - nobody has to justify anything, if they are able to accrue some wealth beyond your imagination does not make it wrong that a person should be able to do so.

To this I have already answered: "Explain this (i am fully anticipating Libertarian-Randian gobbledygook)" - obviously a large amount of accumulated wealth is represented by a business and this business clearly benefits the society much more than the individual who runs it, otherwise the company wouldn't be valuable enough for you to pay attention how wealthy the owner of this company becomes.

This: "Everything you said would equally apply if he was worth $1B as it does $1000B so what does he need the extra 999B? His lifestyle changes 0%. He can still own and run companies." - implies that a person shouldn't be able to have ownership in a company that is growing in value, Musk or anyone else. So if you build a company that becomes so valuable people invest into it enough that its market share, its profits are so large that the value exceeds 100B (on paper, doesn't matter). If you are the single largest owner of the stock in this company your shares go above and beyond 1B.

You are pretending that you are not suggesting confiscation (oppression by the voting majority) yet what else are you suggesting? Be clear, what are your demands and goals? I already see the reasons, jealousy and ideology with a strange belief that a person shouldn't be able to own something of serious value for some reason.

This: "And I would ask just the same what the unhealthy fixation on defending the massive wealth inequality?" - I am FOR wealth inequality, it's the only thing that actually motivates people to move forward with business ideas in the first place. If wealth equality was the goal, nobody would be ruining their lives trying to run a business.

This: " I'll guess if I ask for the alternative you'll point to "communism" and I will just say you are not a serious person with a serious position. Like I said, Randian nonsense." - you are the one bringing up communism and Randian ideas, whatever, you are fixated on the nomenclature.

This: "You say you want to "protect private property" as if what I am suggesting eliminates private property in any fashion." - of course you are. You are suggesting this exact thing, you wouldn't be happy until there wouldn't be "wealth inequality". This requires that people cannot own things cannot operate things as they see fit, cannot go beyond some artificial number that is stuck in your head. You think 1B is plenty and 100B is too much, whatever that is all about. In reality it's all garbage. A person who made a billion dollar company can use the money that he makes to start more companies and eventually go much further than 1B dollars and this bugs the shit out of you because you are on a mission.