It could be Tylenol or it could be vaccines or it could even be the dreaded ghey or maybe those dastardly drag queens!

Jokes aside we really are still at the leeches stage when it comes to mental health. Assuming our civilization doesn't collapse and that is assuming a lot in 200 years they're going to look back and wince when they see how we handle mental health care.

So it's not a good idea to lose Intel's fabs for lots of reasons so you can expect several unlikely partners to prop them up. AMD can find a use for them it's not that they're bad it's just they're not the best and the world is ultra hypercompetitive. The slightest misstep and Wall Street eats you alive. It's like a mafia you're only as good as your last envelope

One to pick up the garbage and another to drive the truck. It's one guy now.

This is one less job in the world. And nothing on the horizon to replace it. By itself it's a minor thing but we've been automating Blue collar work in the factories for 45 years now. 70% of the middle class jobs lost in that time got taken by automation and process improvement not outsourcing.

We are entering an era of at least 20% permanent unemployment maybe more. We will of course wallpaper over it with statistical games like we're doing right now.

Just a reminder the 25% got us in the world war II. Not that it matters for anyone around here we are all too old and fat and weak to be drafted. And because of declining birth rates there aren't enough young people to stop us old farts from sending them off to die in war.

Of course there is the little problem of those firecrackers we keep in silos. But I'm sure some sort of magical missile defense system will protect us all. And besides we wouldn't hand the most powerful military on planet Earth over to religious extremists over Petty moral panics and getting the ick from queer people now would we?

That sinking feeling you've got your stomach right now will go away as soon as you reach for that button to mod me down. Go ahead it'll make you feel better for a little while.

I might make a little bit more than somebody waiting tables and I make less than an AI programmer but at the end of the day that's really just a question of the quality of the products we buy, especially if you're not American and not dealing with the fucked up American healthcare system.

I don't get to order the person waiting tables around outside of their restaurant and the AI programmer doesn't get to order me around outside of my workplace. Even in that context there's all sorts of limits in place.

It's like this. When you have more money than you can spend it's savings. When you have more money than you can save it's investment. And when you have more money than you can invest it's power.

I think the problem is it's easy to think you have that kind of power when you go to a restaurant and make the waiter hop to it for an extra $5 tip. That's not power.

Power is denying that waiter the medicine they need to live so they struggle harder to please you in every single aspect of their lives desperately hoping you'll let them have that medicine just a little while longer. That's power.

Google, Apple Microsoft and facebook. They're the only ones that own large enough platforms to reliably source good training data and have control of those platforms in a way that they can tell the difference between a real user and slop.

AI has a lot of problems and a lot of reasons it's only going to be bad for humanity. But one of those reasons is the way training data works AI automatically consolidates around a couple of big players leaving everybody else out in the cold.

That means no real competition and when you have a capitalist system like we do without competition the products just suck and all sorts of horrible ways but you still get stuck using them whether you like it or not.

If nothing else those big platforms will cram it down your throat and you will suck it down because they're in charge not you.

And I think that's really the big takeaway here. They're the ones in charge. Not you.

The real crazy ones do anyway. There is a verse in the Bible that suggests God using immoral and evil people to enact his will indirectly.

One of the nice things about holy books from 2,000 years ago is they are a mishmash of thousands of different writings cobbled together by people who never intended for lay people to actually read.

So it doesn't matter what you believe you can be guaranteed you will find a reason to believe it in any of these ancient holy books.

I gather with the Quran the absolutely crazy way punctuation works in Arabic among other quirks of the language lets you really go overboard and you can basically read virtually anything into it. I don't know the specifics of the Hindu holy works but I'm sure they can do the same damn thing.

The ultra wealthy are tired of paying for us to get educations. They have a nearly unlimited supply of cheap overseas labor they can bring in on a hundred different work visa programs.

And of course the last thing they want is a well-educated population who won't suck down their bullshit.

So there is a concerted effort to undermine higher education.

Just a reminder Pol pot did the exact same thing. So does every other dictator. When you see them going after higher education you're next.

We've had decades of Media consolidation. Every time a left of center media outlet starts to get some traction a right-wing billionaire swoops in and buys it.

I remember The Hill started to get really popular. Slightly left of center content all over the place. Then all of a sudden it started a hard right turn. It didn't make a hell of a lot of sense until I looked it up and sure enough a billionaire owned media outlet bought them out and fired everyone.

Sooner or later everybody goes through tough times and if you want spewing propaganda from the wealthiest people on the planet then there's a high probability you're going to run out of cash.

When that happens you are the go out of business and go away or you let yourself get bought out hoping to maintain editorial control and naturally you lose it.

When the left wing blathers on about wealth inequality this is the problem we're talking about. The real problem isn't the inequality it's the enormous amount of power we've given approximately 1,000 people. They can basically tell you what to do and if you don't do it they can crush you like an ant.

Unfortunately the left wing sucks at messaging and they are ridiculously conservative when it comes to changing messaging and tactics so they are still operating like it's the 60s and there's a huge number of Black folk fighting for equality and white folk fighting with them.

The problem right now isn't equality the problem is we have this tiny group of people with way the fuck too much power who can order us around. But the left wing is still hung up on equality.

Give us more cheap work visas. We don't like to train because it costs money and we shouldn't have to pay any money we should just be paid money. Because we are The specialist of boys.

Now get back to your 996 work weeks slaves. Just because we're automating all the jobs away doesn't mean you get to work fewer hours.

During the last election we literally had to create a new term to describe what they were doing, sane washing.

I watched mother fucking Newsweek report that Joe Biden was staring out into the distance when in actuality he was listening to a question from someone off camera.

I watched Donald Trump lose his marbles during a town hall meeting and dance to an iTunes playlist for 45 minutes. The media outlets declared in a brilliant strategy that brought him closer to voters.

Most of all I watched anyone who tried to criticize King Trump get dog walked out of every single journalist job. Probably two dozen total at least long-term major journalists got fired for daring to report honestly about Trump's mental decline let alone everything wrong with voting for a convicted felon with 26 credible rape accusations and his name plastered all over the Epstein files.

It's not even a matter of trust anymore there just isn't anything left. If you're a right winger congratulations, you won. The news media is yours with the exception of a couple of comedians on after midnight and you already got one of those fired and it's only a matter of time before you do the other two.

If you're a right winger you are getting everything you wanted and you're about to get it good and hard. Have the day you voted for.

So wealthy people can just buy their own healthcare when they are in Congress. All taking away Congressional Health Care does is prevent working class people from running for congress.

You can't punish The wealthy by taking away their salary because they already have so much money. You have to actually take the money away which nobody wants to do because as soon as you suggest that everyone becomes convinced that the next step is to take their houses away.

Violence is a useful too for the right wing but not so much the left wing.

Violence requires a command structure to be effective and the left wing sucks at command structures for pretty obvious reasons.

Violence looks cool in the movies but it's basically useless. So unfortunately we need to use boring ass electoral politics to solve problems instead of 80s action movie coolness...

Better, yes. A lot better? No. The US homicide rate is 2 to 5 times higher than European OECD countries.

Protected us from the death panels of the public option that the Democrats started to push when the affordable Care act was in negotiations.

I get angry at but I can forgive. They are being fooled and they can't help being what they are. Like my old next door neighbor that was deeply republican, this is before Trump but I am sure she'd call herself maga if I met her today, she had five kids from three fathers and at least one of them was alive because the government paid for necessary Health Care I think it might even be two. And she herself had a congenital heart problem that the government paid to fix and is the only reason she was alive the last I knew her.

I can't get angry at that level of stupidity because whether it's nature or nurture it's definitely not her fault. She just doesn't have the capacity to process information to figure out the right course of action and who really is on her side.

Now the little fuckers who are just indulging in moral panics like the current trans panic or the drag queen thing or freaking out about violent video games or whatever the fuck excuses they come up with to vote for right wing politicians those guys could go fuck themselves. They know damn well what they're doing and they know the risks and they just do it anyway because they think they will personally get away with it and be able to stick it to whatever group of people whether it's gamers or queer people or whatever that they've decided they don't like.

Those people can absolutely take a long walk off a short pier. And there's a bunch of them on this website