For billionaires. Meanwhile you and I got about 25 bucks a month but thanks to Trump's tax cuts for billionaires and the big beautiful bill for billionaires he has raised the national debt by 25%. Think about that a quarter of the debt is because of trump.

We elected the king of debt to be president because he promised to reduce that and we elected a billionaire rapist pedophile because he promised to protect us.

Honestly at this point if I wasn't being dragged down with the rest of them I would be happy to see these fuckers who voted for Trump get what they deserve. The better half of me knows that stupid people don't deserve to be taken advantage of but fucking Christ there should be limits to stupid. Like some practical limit to how stupid you are.

Not that I'm terribly fond of China what would it be a dictatorship and all but it is annoying how the Epstein class is busy trying to make me angry at them for no particularly good reason. They're all good reasons to be upset with the Chinese government what would the human rights violations and all but now this is bullshit.

Yeah but Federal regulations override state regulations. Supremacy clause which is what they're relying on. They have control of the supreme Court thanks to decades of bribes and so here we are..

Even if you're not stupid enough to gamble because you know you have to lose because of course you do you're going to be negatively affected by this because tens of millions of young men will gamble with money they don't have to lose and that will increase crime and cause a ton of other problems.

This is a classic chesterton's fence where you don't take the fence down without understanding why the fuck it was put up. Gambling is highly addictive so it needs to be carefully regulated. Criminalizing it isn't a good idea either keeping it locked away to one state and then heavily regulating it in that state more or less seem to be working. And we just pissed that all away.

Six of nine judges are completely on the take. Google the phrase luxury motor Coach sometime.

It should be a bigger deal that the Chief Justice of the supreme Court is a corrupt sellout but well here we are. Half the country is quaking in their boots because 34 trans girls might play sports and one of the most powerful men on the planet is openly taking bribes and they shrug their shoulders.

I don't know how a species like that survives the next 50 years let alone the next millennia.

Have you been awake during el Bunko's alleged presidency? The Justice Dept. is as crooked as the crooks. el Bunko's idea of following the law is breaking it and daring the judicial system to catch him at it, and then go crying to Supreme Court which promptly bends over and takes it.

You can take real eyeballs and put them on people's tick tock videos and you can easily monetize that because there's so many scams and social media influencers trying to make money there. Plus I bet you can show them literally anything without any age restrictions because the feeds would run with the application's account. You might even get ad revenue from it. Although there's usually very little money to be made doing that the real money on video platforms is either patreon or scams.

Nothing childish about it. Why would a psychopath waste time on something that does not directly benefit them?

It was a bunch of finance Bros and tech Bros jacking up the prices on everything you buy to the point where you can't afford video gaming anymore.

Right now we're just barely able to skate by because there's a glut of old hardware floating around that could be sold for cheap. Like how Sega mega drives are available in third world countries these days.

In a few more years that's basically where we're going to be at. Video gaming will be a luxury like it was in the early '70s. And you certainly won't be able to afford it in your retirement.

They're talking about it openly if you're listening but you have to really be listening.

Basically they want to create a national sales tax because that puts the tax burden for paying for the military and the police and everything onto people who spend most of their income buying things. That's you.

So this is just a way to make you the working Man pay the taxes for the people who own things for a living instead of working for a living.

The idea that we have people who own things for a living in our economy and aren't just retired because they're not able to work anymore is one of the fundamental problems with our economy and our civilization. You can't have a capitalist society built on labor value and work and then have the wealthiest and most successful people not actually doing any work because they just own stuff for a living.

I mean you can but it pretty quickly devolves into some form of feudalism or fascism take your pick.

But then that's not capitalism anymore. So I guess that dovetails back to you can't have a capitalist system and what the wealthiest people skate by without actually doing any work.

On the other hand Elon Musk works 100 hours a week and is history's greatest inventor so... Lisa Simpson said so herself and would she lie?

I suspect you were just asked to be nice, and through a combination of spectrum OCD and insufficient cognitive therapy, you decided somehow you were being asked to do something wrong.

So you helped elect an ignorant sociopath. Congrats on that. Maybe you should have attended more of those cognitive therapy sessions.

In 2026 the only effect this has on me is where the patents are held.

Problem is we have fundamentally broken the economy for people that work for a living. When you completely break that social order then it doesn't matter and nothing matters.

When literally all of the benefits of the future go straight to the top and stay there and it never trickles down then it just doesn't matter if the work is done in Canada or if the work is done in america. I suppose it sucks when the work hasn't done at all but then again at a certain point it doesn't matter because if you make a new medicine and I'm American and my insurance company won't pay for it or I get laid off because some idiots started a trade War so that he could raise taxes on me at a real War so he could win a midterm election and I maybe get laid off because of the cratering economy well I'm not going to have health care because we cut all the social services to make way for you guessed it tax cuts for trillionaires.

Seeing people especially Centrist types complaining about brain drain really kind of pisses me off. Seen the left wing do it though really pisses me off because it's the kind of line goes up bullshit they should know better than. I don't see anyone on the left anymore talking about getting the benefits of modern automation and society to The working Man except in platitudes that they quickly discard. And I say that as a left winger.

So bottom line why should I care where the research is done? If by some miracle I make enough money that I can access it it makes no difference to me which billionaire is profiting from it whether it's a Canadian billionaire or an American billionaire and if the shit hits the fan for me and I lose all access to healthcare and technology and Christ maybe even a place to live then fuck it let it all burn.

You can't keep abandoning large swaths of the population and expect everything to be honky-dory. I find most people are hoping to die of old age before the shit hits the fan

Well, that character isn't on my keyboard. I don't even bother to double up my hyphens - I just use one as an em-dash. If it was a key, I'd use it. Until then, I'll just use the one hyphen and let Word or whatever deal with it.

Alt-0151 will get you the em dash. Or, type 2014 then hit Alt-X and Word will convert it for you.

Now be a good American and whine how that is too difficult.

Haven't worked in academia, have you. I'll put it in terms you might understand. Suppose there is coach of university basketball team. The school and the coach have a great reputation of attracting the best up and coming athletes. Then the school Administration decides to cut the basketball's program funding so that it will no will no longer have great facilities, the travel budget is reduced so the school cannot recruit like it used to. The star player decides to finish out his eligibility at another university. Several of his friends decide they'd also like to transfer because of the situation and that the school did nothing to keep the star.

Now, the coach can expect the basketball program to deteriorate because word gets around and high school players learn that tjhe school won't support the basketball team very well.

So the coach goes to the Administration and explains how they are destroying the basketball program. Unfortunately for the coach, the Administration is run by you who understands nothing about college athletics or basketball. You tell the coach: "There is probably a long list of players eager to fill the vacated roles and a long tail of high school players who will follow them."

Now you have destroyed the basketball program. I might add your attitude is what got the U.S. into the current predicament with respect to qualified individuals to run anything. DoD is being destroyed by the same boneheaded thinking. Who the hell needs expertise, there's always a long list of unqualified people willing to step up and screw up.

Dr. Who, Robots of Death (Tom Baker).

Tariffs are a tax collected by business for the government. Since Trump is the one who gave the illegal order, he would be responsible, but since the Supreme Court has ruled a president is untouchable, nothing will be done.