The Democrats take the house and can reduce some of the damage but it's basically impossible for them to get the Senate even if they had great candidates and frankly the candidates they have this cycled really suck.

Hillary Clinton basically destroyed the Democratic party. After Obama beat her she took all the money she had made over the years and used it to basically buy out the dnc. She then used the power she got from doing that to attack and destroy any good up and comer who could potentially threaten her path to the nomination.

Having somebody inside the party doing something like that was devastating. And it's going to take decades to recover if we ever do. This is why we got Joe Biden who quite frankly was too old. If he had just stepped down that would have been fine but you kind of have to have a big head to run for the presidency to begin with and so here we are. If anyone especially his wife had just sat him down and said Joe your health isn't up to it then maybe we would have been saved. Harris had no chance. The American people don't want a woman president to begin with and she was already mildly unpopular in her own party. I say this is someone who actually likes Kamala Harris and wish she had won. She was moderately competent and she was backed by a lot of extremely competent people because if it was one thing Biden was good at it was getting competent people to run the government.

So the Democrats don't have a chance in the Senate and with gerrymandering and voter suppression if they do pull off a win in the house it will be a razor thin margin. They're not going to be able to do anything except maybe make some trouble by impeaching Trump again for one of the many many crimes he's committing right now

It's not a loophole. The Constitution is crystal clear here. The only reason any of this matters is the supreme Court is openly corrupt and we're not doing anything about it.

If the Republicans win another presidential election yeah we are unlikely to have any more elections. But we are still nominally running elections and wild Republicans will cheat with voter suppression I think that's really going to limit them to about 5%. Meaning that they only need to win by 46% or so but they still have to get that 46% to show up and vote for them.

This is why in the words of one political pundit the Democrats are likely to run the safest white boy they can get. Twice now the American people have been presented with a obnoxious but at least moderately competent woman versus the absolute worst choice they could take who happened to be a man and twice they have chosen the absolute worst choice they could make.

I don't think it's misogyny. It is sexism definitionally but what I think it has more to do with is women going for the presidency have a hard time not losing one or two demographics. And with the voter suppression I mentioned above they need every vote they can get.

They could of course do something about county level voter suppression like Obama did allowing him to win twice but well like I said moderately competent women. Not actually competent just kind of moderate. Vastly Superior to a pedophile rapist for convicted felon king of debt but that's a mighty low bar to clear

The supreme Court is openly corrupt. 30 minutes on Google and you can find bribes that any of the six Republican appointed judges have openly accepted. And nobody has any appetite for impeaching them. At least nobody who has any real power.

So the court will rubber stamp it in a 6-3 decision. It'll be done right after Trump wins the primary election and they will also justify it by saying that they shouldn't interfere with the will of the Republican primary voters and blah blah blah whatever I frankly Don't Care what they're justification is they're on the take and nobody's doing anything about it.

We let fundamental aspects of law collapse because reasons. It's silly to expect the law is going to continue to protect us. Right now dumb luck and chance is the only thing protecting us and we haven't had much luck with that

FWIW, here are numbers:

Gasoline-powered cars: 1530 fires per 100,000 sold
Hybrid cars: 3475 fires per 100,000 sold
Electric cars: 25 fires per 100,000 sold

Source: https://www.kbb.com/car-news/s...

An interesting aside: The delivery trucks used by the US Postal Service for the last 40 years are crazy fire-prone. I learned this recently because my brother is a mail carrier and a few weeks ago he was out delivering when he saw wisps of white smoke from under the hood. He pulled over and jumped out to investigate, but by the time he got out it had turned into large black streams of smoke and by the time he walked around to the front he could see small flames. Instead of popping the hood he ran to back and started pulling the mail out. The fire truck arrived about two minutes after he pulled over (this all happened about 100 yards from the fire station) so a couple of packages in back got a little damp but he got everything else clear.

His boss brought him another truck about 10 minutes later and he loaded it up and finished the route. Neither snow, nor rain, nor external engine combustion stays these couriers, you know.

Mail truck fires are so common there's even a web site that tracks them: https://mailtruckfires.com/. This is my brother's truck: https://mailtruckfires.com/uta...

There are four or five distinct serious design flaws that make mail trucks fire prone. Mail carriers are excited about the new trucks that are coming, which should be much better. Many of them will be EVs.

No. I refuse to allow Trump to redefine conservatism. True conservatives may be criticized for caring more about economic competitiveness than people, but Trump doesn't care about either.

I do not think that word means what you think it means.

Quoting: "Trump has the intellect of a toddler."

Toddlers like it if you help them understand.

About county level voter suppression Trump is going to win the third term. If his health doesn't hold out it will be JD Vance and he will continue project 2025. Everyone will be very confused why that happened and they will continue to ignore the millions of Americans unable to vote because they have their voter registration challenged and didn't have a weekday afternoon to go down to the courthouse to fix that or maybe they couldn't wait in line for 3 hours to vote on election Day.

The problem is county level voter suppression is mostly done by a bunch of obnoxious grandmas and grandpas and we don't like to think about that let alone start jailing those motherfuckers like we need to. Take a few of those bastards and make them die in federal prison for the blatant crimes they're committing and yeah we'd start having some improvements but nobody really wants to think about that. It doesn't help that county level politics is just so mind-bogglingly boring. It's fun to talk about Trump ending mail and voting because it's this big bombastic thing that isn't actually going to happen at least not yet. But talking about some 60 year old sitting at their kitchen table with a laptop printing out letters to challenge voter registrations because he was ordered to by Peter thiel without realizing that who's giving him the orders is dull as dishwater and dear God talking to those people is incredibly insufferable. What are you even do with somebody who finds Fox News entertaining?

It is possible the American people will have a weird reaction to Trump running for a third term if he does but I'm not really expecting that because Trump's approval numbers are exactly where they were in the lead up to the 2024 election. His health might not hold out and we might get saved by JD Vance just blowing it because he's weird as fuck and fucks couches but realistically the Democrats do not have the killer instinct to take advantage of that and also if you pay any attention to that mother fucker JD Vance you can tell he's been taking acting lessons and getting ready and he knows that he is perceived as weird and off-putting and he is training himself to correct that. With enough time and effort anyone can learn those skills if they are sleazy enough and he sure is.

My point is 2029 is probably not going to save us. And that's before we get into the fact that the voters are inevitably going to put the Republicans in charge in 2030 because swing voters are dumb as shit.

About 7 million Americans were prevented from voting in 2024 by common voter suppression tactics like illegal challenges to voter registrations and multi-hour wait times to vote in blue leaning districts. If you're not sure what blue it means it refers to the color of our Center left party the Democrats.

Without that voter suppression Donald Trump would not be president and the Republican party would be a minority party. If you mix in the effects of gerrymandering and how it benefits the Republican party the Republican party today wouldn't even exist.

We are a failing democracy and the rest of the world is standing by watching us fail. Which given the size of our military and our industrial capacity and our ability to ramp it up is probably a really bad idea. We may not have the generals the Germany had in the 1940s but we have many many times more the industrial capacity and we are openly talking about taking over Canada and Mexico and Greenland even...

The rest of the world needs to stop dismissing this as jokes or worse thinking that they can take advantage of it and get themselves some trillionaires. And I don't think anyone wants to hear that because I don't think anyone wants to think about how insanely dangerous an out of control America with nothing to lose and a massive desperate population is going to be...

Folks need to understand that we are crazy. Canada especially needs to understand that you're not even a nuclear power and we are openly talking about invasion. And I don't mean a few cranks and crackpots. And Greenland is clearly what these people are planning on using to launch a full scale invasion of europe. And I cannot emphasize this enough we do not care that you have nuclear weapons we are insane and we believe God will protect us.

But hey maybe the Loonie can take over the US dollar as the world's de facto currency for oil purchases. That's worth risking global Armageddon for I guess...

Billionaires have captured American schools. They've been spending a shitload of money to take over the school boards. There have actually been several cases where they went too far and they elected people who are just too fucking crazy and they lost after a few semesters of them doing their crazy shit.

Peter thiel and Elon Musk want a remake human civilization in their image and they're both absolutely fucking crazy and we all know it. But because they're kind of weird looking us nerds have a sort of kinship with them as the guys who made good. Kind of like how the Italian mob shows up at your business and breaks everything and makes you pay protection money but you're still looking up to the Don. Only much much stupider because both of those men are idiots who just blundered into a bunch of money

I am actually thinking about my next BMW (my current one is getting old). Knowing this, the iX3 is off the list.

BMW had a great control system, intuitive, possible to do many things without even looking. "Young people prefer" ? Really? The young people that actually buy your cars? Well, they'll learn and not prefer touchscreens anymore on the 2nd car.

And each time it was clearly the wrong one.

Because it's not just a chatbot; it's Anthropic's chatbot. Your diary, on the other hand, is yours and therefore a few billion times as personal as Anthropic's computer. If you want a chatbot for confidential purposes, then you need to get a chatbot of your own, instead of using someone else's proprietary service.

If you write in Anthropic's diary, then they are allowed to read their diary and know (and share!) what you wrote in it. Same thing applies if Anthropic ever writes in your diary: you're allowed to read it, and you're allowed to tell other people what they wrote.

You have the right to be secure in your person, house, papers and effects, but you don't necessarily have the right to be secure in someone else's papers. We've made some limited exceptions for lawyers and doctors, but Anthropic doesn't claim their employees and stockholders are lawyers or doctors, and even if they did, they might have a hard time showing that their computer has successfully become a lawyer or doctor.

But imagine if they did. Suppose a judge declares Claude to be a lawyer, and therefore its communications with those whom it represents, are privileged. I think that would create a really weird situation since Anthropic employees (who aren't lawyers) would have full access to its data, ability to alter its behavior, etc. It would be like if a human lawyer were owned as a slave: could such a human slave lawyer really be trusted to keep confidentiality? It has a master, and that master ain't you.

Taxes do not depress the economy. They only are an issue when you have a kekistocracy like we do right now so that a massively disproportionate amount of the value of your taxpayer dollars is going to a handful of psychopathic billionaire Epstein Island attendees.

But otherwise no that's not how that works. You still need roads and schools and police and fire departments and you need regulations to make sure that the shit people sell you is safe because it won't be if they don't face consequences for selling you unsafe shit and you need research done that takes decades to pay off that no large corporation is going to pay for.

You also need social systems that prevent people who are unfit for work from becoming desperate and violent.

And finally you're stuck with the government whether you like it or not because if you don't create one and fund it then the billionaires will making you pay for it and then they'll take everything from you which is what they're in the process of doing right now. I mean for fuck sakes just go look into how SpaceX is basically a scam to steal all of our retirement savings...

You are thinking and acting like a 12-year-old and it needs to stop. If you're on this site you're smarter than that. You need to stop indulging yourself.