It's that nobody gives a fuck about children. I mean except Trump but that's the wrong kind of fuck...

So that you don't understand how anything works over here but social security and Medicare are basically pension programs for our elderly and extremely disabled.

You pay into them and you get out of them.

Now like a lot of pension programs they have a problem in that they are pyramid shaped. They are designed for either having a lot more people or having a lot of people with higher wages or both.

And of course we have been slashing American wages so people don't have kids anymore creating a double whammy in our pension program.

This is all easily fixable by paying better wages. Which of course comes out of the billionaire's pockets but seeing as how you're shilling for them I could understand why it would upset you.

What I can't understand is why you're shilling for billionaires on this dying website. Is somebody paying you for this? Because it would be sad if you were doing it for free...

You need that many people when you're running a particularly nasty little scam.

Bill Gates is foundation does not exist to spend his money on charity. If it did then he would have given away the covid vaccine patents that the charity held.

The Gates foundation exists to whitewash his image so we all forget how much of a complete total bastard he was and always will be as well as to protect his fortune and power.

You do not get charity from billionaires. You beg them for the right to exist.

I would bet money that they have several people who are involved in covering up Bill gates's behavior and they're doing a large number of layoffs so that it's not obvious to a journalist which ones are being fired for that reason.

This way they can preemptively distance themselves from the people involved in the cover-up while giving those people time to cover their tracks.

It doesn't matter how obvious it is that Trump is an incompetent boob they will never know because in order to avoid facing that fact they hide out in safe spaces where Trump doesn't get criticized.

I'm sure you've noticed it. If you post something about Trump you don't get modded down immediately anymore and you don't get a bunch of idiots screaming tds. You get a couple of very obvious llm bots running off of people's gpus, they'll be one of them under this comment if it gets modded up, and that's it.

Trump supporters will not hang out anywhere that the mods don't protect them. They have become extremely fragile and protective of their egos

Was to bribe him in the hopes of getting juicy government contracts like what Elon Musk got. You can get a pardon from Trump for a couple million bucks but I think if you want nice big juicy government contracts you're going to have to match what muskrat brings to the table and that was a quarter billion dollars of campaign funds.

In other news, the president of the United States accepted a quarter billion dollar bribe in addition to several billion dollars worth of bribes for pardons and literally nobody cares.

I'm sure this is fine.

It's a bad thing when you're raising $1.5 trillion in capital. You raise capital to grow a business. If the business can't grow that's a scam. The investors will lose their money. There won't be enough revenue to sustain that valuation.

SS and Medicare come from a completely different tax pool. It's not part of the main budget. You're spouting weasel words.

SpaceX is a scam. The too long didn't watch is they don't have any more customers. There aren't any more launch customers besides muskrat's own satellite internet company and there is a limited pool of people who can afford high-speed internet but that don't have landlines. The service is too unreliable to be used in a military setting and as soon as there isn't a favorable administration for Musk he's going to lose his government contracts because he has actively interfered in international conflict making him a national security risk.

You can't be a defense contractor if you're going to fuck with the military when it's suits you.

All of this means that SpaceX is already at its maximum value and they are seeking 1.5 trillion.

Mark my words they will dump that into your 401k.

Trump is already loosened rules around putting bad stock in your 401k. At first if you are really paying attention and one of those fancy sophisticated investors you will be able to catch when they do it. Your company will gradually sneak dodgy index funds into your portfolio but you're smart so you will catch them doing it and stop them right? Right?

So you're not one of those other suckers but here's the thing they will go after the low hanging fruit first and when they have exhausted them they will come for you and they will change the rules again. Eventually you're going to find that your options are locked down and your money is just evaporating and there's nothing you can do about it.

Basically better start picking out your favorite flavor of cat food for your retirement

Yeah but the people who banged on about how Doom was the problem got a lot of press out of it and some of them built entire careers out of it.

That's what this is about. He knows damn well they are covered by section 230 of the cda, and as much as the right wing would love to strike that down so that they could finish taking over the internet this isn't going to be the case that does it.

He is just after a bit of press and a little bit of think of the children bullshit.

There are a bunch of billionaires, going on trillionaires, working to that goal. If we get to that point money doesn't matter anymore any more than money mattered to the kings.

Basically we are looking at the end of capitalism without socialism replacing it. Instead you will have a hereditary class of kings and queens, and they will have a handful of engineers to keep everything running and a handful of violent thugs to keep the engineers in line and to occasionally exterminate the masses of they become a problem.

I'm aware of that wholesale pricing fucks small businesses, I'm assuming that your business is so much better that you are able to compete without the bulk wholesale advantage.

Whenever I bring up the fundamental problems of capitalism people tell me that it's okay because capitalism is self-correcting. If a business does bad things people will stop patronizing that business because there will be a competitor that does a better job with a better product.

You're actually just kind of proving my point. You are pointing out that it is even harder to compete with large businesses.

So what I'm saying is it's already hard to compete with a large business and now that large business is going to Target you as a potential competitor and get away with it because we don't enforce antitrust law.

If you go tits up because you can't buy them bulk enough to compete that just means you didn't get to the point where they noticed you and crushed you. That doesn't mean they aren't crushing people who get to that point.

First yeah we're all going to chime in and say this will backfire.

It doesn't matter if it does. It's a blows up and costs a business some money odds are very good that the savings from wages will more than cover that.

What's worse is because we don't enforce antitrust law if a company goes down to tubes because it relied too heavily on AI it can just buy out any potential competitors and jack up prices on products you need to live and make back all the money.

Second there's basically two possibilities here, either the AI works and they got the fire a bunch of people or the AI doesn't work but they fired them anyway and the survivors have to work harder to keep their jobs.

Remember no antitrust law enforcement so if you get shit canned and try to start a business then you will be targeted and best case scenario you might get a buyout if you are under the radar long enough but more likely they just run you out of business.

Companies don't need good products anymore because they don't have to compete. So there is no floor and they can make things as shitty as they want and if you have a problem with it tough shit.

You could of course just stop consuming all together but at the very least you need food and shelter and medicine and some minimal financial services and transportation. So good luck stopping all consumption.

The point I'm getting at is that fundamental underpinnings of a functional economy have broken down and we refuse to acknowledge that fact.

AI training data was going to be the major problem and sticking point. Previously they could just soak it up for free from the internet but now that the internet is 70% AI slop that's not really going to work.

It does still raise the question of how the name of hell are we going to train AI to do programming tasks when we've replaced most of the programmers. But I guess we will cross that bridge when we come to it. I suspect that over time programming languages will be built AI first and programmer second.

One thing is for sure everything is going to keep getting worse and worse and worse. And we are going to keep blaming the wrong people because that's what we've always done.

There is way too much danger of collusion and antitrust violations with surveillance pricing. It's been a common workaround for companies looking to collude. Instead of getting in a smoky room and agreeing on price fixing you put all your data on a shared platform and use that to do your pricing decisions. The end result is the equivalent to the aforementioned smokey room but on an app so it's passed off as legal.

Apartment owners did this and it caused rents to shoot up an extra 20 or 30% over what they would have been without it. Several attorney generals pushed back against it but the damage is already done. Also the courts are packed with pro corporate judges so long term it's probably going to die and we're going to go back to having these policies in most places.