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

And each time it was clearly the wrong one.

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.

You would have a point. But they are so you don't. They will rule that the Federal regulations override state making it all legal and then we're just stuck with legalized gambling everywhere because we elected a corrupt asshole multiple times for some god-awful reason and they kept getting supreme Court Justice seats.

This last time we fucked up so bad I don't think there's any coming back from it. I'm happy to be proven wrong but the shit's about to hit the fan in so many ways and there's fuck all we can do about it. It's not like I can wave a magic wand and give everybody in the country a hundred IQ points.

Maybe even 2 years. I mean if you're in the Grand theft Auto then yeah that's fine but everybody who isn't this game is going to choke the life out of the industry. I think it's budget is over 2 billion. I don't even know what the hell you do with that. But whatever the case it means that for at least the next year or so it's going to be basically impossible to get anyone to play anything else in the larger game industry. The same thing happened when Skyrim really took off. There was a period of time where it kind of just choked the life out of the industry but that one was only about three or four months.

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.

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?

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

You can keep trying to beat the machine but you're not going to in the end.

They're going to keep trying this and they're going to gradually improve it to the point where they can automate some tasks and where they can drastically improve performance. Also AI is going to take people who normally could not compete with you for jobs and provide them with a crutch that lets them compete. That will drastically increase the number of people you have to compete with in the job market.

This is what's driving me nuts about America we completely lack any sense of nuance or complexity. Either the AI job apocalypse takes all of our jobs and we are all broke and homeless or it's nothing to worry about carry on.

Instead what is likely to happen is that we're going to hit a tipping point where automation hollows out the middle class and we don't have enough people with disposable income to drive a capitalist economy causing a collapse into tax base and a general spiral into abject poverty for 95% of the population.

Long-term if the technology works out for the Epstein class they will replace everyone except a handful of engineers and a handful of thugs to keep the engineers in line. There's a well understood process for doing that used by guys like Vladimir Putin and Kim jong-un. It's a more advanced version of feudalism. What the cool kids called techno feudalism.

But short-term we already have a major crisis on our hands. The only people with significant disposable income in the US economy are the baby boomers and they are blowing through all that money on our healthcare system and just living their retirements and making it to 80 or 90 years old because of various drug cocktails. Current estimates are that only about 30% of the wealth held by the baby boomers will be passed on and most of that will go to a handful of individuals this proportionately.

So right off the bat in about 5 or 10 years we are not going to have the disposable income needed to keep our economy functional without major systemic changes we are not willing to do. Basically some form of socialism and wealth redistribution.

Instead it seems we're going to pretend they'll be magic future jobs that nobody can describe but somehow save us. But I don't see how we get there when virtually all of the energy on new tech in our society is being spent automating jobs away not creating new things. Literally trillions of dollars are being spent to free the Epstein class from the shackles of capitalism and having to sell their products to us and employ us.

It's not a doomsday scenario it's not cool like that. It's a gradual wearing down and breaking down of the social order and a return to the worst kind of societies where everything is built around glorifying and exalting a handful of kings and queens.