You imply this is a Republican issue? O rly? Personally I think it's both parties, but I expect I'm going to get modded troll for suggesting it's not just Republicans.

Clear recent examples with significant Democratic sponsorship, majorities, or leadership: (I only asked for a half dozen obvious examples)
Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (2021)
Inflation Reduction Act (2022)
CHIPS and Science Act (2022)
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (2009 stimulus)
Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (2021)
All-American Flag Act (2024)

Actually the biggest and loudest and most effective critics of socialism are those who have lived under socialism.

Actually the contrary is more likely. The far left discourages talk, interaction, ... too many get swayed away when honest discussions take place. Hence the silencing and harassment of conservative speakers on US college campuses.

Banning AI data centers is not socialist itself, but Bernie's motivations for doing so are. AI is going to provide economic and military advantages once it becomes reliable. He prefers a communists state to get their first, he does not want the USA to have such an advantage. Economic success is the greatest barrier to the Neomarxist Revolution that Bernie desires.

Yes. Firstly we have currency manipulation. With an artificially low currency everything in china is on sale. Steel, plastics, labor, etc. Add labor abuse and environmental abuse and you have a pretty hefty discount compared to manufacturing in the USA or EU. On top of all that BYD receives operational in government subsidies in several years including 2025. The EU imposed a tariff over this in 2024. So has Canada.
https://eletric-vehicles.com/b...

It is ENTIRELY true that China's manufacturing is rooted in "unfair trade, subsidies, intellectual property theft and surveillance".

It is ALSO entirely true that the US auto industry is likewise rooted in ""unfair trade, subsidies, intellectual property theft and surveillance" AS WELL AS anticompetitive trade practices, monopolistic behavior, market manipulation, mendacity, and grossly deliberately unsafe choices.

The Chinese are awful, but at least they deliver shitty cars that are cheap. The US companies are likewise awful, but they deliver shitty cars that are overpriced as well.

I'm not sure I see any winners here.

Bad guess. I've been an independent my entire voting life. As a small child I was heavily influenced by Watergate. When I turned 18 I did not know if I could trust either party so I went independent. I vote for candidates, not parties, sometimes D, sometimes R, sometime L.

BS. We have Weather Underground murders captured, prosecuted, jailed, and when release decades later they are giving positions in academia due to their "life experiences". Again, infiltration and working from the inside being part of the post-Vietnam pivot.

Irrelevant. Being at that one historic event changes nothing that happened at the different historic events I mentioned. That police or FBI or the Pentagon did sleazy things at does NOT justify, arson, bombing, assassination, robbery, etc. Nor the overthrow of the US government as part of a marxist revolution. You fix that shit at the ballot box. Ie, the Carter election.

It's funny how the troll-right keeps trying to rant about the evils of socialism - And yet somehow, every one of their points seems to be in favor of it!

/ For the record, I'm a fan of social safety nets, not ML Tankies.

When US companies can sell a modern fully-featured car in the $10k range, I might start caring what they have to say on the topic.

Until then, Detroit can take a long walk off a short pier. I have zero interest in a 20MPG behemoth that needs 360-degree cameras just to see over its own hood and tailgate, all at the low, low price of five to ten complete BYD Seagulls.

And if China want to track my every move - It's already happening, and personally, I consider them far less of a risk than GM or Uncle Sam doing the same! GM is rent seeking; Uncle Sam wants end-runs around the 4th amendment; and China's motivations may not exactly be pure, but their interaction with me is at least one-sided, they have little to no ability to do anything that affects me.

I see what you mean, but heck, that's not even playing every day - More like every other day on average, and I often burn a few hours on Sundays.

But that 4% stat is interesting - What this tells me is Game Pass is effectively a gym membership where the entire business model depends on 95% of people never using it.

Nope. The war was partly a pretext to get support from the masses, it was also partly a defense of communism who were being targeted by the US military. Similarly, many of today's social issues are also pretexts. As we saw with the co-opting of the legitimate BLM concept, police reforms wrt unnecessary violence, and the formation of false BLM local organizations which were really front for marxists. Again, my accusation, it their self identification like in the 60s/70s. Literally describing themselves as a "trained marxist", the faux-BLM web page filled with marxist ideology unrelated to police reforms, much of it regurgitating the phraseology of the 60s/70s when it was originally created.

The vast majority of Vietnam era protesters were regular people who legitimately cared and did NOT support crossing the line into violence. A small number of these may have acted as the "useful idiots" but these tended not to be the initiators of the violence, more like the Jan 6 idiots who joined in with what the provocateurs were doing. And then there was the source of the violence, the marxist / maoist radicals who had an agenda beyond protecting their communist allies abroad, who had a mission to destabilize and foment their revolution in the USA. From their manifesto: "Our intention is to disrupt the empire ... to incapacitate it, to put pressure on the cracks," After the Vietnam war ended and their support evaporated they criticized students abandoning the revolution, and worked to recruit students to revitalize their revolutionary efforts. They eventually conceded that there was no longer popular support and refocused their efforts on undermine the system from the inside, starting with academia but wanting students from all majors to join their efforts to have a wider impact throughout government and industry. How do I know this? I was among a group of student receiving the pitch, hoping to be recruited. The preceding is how they described their pivot and ongoing efforts. And its what they did. And its what we see today.

BS. Members were involved in political assassinations, armed robberies with casualties, arson, bombing. There is no such thing as a peaceful or safe arson or bombing. Collateral damage was an acceptable price to them, an attempt to minimize collateral damage does not change this fact.

Not at 15 hours a month it's not. I'm a total casual, and even I'd burn through that in under two weeks.

This must be some form of Anchoring. They fully plan to come back in a week or two with 10x the hours, hoping everyone that would have laughed even at that, initially, suddenly decides it's not so bad. If not, this is Microsoft announcing the end of Game Pass.

Is poker "gambling", when skill matters more than the luck of the draw? The worst hand at the table can still win.

For that matter, is the stock market as a whole gambling? And I don't mean that in the typical whiny "waaah, I suck at picking stocks, this is gambling" we often hear; rather, the winners are simply making better use of the available information than the losers.

Relating that back to Spagnuolo - Did he place the bet after all the numbers were compiled and not yet released, or did he make what amounts to good guess based on largely public information he just happened to have a better way to access than you or I? The former would potentially be insider trading (if not for the jurisdiction argument, which is pretty damned solid); the latter just means the losers need to git gud at finding that information.

It's a good idea.
I just was renewing my dl with the state of MN and to avoid really stupid amounts of time in registration (going from a normal to "enhanced" id they have you upload not just the front and back of your dl but also your passport. So I instead accepted that I'm going to spend my whole fucking day in their office.