What they think they're telling the public: "We've learned a lot, and things will be much safer now."
What they're actually telling the public: "Move fast and break things, bitches! NOW WITH NUCLEAR POWER!"
It's interesting that you think these people are awful just because they're poor.
Are they awful because they're poor, or are they poor because they're awful? Some people are born in poverty and never have a chance to escape. Others end up there because they make bad choice after bad choice, knowing they're making bad choices.
26% of these people used the money to help friends and family.
That could be buying an ageing parent life saving medication. That could also include buying an addict brother his next meth hit so he won't steal your car again.
Does the study even attempt to distinguish between them?
It never ceases to amaze me how many leaps of logic people are willing to make in order to condemn folks they've never met, yet no leaps of logic are acceptable on any level in order to support those same folks. If we had a true UBI, they wouldn't have to throw their UBI money at others to help them survive, whether you want to attribute that survival to buying someone's next meth hit or not. That's the part of this study that failed to me. If we find out the UBI payment is mostly going to family members, maybe the family members should be included in the UBI experiment and see if that doesn't slow the bleeding from the original UBI participants.
Never listened to how rock songs start?
That's a count-in, not a countdown.
The economy is not the stock market.
The stock market is up. Big business is making innovations and selling them to each other.
The economy is hurting. Prices are up, and sales are down. People cannot afford the things they need.
We know that the economy is not fully encompassed in the stock market, but the view of our decision makers, from the corporate C-suites to our politicians, is that whatever happens within the stock market is 100% the indicator of the entirety of the economy. There isn't enough time for them to concern themselves with the fact the plebs can't afford to eat or keep a roof over their head. I expect we'll hear the ramp-up in rhetoric against the homeless as the economy continues to grind and bind in such a way that the lower classes continue being drained to feed the upper classes, the stock market continues to soar, and the rest of us continue to lose value on the very thing they've legally obligated us into using as our retirement funds through 401k implementations that say, "All your savings are belong to finance bros."
-but I will get paid for it!" - Tech Bro
Let's not forget, the tech bros are openly saying there's a 1/3rd chance that AI will wipe us out as a species, but "that's an acceptable risk." Because they might make a profit on the way to extinction. And we're letting them decide for all of us without pushing back.
How many crimes have been committed DUE to Flock cameras? How many abuses that may not have been criminal but were unethical? In a society that touts freedom as much as we do, the bar should be set extremely high for such a technology. Right now it's the lowest, rotten hanging fruit.
Freedom is a buzzword that holds no actual meaning in the US any longer. If it ever did, we abolished its meaning right after 9/11, when we used the convenience of the tragedy to flip society's view of freedom on its head and decided that safety and security theater is far, FAR more important than what freedom actually means. We've become a marketing wing for freedom, democracy, and open society, while we clamp down harder and harder on all those concepts and try to pretend that we're some bastion of hope.
Somehow, I'm still surprised when I see how quickly the lackeys fall into line whenever Trump makes some random pronouncement. I shouldn't be surprised, there are so many examples of this now, I just... I still am. It's like a bad movie about a capricious monarch who occasionally decides to change the name of something. When the lackeys bow and scrape and run off to scribble in their dictionaries, that's the filmmakers saying to the audience, "Look how stupid monarchy is." You don't expect to see this in real life. It's symbolism, movie hyperbole. It's never intended to be realistic.
It definitely supports my conclusion that we've somehow slipped into a really badly written Hollywood script. Our reality is being written by a drug-addled halfwit who is constantly being flooded with committee suggestions on how to improve the script, none of which are coherent individually, and are even less coherent when viewed as a whole.
The Emmys kind of epitomize the whole award show thing, an industry that sometimes displays something brilliant ignores all that brilliance to come together for one night and pat themselves on the back for ignoring anything new, or challenging, or different, or actually entertaining. Emmys, Oscars, Grammy's, the twenty-seven different Country Music Award shows we get every years, I swear there's one less than every two weeks, all of them celebrating the bland, tasteless paste of sameness they churn out.
Maybe we can just spin up a 24/7 streaming service for award shows. So those that need that fix can get it all in one formless space.
AI slop generated gaming concepts are not complete until every single slop game created gets auto-posted to every game distribution site so that we can flood out any decent game by drowning it under the weight of the slop generation, just as we're currently doing with video sites.
How much will my subscription increase?
You're thinking about it wrong. Think of all the new content you'll have available that you won't want to watch! Isn't that worth paying two, maybe three times as much?
It's not AI/SI that caused the problem. It's the fact that our government officials are so god damned stupid that they think a technology that's still in a rough part of its early development is ready to make important decisions and that those decisions are infallible rather than something that needs to be verified by actual intelligent humans. Or they are no actual intelligent humans allowed to participate in the process that could verify the output of the machines. Either way, the real problem is human stupidity.
I'm not a huge fan of where the AI industry is these days, but the root reason is because us fleshbags have some stupid-ass idealism about it and hold it up as if computer god has already been achieved.
Most of his kids don't even like him.
I have to think he's at the point where at least some of his kids don't even know him well enough to know whether they like him or not. Once you start pulling shotgun blast duty with your seed, you start running out of hours to be a parent. I'm sure he can throw money at them, but money without support doesn't create a relationship.
Hardware lockdown? Do not give the game companies the idea that the nightmare of iLok is the way forward. Because those fuckers would do it in an instant if they thought about it for a moment.
We'd have to claw back all the data that got funneled to Peter Thiel's organization, DOGE siphoned off a lot and sent it to them.
There's no regaining the trust of America's former allies. They now know that the American political system is as much to blame as la Presidenta for enabling an idiot like him to get the top spot. They cannot trust that Americans won't be similarly stupid in the future and decide, based on their myopic concerns, to burn down institutions that actually work; they are too stupid to understand how they work.
The Ministry of Christian War Crimes will now have to be de-wormed from infestation caused by the current asshole. He even is setting up a Christian ministry inside the organization devoted to Christian hate. He is pop. the upper ranks with Nazis, and making the organization anathema to everything America stood for before la Presidenta took over. And all this before we lose another war. And that war won't be over Taiwan. el Bunko will do a deal with Emperor Xi: they get Taiwan and we get to buy Taiwanese chips at inflated prices and subject to cut off whenever Emperor Xi has a bad day.
We'll have to dismantle the Ministry of Propaganda that la Presidenta is setting up in the gov. His silly chatbot is only the beginning. Project 2025 has big plans for the Ministry. If they are able and with the proper funding of genetic research, they'll recreate Josef Goebbels to run it again.
There's no replacing the trust the judicial system had in the justice dept when that department can be used as la Presidenta's personal vendetta sycophants. And that's not even counting all the la Presidenta bootlickers he and the R's in Congress have inserted into the judiciary. The justice dept has misled grand juries. And when they have a case in front of a judge that is not one of their toadies, e.g. Ailieen Cannon, Emil Bove, etc., they find a justice dept. lawyer who knows nothing about the case and hence cannot answer any of the judge's questions.
There's no replacing the lack of honor in Federal Law Enforcement short of disbanding ICE, the FBI, and a few others, and rebuilding from scratch. Those organizations have been corrupted, just like everything else el Bunko touches.
We might have a shot of restoring the Treasury and the IRS, but we'd have to go through those organizations with a scalpel and excise the filth with which la Presidenta and Project 2025 have infected those organizations.
And there is no non-generational change method to put the racist genie back into the bottle that la Presidenta has let out. He didn't cause the racism, but he's made it safe to be racist in the America, a nation built by immigrants, slavery, stealing Indian land, lack of human rights, etc.
The ultimate goal of the people who saw Trump's rise as a weaponized version of something they'd been trying to achieve for decades is to cause so much disruption that even if "the right people" get into power after him, there's so much shit gobbing up the works that they'll have to concentrate on fixing the most egregious rather than moving the country and the world forward towards actual progress.
It's not like there weren't warnings hanging everywhere during the start of this absolute shitshow. Even during his 2016 run, Trump essentially ran on chaos and bluster, with zero actual tactical plans good or bad. People with brains and money saw it and learned how to play the man like a fiddle by the time 2024 rolled around. So, sure, he's a chaotic force of weirdness at best, but somebody stroking his ego and throwing money his direction can get him to do pretty much anything, and have him go full Goerge Costanza "such a cool guy" gushing over them after. It's not limitless, and it's tough for other egos to keep the momentum going, as we saw when Musk's ego clashed with Trump's ego, but he can be manipulated with the right combination of funding / gifts / grifts and ego stroking.
Even if we have a clean-sweep of anti-Trumpers / anti-GOPers over the next several elections, it's going to take DECADES to unwind all the stupidity they've created even within the United States. As for the world stage, well, I wasn't the only person to say before the election that Trump makes our whole country look worse to the entire rest of the world. His number one trait as President the first time around was making chaotic and stupid moves against allies and cozying up to despots, making our country seem impossible to trust to those who previously considered us friends. And we're going to have to live with that image for a LOT longer than a couple election cycles. Because if we did it twice? We can do it again in a heartbeat. And the world knows now that 2016 wasn't a fluke. It was just the first full flaring of symptoms that had long been rotting us from within, finally reaching the surface. And now we've shown the world that when push comes to shove, we'll lean into those symptoms. Even if we take the entire rest of the world with us.
For me it's because there have been many, many examples of companies and organizations saying that they are not retaining the data, and then it is revealed that they are, in fact, retaining the data.
It's never easy to tell if it happens in any given case because of maliciousness or incompetence, but it happens repeatedly.
At this point, you'd have to be completely and utterly disconnected from any form of our current reality to ever believe any entity saying that they aren't retaining any data. They're either retaining it themselves, or passing it on to some other service to retain it so that they can "legally" claim they aren't retaining it.
A boss with no humor is like a job that's no fun.
