He added a fee but it's not really enough to matter and it only applies to H1B which is only about 65,000 visas a year. For context we bring in around a million immigrants legally every year and about 40% of them are here for what would be considered middle class jobs (doctors programmers project managers that sort of thing).

Trump is making a lot of show and ice beating the shit out of grandmas makes good TV for bitter old racists but in practical terms immigration is increasing under Trump especially the kind that takes good-paying jobs Americans are gunning for.

As is typically the case with Trump it's all theater and none of it is real. I mean yeah ice will hurt a bunch of people and your racist Grandpa is loving that but it's not going to help anyone under 70 get a job.

And Trump is a billionaire. I mean he is now what with all the cryptocurrency corruption.

I know there are still a ton of trump supporters here though. They keep quiet and use their mod points when they get them. And they will vote for Trump in 2028.

Consider me stigginit'd.

You could stop actively supporting and voting for rapists that would help. Because Trump fucks kids after all and you love Trump.

You could also stop punching yourself in the nuts. That's going to be real hard to do because you've been doing it your whole life but if you try real hard and maybe take a classic Community College you can figure it out.

And remember if you see an llm remind at the Trump fucks kids!

I don't think anyone involved here is on the side of capitalism. This is a billionaire money fight and billionaires have pretty much had it with capitalism and consumers. That's why they want control of the media. They want control of the information you consume.

and they implicate Trump. I think that much is obvious at this point.

It's just racism. The practice got it start here because after minimum wage took effect there needed to be a way to pay black people less than minimum wage. That's why the United States developed tipping and other countries didn't.

Anytime you see a quaint little American custom that you can't figure out why it's still around the answer is usually there was some nasty little bit of racism that we've forgotten because of the civil Rights amendments and a shitload of lawsuits.

In this case though this is just taking what's left of tipping which these days is a mechanism where companies can advertise one price and offer another. Sort of like how sometimes something evolves in an animal and then gets put to another use.

I'm not sure the status of Australia's consumer protections though. In America with how corrupt things are now as long as it's large corporations doing this shit I'm sure they can get away with it however Australia might not allow what is very obviously just a trick to advertise One price and offer another. Bait and switch like that is generally frowned upon.

You can solve all these problems you want and Microsoft will use nasty little Monopoly tactics to prevent Linux from getting anywhere.

If you want Linux on the desktop then you have to vote for Democrat politicians or your local political equivalent. Basically you need to vote for somebody who will do trust busting. You also do probably need to pay attention to primary elections. There aren't as many of the really corrupt corporate Democrats as they're used to be however there are still some and if you change your voting behavior you can bet your ass the lobbyists will notice and adapt.

The reason you can't get anywhere with Linux on the desktop is because you are trying to solve a political problem with technology and that doesn't really work.

Something you probably do not want to think about.

Let's say you are a mentally unbalanced person with easy access to guns 70 or 80 years ago.

If you were black and you went on a shooting rampage nobody cared because nobody cared what the black folks did to other black folks and we didn't let them near white folks.

If you are white and you wanted to go on a shooting rampage well, you had plenty of black folks you could shoot up and again nobody cared.

My point is the violence was there people just didn't give a shit. If you actually read the history of racial violence in America it is terrifying stuff. We do everything we can to pretend it didn't happen.

So by the '70s racial violence was frowned upon and you were likely to get in trouble for it and by the '80s you were definitely going to get caught and thrown in prison. Hell there's a couple who showed up at a black birthday party waving their guns around and threatening people and they're doing 10 years in federal for that.

So what you're seeing is there is no longer a socially acceptable outlet for mentally ill people who want to commit violence and kill people.

It's kind of like how fentanyl became a crisis but crack cocaine wasn't a problem. Fentanyl was a problem because good American white men were taking it and overdosing. But nobody gave a shit about black people just lock him up in prison if you catch one of them. And let the CIA sell them the crack you lock them up for.

And of course pointing any of this out triggers the fuck out of people because we're not supposed to confront or think about all the racial violence that exists in this country today let alone the stuff that existed before.

Not the ones doing the shooting anyway. There have been studies and school shootings are generally not done by the bullied ones.

What it looks like so far is you have a mentally unstable child who has been showing clear signs of mental instability and parents who have been leaving guns lying around because why the hell not we've got a second amendment right?

The parents of that school shooter in Michigan are going to do 10 years in prison for negligence. That seems to be the solution right now. I'm not sure it'll work since again talking about studies there are clear studies that long prison terms don't actually deter crime.

Education and awareness would be the solution but that's off the table because you can't have the slightest discussion about gun control without it being used to elect incompetent politicians who wreck the economy in favor of billionaires.

Basically gun control like abortion has become just a polarizer designed to create a handful of single issue voters. So serious discussions are impossible.

A huge chunk of their money comes from selling some of the worst crap to cops. There's a thing called cop City in I think Georgia where Motorola and one of the company paid for 2/3 of the building. It's a massive complex for training police. Motorola gets the money back when the cops buy tech and weapons from them.

This kind of blending of government and Private industry is a huge component of fascism. It's also all kinds of fucked up do you have a private company giving the cops tens of millions of dollars for a training facility.

This kind of crap here in the school is an extension of that. And you can't say no because they are going to give a lot of money to local politicians and you're going to learn the names of those local politicians and most people when it comes to local races vote based on which name they recognize.

Even if you're somehow smart enough to figure this all out on your own and you do them scroll enough that you're aware of it your neighbors aren't.

True but the problem is that it's bleeding over to mainline gaming.

AI he's worse because it's very tempting to slopify because of the huge cost savings. Where before they would at least do the pre-production work by hand now they want to do it with AI slop.

That didn't pull their own weight? Sure you did. It's a pretty universal experience.

You resented it didn't you? Again pretty universal experience.

That feeling of resentment is easily exploitable to prevent any effort to organize. It is really easy to get people angry at somebody who maybe isn't working as hard as they do or in a job is miserable as theirs. Misery loves company and people want other people to be miserable like them.

Mix in a bit of generals stupidity and the inability to process information and a ton of propaganda and it's basically a done deal. People become incapable of organizing.

If you look at the 1900s when socialism was popular we still need it everybody to be firing on all cylinders and working so it was really easy to turn regular working people against the billionaires because it was really obvious that everybody was working except them.

Now we are looking at about 15 to 25% of the population becoming basically useless. They're just isn't going to be any work for them to do it's worth doing and that they are capable of doing.

The idea of letting those people sit at home and play Xbox and drink beer is infuriating on a primal level to anyone that still has to go to work. What's worse is the more useful you are and the smarter you are the more likely you are to be stuck working in that world.

I don't know how to deal with resentment but you can't sit people down and explain to them that they shouldn't feel something. Explanations don't make feelings go away. It's why Ronald Reagan famously said if you're explaining you're losing.

Of the kind used to stop mass shootings overseas, specifically where you seize everything except a handful of hunting rifles and farmer shotguns.

That's because down south you will find plenty of Black folk who need those guns to protect themselves from the white folk. And I'm not going to pretend that's not happening.

A while back there was a story of a bunch of Red hats who drove down to a mosque with their rifles intending to cause trouble. I don't think they were going to shoot the place up just intimidate people but it wouldn't have taken very much for it to turn into shooting...

So when they got to the mosque they found it was a Nation of Islam mosque and when they saw the brothers out front with their rifles they turned around and went home.

What I'm saying is mutually assured destruction works on both sides.

The argument could be made that we could take away the Red hats guns too except I know damn well we selectively enforce laws in this country and again I'm not going to pretend what's happening in the real world isn't happening.

This is not to say we shouldn't have some gun control laws. Irresponsible morons who leave tons of guns easily accessible by mentally unstable teenagers need to stop that shit.

But what I'm getting at is I don't have any illusions about overthrowing the government with civilian firearms, logistics and tactics but there is a place for preventing oppression with firearms.

But more importantly it makes everything into shit.

Specifically AI copies and regurgitates and when companies start using it what's going to happen is everything ends up turning into slop like all those shitty mobile games that all look the same.

Apart from AI devouring all the RAM and drives and electricity and jobs the reality is if you use it to make games your games are going to look like crap because the AI is going to spit out a rough approximation of everything that was used as an input resulting in the lowest common denominator.

It's like how you've got those modern military shooters and you can take five of them and take a screenshot and they're indistinguishable because they're all being made from the same crap template. YouTuber Yahtzee called it spunk gargle wee-wee.

The reason it's called AI slop is because it all blends together into a slop and becomes an indistinguishable and gross mess and there's no getting away from that just because of the nature of AI and the fundamental underpinnings of the technology.