People seem to be forgetting that Ukraine is still a nation-state. That's how they can defend themselves. A guy in the basement isn't going to be able to do jack shit. First off 99% of those guys will get identified and taken out long before they get any drones built. For the remaining 1% they won't be able to throw enough drones at the problem because they're going to be too busy scrounging up food.

I don't think folks have realized just the scale of poverty that the Epstein class has in store for us. Go look up what it was like living on an American Indian reservation back in the 1800s. Think that. Maybe worse.

That a fine upstanding company like Microsoft would engage in potentially anti-competitive behavior? Perish the thought. Quick fetch me my fainting goats!

On a more serious note elections have consequences. If you like having choices when it comes to software 45 years of zero antitrust law enforcement is one hell of a consequence.

Companies don't care about the quality of your work or your skills. There is a small number of people who have unique and irreplaceable skills. They are a very small number. These are mostly people who are genetic freaks of one's kind or another. People who have amazing recall and focus and can learn incredibly complex mathematics or people who have incredibly good vision and hand-eye coordination who can become surgeons. Things like that.

For literally everything else good enough is always good enough.

Now if companies still competed against each other good enough wouldn't be good enough. Higher quality talent would produce a higher quality product overall and customers would flock to the better company.

We stopped and forcing antitrust law over 40 years ago. You can find the charts showing you the seven companies own basically everything. And those seven companies are owned by a handful of people when you look at who actually owns the stock.

So that gets you enshitification. I don't need to make a good product. If somebody comes along making a better product because they overall have better people I buy that company or I run it out of business. This is what Facebook does. You can look up the company's Facebook has bought and it's a who's who of up-and-coming social media competitors. Amazon did the exact same thing and it's how they became the number one retailer. It wasn't impressive tech it was buying their competitors and being allowed to do it by toothless regulators.

We broke one of the fundamental aspects of capitalism and they are downstream effects. In this case there's drastically less employment in our economy as a result and your wages and mine are substantially lower as a result.

It's a chesterton's fence. Don't pull the fence down if you don't know why it was put up

The compounds of the ruling elite that own all of the capital and AI will be thoroughly shielded against EMP attacks of any kind.

Nobody is coming to save you. That includes mother nature. Although there is a distinct possibility that these idiots will get their hands on nuclear weapons and end our species.

But for most Americans that would be a change in how they vote.

Most Americans vote based on who was in office the last time they got screwed over. We vote for the other guy. It literally doesn't matter how terrible or destructive the other guy is. If I'm having a bad time I'm voting for the other guy.

The problem is that creates a ratcheting effect. You're always moving towards the pro corporate direction because sooner or later if you're just voting for the other guy you're going to vote for somebody who's super super pro corporate and when those guys getting power they seize a lot of power and get a lot of shit done. Now during the next cycle other guy voters are going to switch to well, the other guy who will be significantly less pro corporate if not completely not pro corporate (although financially it's hard to make it out of a primary if you're not pro corporate to some degree, because if all else fails the corporations will spend up certain amounts of money defeating you in a primary if you're a existential threat to them). But the problem is you still have all the damage from when you voted other guy without really thinking about it because the last guy didn't fix every problem in the world in 4 years.

I don't know how you stop other guy voting. I don't think it's enough to expect people to vote strategically because people hate politics and it's a chore thinking about it and dealing with it so asking your average voter to vote strategically is of tall order...

What I would like to get people to do is to at least start to think about their vote. Also I'd really like to get something done here in America about county level voters suppression. We have a lot of it and it is drastically changing our politics...

But getting back to my original comment the main goal here is to get people to actually think about their vote just a little.

Every time you get angry at somebody screwing you over in a systemic way the next question you need to be asking is, does this change how I vote?

If the answer is no then your rage is impotent and useless.

So it's not like the editors have anything important to be posting about right? Everything is just so calm and dull but you've got to expect this. It's just one slow news day after another and has been since the beginning of 2025.

There's nothing ironic about it they got what they paid for. People forget that Trump was a Russian stooge for ages. The reason he wasn't bankrupted during his most incompetent business deals is because he was laundering money for the Russian mafia.

Never mind the fact that Russia and the Israeli government both have massive amounts of dirt on Trump thanks to his long-term friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. You would have to be incredibly naive not to know that the Russian government has evidence of trump raping kids. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure that out. We learn from the Epstein files that the Russians provided a lot of girls to Jeffrey Epstein and we have eight credible women accusing Trump of raping them when they were children details of which have been corroborated by several journalists.

The problem is you can lay out all the evidence and proof of that but nobody is going to believe you because it's too fucking insane to think that we elected a pedophile who is under the control of a hostile foreign Nation to be president of the United states. I don't think the human brain is capable of grasping the enormity of that.

You get the same problem with things like the Iran Contra affair or how Ronald Reagan arranged for Americans to be held hostage so that he could win his election. It's just something that you don't want to believe is true no matter how true it is because you don't want to face a world that fucked up.

It's not difficult - Iran must be balkanized if Israel is going to conquer the Middle East and expand its proper borders to "those promised by God". They will demand a regional empire beyond their borders as a "buffer zone".

The Eschatological Christian Zionists want them tp destroy the Al Aqsa Mosque and build the Third Temple so Jesus can come back. Much of the Senior Brass at DoD (or Department of War Crimes) believes in this.

Is it all absurd and crazy? Doesn't matter, it's what motivates the people with nukes.

That and Trump being blackmailed with Epstein Tapes. The news says it's specifically an audio tape of a phone call between those two.

This is what the people who want peace in the world are up against. We can't counter what we deny.

> when your investigative toolkit is journalism

Exactly. The English Majors went where other investigators have previously gone and ruled out.

The stack of blockchain, Merkle Trees, halvings, etc. show a level of insight a quantum above Hashcash.

There's noting wrong with being "quite good" but "engineering genius" is something different.

Besides, Satoshi would never have stood for not funding mining with txn fees. The BTC chain is in danger of being unmineable very soon.

The rank and filed that those radicals need to stage an actual revolution aren't. Just like when 9/11 happened in America I can tell you right now that every single regular Iranian person is going to rally around the government and the military. Doesn't matter how terrible the government and the military are when your country is attacked you rally round them.

On top of that Trump has done numerous stupid things guaranteed to undermine any opposition of the Iranian regime. Go look up YouTuber Belle of the Ranch. She does a good job talking about it and how incredibly inept the Trump administration has been. Like criminally inept.

There are no upsides and no good outcomes from this. This is downhill for everybody. Which is to be expected from a man who bankrupted casinos.

So that Russia could have more access to our politicians and voters. It worked Trump's president again. But it does mean that we are substantially more vulnerable to other attacks. Especially when a senile old man can easily be tricked into starting a war that even Bush Jr wasn't dumb enough to start...

As for Iran yeah, we attacked them without any reason to do so. We already had a perfectly good deal to stop them from building nukes. But it came from a black man so it had to go.

And now it looks like all told this little adventure is going to cost us about a trillion dollars. That's another trillion dollars of debt and inflation. Almost as if electing a well-known rapist and pedophile with a long history of bankrupting businesses including casinos was a bad idea...

Funny thing is I don't see anyone defending El presidente in public anymore. Trolls will yell TDS at me but they never actually defend his actions anymore. Not outside of their safe spaces.

And despite $4 a gallon gas and a huge wave of inflation about to hit in a few months that we all know is coming, Trump still somehow has a 36 to 40% approval rate depending on the poll. I don't even know what you do about that it's fucking insane.

I bought some paper books from Amazon in 1998 and they still work like the day I bough them.

Excellent support after 28 years.

A sizable percentage of likely Democrat voters are worried that a woman would get bullied in international negotiations by male world leaders. This is of course a silly thing to think but they think it.

To counteract that women who run for president, and this goes for both Kamala and Hillary as well as the various women who ran in the primary, all have to do a bunch of saber rattling to show how tough they are to those voters.

The problem is that saber rattling inevitably backfires and a bunch of young men see it and get spooked that the woman in question is going to drag us into a war with a draft.

There's an old saying about war, don't give your opponents problems give them dilemmas. What I described above is a dilemma. There's no actual right answer or good solution. If you skip the saber rattling you lose the voters who think you aren't going to be able to negotiate and if you do the saber rattling you lose the voters who think you're going to draft them off to die in the Middle East.

The Republican party has a lot of these kind of dilemmas and they can usually solve them with overwhelming propaganda and dog whistles because they have a much larger media apparatus and a lot more money. Those aren't options for the Democratic party.

Because of all this under the current system it's basically impossible for a woman to become president. I think if they completely eliminated voter suppression then they could win but that's going to be a multi-generational effort.

This is what Jasmine Crockett meant when she said the Democrats are going to nominate the safest white boy they can find. They aren't in a position where they can risk running a woman again. We've got 20 or 30 years of civil rights organization and voting rights organization before that can happen...

I think they see a clear attack point. Big enough to make it worth trying it. It also helps that these computers are incredibly cheap to build not just because the leftover parts but because it's literally just a phone SOC.