So yeah I believe real things are real.

I do think the actual cheating didn't put Trump in the White House but it probably did put a few close state legislatures in the Republican hands.

The voter suppression is pretty well understood. You can find some videos on YouTube if you care to be bothered I'm not going to waste time linking them here.

It's always the same three tricks. First close voting locations and or send a broken voting machines on election Day so that you have multi-hour wait times to vote.

Meanwhile do illegal challenges to voter registrations and voter signatures that require people to drive down to the courthouse on a work day and prove they are who they are in person. That's 3.5 million right there by the way. There was a coordinated campaign.

If they take away my right to vote you're next and once they take away your voting rights they'll take your house.

They're going to take your 401k too and all your savings. The 401K they will just steal and your savings they will get with medical and food.

Start picking out your favorite flavor of cat food. Maybe buy a good tent while you still have some money left

The laws to make the voter suppression illegal or part of the voting Rights act which the corrupt supreme Court struck down.

There are state laws that could be used but the Democrats are competent administrators but they don't have the bloodthirsty rage needed to force through the application of those laws.

If you've ever heard the phrase the machine with regards to Democrat politics in Chicago that's what's needed to outmaneuver the Republicans like that.

The Republicans know that and every time the Democrats start to build one up they attack them with the federal government like how they shut down acorn

I know you know probably know all this and I know you think you're going to be part of the club when Trump gets his third time.

Better start picking out your favorite flavor of cat food because you're going to be homeless soon. You are not part of the club.

because his 2 terms were consecutive. See how that works?

Republicans can do anything. Democrats can't. There is always an excuse and they don't matter.

Because 1/2 the people on this forum would let Trump shit in their mouths if it meant a liberal had to smell it.

I remember during covid when grocery stores would throw out food they would have cops guard the trash like that fucking Ren and stimpy cartoon.

What a fucking hell of a world we live in. Back when I was a kid food was much cheaper because although on paper it cost more you had these discounted foods that were close to expiration. I grew up on these giant bags of cheap donuts for a dollar because they were stale. Wasn't exactly healthy but when you're a kid calories are calories

Thanks to that shit I never had to eat sleep. And if you haven't heard the phrase eat sleep good on you. It's one of the most fucked up things I've ever heard in my life

If you did then we wouldn't be having this fucking conversation because none of this shit would be happening. But I can't give you a hundred IQ points so here we go.

This isn't hard numbnut. We deregulated our economy resulting in a shitload of scammers. Those scammers get unusually large and their scams can have large effects on the entire economy when they inevitably collapse.

If it was just an occasional scammer here and there that would be fine but because we have pulled back on regulations so much they are all over the fucking place.

It's scammers all the way down.

Every time the economy takes a dip then Bank starts sniffing around at those scammers and finding their scams and those people get desperate and stupid and dangerous.

When the scam collapses a shitload of people lose their jobs. Like what happened with enron. I bet you didn't know that Enron got as far as it did because they employed about 10,000 people and everyone was scared of taking the company down and having all those middle class Jobs go poof.

What I'm trying to get idiots like you to understand and I'm tired of fucking coddling you morons is that the economy is a complex interconnected system and when you let scam artists integrate into the economy at a fundamental level and form the bedrock of your economy that can work for a little while but when it crashes it crashes mother fucking hard and it takes everything you have with it.

Again I am tired of coddling you stupid fucking children. We need to restore and extend the regulations we put in place after the Great depression and we can't do it because you dumb mother fuckers cannot understand why we did it in the first place.

It's called a fucking chesterton's fence. It's a fence you don't take down unless you damn well understand why it was put up. And you have already taken the fence down because you freak out about trans girls or whatever the fuck it is the Republican party used to trick you.

Learn to think critically and Google competently or you're going to get us all killed including yourself.

Dude it's exactly on topic. This entire thing we are discussing wouldn't be happening if the business in question could secure more Capital to keep it scam going.

That's because you're too fucking stupid and ignorant to understand how systems interconnect doesn't mean they don't interconnect.

But if you weren't so fucking stupid and ignorant then Trump wouldn't be president and we wouldn't be in this mess.

And the supreme Court is absolutely going to let him do it using the flimsy excuse that the terms won't be consecutive. They have already shown repeatedly they could care less what the Constitution says.

Now I don't think the American people are stupid enough to elect Trump a third time but I don't think the heritage foundation and project 2025 are planning to give the American people a choice.

We have Rock solid evidence that approximately 7 million Americans got denied the right to vote using common voter suppression tactics last election.

We also have a couple dozen deep blue districts where Kamala Harris didn't win a single vote. It doesn't take a super genius or a political PhD to figure out what the fuck happened there.

And the old farts that put Trump in for a second term are going to be even more bitter and more angry than they have ever been because their lives are going to keep getting worse and they're going to keep getting older and more bitter and angry because that's what bitter angry old men and women do.

If the left wing can pull their heads out of their asses and actually help the centrists out then we might have a chance but I think the left wing is going to spend the entire time ripping into the centrists and ignoring the fascists just like they did last year.

In a few years as our entire empire collapses we will do whatever he collapsing empire does and invade other countries to loot them and fill our coffers.

That will start with Canada and Mexico and the rest of South america. It's possible China will intercede for South America and trigger world war 3 and it's also possible that they will back off but eventually we're going to take Europe and Russia and then we're going to find out whether or not those nuclear weapons still work.

But hey look over there! There's a trans girl playing sports!

Diversity of opinion means more right-wing opinions.

The news media in the '90s leaned a little on the left wing for a handful of social issues. Mostly because the evidence is on the side of the left wing cause for the social issues. Trans folk are real, gay people are gay because they're born that way and abortion is healthcare. Those are just facts. And anyone with a education knows that so it's no surprise journalists knew it and reported it accurately.

But take away those handful of social issues and focus on the economics and CBS like everybody else was way right of center.

Go look up how they covered the affordable Care act and the public option. Look up their coverage of Donald Trump in the lead up to his first election. Or their coverage of the handful of left-wing politicians like Bernie Sanders.

Here diversity of opinion is a code word that means they're going to stop reporting reality when it comes to social issues.

That also means science is right out the door because has the saying goes we already has a left-wing bias. So expect anti-vaxxers to get a boost and expect more anti-intellectualism and general attacks on higher education and learning in general.

And holy fucking shit can you imagine how triggered the right wing here at /. is right now by having all this pointed out to them?

That's why the right wing desperately needs to take complete and total control of all forms of media like they did in Russia and North Korea.

If you're a nerd go look up Russian science fiction. Not the cool stuff that came out of the Soviet Union when people were able to evade the sensors but the shit being put out today. It is the freakiest weirdest hypernationalistic psycho right-wing propaganda you have ever witnessed in your entire fucking life.

In 10 years that'll be the only thing you can get in america. You can kiss your video games goodbye. It'll all be freaky right-wing propaganda.

Maybe some of the weird old farts floating around here will like that.

One of the things I love about modern capitalism is that you are expected to make perfect decisions with some of the worst information possible and if you make the wrong decisions it's 120% on you.

This is why capitalism always breaks down. It assume not just a rational actor but also a rational actor with perfect information.

Right now liberal arts majors have lower unemployment than computer science majors.

So 4 years ago you start your computer science degree and you work your ass off and you get your CS degree.

Then you find 4 years after you start that the entire job market has been systematically dismantled by technocratic psychopaths who spent that entire time telling you this was the right career choice.

Or a better example. You apply for three jobs. You pick what you think is the best option and against All odds get hired.

3 weeks into your new job your boss tells you that your entire department got axed and now you're out of work again. Meanwhile the other two jobs have already hired someone else.

This one isn't a hypothetical I have watched this happen in actuality. I've seen people take what should be promotions only to have the role they promoted into eliminate it. One guy ended up spending a few years stuck in his dad's carpeting business. He didn't have a college degree and if you don't have that degree then even if you licked into a nice job if you lose it you're starting over from scratch. Nobody gives a rat's ass how much experience you have.

I know that people who like to go on about quote unquote Financial choices are really just bitter angry people that want to take that anger out on somebody else and have somebody beneath them on the totem pole.

But it's infuriating that people who aren't like that fall for the nonsense propaganda about all the choices we are supposed to make with the crappy information we have.

There is a wonderful invention called a "parking lot" which removes the needs to build rails to your door. You might want to check into it. Europeans seem to have figured them out.

Rails are pretty much a requirement for recharging while moving. But it does seem like a mechanical device that is below a parked car would work well for recharging stationary cars.

I am wondering if "hybrid" trains would be a good idea though. They would have sufficient batteries to travel a few miles, and be recharged when there is an overhead wire. This could reduce the cost and aestetics problems of overhead wires quite a lot, I think. It would be much closer to the "recharge while moving" idea as well.

Just collapsed. It's not big national news but if you live down south where they operate it's a huge deal.

It turns out that they were promising the same auto loans as collateral to multiple Banks to get their own loans. More or less a Ponzi scheme.

We're going to see a lot more shit like this. Cracks in the economy turning into full-on breaks and collapses because so much of our economy is held together by scams and skeezy businessmen.

It would be easy enough to have bureaucrats regulate this and stop it from happening. Bureaucrats are white collar cops. But there's a reason you have been trained to think of a bureaucrat not as law enforcement but as evil men and women stopping you from doing what you want. I should think that me having said that the reason should be obvious now...

Besides the structural problems in our economy created by rampant automation the economic collapses that have dominated our lives are entirely because we refuse to regulate and we refuse to let the white collar cops, AKA bureaucrats, do their fucking jobs.

So we get these short-term bubbles and then huge crashes that wipe out all of our gains and savings.

So you see a story like this expect to see a lot more of them. People who are running scams and they can't keep the scam going because there isn't enough money in the economy anymore to do that. A little extreme to try and do a murder but that's how shit goes when everything goes south in the economy.

When it comes to these kind of crimes I sometimes feel bad for the criminals themselves because if we had a proper civilization they could never commit the crimes in the first place. Not the murder of course. But the financial crimes that led up to the murder.

Of course half the country thinks murder is something immutable in your soul. Something that's inevitable. I guess if you think of it all knowing and all powerful Creator then yeah it's inevitable because everything is predestined but then it's kind of fucked up since if everything is already laid out then there goes free will.

But I think a better example of a crime that shouldn't exist is dui. If we had a proper public transportation system it would be basically impossible and at worst you'd have public drunkenness.

Is that it came out of Australia where avocados are very expensive because they have to be flown there. But the same stupid fucking meme worked with American boomers and a Gen x trash that are basically boomers because they're so fucking God damn gullible and stupid that they can't stop sucking down the Fox News bullshit for even a second to realize avocados, especially overly ripe ones like the ones you would put on toast, are stupidly cheap.

Seriously there 50 cents a piece after 5 years of runway inflation from cartels controlling food supply not to mention the 8 years of runaway inflation we all pretend doesn't exist from when Bush Junior deregulated the commodities market and let Wall Street jack up food prices because we're fucking God damn idiots.

Before all that they were four for a dollar.

Can you imagine being that blinded by your hatred for poor people and the less fortunate? I mean I get why they're doing it they're all losers and it's the only way they can feel better about themselves.

The best part is they mostly are pretty well off with houses and husbands and wives and whatnot and they've got an RV and all the nice fun stuff but they are still losers because that's not what they wanted in life. I don't know what they wanted in life but every fucking old angry Boomer I've ever met has been deeply unhappy because they aren't actually getting what they wanted.

And every one of them takes that unhappiness out on as many people as they possibly can.

And when you point this out everyone screams not my boomer. Because everybody likes their granddad or their dad or at least their mom or grandma so they don't like to admit that their mom and their grandma and their granddad all vote Republican so they can take food out of hungry kids' mouths. Nobody likes to think about how their parents vote

Look if you create a fair version of capitalism congratulations you've just created socialism but with more steps.

Frankly I'm all for it. People have been programmed to be terrified of socialism using the 4 to 14 trick. Basically they cram it in your skull when you're too young to know better because you don't have critical thinking skills yet.

It is possible to figure out that you've been lied to when you were a kid but it requires a process called deconstruction. It is slow, painful and very few people can do it.

So I say we do what we did to the boomers and the older gen x. Which are basically boomers.

Give everyone socialism but disguise it is capitalism so they think it's all okay.

The only problem is if you do that it is so fucking easy to get old people to pull the ladder up behind them which is exactly what the boomers did. Every single Boomer thinks they made it on their own when they were sucking on the giant teat that was the Great society and the New deal.

If you ever really want to piss off a boomer make them realize that they have everything they have because of socialism. They will get so angry at you they won't even be able to think straight and then they'll go running the Fox news to tell them they're a big boy and they did it all on their own and it's okay that they took Health Care and housing and good pay and unions away from their children because they're special boys and those kids are just lazy...

I don't know how you solve for that though. How do you keep the old farts from destroying the system they benefited from after they benefit it from it.

It's one of many reasons I think our species is doomed. We are just too fucking stupid and too easily tricked and fooled. It's the same handful of psychological tricks in every single country and it works again and again and again just with small regional variation.

They will take the same way Apple famously takes any app you make that's valuable and makes it part of the OS.

So if you want to be a hobbyist sure go right ahead but if you have the slightest inkling of making money then better give that up fast.