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.

What really scared them was other countries not tolerating that bullshit and in most other countries if you lose a lawsuit like this the other party can come after you for damages. They don't care about negative PR, but a case where they are forced to pay out for having their spurious claims disproved scares the living shit out of them because it sets a precedent.

Yeah... Android manufacturers need to pull their finger out and give Apple some better ideas.

Multiple manufacturers have tried the folding phone several times with little to no success. I can't see Apple succeeding (they'll pretend they are though).

What I can see is Apple presenting their most rigid phone ever as "the iFold 1billion and 2 PRO" with someone standing on stage showing us that it flexes slightly if measured with laboratory equipment... and when people break it in real life telling us "you're folding it wrong".

Special Operator type training is far too advanced for a corporate retreat, what they really need is basic. Learning how to march as a unit, work as a unit, understand and follow orders, et al. Shit that a soldier is expected to have down pat long before they ever get advanced training. Training that might actually be useful in helping people work together or improving discipline... However the ego of your average corporate dick will never allow that, they think they're special so they want the special training.

But in reality they aren't getting anything special, just paying to be shouted at by someone who claims they were a SEAL, SAS, et al. but in all likelihood never were.

Not really an unknown consequence.

Popular brands know never, ever release your cheap products under your brand. Airlines are famous for this, when QANTAS wanted to release cheap, no frills flights under a LCC model, they didn't brand it as QANTAS CHEAP because that would cheapen the brand QANTAS, they created a new airline called JetStar and even though they are wholly owned subsidiaries. It's not unusual for a budget airline to operate under the parent airlines AOC (Air Operator Certificate... the bit of paper that says you're allowed to carry passengers), LEVEL (Spanish low cost carrier) operated under another AOC until it got it's own (Iberia's I think). The point is, they didn't want to associate the parent brands just in case they got successful.

But this isn't exactly off brand for Apple, they're charging $700 for a $300 laptop and $300 is being generous as we know it's really a $200 phone.

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.

I would think the transmission could be for a split second, at random times that only the American military knows, spaced perhaps even hours apart. Transmission could contain GPS coordinates, encrypted, it would be useless for locating because it was so short and frequency chosen to echo off rocks well.

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.

Ironically this war has worked out well for Russia—it draws media attention away from Ukraine while simultaneously expending supplies of Patriot missiles and other munitions, and the spike in oil prices has basically wiped out the benefits of crushing them with sanctions for the past four years.

These are just some of the 'miracles' you can accomplish when you let Bibi Netanyahu start another war so he can keep postponing the conclusion of his corruption trial...