You can just say bribes. We all know it's bribes so you can just say bribes. Bezos out bid Amodei.

It's going to be weird if we ever become a democracy again not seeing a headline involving an obvious quid pro quo bribe every day. There are Latin American dictatorships that would take a look at what Trump's doing and say hey buddy, tone it down a bit.

The basic attitude was that if Trump was going to fuck it up that badly it was better to shut it down.

Trump's pick was already going to dismantle the apparatus and the entire process while also giving Trump a powerful tool to attack his personal political enemies. And the Republican party have started to realize that includes them.

I wish the American people could do the same but well, here we are

Most of it.

And yet, there's a long way yet to go.

Nobody in the UK thinks they're going to get the sweetheart deal. What's going on here is the younger people want to rejoin because they want access to the jobs that are available on the continent and the older people don't want to rejoin because they don't want to have to open the United Kingdom up to widespread immigration and they think staying out of the EU protects them from that.

As usual the old people are wrong because if it's one thing old people are good at it's being wrong. The purpose of the immigration is as always cheap labor and the kind of politician that will promise you to kick out the immigrants is always going to want all that sweet sweet cheap labor so while they're talking about kicking immigrants out on one side of their mouth on the other side they're promising business owners and corporations a limitless supply of cheap labor imported for next to nothing and that can be abused at will.

The real problem here is that human brains and human cognition did not evolve to deal with geopolitical issues. We are just not equipped for this much bullshit. We're supposed to be chasing down antelope

The UK mostly doesn't do voter suppression. However, they did for the Referendum. Basically, anyone who might not be racist was not permitted to vote.

Even then, 48% still insisted on staying in the EU.

One of the reasons the UK doesn't do voter suppression the way the US does is because (until very recently) the House of Lords had a lot of people in it who owed no favours at all to the political elite but did have a huge responsibility to making sure that things functioned in the long term. This has since been corrupted, so the HoL is no longer anything like as independent and politically neutral as it once was. Rather, the two main parties have stuffed it full of sycophants, which makes it useless. Which, of course, was the intended effect.

Because those in the HoL were partly hereditary (and therefore not under anyone's thumb and impossible to manipulate) and partly chosen on actual merit (they'd done stuff that was actually impressive and good for the country), the HoL were the true guardians of the Constitution and the nation. The House of Commons has always been corrupt and degenerate, so a parallel system that politicians couldn't control meant their worst excesses would always be curbed. The HoL has defended the common person FAR FAR more often than anyone in the Commons ever has.

This didn't make the HoL perfect, or even advisable to retain in its historic form, but it made it immune to the corruption that we were seeing in the rest of the system. What we needed was a replacement system that retained that immunity and improved on it.

Although there is a right join, no far right join has ever been defined and there's no signs that it would in fact be possible.

In charge of the intelligence apparatus. Even by Trump's standards he was a completely incompetent toady piece of shit lunatic.

This was Congress telling Trump he couldn't have his pick without directly opposing him because direct opposition risks a primary Challenger.

Anyway Trump backed down so it'll get renewed here in a few weeks. Nothing to see here just a little back room politics.

It is frustrating how completely fucked up our politics are because Republican primary voters are bat shit insane. On the other hand if you're voting Republican in this day and age you're pretty far gone.

I don't know about the United Kingdom but in the United States we have heavy-duty voter suppression done at the county level that makes it basically impossible for close elections to be won by anyone else but the candidate backed by the Epstein class.

The UK adopted all the shitty tricks that America did, their ruling class was all over Epstein Island too after all.

So I can't imagine they don't just use the same tricks to make sure people can't vote when they're not supposed to. Maybe it was just a little local color and flavor. I mean it's not complicated. They just make it hard to register to vote and easy to challenge a single voter registration then they get a bunch of volunteers to challenge voter registrations. Mix in some broken voting machines in any district where people oppose the Epstein class and that's it, it's impossible for close elections to go any other way and it's pretty easy to use propaganda to keep elections close

They use local guys to build the shell but that's done in no time. The insides needs specialized labor and there sure shit not going to pay the train local people to do that. Even if they did the skills would be useless once the data center is built. So they bring guys in from out of state and have them do all the work and they just go from state to state building.

Building a reliable long-range monoplane in 1927 was a milestone. Flying it solo from New York to Paris was a publicity stunt.

Which of these two actions do people remember and celebrate today?

Because they're going to get the data center no matter what. They won't stop voting for pro corporate candidates and pro corporate candidates are going to take over state governments if they haven't already and then they just roll in with the state government and force the locals to allow the data center to be built. It's already happened a couple dozen times in red states where locals told a data center to take a hike and the state government moved in and said fuck you we're in charge.

What small government conservatives never seem to get is that you just can't have small government anymore. Government is an invention like a nuclear bomb. Once the genie is out of the bottle you're stuck with it. Everybody has to have it and everybody has to deal with it and you can't just unilaterally disarm because that's not how that works.

Is it every idiotic and horrible thing they do is they distraction from the next idiotic and horrible thing they are going to do or the previous idiotic and horrible thing they did. They even have a name for it it's called flood the zone.

Also I've noticed that the judge that used to show up here and defend Donald Trump and Elon Musk and all those other motherfuckers just keep their damn mouths shut now. They stay in the safe spaces whenever they want to talk about dear leader. Occasionally one of them gets mod points and I can always tell because they go through my last five posts and mod them down because that's how many points slashdot hands out at a time.

But I'm upset with all the high inflation and useless wars and the 8 million dead children Elon Musk killed so they feel like they are winning because to them winning means the other guy loses and gets upset.

It's 12-year-old thinking and that's basically where they stopped. An entire group of people who never learned to read or think past the 6th grade level. And they are in charge of the world right now.

But you don't understand wealth tax. Think about the numbers there. We're telling you to give up 80% of your $500 million dollar company right? Go ask chat GTP what 80% of 500 million is.

The point of a world tax is not to take property away from you. The point is to take power away from people who can now tell you what to do because they have too much money which is no longer property it's power. You have to decide now if you want to have a say and how you live your life because you can't have trillionaires and freedom.

In what way is having less choice of news outlets (once CNN and CBS are under the same owner) not harmful to consumers?

Only if you treat them like shit.

Effects.

Treating women like shit makes them not want to pump out babies. Now they have a choice, so they are doing a lot less of it. Literally all it would take to get a large portion (a majority IMO) of them to do it without support from a decent partner would be to gracefully and quietly fund the programs that ensure they will be able to feed and provide medical care for their children even if their circumstances change, but there seems to be a problem even meeting that bar.