Next you should pretend I wrote that first reply of yours where you linked to a random Australian video about the previous elderly president and then said they were in a cult. How would you critique me?

Yeah, and this is especially so in the important voting bloc of white middle class people --the ones who probably own their home (with mortgage obviously) and are still making ends meet. The good ones are horrified to see what’s going on in the world, and the troubled ones may still think they are temporarily embarrassed millionaires with the whole master race thing going for them, but other than inflation their day to day life has not changed.

I’m a white dude living in the swing state of Pennsyltucky, in a very white republican suburb a good distance from the city. My town is growing and some good companies have large offices here (access to infrastructure plus the tax benefit of being in the next county over), so it’s attracted residents from just about every ethnic background. But to get an accurate mental image, you have to sprinkle that diverse mix over a base layer of 80% white people, lol.

Just mentally going through our family, close friends, social acquaintances, and various local parents we run into (I have a kid in elementary school, and we’re active in the school district), it is almost all white families living in single-family homes or sometimes townhouses. Many are two-income families, some are one-income families (working professionals in a reasonable COL area, not exactly CEOs). I know everybody has their own problems including the ones they don’t share with me, but for most of these people life just looks normal. If you followed me around all day and could not see the awful news on the screen when I sat down at my PC, you would be hard pressed to tell which decade we are in. You would need a clue like peeking at my phone model or seeing an old covid mask on a shelf.

There ARE exceptions. People who are not white have absolutely been fucked with by ICE. Thank goodness the best Mexican restaurant in town got raided so that my fellow whites aren’t tempted by amazing food from non-white sources. And I do know of one white family where both parents are civilians that work for the government. Both remotely, before Trump 2. They are amazing people raising three great kids (the kindest people we know are usually single child) and they got all kinds of unnecessary stress and fuckery in their real lives thanks to all the chaos and ill considered return-to-office mandates.

<Attenborough>

Here we find the conservative doubling down by immediately repeating that no, they do in fact know that you are, but plead: “what, then, am I? Tell me!”

Oh what a lovely surprise! They have just tripled down in the very same sentence! You see, part of their hive’s rules is that all outsiders must be treated as cooperating members of a single enemy conspiracy.

pedodent

Holy shit, lol. I really hope that term is becoming a thing.

I think most of us believe decisions should be data driven, but in some edge cases gut instinct is valuable.

What you call gut instinct, I call the output of an immensely complex yet efficient organic neural network that has been trained on years to decades of relevant experience.

If business leaders think AI is so great, they need to get in on this shit while they can still afford it!

It’s interesting, and by interesting I mean horrifying, that these outspoken hateful religious leaders assume that just because gay people give in to the homosexual desires everybody obviously has, they will also give in to the pedophilia that everybody obviously has.

I think it’s more that we are way into blissful ignorance in this country.

If you polled the citizens to ask whether America was founded/discovered by European explorers, the vast majority would agree. But of course, even if 80% or 90% get it right that still means tens of millions got it wrong.

But if you polled the citizens to ask whether US territory was simply discovered or stolen from existing inhabitants by murdering/genociding them, I bet you would flip the numbers.

Very true. It’s like an order of magnitude difference, where 1% income is in the “approaching a million” ballpark, but 1%er net worth is above 10 million.

But relative to the billionaires like I was talking about, they are at about the same tier of “poor person but with class,” lol.

The timing of this almost feels like the CIA threatening Trump. He can cause a ruckus and ruin ordinary people’s lives, but if he starts to threaten the global economy and/or civilization that happens to supply the billionaires with things like drugs and yachts and sex slaves employees to run them, history might just have to repeat itself.

The article makes it sound like this was scheduled though.

Yeah. The top 1% of incomes is generally $500K - $1M depending on which site I look at.

In the eyes of billionaires, people at that level are just poors that get paid too much to keep them humble, but with respect to regular incomes they are the rich people building investment portfolios in things like stocks and being a landlord to 5-10 units.

Not wanting to go to a concentration camp is understandable, especially if you have a high paying job.

Not wanting OTHER people you’ve never met to go to concentration camps? Whoaaa there Che, put down that AK-47!

I can totally see this coming.

The developed world has a population growth problem. Population growth has slowed or reversed in many countries, but the global economy is designed around infinite growth, fed by an infinitely growing pool of workers and customers. Then when they retire they can be taken care of by the infinitely growing population of young people.

It takes zero imagination to picture this administration forcing “high value human resources” to remain in the country, including putting them on no fly lists. Unfortunately since they are stupid, the brain drain has already started.

We as a society did not forget how to build good houses, write good software, design good vehicles, or anything like that.

We just stopped caring about it because the core purpose for any business is to increase revenue, decrease costs, grow, and absorb market share (exceptions being niche and boutique places that price accordingly). And may of us as individuals think we should run our own finances in a similar way.

For instance, let’s say I can build 100 shitty crooked houses with the cheapest and non-background-checked workers, with the same time and money invested that it takes you to build 50 beautifully crafted and solid homes with your team of experienced carpenters. I can sell my shitty homes for 20% less than you since the home buyers are also mostly shopping on price and stats, then I am going to win and once you’re out of business I will be building 150 shitty crooked houses at a time.

God damn it, I had actually forgotten about that in the decade and a half that seems to have elapsed since October.

They don’t care how they’re remembered, as long as people keep saying their names.

This is the only thing that could explain Musk’s actions of the last several months as a believable rational choice. He realized he is not going to be around to see immortality or brain downloads or whatever, so he has to make his name and image immortal instead.

Of course, there are numerous other reasons that could explain it, many of them personality flaws.

Whatever shadow of a hope I had that the people of this country would not gobble up low-effort lies about Iran just had this comment appear from the shadows and shiv it in the fucking liver.

When I look at her eyes in a photo or video, I see the kind of evil where as she squeezed the life out of a kitten she would not laugh, cry, or grit her teeth. She would just stare, then tilt her head like a curious alien or Labrador without blinking.

Please note that I am a fan of both dogs and space, so I am sending zero insults their direction in that comparison. It’s like if I were to compare the number of times Trump shit his pants throughout his first term with the number of times my baby boy – born right after the inauguration – shit his pants over the same interval.

My official guess for the name of this new slavery program is the “Essential Guest Worker” bill/order.

I went to business school in the US about a decade ago (stayed full time engineer and happy about it) and I can absolutely see business schools unironically studying the process of privatizing and offshoring prisons as it relates to other more ethical and humane enterprises.

Yooo, Democratic Senators, fuck youuuu!

Signed, an independent US citizen who has repeatedly voted for your shitty controlled opposition candidates because it was glaringly obvious to me SEVERAL YEARS AGO that anything Trump brings to the table is significantly worse for humanity than your bland business as usual.

Like, Trump was so, so bad that in retrospect it makes more sense that HE was the controlled opposition so that status quo capitalist corporate democrats could win their elections and keep the people “happy enough” while letting the elites play their games.

But no. Now he is much worse, mask-off, nominating unqualified morons and traitors to help administrate the federal government, and you fuckups in the “at least we aren’t an openly bigoted death cult” party did not stop it in cases where you could have.