Republicans only have a couple footballs left before they have to resort to red herrings.
They already have. Voter ID laws and election integrity I think might be the most obvious, suggesting that there are millions of illegal voters on the books and that reducing poll sites and making it harder to register to vote is somehow going to fix that.
This is exactly the issue. A friend of mine knew for a fact she never wanted to have children, but at the time was in her early twenties. Finding a surgeon who would do it was damn near impossible. Half of them refused without speaking with her husband (!) the other half just refused period saying she was young and didn’t know what she wants and would change her mind later.
At NO point was ‘my body my choice’ part of the discussion.
There was a similarly good thread on Reddit a couple weeks back about a woman who just gave birth and was having a lot of pain and knew something was wrong, and the doctor just dismissed her and said she’s being hormonal. It wasn’t until her husband threatened to sue the hospital that they finally got her a different doctor, who rushed her into the ER and as I recall said if she waited another day she’d have died.
The point is, and the problem is, that medical establishment has an awful habit of denying women agency over their own bodies. Always wrapped in valid reasons, but the result is still the same.
This exactly. Abortion is to Democrats what guns are to Republicans. It’s the football issue they can constantly hold over the base as a reason why it’s desperately important to elect them. But they would never ever actually solve the issue for good, because then they lose their football.
Democrats didn’t codify abortion when they had the chance. Republicans made no effort on guns when they had the chance. It wasn’t an accident.
They’re always needs to be an ‘elect us or else’ issue because neither party does enough useful stuff to win hearts and minds on their own. Especially when their nominees are totally uncompelling.
Yeah I was going to say, do some basic research guys. The Satanic Temple does not actually believe in Satan.
party leadership would rather nominate Trump to run against Trump than nominate a progressive.
Absolutely. I honestly think they would rather just not run a candidate (or pick somebody they know will lose and give them no money) than have an actual progressive win. There’s a lot of establishment there. And a lot of desire to keep pounding the same stupid drums of social justice and abortion and gun control rather than deal with real problems like the bottom 99.9% getting fucked over by the top 0.1%, or the effective state of regulatory capture in many industries.
There is a divide and conquer strategy being used against the American people and it is working. We are at each other’s throats over wedge issues that, while important and worthy of discussion, are not even close to the biggest problems facing our nation.
We now have two generations that gave up on having kids because wages are stagnant and housing prices are insane and rather than discuss the breakdown of the overall social contract and loss of upward mobility, we are at each other’s throats over whether we should ban this gun or that gun or which bathroom we should be allowed to use.
It’s the modern-day version of the Arena in Rome- The population is distracted by gladiators while the nation is being run into the ground.
Yeah there is zero chance for Hillary. She lost to Trump the first time, what would make anybody think she could beat him again? Besides even the left doesn’t like her much. And the way she ran her campaign against Trump suggests she should be managing a hot dog cart not a country.
50% more energy so it can tell me to superglue my pizza together and jump off the Golden Gate Bridge? Not seeing the value.
There should be an AI-free ‘eco’ option… I can live without the AI.
Oh please no. Not more establishment bullshit.
Find somebody young and energetic to bring some fresh ideas and new energy. A young Bernie Sanders type. They will mop the floor with Trump.
Casey Neistat. Back when he was doing his daily vlog thing a lot of it was really interesting, covering him and his wife trying to make shit happen in the city as he was running and riding his powered skateboard around Manhattan. At some point his audience started drifting younger, way way younger, and I don’t know if it was him or me but I just kind of lost interest. It didn’t feel new anymore.
That might be me to be honest. I actually don’t watch YouTube that much at all anymore, unless I’m looking for something specific. Their recommendation algorithm is garbage and it is so obviously going for raw time suck engagement that it leaves me with a bunch of unfulfilling clickbait / ragebait where I could watch it for an hour and then just want my hour back so I end up not returning. The whole platform used to be more full of interesting genuinely entertaining and educational videos, now it just feels like a giant time sink. And every other video is now some paid sponsorship or plug where the creator is basically just whoring out their own influence. Case in point, look up reviews of laser engravers. Every single one that I could find, especially of a couple major brands, the creator got the laser hardware for free. Some of them are just advertisements that reuse the manufacturer’s own stock footage, and some seem more like real reviews, but for one or two brands I literally could not find one video where the creator wasn’t sponsored by the laser manufacturer.
Zelle works pretty good, the main problem is the security limits.
Let’s say you hire somebody to build a shed for $5,000.
You can’t just pay him $5,000. The first day maybe you can pay him $1,000, then the next day you can pay him another $1,500, then you’ve reached the 30-day maximum for a new contact so you have to wait till day 31 to pay him the other $2,500.
After that if you want another shed you can pay the $5,000 instantly.
There is no one so ignorant, as someone who is quite sure they know all they need to.
I would encourage you to study the writings of your enemies as well as your friends. I have found it most useful.
Have a good one!
privacy as a luxury good
Sounds like what Apple is trying to do…
Sadly wanting privacy is kind of a niche thing, not a large # of people buying iPhones to avoid surveillance. And most TV buyers DGAF… If a large # of them opted out of content recognition we’d still have dumb TVs on the market.
Unfortunately I think without some kind of regulation that makes personal info a liability / hot potato, it will still be treated as an asset to be collected:(
Well if the risk is that they are paying $300 an hour in unnecessary labor, that’s a risk that would put almost any restaurant under. Perhaps a better answer would be a commission-based system, just build a 20% commission into the price of the food rather than making it a mandatory tip or a line item on the receipt. Problem is that makes marketing harder because you have to explain why your food is 20% more expensive than the competition and try to get people to understand that their bill will actually be the same or less. It also doesn’t necessarily incentivize the employee to provide better service. And while I conceptually agree that should be the responsibility of the manager, in practice it’s difficult. I’m not sure what the solution is. I agree there needs to be one.
Please see my reply to ulkesh here
I think it’s telling that monetizing the operating system is the immediate place one jumps to with this, rather than earning more profit by selling more products which are better for the consumer.
Please don’t take what I said as a suggestion that what we have right now is great. Like anything, capitalism requires checks and balances. In my opinion the heyday of modern capitalism was the mid to late 1900s, because industry was operating at full efficiency but regulation also insured that the average person was able to benefit from that. All three factors of production, land labor and capital, all had a seat at the table.
We have moved a good distance away from that. Capital dominates the conversation, land has made some advances in the form of environmental protection, but labor still takes a distant back seat. And so you get ridiculous situations like a company gets hundreds of millions in tax breaks and subsidies while the CEO gets paid hundreds of millions and the guy who mops the floor is on food stamps. I don’t see this as good capitalism. Labor needs a bigger seat at the table. If a business cannot afford to survive without paying ALL their workers a living wage that allows upward mobility, that business does not deserve to survive. As I see it, that is part of the very base of capitalism.
That said, your suggestion that businesses don’t need a leader is a ridiculous socialist/communist fantasy that doesn’t actually work in reality. Take an established business like McDonald’s. From where you sit it probably looks like it doesn’t need a leader, it just keeps going on its own. But who decides how much the burgers cost? Who decides when to introduce new menu items? Who decides what the promotions will be? Who decides what market segments will they focus on? Who decides whether their next new product will be a salad or a triple cheeseburger? And if you’re going to say middle managers can make these decisions, who decides who those middle managers are?
For what it’s worth, I’m a big fan of employee owned corporations. That doesn’t always work in every segment, but I wish there were a lot more of them. But even an employee own corporation has a CEO, the CEO is just selected by the employees.
As for Elon, your suggestion that he has done nothing shows that you are uninformed. The reason he is not listed as an original founder of Tesla is because of the handful of people who founded it, one already had a business registered and it was cheaper for everybody to buy into that than pay to have it dissolved and pay again to register a new business. I have actually been following them very closely more or less since they started, so I know this better than most. In the early days Tesla was headed by a guy named Martin Eberhard and Elon was just an investor. Eberhard insisted on a design with a two-speed gearbox. This is extremely difficult in an electric car because of the high amounts of torque and extremely high RPMs involved. They went through a couple different versions of this, trying to get one that would last the life of a car, and burned a year or so trying to make it work. If you dig through the archives, you’ll find several news articles of journalists who got to drive the original Roadster, but it was locked in second gear because the shifting didn’t work. Eventually, Elon realized this wasn’t going to work so him and the other investors pushed Eberhard out. There was no love lost, Eberhard fought back, eventually they came to a settlement and Elon became CEO. Please understand I’m not saying this because I like Elon, I’m saying it because I was literally reading the blogs of both sides as it happened. The two-speed gearbox went right in the trash, they went to the one speed reduction gear Tesla uses today, and upsized the motor to give better acceleration. Elon was right about that decision, and he was the one who made that decision, all EVs today use that design.
As for SpaceX, Elon basically started that from the ground up. As I recall the guy who designed the Merlin engine was his first hire. I personally know people who worked for SpaceX and worked directly with Elon. Everyone I’ve talked to says the same thing- Elon is kind of an asshole to his employees, he has absolutely no sense of work-life balance and he wants employees who are 120% committed to the cause and will work late nights and weekends without complaint, he is opinionated and stubborn but in the end he’s right more often than not, but however hard he pushes his people, he pushes himself even harder. Most people don’t last very long in that environment, they put in a handful of years and when their stock options vest they quit, or if they don’t have equity they work until they have a family and can’t put in 60 hour weeks anymore then they quit.
So you want to say Elon is an asshole, you want to say he treats his employees badly, you want to say he doesn’t create a positive environment at his company’s, I will probably agree with all of these things. But you say he doesn’t do anything of value, that is just uninformed.
It’s a very simple answer Apple has guaranteed that your data will stay on your device and stay secure. This is generally trusted because Apple has a track record of keeping user data secure on the device or encrypted in the cloud even in ways Apple cannot access. Point is, when Apple says they are going to do this in a way that respects privacy, and they outline the technical details of how it will work, people trust that because there’s a track record.
Microsoft has no such trust. They have a recent track record of being intrusive and using dark patterns to persuade users to give Microsoft their data, for example in Edge there have been new feature pop-ups that require data sharing with Microsoft and the two options are ‘got it’ and ‘settings’ so accepting requires one click and rejecting requires 4 going into the settings menu and changing a few things. Microsoft is also heavily pushing Copilot which is mostly cloud-based. Furthermore, Microsoft recently showed a system that would basically screenshot your computer at very regular intervals and store them in an insecure manner. Granted it was on the device, but the way they were going to be stored meant they could be stolen with two lines of code. And let’s not forget that Windows 11 cannot be set up without a Microsoft account, so to even use your computer you have to share your email address with Microsoft. In this and many other ways they just do not act like a company that respects privacy at all, they act like the typical big tech give us everything or we will make your life difficult type company that nobody trusts.
If you really think he did nothing at all, then you have absolutely no understanding of how business works or how Tesla works. It’s like saying the ship doesn’t need a captain because the captain doesn’t personally operate or clean a part of the ship.
You are right that it is greed. But that is the very point. That is how our economy works. That is how our government works too. The whole point of checks and balances in the US Constitution is that people are expected to be greedy. Rather than rely on a king to be altruistic, it is expected that people at every level will be greedy so their greed is balanced against the greed of others. Same thing is true with our economy, the whole point of capitalist economy is it harnesses the greed of everybody to move things forward. Investors provide capital because they are greedy and want a return on their investment. Their greed is harnessed and put to work, This benefits all by providing a rich market of investment capital for businesses to use. And because they are greedy, because those investors have partial ownership of the company, they affect its direction.
It’s not always perfect. Lately far too many business decisions are made based solely on next quarter results at the cost of long-term success, and that is driven by short-term investors. Boeing is a perfect example of that.
But to write the whole system off and say it’s all greed and it all sucks and it’s all stupid reflects a fundamental lack of understanding how the economy works.
If you want an economy without greed, the best you’re probably going to find is communism. That’s been tried, it doesn’t usually work so well because without a greed incentive pushing things forward, there isn’t incentive to innovate or to work at maximum efficiency.
And as for Elon’s windfall, I think it’s fair to say nobody needs $56 billion. I definitely support a much higher tax rate for the extreme upper income brackets. If you are making more than 50 or 100 million a year income above that should be taxed at a pretty high rate. I am extremely against the extreme income inequality that has happened in this country. When the CEO is making hundreds of millions and the guy mopping the floor relies on government assistance to afford food, something is seriously fucked up. But I think the solution to that is to bring up the lower guy, raise the minimum wage by a fairly significant amount. I think in most places minimum wage should be ¢15 or $20 an hour. And I also favor a prohibition that if any of the companies employees rely on government assistance the company loses all tax breaks and government benefits.
You’re acting like this was his standard salary. It wasn’t. His contact, approved by shareholders at the time, basically offered him a King’s ransom for an impossible miracle, defined with metrics like sales and stock price. Elon delivered the miracle. Love him or hate him, the conditions were met.
This absolutely.
One often forgotten victim of the war on opioids is the handful of patients who actually NEED them.
I know such a person. A car accident left them with life long constant pain. They have screws and cadaver bone in their body and the surgery got them back movement and life, but couldn’t fix the constant debilitating pain. Going on oxycontin and similar medications changed their life. Suddenly with two pills a day they can LIVE- go to the gym and work out and enjoy it, get through a night of sleep without ice packs and heat packs and still waking up in the morning feeling like a 90yo person. They have a dedicated pain management doctor, a legit dude they were referred to by the surgeon who knew the pain was a likely outcome. But now with the war on opioids it’s a constant struggle. The pain doctor gets constant push back from insurance and the FDA even though my friend is on what every paper and study says is a medically appropriate dose. And half the pharmacists act like you’re picking up a prescription for heroin.
Yes a lot of people were prescribed opioids inappropriately and had problems. Yes Perdue Pharma are assholes. But not every patient is a drug seeking addict. For those who NEED it, opioids can be a miracle drug that is the difference between enjoying life and constant debilitating pain. And those patients like my friend got lost in the war on opioids.