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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: February 18th, 2026

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  • Relatedly, it’s probably just that everyone has refined and conformed their parasitic relationships to give Trump what he wants - attention and the facade of power and deference - which means Trump is fine giving them what they want that he has no interest in - Project 2025 and actual governance.

    Stephen Miller is the archetypical example of this. He publicly and privately fellates Trump, and in return, Trump gives him a blank check to set basically all domestic immigration and law enforcement policy.

    In this scenario, Trump’s mental decline isn’t leverage, it’s just another cost of doing business for the craven opportunists who actually make the decisions.


  • his body is laying down in a parking lot in the hospital.”

    So basically, he died from the ICE “custody” likely in a George Floyd style murder, and the murderers likely brought him to a hospital parking lot and dumped his body on the ground to avoid answering any questions.

    The Trump voter got the day he voted for, but I certainly don’t take any pleasure. It’s not clear his brother voted for Trump [edit: he’s an asylum-seeker, so presumably not able to vote] and it’s a tragedy either way. I just feel a little more dead inside reading this. I guess there’s a limit to schadenfreude.




  • We need to call the institutional capitalists’ bluff. Tell them single payer is a great way to prove capitalism works AND that private insurance is needed!

    Create a public single payer option, and we’ll all marvel as private health insurance companies innovate and justify their existence by creating better, cheaper insurance products that we can decide to buy as a demonstration of the invisible rational hand of the market! Competition! That’s why we need a single payer option! If you aren’t for public insurance, you don’t believe in capitalism!



  • Well, I clicked through to the PDF, and every single image was somehow more depressing than the last, including when I returned to the front of the deck after the last image, just a forever downward Escherian spiral. Here’s nearly where it ends, so you know I’m not kidding:

    Now, don’t get me wrong. I think this is an outlier poll in many ways from what we’ve been seeing and will remain optimistic that this opt-in polling (however the intro statement alleges it was controlled) biased it towards false neutral metrics. I mean, NYC voters freaking LOVE Mamdani, but the polls here suggest he’s reviled - no doubt because Fox News is much better represented in the polling bloc than to voters who actually matter for Mamdani’s elections.

    But really, all I see reading is the equation: consent equals lies multiplied by duration, volume and repetition.


  • I had to look it up to see what Trump/DHS’s unconstitutional argument will be to ignore this. The “…” omitted sections show pretty clearly what they will say:

    Whoever, being an officer of the Army or Navy, or other person in the civil, military, or naval service of the United States, orders, brings, keeps, or has under his authority or control any troops or armed men at any place where a general or special election is held, unless such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both; and be disqualified from holding any office of honor, profit, or trust under the United States. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/592

    “…is held, unless such force is necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States, shall be fined…”

    So their first-year-law-school failing DOJ leads will argue that they need ICE there to stop voter fraud, which force is necessary to “repel armed enemies of the United States” since hypothetically the rampant fraudsters could be armed.

    Either Trump will just do it without any lawsuit-ripening warning, or if his demented brain reveals his plans early and a suit is filed in time, the Supreme Court will hear the emergency appeal of the inevitable district and appellate findings that it is unconstitutional, and issue a shadow docket ruling that overturns the (ruling upholding the) Constitution without comment or reasoning.


  • WASHINGTON — Vying to become House speaker in a few months, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries outlined four items on the agenda that he said would enjoy “uniform Democratic support” and advance the party’s goal of “making life more affordable.”

    This is why people are frustrated with politicians and Jeffries in particular. No, we don’t want the goal to be to make life “more affordable.” We’re well past “more affordable.” Saving $5 on a $15,000 hospital bill is “more affordable.” No, we want life to be “affordable.” That’s single-payer system. Maybe “more affordable” is the temporary compromise until we finish a clearly defined path to “affordable.” But it’s not a goal.

    The mere fact that he’s out here talking about extending tax credits and using weasel words is utterly demoralizing also because it suggests this is the starting position which he’s going to negotiate down from later.

    He can’t lead on policy, he’s certainly not following the voters’ stated wishes, so it would be great if he could kindly get out of the way.







  • Yes, agreed and exactly - and now Amazon’s “price history” AI button helps Amazon keep shoppers from using independent (more reliable) tools.

    I think what makes this worse is that Camel Camel Camel may not be able to even function in a surveillance pricing world. It requires an objective same-price basis, and once surveillance pricing algorithmically re-prices for each shopper, a single-point third party can no longer track the price reliably for everyone.

    Then the reason why surveillance price tracking is so unrealistic is because shoppers would need to actively submit and refresh their pricing for any comparison site to be valid, and that just isn’t going to happen.


  • I think unfortunately that overestimates the amount of information and discernment shoppers exercise, versus doorbuster/marketed deals and brand loyalty. Going back to net neutrality, “disclosure” just meant that fine print would be used to disclose, along with false “benefits” like saying you get “free” Netflix data on your cell plan, to sell it as a feature.

    When you are online, as well, you will have no idea what anyone else is paying. The retailer will completely control the information environment unless consumers put forth an unrealistic, disproportionate amount of time to compare prices.

    Disclosure is not how you kill stuff like this, it’s how opposition to this dies.