My message to Garcia?
Yes. Yes you did, you stupid cow. This is exactly what you voted for, Garcia. Lock, stock, and barrel. You are a fucking moron and now, only as the leopard eats YOUR face, do you realise how stupid you were.
You voted for this. 100%. Now fuck off and take it while we try to reverse the slide into authoritarianism you voted for. Maybe next time you won't be so fucking stupid!
Stupid is as stupid does.
So...how close are we to that point where other countries open their doors to us under asylum laws? I mean, Trump's siccing the military on people and it's not even 6 months into his term yet.
Now that Musk has turned his chainsaw on Trump, what happens to all the government data he accessed?
Indeed. I stand by my original comments saying that this is a huge distraction. partial_accumen is here to proclaim loudly to the world that I'm TALKING TOO MUCH ABOUT HOW TRUMP IS PULLING A FAST ONE, and meanwhile, what's Trump doing? Nationalising the National Guard to implement martial law in blue cities that don't appreciate his bullshit.
Like I said. The Musk bullshit was entertainment, designed to distract us from what's really going on -- the imposition of Project 2025. The eradication of our civil liberties. Sending the military against those of us that dare stand up to Hair Fuehrer. The establishment of a right-wing dictatorship. Thread after thread after thread is coverage of the Trump-Musk bullshit distraction event. And rather than make that the central part of his complaint, ol' partial_accumen decides the better idea is to get me to shut up about the distractification going on here. Seriously, that's the thing he's worried about?
Now that Musk has turned his chainsaw on Trump, what happens to all the government data he accessed?
And no one is stopping you from moving on to other comments you agree with, but here we are.
Now that Musk has turned his chainsaw on Trump, what happens to all the government data he accessed?
What happens to the data Musk took? I guarantee you it's already being sliced and diced by the powers that be that have put on this show for us. Before you get your hope up that things are gonna change, I want to give you a quote from Macbeth for you to remember.
"It is a tale told by an idiot. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
We're just being kept 'entertained' so they can get on with the business of robbing us blind and making us fight each other.
Yep. Don't lose sight of the ball. They're trying to pull a fast one on us.
And that's what they want you to think. They want you to underestimate them and focus on the public shitshow, while they quietly implement Project 2025 while you're distracted by the slapfest they're putting on for you in public.
As I said above. They're a bunch of conniving bastards, and until I start seeing real things like Elon explaining exactly how Clark County in Nevada was stolen from the Left, or Trump actually cancel SpaceX contracts, or Musk abducted by ICE agents and sent to El Salvadore, I'm going to continue thinking this is all a WWE plot designed to distract us from the shitshow going on behind the scenes.
Trump is a world-class actor who has stayed entirely in character for years. I could see the other two playing their parts at Trump and his merry band of miscreants' direction. Remember. They need us to forget about gutting Medicaid (and Medicare), the billionaire tax cuts, the raiding of the public space for loose money so they can fund those tax cuts, and the imposition of a right-wing religious autocracy on us. Don't lose track of that as you enjoy the entertainment this show gives you. That's all I'm saying.
PS: I do agree that they're thin-skinned, emotionally stunted man-children, but they're also conniving bastards, and they want you focused on the drama....
Indeed. Trump IS an Entertainer and has been in the showbiz industry for quite some time, so it wouldn't surprise me that this is all just a show and we're being taken for a ride. But he is also an egotistical prick so this might actually be for real. I'm just not going to hold my breath or let myself be distracted by this side-show from the shit the Shitgibbon and his merry band of miscreants are pulling out.
Heh, I wouldn't be interesting to talk to Musk either...or Trump for that matter, so I totally understand!
But until the fur flies and secrets drop, it's all just a game of fakeout to me.
An easy and non-impactful thing for Trump to do, and it's not like Trump's followers would ever get a "Tesler". Those are filthy EVs and manly men only ever get gas-guzzling Big Trucks (tm).
Still not convinced this isn't theatre for our consumption, but I'd love to see this happen.
Exactly. Any half-way competent Russian commander would steamroll Ukraine because Russia has roughly 10x the GDP as Ukraine (or it did before the invasion, at least), and roughly 4x the population. That Russia has only managed to take a sliver of land on the west side of Ukraine and not the whole country suggests that Russia has dropped the ball in an epic way AND Ukraine has gotten crazy lucky. This war should have been over a long time ago if Russia was 1/10th what we thought it was back in early 2021 before the invasion. That it's not and not only has Ukraine managed to hold Russia off but actually take over Russian territory puts the lie to Russian propaganda that they deserve a seat at the same table as the US and China. As the Infographics Show likes to put it, we thought Russia was the second strongest military in the world. Now we know it's the second strongest military in Ukraine...
No. He's saying that 100% of the personnel they had at the start of the war are wounded or dead. Bit of a difference! We know Putin has plenty of bodies to throw in this meatgrinder.
I've got some thoughts on this.
When I was learning about the world, some time in the early to mid 1980s, I learned something that was interesting to me. There was roughly 1 person for every year Earth existed. I also learned that that number was likely too high, and our life was about to get more complicated because too many of us were too hungry for the resources Earth had to offer.
But now, 40 years later, there is now almost TWO people for every year the Earth has existed. Now, every rare resource has two pops chasing after it. What's worse is everyone wants what they had in the 80s (a house, a car, a large yard, etc) without being willing to give up on any aspect of the dream. People who have houses fight against higher density housing. Cars get bigger, not smaller. And thus every individual consumes more than they did in the 80s.
What happens when supply goes down (because NIMBYism and rampant consumerism), while demand goes up (because there are now twice as many people chasing resources)? Look around you. Everything is expensive. Housing. Fuel. Food. Education. Healthcare. What could be done with a single income in the 80s now can't be done with two incomes today. World-wide, even. Japan, China, South Korea, Germany, Italy, Poland, Ukraine, and even China are suffering population growth rates falling below replacement rate because it's too fucking expensive to have a kid in this world. House ownership is a forgotten dream for young people these days, and even for me. I'm earning 6 figures these days, but even that's not enough to afford the down-payment on a house, especially with rents as crazy expensive as they are. Car ownership? In 2005, we looked at the costs of a car (not just the cost to own it, but the cost to maintain it, the cost to keep it fueled, the cost to drive it responsibly -- insurance, and the cost to store it) and decided it was too expensive to own a car or even lease a car. When we need a car these days, we rent one, and give it up gladly at the end. We don't run the AC in the heat of the day because electricity is too fucking expensive. And I don't know if the 15kg I've lost over the past 2 years was due to being disgusted with how expensive everything is, but...well, I am disgusted with how expensive food is. That's the one thing I can't escape.
I hear ya on the whole 'why did I bring kids into this world?!' A fun (?) thought exercise I like to do is consider what life would have been like had the wife and I had kids. Back in 2005, we were in a good place for having kids. She was working for CompUSA and I was working for Qwest, and our total income was 5x our rent, easily. We were finally settled down, and things were looking up for us. Then Hurricane Katrina hit.
Let me be clear. We were thousands of miles away from where Hurricane Katrina hit. New Orleans flooding did affect my wife as she has family down there, but even had Katrina made it to where we were, it'd just be a moderate rain event for us. But that didn't stop the massive corpo I worked for cashing in and cutting its workforce. We went from "you guys are doing a great job, we're going to hire you as regular IT guys" to "pack up your desks, you're done here" in less than a week. We went from on top of the world to filing for bankruptcy in 3 months. Had we had a kid in that time period, we'd likely have had to move back to Louisiana so the Grandparents could help with the kids while we went and worked minimum wage jobs just to try to keep a roof over our heads. I'm so glad we didn't, but that's a shame to poor 'Victoria', our hypothetical daughter who I would have liked to me. On the other hand, she'd likely have a touch of AuDHD like her mom and dad, meaning the next 4 years would have been hell on Earth thanks to Junior and his merry band of miscreants over at Dept. of Health. :|
None of this is to excuse the shitheads in the world. It's just...when you have twice the pops chasing half the resources, even the most well meaning of governments will be fighting rampant instability, which makes Authoritarianism look appealing.
My comment to her is that we need to enforce anti-harassment laws in all spaces. I don't care if you're a man harassing a man, a man harassing a woman, a woman harassing a man, or a woman harassing a woman, the cops should come take you away and ... educate you why we don't do that shit in a civilised society. And you don't need to make a person presenting as a woman use the men's washroom, or a person presenting as a man use a woman's washroom, to make that happen! In short, you don't need to be a dick to people.
Fun fact. I saw a recent news article where a trans-man (i.e., born female, presents as male) went into the woman's washroom because the only free stalls were urinals, which he couldn't use. So he went to the woman's washroom to use a stall there, and got harassed by the police because...well, he was a man in the women's room. Except he wasn't. He was born a she, and in North Carolina, you USED to be demanded to go to the washroom of your birth gender, and they're trying to force that back in again, after it was partially repealed and allowed to expire back in 2020.
It's not about protecting women. If it was, they'd just enforce the laws on the books about harassment, sexual or otherwise, and be blind to the genders of the perpetrator and victim. But we can obviously see that this is about legally harassing transgender people, and it just uses women's rights as cover for the hatred. Your only answer as a transgender person to peeing is hold it...or pee yourself. Or move to a state, city, or country that doesn't treat you like shit because you would prefer to be the other gender...or not be restricted to the binary structure in general!
This in particular pissed me off. Soon as the news broke, here's me:
"Are you fucking kidding me?! You make the rich celebrities pay YOU, not the other way around. If they have to be paid to endorse you, then they aren't fucking endorsing you. They're making their down payment on bribery!"
Obligatory 🤮 emoji.
Thanks for that mental image. I hate it. 🤣
I'd answer this with 'we rebase the dollar when a coin can't buy a thing.' It should have happened decades ago. Here's my worked example.
A penny used to be a lot of money. You could buy actual things with a penny. I'm sure our oldest contributors can point to the day that a penny would get you a piece of candy. In my earliest days, I could get that same piece of candy with a nickel, but by my teens, that piece of candy would be a dime or even quarter. I remember when a bag of M&Ms cost $0.50, That became $1.00 around the 2000s, and is now $2.00.
A penny sitting on the ground was 'good luck' back in the day. I think that's because you could bend down, pick up that penny, head to the store, and plink that penny down and get something in exchange for it. Today, you can't plink down a single penny for anything. You can't even plink down 10 of these pennies or a dime and expect to get something today, with the cheapest things requiring 25 of these coins (or a single quarter). Not much luck if you need 25 of them to get a burst of sweetness.
If we did away with the penny, would anyone lose anything? That's 5 seconds at Federal Minimum Wage, and about 2 seconds at my city's minimum wage. It takes more time to reach down and pick up the penny than you'd earn working a minimum wage job, so arguments about 'Oh, prices will go higher if we eliminate the penny' ring hollow to me. There is functionally no difference between $7.99 and $8.00 pricewise. Even a hike of a $7.9 priced item to $8 isn't a bunch of money. We're almost to the point where you can't buy something with a single dollar bill. The time for the hundredth of that dollar bill passed a LONG time ago.
Links, please? I haven't seen anything suggesting that, yet.
I'm probably OK. I'm straight. I'm White. Though I am agnostic and don't buy the State Religion behind Project 2025.
My wife, however, is Black, Bisexual, and Pagan, four strikes, and now I'm a race traitor for having married her, so there's my strike.