I voted for Harris. I’m a progressive who has voted a straight blue ticket in every election.

That doesn’t change reality. I’ve donated thousands of dollars to this party and it is incapable of winning. A political party that can’t win, can’t make policy. That’s not me being a sour bastard, that’s just reality and also me being a sour bastard.

How fun I am or not doesn’t change the fact that this party has been on a losing streak for decades.

As the republicans have embraced less and less popular policy positions they’ve also won more governorships, state houses, the senate, the house, the White House, the Supreme Court. Even when democrats do manage to pull together a win they cobble it together with blue dogs and then use that fact to excuse not making progress.

The cornerstone piece of legislation we’ve gotten from them in my lifetime has been the ACA. And sure it’s better than what we had, but it’s literally romneycare. The best piece of legislation we can point to from our party was literally workshopped by the heritage foundation.

The thing I’m getting tired of is losing. Then being told, we lost because the voters voted wrong. Next time they should vote better even though the party is going to do everything the same way, money please!

The thing that has driven me crazy for so long is this is the situation in America.

There are 70M Americans that will vote Republican and nothing will ever change their minds

There are 70M Americans that will vote Democrat and nothing will ever change their minds

There are a couple million independent undecided voters that everyone goes after

Then there are 100M+ people that sit out the election and no one seems to try to understand what would make them vote. It’s so crazy that we have just decided that there are red states and blue states and that’s how it is. A party that could retain some of either party while activating half the people that sit out would be a force to reckon with.

As the Democratic Party has tried to find some way to win again they have gone after which group? The handful of independents and the 70M republicans that aren’t going to vote for them ever. And the people sitting it out probably aren’t looking for them to shift right, if so they would be republicans.

A party that can’t win has no value.

The party’s job is to articulate a platform that appeals to apathetic voters.

The party’s job is to articulate a platform that energizes a large enough part of the population to vote them in.

If a party advances positions that can’t win elections, then the party has failed in its primary purpose.

Honestly I’m not sure American businesses are very smart.

I imagine corpos do want trump, but it seems as short sighted as going after quarterly profits ahead of all else.

Ok, so you own a corporation and want those pesky “water break” regulations that are really cutting into your profits to go away. So you back trump. He tweets out “WORKERS DRINKING WATER ON THE CLOCK, SAD AND BIGLY BAD” and they decide that’s an official act and you can squeeze an extra 15 minutes out of your workers.

Meanwhile, he puts a 20% tariff on all your inputs.

I don’t support, but could at least understand, companies wanting this guy out of some rank greed. But he’s articulated positions that would be awful for most businesses. Every serious economist has looked at his tariff plan and gone “oh yea, that would destroy the economy”

The man personally probably doesn’t give a shit. He wants power and admiration and if someone like Stephen Miller says “hey this plan I have for changing how divorce and abortion work is good for your campaign / presidency” then he will go along with it.

The threat of a man like trump is not that he personally wants to do a bunch of bad things (although he does seem to think a lot of awful ideas with clear history and mechanism of not working, like tariffs, are smart and good). It’s that he doesn’t care about the people around him that want to do awful things.

I went through a round of layoffs at my last company. They laid off around 15% and then went hiring, people who just had their teams cut in half and their workload doubled and had to say goodbye to colleagues with years of experience were then told to do 3-4 interviews a week to hire new talent.

It was all just a yank of the choke chain. Management wanted labor to know that they could replace you. Our most senior people burned out and I left after staying longer than I really should have to try to help out my teammates.

Layoffs like this are about obedience and control and showing the investors that you are willing to break people to return them a healthy profit.

Tip 2 - at a time when computers are enormously expensive use your wealth to purchase one for your child and provide them extensive exposure to an emerging market out of reach to most people.

Bernie supporters also ended up being one of the most loyal voting blocks for Clinton.

A higher percentage of his voters backed Clinton than her voters backed Obama in 2008

From https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/did-bernie-sanders-cost-hillary-clinton-the-presidency/

As a Bernie bro that voted for Clinton in 2016, there is this very small number of very voca Bernie supporters that screech the loudest and give everyone else a bad name.

I like how none of the points are correct.

At best they could be a critique of the lives of the people that voluntarily join up to starfleet. Really the only thing that rings true is that, like any military, they have uniforms and you have to follow the orders of the chain of command.

They show tons of citizens of the federation doing whatever the fuck they want. Doing weird science experiments, going to conferences, settling planets, running a vineyard in France, Captain Siskos dad just has a restaurant for the fun of it.

Casinos mathematically always make money, the odds are structured so that they always make money.

Donald trump bankrupted a casino.

Read that to yourself as many times as you need to to figure out who you should trust with the economy.

I don’t think it’s weird to feel exhausted by the pace of innovation, especially when the innovation has nebulous value.

I felt this way with the wave of “smart house” stuff. I’m a software engineer, I spend all day programming and debugging stuff. I do NOT want to spend 1 fucking second of my precious finite life debugging a fucking light bulb. Not one. Oh I can say “Alexa, red alert” and all my lightbulbs turn red, fucking fuck you. I don’t want my refrigerator connected to the internet, I don’t want my toaster monitoring my speech patterns to serve me ads and customize my toasting experience.

To every shitbag manager out there tying to shove this garbage down our throats, fuck off and die. And you might think “you don’t like a smart (whatever) then don’t buy one.” Fuck you too, over time I fucking can’t. Try to buy a tv that isn’t a fucking smart tv, you just fucking can’t anymore. And slowly but surely everything you use turns into some shitty piece of fuck.

The good news is that AI is probably a bubble. We’ve fed the sum total of the internet into our LLMs and we’ve gotten pretty convincing liars that are sometimes right. We are running out of data and 99 out of 100 uses of AI don’t make sense.

I’ve been in the startup scene for my entire adult career and if you talk to people that try to jam AI into their products to make investors happy you’ll hear very similar things every time. It was incredibly expensive, no one used it, and no one liked it.

There are some use cases for AI, but not nearly as much as what’s getting thrown at the wall. AI has been through many winters where progress stalls, the hype dies out, and AI winter begins.

Final thought, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. People are enamored with using AI to make false memories (sorry, there comes a point where you’ve touched up a photo so much it isn’t reality anymore), destroying their ability to use their brains for critical thinking, art, writing, reading. You don’t have to. Those people might deeply regret not having a single real picture of their child. Maybe the clouds made the photo look bad, but now you can’t remember laughing as you ran through the rain.

Our lives do not need to be curated and polished into some technicolor madness. Do what you want and in 20 years people will ask you “how are you so interesting and fulfilled” as they shovel AI garbage into their maw. I see a future that is similar to what happened to social media (I know, I’m using social media right now, we are all hypocrites). People working everyday to present some faux reality to others, jealous of everyone else’s faux realty, unhappy and unable to go 5 god damn minutes without a dopamine hit.

The other day I had to wait for something, I sat and looked out the window at the beautiful trees rustling gently in the wind. I took in the glory of the world around me, I sat in peace and let my mind wander. These are skills too few enjoy these days because they let the future happen to them.

You are in charge of your life.

Yes, I think that’s part of it, I shouldn’t be able to read every letter in your signature. I don’t trust that :D

There’s a reason there’s a print line under the signature line, your signature should be some vague squiggle.

I always hated how I was taught to write the capital letters in my name and then I was sitting in civics class and looking at the Declaration of Independence and stole big parts of my current signature from our founding fathers.

They knew how to write their names with style.

Why would you complete a game when you can make a constant stream of income and increase that income stream with announcements and drip feeds.

Look at this madness https://robertsspaceindustries.com/funding-goals

Read the sticker, he doesn’t own a franchise he owns the “DG Empire” what a dork

Ok it shouldn’t be a big deal, but I’ve found that you can tell a lot by a signature.

This guys signature looks like a 7th graders.

Edit: wow I just noticed the “DG Empire” on the sticker. Emperor Axe Body Spray over here

Why is that important? I mean it’s not really, I’ll fully admit I’m being petty. But I’ve found that people that write like they’ve just learned cursive do so because they seldom write things. Now this observation is likely less true today than it was in the Jurassic period when I grew up and had to write out schoolwork, but given that this guy owns a McDonald’s franchise I’m gonna guess he had to handwrite schoolwork too.

There is just something visceral about this signature, it’s a sloppy and bad version of textbook cursive. One of the things that happens when people write a lot is that they develop their own handwriting style.

Anyways, the sentiment in this letter and the stupid stunt are enough to hate, but this signature is just awful 1 / 10 please try harder.

As a Bay Area resident, what the absolute fuck? Is delta in favor of veteran suicide. For something to be “threatening” there has to be some sort of articulable threat. Who was the flight attendant white knighting for, the grim reaper?

Fuck delta

It will truly be a shock to the owner class when after extracting every last bit of value out of the planet they realize that they can’t eat money.

They can’t breathe it either.

It won’t protect them from drought or super hurricanes.

The bunkers they are building to ride out the doom they are sowing will be protected by men. Men who today are willing to accepts their slips of paper. But when that paper becomes worthless, they will slit their throats and sleep in their beds.

They are piling up paper that will turn to ash and they think they are oh so clever. They’ve been able to buy off and escape accountability in almost every domain. But the extraction has taken its toll on the earth, the delicate balance that the ecosystem exists in and the damage they have done can’t be fixed by buying a senator or even building a bunker.

It may be the only solace the rest of us have, man seems incapable of holding this class accountable, but reality doesn’t care. The laws of physics will not bend as easily as the law of man, and they will sit there with their bank accounts full of zeroes and impotently slap at the cold cement walls of the prisons they’ve built for themselves and they will know fear.

“Which are looks or an extravagant personality”

Why won’t cure girls date me, I’m ugly AND boring!

It’s so sad that these people clump together and just reinforce each other’s insecurities. Sure if you look like a thumb and only want to regurgitate 4chan memes you aren’t a very desirable partner. But there are tons of guys that are not leading man attractive that have partners. How do they do it?

Do things, when you do the things if there are women there, treat them like the human beings that they are. The more things you do the more stuff you have to talk about, when you find people that like the same stuff you do and you treat them like people, they end up liking you… it’s really that easy.

It is maddening watching so many men gather together to try to unravel the mystery of “treat women as people” and the absolutely bonkers alternatives they will come up with. Did you know that there are fitcels? These are incels that bought the propaganda and decided “I’ll become the Chad” and dedicated themselves to building fit bodies. They still have the “-cel” suffix because for all the effort, all the hours in the gym, all the supplements, all the physical pain, they never realized that women are people.

It’s fucking wild. Maybe the internet was a mistake

What stability though? They’ve been there since being established after WW2 and it’s been an extremely volatile region the entire time.

It would at least be a Faustian bargain if they were doing horrible atrocities but that’s just the price you pay for the Middle East being a peaceful and stable area of the world… but the Middle East has been in crisis for my entire life, so what am I missing?

Also America has the ability to project its power in the region without Israel, so what exactly is there to gain?