I have to imagine that media understands this and doesn’t care.

A responsible media, one that cares about the outcomes, would zero in on the salient dangerous parts of trumps agenda. If we had a media ecosystem that actually cared about informing people, they would have actually explained what Project 2025 is, they could have even read parts of it stopping to let experts weigh in.

We don’t have that. We have a capitalist media which like all actors in capitalism chase profits. The media companies know that trump is going to do some weird shit everyday and that by reporting on that weird shit they can get the eyeballs on the cialis commercials, because that’s their real goal. Selling ad inventory and making that ad inventory as profitable as possible, if news or information happens as a side effect, fine, but it’s not the goal.

During trumps first term I used to watch msnbc most evenings, it was the same 4 stories first told by the news, then by Rachel Maddow, then by Lawrence O’Donnell, then by whatever was on after Lawrence O’Donnell. Looking back it was the least information dense thing you could imagine. 4 facts repeated ad nauseam over 4 hours. Now they all had different guests on but the guests job was to do a few things. One, reassure you that this is important and you should pay attention. Two, tell you how outrageous it is so that you’ll pay attention. Three, prognosticate wildly about the ramifications so that you’ll stay tuned for more information.

The populace largely follows this drum beat, but the populace is also to blame. You see it outside the realm of politics too, the average person likes novelty and scandal and gossip. You can see this in things like twitter trends. Something happens, there is a viral video, and suddenly for millions of people it’s the most important thing in the world. It’s new, it’s outrageous, it’s exciting to talk about and be listened to. In some ways corporate media, whose goal is to generate profits, just realized “this is what people want” they want us to cover the story of the day or week and give them that salacious novelty.

Trump just happens to be extremely good at generating the kind of events that are perfect for this formula. He’s a man that will do or say anything to make his base cheer, and often those things are batshit crazy and he doesn’t care that they are batshit crazy because people are clapping.

The story there is that there is a man with a lot of power with no externally observable moral center that is willing to do or say anything to increase his power. But that’s a complicated story, that would take a lot of time and effort and dot connecting, what if someone gets confused or bored and turns away. Then the ad inventory won’t be as valuable because there’s fewer eyeballs. Better to go with whatever weird thing he did or said today, simple, understandable, and it will cause the emotional reactions we know keep people tuning in making our ad inventory highly profitable.

If Biden were more interesting they would do it to him, they try from time to time, oh look he bit a baby dressed as a chicken on Halloween. He just isn’t out in public doing 3 hour rallies daily that the news can sift through for best hits.

Finally there is the staying power. Why does trump end up in this cycle more than others. The way the cycle is supposed to play out is

1. Powerful person does weird / bad thing
2. People are outraged
3. Person is shamed or loses support and then the news can report on the fallout.

Step 3 never happens for trump. His supporters do not care about the thing that’s outraging people today. They will never stop supporting him and he will never feel shame, he feels the opposite, he’s proud of the way he can manipulate this machine.

So the news doesn’t get a step three, but this is the formula, so back to step 1. So for trump you do get this unique media cycle of weird / bad thing -> outrage -> nothing. And that nothing sits in the air like an unresolved chord at the end of a music piece, it’s discordant and unsettling and there is no resolution coming. In fact, it’s the kind of thing that might make people stop watching the news. Better spin up the next thing so people will forget about last weeks outrage and start fresh.

In this we agree.

The democrats are just the blue colored boot of the oligarchs.

Naive is the Democratic party’s current position of favoring those donors over voters.

I understand that they’ve done a cynical calculus and decided to leave those voters on the sidelines. It is a failing strategy that successfully got them billions of dollars and lost the election.

It is not that I do not understand the deeper reason, it is that I reject it as a failure.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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?

After his 40 minute solo dance party, he’s probably exhausted.

It is not, in fact, cheaper to impose the death penalty.

I was given the con side of the death penalty to argue once in forensics. I was actually pro death penalty and one reason was that I thought it was cheaper. I went to do research on this because it was certainly a point I’d have to contend with from the pro side.

It is vastly more expensive to execute a prisoner than to imprison them for life. https://ejusa.org/resource/wasteful-inefficient/

Now you might think, hey that’s a link to a group that wants to get rid of the death penalty, of course they are going to say it’s more expensive. Go read the studies, I did, and again and again it is far more expensive to execute.

Why? Because we, pretty reasonably, put a high burden in front of the state before we allow them to kill a citizen. The legal process for both reaching the death penalty and then the numerous appeals to that decision is not cheap. It is a massive cost that the taxpayer has to bear to uphold the ruling and actually carry out the execution.

So it is far cheaper to house a person for life, and this shouldn’t really be that shocking. The prisons are built, the daily care of a prisoner is minimal, we provide them with the barest living conditions and food. The number of people we even could execute is a tiny percent of the prison population, so it’s not like they are taking up some huge amount of space and require us to build huge facilities to house them. If you could thanos snap every prisoner that could reasonably be executed out of existence, you wouldn’t free up enough prison housing space to close even a single facility, even more so when you consider that these prisoners are a handful in each facility.

The danger with “common sense” things that confirm our beliefs is that they can be wrong. The world is more complicated than it seems. I used to believe that it was cheaper to execute than to house. I was forced to argue the other side and because I’m competitive and want to win I did the research. I’m glad I did, it taught me an important lesson in not just believing something because it felt obviously correct.

All told, I’m not really sure I’m even against the death penalty. Some people are irredeemable and their deaths don’t weigh heavy on me. On the other hand, the idea of making it any easier for the state to execute me if they want to is unsettling. The common arguments in favor of the death penalty don’t really hold up. I’m an atheist, so I don’t believe the person is going to some eternal torture, they simply cease to exist. And it’s more expensive. From a practical standpoint I see little benefit for imposing the death penalty, but I understand the point of view of people being so reprehensible they don’t deserve to live even if it’s a high cost on society.

If you would like to continue arguing in favor of the death penalty though, you’ll do yourself a favor to go research the subject. It is more complicated and nuanced than you might think at first glance. And at the end of the day, if the thing you care about is cost, you’d never execute another person. It is far far more expensive to execute a prison than to house them.

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Let’s say he was dictator for one day only, just as a fun thought experiment.

That is also awful

Imagine someone walking into your house and saying, “I’m only going to ignore the law for 15 minutes while I’m here tonight.” Sorry, what the absolute fuck. Even if they kept their word that’s a monstrous thing to say, what the fuck are you going to do for those 15 minutes?!

That’s when you kick that fucker out of your house. So America, let’s kick that fucker out of this house.