It also requires a lot of free labor and money from other workers that are willing to donate or put in time voluntarily. When you’re only just able to put food on the table and a roof over your head, that’s hard - and it’s harder to organize it all because you don’t have a critical mass of unions that communicate and understand each other’s struggles.
I was about to say, anyone who examined him beyond Hillbilly Elegy figured out the guy has no beliefs beyond “I deserve power”. He’ll say and do whatever you tell him to if you tell him that it will make him more powerful over people’s lives.
I was about to say, all those third world countries in Africa and South America are looking to do wind, solar, etc because it’s cheap and independent, rather than relying on coal or gas from other nations.
Well of course, first you invent the ansible.
It already is. Trump’s lackeys already went waving paper to Congress to get them to figure out legal wording to bypass the 14th without another Amendment. I expect we’ll see that sometime around November or December.
Neither would Marco Rubio, or Ted Cruz IIRC.
Yeah, even a coordinated attack on physical networking backbones wouldn’t be TOO rough. We’d have to piece together what’s left and figure out what to replace, but there’s enough worldwide structure that we can do that in a pretty coordinated manner even without the Internet - it would probably just take a lot longer. I feel that a lot of the West would be the worst off, but surprisingly, a lot of governments already have plans for stuff like this. I feel even with incompetence, you’d be looking at 2-3 years max, but I don’t think you’d see Purge-style societal collapse or whatever you’re envisioning.
Yes. The terrible “doctor” has ingratiated himself with the administration for a while, actually having his fucking film crew accompanying ICE raids in Chicago which then aired on his show.
Elon, the guy who sent multiple incredibly sad emails all but begging “please let me come over and party on your child sex island Mr Epstein I promise I’m cool”? That Elon?
Anthropic just knows it has political leverage, that’s it. Large parts of US infrastructure and business now rely on Claude models to even function the way they do with the staff they do, and you can leverage that dependence into political action and retaliation pretty easily in the name of “national security”.
No no, there will be proof. They just need time to find good videos of those people so they can ask Grok or whatever to make a video of them cutting the thing.
So, interesting points. However, consider that just in the last few years:
The big problem with fucking with a midterm isn’t ease, it’s just scale. When you have cops, the federal and a lot of state and even local DOJs, the President’s personal goon squad (which has now been significantly inflated and equipped), and the FBI willing to harass, intimidate, or arrest voters, steal ballots, and challenge every single race, everywhere, all the time, all backed by think tanks and funding orgs that are backed by some of the richest people in the entire world, it suddenly becomes a lot easier to stop up the gears of democratic elections.
Sure, your locals can challenge the results. They can make noise. But at the end of the day, “move fast and break things” works surprisingly well as a governance tactic if your desired end result is maintaining power, because by the time people have untangled the knots you’ve woven, you’re already ten steps ahead and "well it’d be REALLY HARD AND EXPENSIVE to run a special election (if your locality even has a legal way to do that - most don’t).
We effectively had our Hannibal moment getting locked into a stalemate with Iran.
Not if they’re hit with a missile or another satellite. Debris could pretty easily be rocketed up into a higher orbit from a military strike.
remove and destroy
Nah, we only wanted to remove it. Trump and Hegseth have both been public that we should start building another huge wave of nuclear weapons, and you need uranium to do it. Far easier to try and mug someone else for theirs (and their oil and whatever else you think you can get) than it is to actually buy it and refine it yourself.
If an insurance company refused to carry a cop, they’d be sued out of existence by every police union and booster org in the nation.
Especially with the recent East Wing argument, the lesson is “if you do it fast enough and ignore other people getting angry about it, you can do whatever you want.”
“I found an island paradise that’s also full of old Soviet bunkers and we’re pretty sure that’s gonna be nice to have when the next American civil/world war kicks off, we just need to make it palatable for our billionaire friends who can’t stand looking at nature”.
Yeah don’t do that with snappers. I used to carry a shovel in my work van specifically to shove snapping turtles off the road or out of my worksites.