It took Rome 1000 years to collapse.

I mean, if you want to get extra snarky, Rome’s still there. Still one of the wealthiest cities on earth, to this day. The infrastructure is what makes the city and that can be repaired or rebuilt, improved even, as generations come to their senses.

More people started living from the survival mindset and actually getting sick impacted their brain. Dictatorships help people feel safe.

I pin this far more on the toxic media atmosphere than COVID, although the pandemic definitely took its toll. That said, the current hysteria around migrants and Woke feels a lot more like the post-9/11 moment than COVID. Democrats rolling over sheepishly while a Republican wields unitary executive power to disappear dissidents and intimidate

What folks on here don’t want to accept is that this isn’t the first time we’ve had a President behave like this. Its not even the first time in our lifetimes (for the most part - sorry teenagers). This is more normal than not, in fact. Reagan’s War on Drugs, Nixon’s War on Crime, Eisenhower’s Red Scare, and FDR/Truman’s Japanese Internment echoed all the same fascist tendencies.

What’s really changed in 2025 is the abysmal long term economic outlook. Liberals in 1984 could duck their heads and glare at the rampant poverty around them and mutter “If those hippie slackers had earned an education rather than smoking dope and fucking around, they wouldn’t get picked on by the police”. But now… fucking kids at Columbia University are being targeted. Surgeons are getting targeted. Judges are getting targeted.

Literally the only thing you can do to avoid these purges is Be MAGA. And “Just be MAGA, you won’t get hurt” isn’t something liberals can quite bring themselves to do yet (although keep an eye on Gavin Newsom and Richie Torries and Andrew Cuomo, because its coming).

Dictatorship isn’t making people feel safe. It’s making them feel terrified and helpless.

It’s not an issue of believing/not-believing politicians nearly so much as it is a media environment that’s fully saturated with right-wing propaganda.

What do you tell a person who has been listening to AM Radio for 30 years? What do you tell a person that was taught Ayn-Rand-o-nomics in High School while the teacher clutched a copy of Atlas Shrugged alongside her Bible? What do you tell a person who has never actually been involved in the higher levels of business management, because our economic model is so subdivided and the commodities so fetishized?

You can’t get mad at the loyal acolyte of a cargo cult for praying to the cargo gods if that’s all they’ve ever known. Neither can you simply ignore the Cult Leader, who has been blaring the message from a megaphone into everyone’s ears, for their entire adult lives.

I have immense sympathy for people who are pre-programmed to get hoodwinked by this shit and I count my lucky stars every day that I only get hoodwinked some of the time and mostly on things that don’t obliterate my quality of life when they come due.

But more than them, I feel awful for the people who come after us, because we at least got to enjoy that World’s Greatest Middle Class Life while it was on offer. The next generation is going to be fed all the same propaganda, but they’re going to be doing it from in the pod while eating the bugs.

The problem with these systems is that the more they are bureaucratized and legalized, the more publishing houses and attorney’s offices will ultimately dictate the flow of lending and revenue. Ideally, copywrite is as straighforward as submitting a copy of your book to the Library of Congress and getting a big “Don’t plagiarize this” stamp on it, such that works can’t be lifted straight from one author by another. But because there’s all sorts of shades of gray - were Dan Brown and JK Rowling ripping off the core conceits of their works, or were religious murder thrillers and YA wizard high school books simply done to death by the time they went mainstream? - a lot of what constitutes plagarism really boils down to whether or not you can afford extensive litigation.

And that’s before you get into the industrialization of ghostwriters that end up supporting “prolific” writers like Danielle Steele or Brian Sanderson or R.L. Stein. There’s no real legal protection for staff writers, editors, and the like. The closest we’ve got is the WGA, and that’s more exclusive to Hollywood.

Oh, so now you’re just going to surrender our precious natural resources to the Imperialist Chinese?!

Guys, I think we’ve got a Wumao over here. Someone get what’s left of the FBI to arrest him and show his ass the fucking door.

Gentlemen, this is democracy manifest!

What is the charge, officer? Eating a meal? A succulent Chinese meal?

It seems that the data shows that most school shooters are white.

Most Americans are white, so that’s not a surprise. But white communities aren’t over-policed and over-surveiled like tanner neighborhoods. So white students will look “generic” while certain black, brown, and Asian students will pop out of the data as “suspects” more visibly.

Case in point

It absolutely won’t. What we will get is a bunch of kids profiled and harassed by an administration that sees “Suspected School Shooter!!! ALERT!! ALERT!!” popping up based on vague suspicions and poorly conceived correlations.

The argument I saw one fascist use on a Facebook thread some years back was “If you were handed a bowl of M&Ms and you were told one of the brown ones was poisoned, how many would you leave in your bowl?” That’s the logic behind these algorithmic surveillance programs. Just grab known data points and draw a line through them. And the data points they lean into - age, race, gender, zip code - are what the system can grab rather than what might conceivably inform you of a person’s psychological state.

Its not just a matter of shipping. You need dealerships and licensing and the like. England is notorious for its long line of middlemen who make everything more expensive. So no surprise BYD can’t get a competitive vehicle into a state that hates foreign competition and loves rent-seeking at every turn.

He’s not even hurting them. They’re still up for the year. They’re historically up for the last ten years, in the face of enormous economic headwinds.

Trump stepped in, the market surged, and now its floated back down to December 2024 baseline.

And these losers are screaming like stick pigs because Big Line doesn’t always go up forever.

Even past that, the market has been on a historic bull run. The NASDAQ is up around 150% over five years. Unprecedented gains, even with the COVID dip.

What kind of whiny bullshit is this about a 15% decline? You’re holding equity with a 100+ p/e. You took a bunch of leveraged risk and came out ahead, but you’re still not happy because… you’re not a trillionaire like Daddy Musk yet? Take your fucking profits and back away from the roulette wheel, you degenerates.

In this day and age with everyone carrying a smartphone, there’s no excuse for using work computers for personal activities

There are plenty of reasons, mostly amounting to “Nobody tends to give a fuck” and “I’m not running out to buy a second high end laptop just to casually browse the web from my couch on the weekend”.

What you’ve got is a very poorly enforced, very draconianly executed set of deliberately vague and inarticulate rules that vary from company to company. And none of that really has anything to do with the “kill switch” thing. In the same way you might say “Well but obviously nobody should smoke weed in a state that criminalizes it! That’s just stupid!” when you’ve got the police tearing apart a particular person’s house for a completely unrelated issue, based on an officer’s exclamation of “I smell weed!” at the front porch.

Just accept you live in a police state and stop buying into excuses made to surveil and punish.

There is nothing wrong with a conservative outlook.

When you’re living in comfort and you benefit from the status quo and you prize stability over the perceived benefits of change, there’s an argument for a conservative outlook.

But I’ve been living under Conservative governance in my home state of Texas for forty years. The pattern of police enforced racial castes, privatization of public institutions, and ecologically unsustainable consumption has been ongoing for my entire life. This is what conservatives are fighting to defend. Misogyny. Supremacy. Homogeneity. A wild imbalance in economic opportunity. Its too late to try and rebrand this as “bad” conservatism.

Trump’s policies are more extreme than what came before, but the impulses remain the same. It is the composition of American elites that has changed.

The maga don’t have a conservative outlook.

The Red Hats are the children of Goldwater/Reagan and they are shepherding Paleoconservative Libertarianism to its logical end game. They were raised to believe in Galt’s Gulch and Friedman’s free market fetishism. They were raised to believe in Evangelical Christianity and Christian Dominionism. They were raised to believe in winning the Cold War at all costs.

And what they’re doing has plenty of historic parallels - from Nixon’s War on Crime to Eisenhower’s Operation Wetback to McKinley’s Jim Crow. They’re White Nationalists embracing White Nationalism, on the belief that the Peace Dividend they reaped in the 90s was a Heavenly Mandate to Do As Thou Wilt. If you carve off all the QAnon cultism and bigotry, what you’ve got are a bunch of Gen X and Y folks who are fighting to preserve the segregation and the implicit international hegemony they enjoyed when the Iron Curtain fell and America was the uncontested global superpower.

It is conservatism in root and branch. A philosophy flailing in the face of a diminished empire to preserve the icons of prosperity their elders once enjoyed.

The founding fathers never anticipated such dick-headery

George Washington was the richest man in the New World at the time of his Presidency. Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and John Jay weren’t far behind. And quite a few of them (particularly the Federalists) were notorious for the wealth they accrued on currency and commodity speculation. That was one of the sticking points of the First National Bank. Whomever controlled it could effectively finance scams and flim-flams at a rate unheard of prior to the institution of modern banking.

Go ahead and sell books you’ve never read nevermind haven’t written, and memecoins to dumb twats after you are out if you want, but this shit can’t happen in active office.

This is the whole reason people seek active office. Politics is just another avenue of celebrity, with the bonus of influencing policy in such a way that you can direct public spending into private pockets. This is the latest means of doing so. But its an age old tradition, older than the nation itself.

Idk about the sole point. Lots of people speculated on them believing there wouldn’t be a rug pull within hours of the coin’s official launch. Crypto is the new Box of Rocks. All advertisement, no substance.

I started rawdoging urls a while ago.

Works best when you’ve got a web ring or other friendly community of contributors to reference against one another.

But those are few and fair between in the modern day.

But people are too used to products that are free because they make the person using them the product.

That’s definitely one model for operating a public service, but its far from the only one.

I think you’d be surprised to discover how many people speak English as a second language, thanks to its extensive use in business and law. Even (perhaps especially) in China, where US-Chinese trade relations have been going strong since Nixon shook hands with Mao.

Only in the last ten years has the relationship between Wall Street and Hong Kong/Shanghai degraded and the appeal of English as a business language fallen by the wayside.

Been happening for a lot longer than we like to admit. Students coming to the US for education and then returning home to work have been the norm since the early '00s, on account of the US higher education system being highly subsidized by the States and Feds. This made US education relatively cheap for its quality, especially at the state university level.

But that was good, actually, because we became a nexus of research and development. Lots of students came, got education, and left. Lots more stayed around, lured by the high paying jobs at domestic firms. A few even joined the education staff of the universities themselves. A bit of brain drain was fine, so long as we produced far more than we lost.

Now we’re just hemorrhaging talent and expertise because we no longer value the work product of the professional classes. We’re pricing people out of public universities and imposing strict ideological tests on the students we do let in. We’re going full eugenics mode on senior staff and administration. And we’re turning education more and more into a means of profiting off credentialing than accruing working knowledge or performing independent research.

America is dismantling all of its socialist institutions.

Like many industry observers accurately stated that the shortages will subside long before any of the CHIPS spending could even possibly make a difference.

If you consider advanced microprocessors a strategic asset, the immediate short-term pinch in supply isn’t the problem. Its the long-term overseas outsourcing of production to regions we consider at high risk of foreign conflicts (Taiwan and South Korea). Simply moving finished chips across the Pacific Ocean is its own strategic problem.

One could easily argue that our steadily ratcheted hostilities toward China, Russia, and Iran is the actual root cause of our problems. And we’d do well to in-source production for supply flow reasons, but our real panacea might be to simply stop fucking around at the periphery of a rival imperial power.

But if you consider the Russian, Chinese, and Iranian peoples as inherently adversarial to the American way of life (on account of them hating us for our freedoms), then relying on Samsung and TMSC as your primary supply of chipsets seems imprudent.

Of course, if you wanted to give the economy any hope for viable electronics while also massively screwing over imports, this would have been your shot. So it seems strategically at odds with the whole “make domestic manufucating happen” rhetoric.

A big central problem of the US chips strategy is that we’re not building capacity, we’re building investment incentives. The goal is to make local manufacturing profitable rather than productive. But that’s at the root of the ideological divide between American and the BRICS we’re positioning ourselves in opposition to.

We wouldn’t be threatening war with these countries if we had a strong global socio-economic consensus.

He was handed that flag at a rally.

By a campaign staffer.