I would like to add that having free and fair elections isn’t enough to be a democracy. A democracy, by definition, is simple majority rule in which the government represents the will and interests of the people. Paid propaganda, paid lobbying, SuperPACs, the existence of a donor class, etc all betray the ideals of what democracy represents. Any government that ceases to represent the interests and will of the people ceases to be a democracy, regardless of how fair and free their elections may seem.

If we embrace survival bias, then yes. From my perspective, late stage capitalism is increasingly like a game of musical chairs where opportunities for success are steadily decreasing year after year.

Then why did Biden pledge his full support to Trump?

They’ll brand the DSA and socialists like Hasan as terrorists first. Then once they have purged the country of leftist leadership and leftist organizations then they will come for left leaning groups like NPR if and only if NPR refuses to bend the knee.

Morning Joe from MSNBC has already bent the knee. More will follow once Trump makes an example out of his critics.

My theory is that Putin blames the US for destroying the Soviet Union. He blames us for forcing the USSR into a cold war it never wanted and he saw first hand how endless anti-communist propaganda turned the whole western world against the USSR… So now he believes he is doing to the US what we did to the USSR, bombarding us with endless disinformation and propaganda to destroy our country from the inside out.

They’ll just completely gut the environmental regulations and eliminate all fines.

If we want to see what the future will be like for the US, than look no further than Putin’s oligarchy.

If nuclear helps us phase out fossil fuels quicker than I fully support it.

We can have regulatory institutions while still democratizing the economy. We don’t need capitalist-neo-feudalism to work together to protect public health, improve our educational and build infrastructure.

The moment LLM can do your job for you is the moment that you lose your job to boost shareholder value

Jokes on Elon. Conservatives hate electric cars and now Tesla’s core customer base hates Tesla because of Elon

Yes, but it is also a bit scary / dystopian that a $62 billion company would go to such great lengths to have one of their own customers thrown in jail for using the product that he paid for in a way that wasn’t hurting anyone.

Tesla has faced criticism in the past for the design of its manual release levers, which are considered poorly designed and unintuitively placed

Calling it poorly designed is a massive understatement. The manual release is a wire that is hidden behind a hidden panel. A guy made a video showing how to do it and he struggled to do it despite having practiced a few times in advance. The chance of pulling it off while the car was on fire would be very, very low

The fact that Elon is going to help Trump gut all of our federal agencies makes me sick to my stomach. Trump winning the election is like a terrible nightmare that I can’t wake up from.

If I were a narcissist like Trump then I would love to be the President: I could set up all my family and friends with 7 figure jobs, I’d buy a hotel and then force the SS to rent out the entire building at 10x the normal rates, I could spend most of my time golfing, I could chat with my buddy Putin on the phone every day, etc.

Are there shitty parts to the job? Sure, but is it better than being a powerless wage slave to a soulless corporation? Absolutely yes.

Starting wars with allied nations (China) just because they have a semi-socialist economy seems fairly fascist to me.

Either sound great to me. Co-ops are market socialism which is better than capitalism in every way

Do live in a housing co-op? Because those are the only rentals I know of that base their prices on actual costs rather than greed.

He has potential, for sure, but putting the blame on one person was a massive whiff, especially when his own sources had spelled out the real problem multiple times:

"When Gomes pushed back on the multiple requests for growth, Fox added that all three of them were responsible for search, that search was “the revenue engine of the company,” and that bartering with the ads and finance teams was potentially “the new reality of their jobs.”

On February 6th 2019, Gomes said that he believed that search was “getting too close to the money,” and ended his email by saying that he was “concerned that growth is all that Google was thinking about.”

“Growth is all that Google was thinking about”. Companies prioritize quality and customer value when they are worker owned or trying to corner a market, but once they have a monopoly that goes out the window. Profit driven monopolies always end up cutting corners and abusing their customers. That is why anti-trust laws are so important and why it is so frustrating that we allow companies to bribe our politicians into eroding our anti-trust protections

Elon calls himself “Dark-maga” which is pretty dorky. Dork-Maga is more accurate

Disability accomodation requests are sent to the professor at the beginning of each semester so he would know which students use accessibility tools