We’ll pay more for less in terms of software, and we’ll pay more for more in terms of hardware, but nearly everybody would happily buy less. For example, the cheapest phones will be $1k+ but with unused bells and whistles, and there will be a subscription paywall to use Google maps.

We’ll have less privacy and security. Our devices will be used to spy on us even more than now.

PlayStation 6 will come out. The next Xbox will have a really fucking stupid name. Call of Duty will be a 250GB game.

It will become more feasible to implement battery tech in your home. Generators will give way to a big battery for power outages. Areas with variable power rates will see people supplement their home power with battery during the day and charge them back up at night. EV adoption will continue to rise. Self driving tech will not change in a meaningful way. Fusion power will be commercially implemented, but barely break even, which is fine because that’s how new tech takes early steps to optimize.

China will be far and away ahead of the US in terms of infrastructure, daily consumer tech, and overall happiness. The US will pretend otherwise and launch a targeted propaganda campaign to keep its people too dumb and busy to notice how badly they’re getting fucked. But even worse than now, though.

Healthcare tech will expand. But not in the US. Not for the working class, anyway. Measles outbreaks will come in waves. Flu and a new covid strain will be devastating within 18 months. Polio will pop back up like measles currently is. Maybe TB too. Mental health will continue to get stigmatized if not fully ignored.

Physical media will be basically gone. Disc drives will as rare as actual audio CDs are in everyday life.

Lab grown meat will be more affordable, and it will bring a culture war with it.

If they call people terrorists just for being against this, then wouldn’t that encourage people to take terrorist actions in their protests? If you’re a terrorist either way, may as well get some bang for your buck, right?

“removed”? Is there a slur for an M&M-fucker?

The deeper cost is that there are way fewer white collar do-nothings tampering with frivolities to justify their paychecks. That and subsidizing tech and infrastructure (including EVs) like any responsible country would and should do. It’s the sort of investment that any dipshit who’s played a Civilization game should be able to comprehend.

Capitalism trusts corporations to invest in the right things for the future, but they’re not thinking about 10-50 years from now. Their goal is short term profits. Show growth for the next couple of quarters. But really they’re just trying to not get eaten by a bear, and you don’t need to run faster than a bear to achieve that; you just need to run faster than the guy next to you. Chevy and Ford have done a decent job competing with each other, but they’d be blown out of the fucking water by BYD, and that’s why they’re tariffed to hell and back in the US.

That depends. For pizza and Asian cuisine, Sriracha. Special shout-out to Underwood Ranch specifically, because that shit is top tier. For everything else, chipotle Tabasco. When that goes on sale, I buy a few bottles because I know I’ll go through it lol.

If you’re decent at math and physics and are even remotely handy, you can probably get into a data center or power plant. Both industries are growing like crazy while boomers and older Gen x are retiring.

It took a long while as a contractor, but I eventually got a job as an operator in a power plant. The rotating shift work can be rough, and some days are really demanding, but it’s overall not too bad usually and it pays well. Outside operators here start at like $40/hour. My water treatment specialty has gotten me a promotion and raises so now I’m at like $53.50/hour. If I can continue training and pass the test and board for it, I could make over $60/hour as a control room operator. With built-in OT and scheduled maintenance outages demanding even more OT, it’s impossible to not break $100k/year here. With bonus, I might break $150k this year.

Brush up on chiller loops, chemistry 101, physics 101, NATO phonetic alphabet, get 15k steps in a day, and change the oil in your car. If that’s pretty easy for you, there’s a career waiting for you lol.

Piggybacking this comment because similar:

Chop up some veggies (I like zucchini, yellow squash, onions, and maybe carrots), toss them in olive oil, salt, some seasoning, and an acid like lemon juice or wine (or a little balsamic vinegar if you want that vibe), then throw it into a lubed pan and into a preheated oven until roasted to your liking (probably like 15-20 minutes at 400°F).

I like this method because it’s largely passive, so this can happen while you deal with some other part of your meal. Sauce, meat, rice, whatever. Plus it’s pretty hard to fuck up unless you forget to use a timer lol.

Right now, I’m working a ton (72 hours per week) and my wife is working and going back to school, but every Tuesday is an entire day together. We just started playing Baldur’s Gate 3 for the first time, and we look forward to it all damn week lol. We started like a month ago, but we’re still only just now wrapping up the goblin camp. We both were already really familiar with 5e DnD, so a lot of the mechanics feel pretty intuitive to us. I have gripes with the camera (PS5 version) but overall it’s a fantastic experience.

Before picking this up on sale, we were passing the controller back and forth through Astro bot. Also amazing! We rolled credits, and I’ll probably aim for the platinum trophy at some point without her. There’s truly not much left before we snag that, so she’s not missing out.

I don’t think we should normalize misgendering somebody as an insult. He’s a fascist, not a woman or trans person.

Guess they’re just smarter than you

Perfect. I said something similar the last time this sort of rhetoric came out of a coworker’s mouth. Literally what I said about begging on the streets and making 6 figures was what he said. I said “that’s not happening, at least not for more than maybe up to 5 people, and if you don’t believe me then why don’t you just do that instead of working harder and making less?” The response was some bullshit about not wanting to be a drain on society and how he would feel bad taking money he didn’t earn. And yet his goal is to buy a few houses and rent them out so his housing is paid for by other people. Pointing out the irony to him would be a waste of breath.

My mom hasn’t worked in a decade. Survives off of snap and my dad’s SSDI survivor benefits. She STILL buys the whole welfare queen narrative.

Of course she does. She is said welfare queen. I’m sure she’d try to explain how it’s not the same thing, but the reality is that she believes that she’s earned (there’s that word again) what she’s receiving, implying that others haven’t. I would have trouble maintaining a close relationship with somebody who holds these beliefs.

Thankfully, nobody ever becomes homeless due to losing their job and struggling to find a new one. Robust social safety nets have ensured that the only people who find themselves homeless are lazy pieces of shit who are actively trying to be in their situation. They prey upon people’s generosity by begging in the streets and raking in 6 figures.

Big fat fucking /s because holy shit, I’ve actually encountered people who believe bullshit like that. I lived in my car for a little while, but thankfully I still had a job and there was a shower I could use at work. Only an absolute fucking ghoul would prey upon the unhoused.

Do both. An armed community can defend itself. Protect your neighbors. Fascists will be less likely to use their guns on you if your community has guns to fire back with. Build your community and then be able to defend it.

Oh I’m aware of that, but every time this playbook has been attempted, the perpetrators have been thoroughly smacked down. What makes them think that they’ll have a different outcome? And even if they do, don’t they see that absolutely controlling a pile of shit is worse than half controlling something that works? Musk already has hundreds of billions of dollars, and he’s threatening that by doing this. Trump already has billions and is president, and these actions are probably gonna get him some more attempts. The lackeys might be at risk of losing things if they don’t obey, but that doesn’t explain why they’re receiving the marching orders in the first place.

Sure, but why? To what explicit end? What is there to gain from getting rid of whoever their targets are? Idk if I’m overthinking it or underthinking this, but it kinda seems to me like this ends up making things worse for them too in the long run. So I just don’t get it.

Revoking the right to abortion makes sense to me. They need more consumers and laborers to feed to the capitalism machine to perpetuate the infinite growth that it demands. I don’t subscribe to it, but it does make sense to me that they would be on board with that. Culling the “undesirables” however doesn’t really make sense to me. I don’t know of a single thing that improves because of that. Fewer laborers, especially fewer desperate ones. Paired with tariffs, fewer consumers both foreign and domestic. Fewer tax payers. Most of who they would target are probably renters and not land owners, so more vacancies but not new unowned land, so rent prices and property value would drop. So who the fuck wins? Racists who care less about their account balance than the skin color of people in their town? Couldn’t they just stay home and have that and their money too?

Yep. My immediate thought after reading this headline was of the couple times he looked like he was gonna cry because people were celebrating the downfall of Tesla and the time he was streaming PoE2 and got bullied enough that he pretended to lag out and ragequit.

He’s truly a net negative contribution to the species, and he furthers that status with every breath. Maybe there could be some argument that putting money into stuff pushed companies to adopt new, greener technologies in order to compete, but his pro fascism agenda has completely negated any praises I might have ever sung. And I think he’s too deep to ever reverse course.

We know that he salutes like Hitler. Let’s all hope that he does that other thing like Hitler did that one time in late April of 1945. Epic memes ftw for the edgy memelord mastermind if he does it on the same day. 360 skibidi no scope rizz king shit.

If the beliefs, statements, or associations are lawful, then why and how does the government have the right to expel the person against their wishes? What does “lawful” even mean if the actions described as being “lawful” result in consequences by the state that serve as a punishment? Furthermore, are there beliefs, statements, or associations that would be regarded as “unlawful”? What are some examples of that? What would the punishment be for that?

What the fuck is the actual goal of this? Why facilitate such cruelty? What are these fucks getting out of this?

Everybody needs to arm themselves and learn how to shoot. Now. While it’s still possible to. If they’re not gonna follow the Constitution, then you’re no longer guaranteed your day in court to seek justice, so there’s no longer any reason to “come quietly”. If your sentence is to be death anyway, then violent resistance may be the only route to deter cops from continuing to violate their oath and kidnapping/murdering other innocents. Do it for them.

Most cops are like black bears. They’ll rush you and try to intimidate you into doing what they want, but if you make it clear that they’re gonna get hurt or killed if they try, they’ll tuck tail and run. They’re cowards cosplaying as tough guys. Make them ask themselves whether this is worth maybe not getting home to their families over. Give them nightmares. Terrorism is attacking them where they peacefully are; I’m just saying to terrorize from within your own home to scare them off. They might come back with SWAT, but make them burn those resources all the same. They don’t have infinite equipment and enforcers, and they’ll ration it all well before getting low. They’ll have riots to quell, so they can’t put too many resources into every little kidnapping.

As John Lewis said, “Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and redeem the soul of America.”

I think that other plants are the better option. I myself have a fairly diverse little back yard. It’s not conventionally pretty, but I’ve seen bees enjoying it, and some birds come down looking for bugs or worms or something here and there. Combine that with the erosion control it provides, and I’m happy. No watering necessary, just cut it every week or so to keep rats and snakes from trying to nest. I think it’s beautiful. Mostly green but with some purple and yellow from various whatevers mixed in, and lots of life visiting it.

I don’t know why anybody would choose grass (real or otherwise) over this. Maybe for certain yard games, but my yard isn’t large or perfectly level or anything anyway. And I don’t think it’s worth tons of water and fertilizer, or the cost of astroturf, or the withholding of bee habitation just to play bocci once in a blue moon. Or even worse, to impress neighbors and passersby. Grow a fucking garden instead lol.

It’s a good thing they don’t do that anymore, and the current obsession with AI is founded upon tangible value and provides something that people don’t generally hate rather than just being a buzzword cheat code to get investors to fork money over now while people figure out a useful business model application for it later, all because “tech is complicated” so most people don’t immediately see the scam that’s happening. Man, wouldn’t that just be thoroughly embarrassing if the AI gold rush had the same outcome as the dot com gold rush? That’s why nVidia was such a winner; they’re selling figurative shovels.

Actually, it’d be more embarrassing if it didn’t happen, because it would mean that people didn’t connect the dots. But people are flat earthers and antivax at an alarmingly increasing rate, so I really couldn’t bet on the AI bubble bursting when these pins ain’t sharp enough to get it done.