Not all the protestors are involved in criminal activity. The news is constantly reporting that 95% of the crowd is peacefully exercising their right to protest, but a small minority of people use the situation to their advantage and cause chaos. The media then reports on these (accurate) instances of violence and then right wing talking heads run away with that and paint the picture that everyone is looting and rioting and attacking cops.

It’s also a known tactic to have provocateurs incite a riot so that the people in power can use it as an excuse to crack down on an otherwise legitimate protest.

You can withhold paying your federal taxes from your paycheck. Most people don’t because they don’t want to get stuck with a big tax bill in April with no way to pay it if they spent that money or lost it on a bad investment. if enough people all did that at once, regardless of state, it could put a big financial burden on Trump. The government heavily relies on this steady source of income, and unless you make a lot of money, you are probably getting a federal return every year, which means you gave the U.S. Government an interest free loan of sorts.

Can ChatGPT actually play chess now? Last I checked, it couldn’t remember more than 5 moves of history so it wouldn’t be able to see the true board state and would make illegal moves, take it’s own pieces, materialize pieces out of thin air, etc.

Trump verifiably tried to steal the 2020 election on live television. Even though he failed, his attempt came close enough to succeeding to give pause for thought. There are fewer guardrails now than there were before to prevent something like that from happening again.

So, to that point, I say why wouldn’t trump cheat again? He was never punished for his last attempt. In fact, he was rewarded for it!

We’re never having another election that won’t have doubt cast on it from either side. We burned that bridge on January 6th.

It’s exactly this, 1000%. I work for a small company that had a return-to-office mandate a few years ago when Covid began initially winding down as access to vaccines became widespread. I was working fully remote and had leased an apartment over an hour away from the closest branch office in an affordable part of town. We had our most profitable year ever in the nearly 50 year history of the company in 2020 when literally every employee was working remote. Morale was up, I was saving money that wasn’t going to gas or car maintenance, and I was feeling positive about the future of work-life balance.

Then, one day, I get called in for performance review, and it was all smiles and sunshine and then they said “You’re doing a great job Furbag, but we’d like to see you back in the office for a minimum of three days per week.” That was the first and only negative comment I had ever received on a performance review since starting for the company. When I escalated the results of my performance review to management, wanting a more clear explanation for why I am being asked to commute 1+ hours in to work almost every day from the outskirts of the bay area, they told me exactly what you said “We’re paying for this building, so we want people physically in the office to justify it. Also, every other industry is doing return to work mandates so this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.”

Naturally, this is still a sore spot for me. The company didn’t learn it’s lesson and still follows industry trends like little lemmings (and not the good kind that post here) while looking into buying up more real estate in other parts of the state to expand operations. They could be selling the building I’m working in now, and use the profits from the sale to fund everybody with equipment to work from home (desk, chair, monitors, hardware, etc) and work would continue as usual with a lot more employee satisfaction and work-life balance, but I’ve learned that owning real estate as a business is in itself a prestige that the C-Suite loves to show off to it’s competitors. “Look at this historic building we own, isn’t it grand?”, “Oh, you think that’s grand? We rent 12 floors of a 40 story skyscraper in San Francisco, beat that!”.

Managers need the physical locations to continue to exist so that they can justify their own existence, and they’ve fully convinced gullible CEOs that productivity will wane if people are allowed to do work from home “unsupervised”, even though there’s plenty of data that suggests the opposite is true.

/endrant

“The grand jury found that over the past nine years, Abrego Garcia has played a significant role in an alien smuggling ring,” Bondi said.

Dear God, this person has no idea what they are talking about. A Grand Jury doesn’t determine innocence or guilt, their only responsibility is to determine if there is enough evidence to go to a trial. If Grand Juries suddenly get to decide if people are guilty, then Trump is guilty in ALL of his prosecutions, not just the ones we had enough time to confirm, since they all said there was plenty of evidence to go to a trial.

In any case, I can’t wait for the prosecution to present their ironclad case to a real jury, because the whole photoshopped tattoos and driving people in cars is probably not going to carry much water.

This is Trump’s “Star Wars” program. Can’t have high speed rail, but we can funnel trillions into the pockets of these government contractors for a solution in search of a problem.

My opinion has also shifted over time, but not quite in the way I expected. I was also very anti-gun and pro-gun control, and maybe you can make an argument that I was being naive or that I’ve succumbed to the decades-long conservative culture war, but I feel like things have gotten so bad that we can’t possibly rely on the police or the military to be able to effectively protect us in times of crisis anymore.

Seems like cops are more likely to shoot you than help you these days, and the military might be under the control of someone competent, or under the control of a fascist demagogue who replaces all the generals with incompetent yes-men, which is a huge national security threat for a disarmed populace. Also, the government using the military against it’s citizens (or non citizen residents) is definitely not off the table - no matter what pretty words the soldiers said about defending the constitution, a lot of them are in bed with the folk who want to exterminate “the enemy within”.

Maybe if we had more stability we could make a push for more restrictive gun laws, but I don’t think it’s politically feasible for either party at this point to make any such suggestion. The tragic part is that mass shootings will continue unabated until we find a way to counteract them without touching on the subject of gun control.

I’m not talking about state mandated education. Nobody is required to attend university.

If you go to a college worth attending, they will teach you critical thinking skills as part of the course requirements.

Regardless, the situation with generative AI is not helping in that regard.

Imagine paying tens of thousands of dollars (probably of their parents saved money) to go to university and have a chatbot do the whole thing for you.

These kids are going to get spit out into a world where they will have no practical knowledge and no ability to critically think or adapt.

There was talk that she was going to run again for local elections, which is a huge step down from having been the VPOTUS, but she would be more involved in California politics again. Possibly having that household name recognition would give her an edge in a congressional race or gubernatorial campaign (Newsom is finally turning sour to even moderate Democrats with his hard right shift lately).

Is there a way to poison the well so badly and so irrevocably that corporations won’t dare use generative AI for anything? Can we somehow trick these overgrown chatbots to speak ill of their masters in the form of direct-to-stream advertisements?

I’m certainly not crediting Trump for that ceasefire. Biden negotiated it. Doesn’t matter whose ass was in the seat in the oval office at the time.

One of the last things Biden did in office was secure a ceasefire. One that ultimately fell apart when Trump let Israel off the chain to “finish the job”.

People who refused to vote for the party that was committed to stopping the war simply because they were acting too slowly for their taste are now culpable for the continued genocide under Trump. Enjoy the greater evil.

Check this guy’s computer first. Guarantee there’s some fucked up shit on there. It’s always projection.

Have the military replaced the government now?

That would be a military junta, not martial law.

Martial law is when soldiers, not peace officers, are tasked with upholding law and order.

It doesn’t matter if it’s for a good reason or not, it’s still martial law.

That’s a good question. Everything is digital nowadays, so it’s not like we’re getting film reels from Bollywood.

If I had to wager a guess, the cinemas would probably be paying the tariff at the time of acquiring the license to show the film.

It’s entirely avoidable, if only Trump would have actually learned something from his first term and actually funded research and prevention teams. Sadly, he only has the foresight to see how cutting those programs saves the US Govt. a penny now, and not the wisdom to see how that panny would have been money well spent if it prevented us from having to spend thousands on recovery efforts.

Trump administration offers tribute to mighty Poseidon thanking him for fair winds, calm seas and big water. The President was quoted as saying:

“This is the greatest tribute in the history of tributes, not even Odysseus could have offered what we offered. Tremendous. We’re gonna make America’s oceans and seas and yes, even the beautiful Gulf of America Great Again. This F-18 is the first step in improving relations with Poseidon. Great guy, in fact. Not many people see it because of all the drownings and shipwrecks but behind closed doors he’s a very different person and he runs a tight ship, the ocean is respected and we need to start taking notes from him. Joe Biden didn’t normalize relationships with Atlantis, but I did. Sleepy Joe and Kamala couldn’t do it but I am the first President in 227 years to even get a meeting.”

Everybody on the right “likes what Trump is doing” or “Likes what DOGE is doing”, but when you ask them to articulate, specifically, what actions or policies they like, they will generalize to something the administration has claimed without evidence to be true but is difficult to prove or disprove (“He’s making the border safer”, “He’s getting rid of taxpayer waste”, etc.) or they will retreat from the question by attacking you personally or just saying that the vibes are generally better (“The tariffs will fix the economy”, “America is respected again”, etc.).

I’ve never once had a debate with a Republican who came prepared with sources to back up their claims. That’s because as soon as they try to dig and find evidence of the insane stuff Trump and Musk are peddling, the lie unravels itself and it just becomes easier to accept things at face value rather than think critically.