But how is that.relevant?

Elections are the means by which we survey a burraucrat’s popularity.

Bush’s party, the Republican Party, took the majority of the legislature after 2002 and greatly expanded the powers of the chief executive office that Bush held.

It’s not the quantity of thought but the quality that disturbs me.

The only thing I love more than Vibes Coding is Vibes Management.

You get a meeting! You get a meeting! Everyone! Gets! A! Meeting!!!

I mean, its hardly unique to SV or to the Tech Sector broadly speaking. One of the biggest challenges I’ve seen down in Texas is teachers earning enough money to live in their (comparatively much cheaper than California) school districts.

But I gotta say, I was earning $48k back in 2006 way out in the Houston 'burbs and it was a tight squeeze. Nothing has improved. “Just earn less” doesn’t work when you’re bumping up against a bunch of landlords and lenders saying “Fuck you, pay me more”.

Try a $48-64k job and get some experience.

Try renting an apartment in Silicon Valley with a $48k/year paycheck in your pocket.

The starting salaries justified the crazy cost-of-living in a city that wanted $5000/mo for 800 sqft. Now the question becomes how you afford to get the experience in a job that pays below the regional pricetag.

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Mark Carney doing pretty much exactly what you expect a finance sector ghoul to do when given an ounce of authority.

Glad the union was able to springboard off his “Oh hey its impolite to strike please go back to work now, eh?” and into a settlement with management. God bless Canadian labor solidarity. Wish we could get some of that down south.

Modern Day Argentinian police departments are definitely not, themselves, full of fascists.

The issue isn’t about thwarting the plan. The Wall already doesn’t work. Even conservative think tanks will admit to that much.

The issue is coming back to The Wall as a cultural rallying point. Build it 10’ taller. Build two walls. Put turrets on the walls. Patrol with drones. Add more barbed wire. Unleash sharks with laser beams on their heads into the Rio Grande. Litter the border with radioactive waste.

Anything to get people to turn their eyes south and say “Aaaah! Invasion! It must be stopped!” The Wall is just the latest panacea for a problem these people invented. They’re going to keep coming back and re-imagining it in between cooking up increasingly elaborate hoaxes about armies of brown people marching across it to Steal our Freedom.

Companies used to provide workers a pay related sense of justice, a career for life.

… There was a period from the 1940s to the 1970s when this was more common-place. But historically this kind of cut-throat wage squeeze was very normal, particularly in the industrialized American north.

One of the driving forces behind improvements in the American capitalist model, wrt pensions and professional job security and a regulated relationship between business and labor, was European Communism. The allure of the revolutionary communist reconstructions (and less revolutionary socialist rebuilds) drove some significant number of Western professionals into the waiting arms of Papa Stalin and a fair number more into large labor unions and socialist political ideologies.

Without the USSR as foil to the capitalist system, there is less urgency among the capitalist class to negotiate with labor and less optimism among American workers to achieve some kind of superior economic position.

That, combined with an absolute tsunami of corporate propaganda to brainwash civilian workers, a swelling pustule of a police state to cow the lumpen proletariat, and a Global War on Whatever to galvanize young liberals and conservatives alike against the phantom menace of foreign invasion, has supplanted any kind of negotiating between capital owners and their wage cuck workers.

The only thing you have to hope for in the modern day is a big enough 401k such that you can live like a parasite rather than the host.

The Danube is a river that runs from the south of Germany to the Black Sea.

As temperatures rise and snowpack in the Alps is depleted, the volume of water flowing into the Danube falls over time.

The Atlantic Ocean is rising with melting polar ice. The rivers of Central Europe don’t have access to that glacial run-off.

Obviously, the problem is that you’re asking the wrong questions. The AI is infallible. We just need to get the end user to accept that sometimes 2+2 = 5. Just depends on what Big Brother tells you.

The gerrymandering that Gavin says will happen in California is going to be voted on in November, it will probably not happen.

I will say this. They aren’t waiting until November 2026 to vote on it. So they’re at least pretending to take this seriously.

But I’ll also say that some right-wing court is going to decide the ballot measure is unconstitutional. And the California Dems are going to throw up there hands, announce collectively “Oh well we tried!”, and then find a way to blame Transgender people for the Permanent Republican House Majority.

2028 has to be about people on the right and left joining together to repudiate fascism and totalitarianism

I fully expect to see a repeat of 2020. The party establishment will be split between Elderly Nepo-Ghoul With Fanatical Partisan Following and Young Pretty Boy Who Says Progressive Things To A Room Of Millennial Age Investment Bankers.

On the edge of the debate, you’ll see a few genuinely progressive leftist voices saying things like “We should be against genocide” and “Homelessness is easily solveable if we put forward even the least amount of political capital” and “Granting DC statehood is the most obviously smart and moral Act any future Congress can pass”. Maybe even a few “Medicare 4 All is still a good idea” die-hards shouting from the extremely cheap seats.

And then one (or both) of the insider candidates will pick up a few of the more popular slogans as their own. This, while denouncing any of the fringe voices as Anti-White Racists, Politically Toxic Far-Left Anti-Capitalists, Eco-Terrorists, and Fat Ugly Unfuckable Losers.

Come primary day, said fringe leftists will do shockingly well in some of the early states. At this point, the centrist candidates will panic, drop the kabuki of intra-party squabbling, align behind whomever the current Party Elder tells them to select, scream that a vote for Fringe Candidate is a vote for Fascism, blanket the airwaves with a deafening smear campaign, disavow every nice thing they said up until this point, and maybe squeak in to the convention by a few points on a technicality about who gets to be Superdelegates.

The Convention will be a coronation of a rotten corporate homunculus. Any leftist disgusted by the process or the annointed candidate will be denounced as a Far-Right Foreign Plant designed to undermine the fundamental principles of democracy itself. Said rotten homunculus will pick a Token Minority/Progressive as their running mate, then immediately dump that person to the sidelines and campaign exclusively with the reanimated corpse of Rush Limbaugh.

Trump wins by a ten point margin in 2028. Leftists are blamed for the loss. Democrats vow to purge their party of anything resembling progressive values or human decency even harder. By 2032, they’re running a Bitcoin Billionaire in an uncontested primary, because it’s unreasonable to trust an election process that’s been infiltrated by Hamas.

US Civil War didn’t have 500 drones flying to various cities across US each day and night.

The Confederate Army got as far north as Gettysburg, Pennsylvania by 1863. The Union Army’s Anaconda Plan embargoed the entire Gulf Coast and resulted in the bombardment of cities as far south as New Orleans and Galveston. Sherman’s march wrecked a trail of destruction from Atlanta to Savanah, across 285 miles. They didn’t need remote controlled planes to bombard cities. They had troops outright razing cities to the ground month by month.

What is your suggestion for how the elections in Ukraine could be organized safely and so that the result would be reasonably representative?

Do Mail In Voting. That’s the same method we’ve been using in peacetime and wartime, around the planet, for centuries. It worked during COVID in 2020. It worked to end South African Apartheid in 1994. Mail in voting was vital to maintain democracy during mass deployments in WW2, Korea, and Vietnam. And, again, in the middle of the US civil war in 1862.

But, again, this isn’t an issue of whether democracy can work. This is an issue of whether Zelensky can maintain his position as his popularity nosedives. What scares the shit out of American liberals is the idea that a popular vote in Ukraine will reveal people aren’t enthusiastic about another year or three of grinding attrition with the Russians. Ukraine can’t risk having an election that refutes the dogma of the hawks.

Over here in Germany and probably the entire EU punishments don’t stack.

I mean, maybe that’s true. Idk. It’s definitely not how the American system operates. DAs have discretion in bringing charges and pushing for sentences. DA bias is, incidentally, a big reason for the racial/gender split in the prison population. The difference between involuntary manslaughter and capital murder is often what charge the DA chooses to bring.

But the turn of phrase “to throw the book at them” comes from the strategy of prosecuting for every conceivable crime, rather than the singular obvious one.

There is no way in which you can get less time for murder than for attempted murder here.

There are drug crimes that carry a harsher sentence than some murder sentences. The “Three Strikes” rule, notable in California, is a similar source of life sentences for non-violent crimes.

Depends on who is telling the story.

Japan / Korea were early instances of US industrial outsourcing. The consequences of the project was an economic boom during late 70s/early 80s in both countries, such that American politicians feared Japan and Korea would return to the world stage as independent regional powers. Reagan’s tariffs, the subsequent opening of Japanese import markets, and the further industrial outsourcing to China, the Philippines, and the rest of the South Pacific labor markets effectively clipped the wings of the Japanese/Korean wage laborer.

You could argue this was part of the “agreement” between Eastern Zaibatsu executives and Western investment banks. But I’d hardly call it a “measured response”. I certainly wouldn’t call it a policy that served the best interests of either Eastern or Western wage labor.