Smeevy

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I thought it was 1-2 billion dollars.... Are we just sticking with 2 billion now?

Do I hear 3? Anybody?

The road to authoritarianism is apparently paved with people telling me I'm overreacting.

This classification, just like every other action taken by this administration, is a means to inflict damage on their ever-expanding list of enemies. The great thing about vague nonsense like this Antifa EO is that they can control who is and isn’t defined as Antifa.

With regard to your political affiliation, I honestly do not care. If you want to gabble on about Antifa as if it's a real threat, you might as well just fly the Trump 2028 flag and drop the silly pretense.

I'm independent

That's great and I totally believe you. Thumbs up emoji and all that.

I've seen what antifa militants do almost every time they protest,

Oh my gosh, you were serious. Can you point out the "Antifa militants" to me? How would someone go about training to join the Antifa Elite Guard?

I see there's a whole process to get into the Proud Boys and all sorts of other right wing extremist groups on Facebook, but I'm not quite seeing the path to membership for Antifa. Is it because they're so well organized and funded by billionaires?

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1-2 billion dollars? Over 2 weeks across 20 states? That's horrible.

January 6th damage was estimated at $2.7 billion dollars by the GAO. That riot (more of an attempted coup) actually was coordinated by actual, tangible right wing extremist groups rather than the shadowy "Antifa" fiction that hides underneath all of your beds.

https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-23-106625.pdf

It is riots like those mentioned that I presume this executive order is targeting.

You presume? This administration has lost the benefit of any doubt. This is a cabal of shameless liars and they should be denounced at every turn.

This is yet another transparent attempt to circumvent basic American rights and you're defending it like I said something mean about your local sports team.

I eagerly await more AI slop that references studies that have never existed. Or, as this administration calls it, "science."

Rational arguments? You're relying on a cognitively impaired, narcissistic criminal to come to his senses?

Even if he does, there is damage here that will not be undone.

We need to stop treating this monster like a wayward child.

What does "globalist" mean again? Please explain that to me so I can understand.

Yeah. It would go to fund education. Sure. Funding education is totally on brand for modern conservatives.

They "didn't do anything" in the same way that a mob boss saying that someone should be "dealt with" didn't mean for that someone to be murdered.

Do those people ever get tired of all of that pearl-clutching? Being a modern conservative seems exhausting, what with all the faux outrage and constantly shifting fundamental beliefs.

I guess that's better than defending pedophiles, deporting US citizens, and then complaining about literally everything all the time.

As Cicero said, "We are slaves of the law so that we may be free."

I'm not being sarcastic or anything here. Accepting a few limitations on the theoretical extents of my personal freedom so that I can exist and not worry about being murdered for my possessions on a minute-by-minute basis seems like a pretty good deal.

Hah. I just watched the video without reading the comments.

I believe if it's flown with the intent of deceiving the enemy then it's classified as a war crime. In this instance, it would appear that the Russians were attempting to at least create confusion for Ukranian forces. Does this qualify as perfidy?

Not that Russia cares about committing war crimes, of course.

I've seen values estimated at between $150,000 to $200,000 for that trinket. That's actually a pretty solid bribe for most politicians and that's just what's been visible to the public.

For comparison, in AZ we had legislators caught in a sting operation that were selling individual votes for gambling legislation for between $660 to $60,000 in the 1990s.

We should not normalize this. That was a outright bribe even if it wasn't as big as what others gave. I wouldn't get off the hook for murder just because I argued that Ted Bundy killed waaaaaaay more people than me.

I completely agree with you. All the best jobs I've had have come from personal relationships.

I wouldn't say that I'm arguing in bad faith so much as recognizing yet another situation like this: https://www.readtpa.com/p/innuendo-studios-card-says-moops-s...

Let's look at "rich flight" through the lens that is not colored with difference to the affluent. The idea here is that, if you make rich folk pay more taxes, they'll pack up their hoard pile of gold, jewels, and dwarf skeletons and fly away to somewhere they're less taxed and more appreciated.

That sounds great until you realize that rich people have massive roots in the places they live. Their expensive homes and professional lives are very closely tied to the community in which they're located. This flight is something that gets threatened very frequently and acted upon very rarely. If past performance is any indicator of future returns, then I'd gladly take my chances that those jerks stick around and pay their fair share.

You're intentionally sticking your head in the sand because you think the paper is from a "right wing think tank" - regardless of the fact that an extremely well-respected fiscally liberal podcast, Freakonomics, supported the findings.

My disgust comes from actually looking through the Mahattan Institute and seeing it's every bit as trash-flavored as the Heritage Foundation. I absolutely don't need to entertain their disingenuous, fascist-adjacent prattle. After the last few months, it's advisable to write off anything that still claims to be conservative. They've squandered all benefit of the doubt and, for the sake of our own survival, should be reviled at every opportunity.

On a more targeted note, you are switching between "I find this idea intriguing" and "this idea is a fact that's supported by the liberals on Freakonomics" so fast I'm getting whiplash over here. Freakonomics, while entertaining, has been spectactularly wrong enough times that it's more entertainment than anything else. You're appealing to an authority that has a predilection for results that are "surprising."

I don't know if you support the erosion of civil liberties, but it seems like you enjoy repeating things from folks that do.

That's what the US Courts get for hiring GDIT.

Sure... what is more likely to occur is that the physical libraries are closed and then replaced with *poof* nothing.

There might be the promise of free home internet, but , darnit, the folks in charge just couldn't do that in a way that appeases broadband providers. I guess we'll all just have to make do with nothing. Again.

How many people were killed after following medical advice from steam engines and airplanes?

You make over $500k annually and you can't afford a house? I call shenanigans.

Your pearl clutching about government waste seemed weird to me until I read your links. Manhattan Institute? You're citing positions from right-wing think tanks after Project 2025?

Unless you need guidance for how to kidnap gardeners or stop women from voting, anything coming these organizations is dangerously ridiculous.

I would absolutely agree that ChatGPT access loses out to physiological and safety needs by more than a little bit.

Now that I think about it, I'm not quite sure where to put cost-effective LLM access in Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

I think you should try holding Trump to the same standard to which you hold Biden. Just as an intellectual exercise.

If you're truly honest about doing that, you should wind up being disgusted 24x7.

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That's not an unfair assessment, but I would pose additional questions:

Why does doing the morally sound thing always have to be easier, better, and cheaper than ruining the world and creating human misery? Why must the morally superior argument be financially unassailable?

I'm getting older and angrier and I've grown tired of meeting greedy, disingenuous adversaries halfway just to have my hand slapped away after they get what they want. Since we've established that conservatives will absolutely put up with pain to harm outgroup bogeymen, I don't listen to their appeals for things that I hope will reduce human misery in the world.

With that in mind: Tax the rich like it's the 1950s, healthcare for all, stop burning fossil fuels, etc. Do it all and see what works, darn it.

Absolutely not. I feel terrible for people coming out of school with CS degrees right now.

Life is already difficult for young people right now and 6 figures of college debt is just putting another obstacle in their path.

For what it's worth, I don't know that the open source route is particularly fruitful either. I hear people recommending that as a way to get hired, but I never hear much about it making a difference in the hiring process.

Just my .02, though.

I umderstand where the author is coming from, but it saddens me that doing the actual work of maintaining software is frowned upon. I would guess that whatever senior pumped those software dependencies into the codebase without a care towards updating them in the future was hailed as a 10x superstar.

Our industry is ruled by shortsighted, greedy children now more than ever.

I believe that, especially in software, we don't ask ethical questions up front and just start solving puzzles.

If and when people start asking themselves these questions, their only options are to rationalize away the harm their work has done entirely, engage in moral relativism, or consider "the big picture" at a zoom-level where nothing ever really matters.