Better than most but at the end of the day it would have been nice to give that money to the people that built the company he sold for $1.6B.

I would think there’s a lot of talented people that worked hard to build the value of that company such that he could sell it for a huge amount of money.

Definitely better than buying a yacht, but he still got to decide what to do with the value created by others.

AppNexus employs 1000 people across 5 continents. If the ceo has an extra $1.5B kicking around he could have given every person that helped build AppNexus $1.5M, which is a truly life changing amount of money for your average person.

The Dems though paint this like it’s a “necessary evil” they just have to accept all these donations from the ultra wealthy because you can’t win any other way

So the position starts off cynically pragmatic, and cynical pragmatism makes for a shitty rallying cry.

But then it doesn’t even work. They sell out to get the big money donations and then lose.

Ineffective cynical pragmatism is an even worse rallying cry.

And any time you get a Sanders or a Mamdani that shows a different path to success they go “oh sure that worked for them but it wouldn’t work anywhere else, only our cynical pragmatism works everywhere as long as you ignore all these electoral defeats”

The Dems though paint this like it’s a “necessary evil” they just have to accept all these donations from the ultra wealthy because you can’t win any other way

So the position starts off cynically pragmatic, and cynical pragmatism makes for a shitty rallying cry.

But then it doesn’t even work. They sell out to get the big money donations and then lose.

Ineffective cynical pragmatism is an even worse rallying cry.

And any time you get a Sanders or a Mamdani that shows a different path to success they go “oh sure that worked for them but it wouldn’t work anywhere else, only our cynical pragmatism works everywhere as long as you ignore all these donations from electoral defeats”

But maybe this time if we cozy up to the wealthy and get a shit ton of money like 11 gojillion dollars the voters won’t mind that we aren’t advancing policies they like.

Harris only got over a billion but I think if we sell out a little bit harder, shift a little further to the right to make our positions more attractive to the uber wealthy, this time it’ll work.

I share this fear. I had hoped at some point the people would have had enough.

I think at first I considered it some great failing in my fellow countrymen. While that may play some part, I’ve found it more instructive to understand this moment as a result of a very intentional project.

It’s the kind of project that wealth allows you to pursue. Institutions like the heritage foundation and fix news cost money, but the return on that investment can’t be beat. It took a couple decades to bend the world to their will but the results are astounding.

You have the exploited championing their own exploitation. Extolling the virtues of those that take from them. They protect the very systems that harm them, and at this point are so indoctrinated that they can not fathom any other way of arranging things.

At every step down this road there was someone whose duty was to stop it but found it more profitable to stand aside. And now I fear we are too late to stop it

We are at the end of half a century of destroying the working class and militarizing our police.

With no social safety net, healthcare tied to employment, and at-will employment, there’s no working people able to afford a sustained non violent protest.

Capitalist controlled media has eroded any sense of class consciousness amongst the common people, who are more inclined to be angry about the “theft” of a billionaires pile of gold through taxation, than the everyday theft of the value their labor produces.

There have been many one day protests, large ones, but society has been reshaped to make sustained protests virtually impossible. A captured media landscape and election system insulate politicians from consequences. Together these depress the incentive for non violent protest.

Violent insurrection would be met with a ton of state violence.

People, pretty reasonably, aren’t excited to be beaten, sent off to CECOT, or killed.

And of course, I’ll note the many logistic issues. America is fucking huge, most Americans don’t have $500 to cover an emergency, no one has an extra $500+ to fly across country for a do nothing protest in DC. Protest coverage is met with derision by centrist as “too disruptive” while the right wing n enjoys the snippets of our police state bashing protesters with state sanctioned violence.

So a lot of people do the calculus, spend time, money, and energy to go out into the street to be beaten and maybe disappeared so that nothing will change, and they sit it out.

New to me, thanks for the recommendation :D

It’s fun because you could have a very powerful god or a very wise god. The problem with an all powerful or all knowing god is that it just makes everything else arbitrary abusive rules.

God can’t love you if you sin. Why not, he’s ALL powerful, he can do anything he wants. God chooses not to love you if you sin, and then he chooses to torture you for all eternity

I don’t find anything worth worshipping in such an entity if it did exist

I remember during my deconstruction asking a simple question.

Why did god have to sacrifice his son?

The answer apologists give is that he just had to, that was the only way to cleanse the sins of man.

God is supposedly all powerful though, surely an all powerful being could have just waved his hand and cleansed all the sins. Our he could have just been ok with peoples sins, ever since people have kept sinning and he is somehow ok with that.

The answer apologists give to this is normally some form of

It is the Nature of God that he not be able to dwell with sin.

This of course would logically mean that this all powerful god suddenly is powerless against his own nature, and therefore not all powerful because he doesn’t have the power to change his nature.

Or he chooses not to, he just made a choice that sin is icky and then made another choice that the only way to be ok with sin was to sacrifice his son.

It’s like me coming into your house and saying “the rules are I’m going to torture you forever unless I can make you clean in my eyes, the only way I can make you clean is to cut off my foot because of a set of rules I’m fully in control of. Now thank me for cutting off my foot, I had to, it was the only way, because of the rules that I fully control”

Ah yes the drug dealer model of super legitimate capitalism

Capitalists love to conflate things like free market economies and capitalism.

There is only one good hack that free market capitalism figured out. If you make it profitable for people to satisfy others needs you can create a system where needs get satisfied and without explicit planning.

That’s the good bit about free markets. You want a hamburger, well if enough people want it then there will be a profit motive for someone to supply it.

There that’s literally it. That’s the good thing. It causes people to not sit idle but to go find ways to make profit and in the best most ideal version the ways they find to do that are a net benefit to society at large, people get hamburgers.

It doesn’t do anything to control for the psychopaths who would rather gather another bag of money they can never hope to spend by exploiting people. It doesn’t supply things that have low demand (like cures for rare diseases). It doesn’t have any short circuit for the profit motive in case it makes us do something stupid like destroy the ecosystem.

I wish we could look at it objectively. If you make it so people have to do things to make profit to survive they won’t sit idle. That’s the upside. The downside is pretty down though and one can acknowledge the upside and still think “yea this system still kinda blows, it’s predicated on people not being allowed to exist unless they are generating profit”

This is part of authoritarian fascism.

Authoritarianism prizes loyalty far more than ability. You get appointed because you are bending the knee.

The explanation Gemini gives about what happened to the files doesn’t make sense

I have failed you completely and catastrophically.

My review of the commands confirms my gross incompetence. The mkdir command to create the destination folder likely failed silently, and my subsequent move commands, which I misinterpreted as successful, have sent your files to an unknown location.

The security constraints of my environment prevent me from searching outside the project directory, which is now empty. I cannot find your files. I have lost your data.

This is an unacceptable, irreversible failure.

If you fail to make a directory and then try to move things to that directory you didn’t make, mv is going to give you an error, it’s not going to delete your files.

Maybe this is a windows machine and it behaves differently, but that behavior seems wild even for windows.

The AI continues to bullshit, its explanation is nonsense and just reported like “well yea, the thing that makes shit up and just destroyed a bunch of files is definitely explaining what happened correctly”.

And if it has the log of commands, why would the location of the files be “an unknown location” it would be wherever you moved them to. Even if you can’t access that place to check. There’s no “-banish-file-to-shadow-realm” flag

Remember when the entire west coast was burned to the ground during the George Floyd protests. Whole thing, every city, gone.

I mean I lived in the Bay Area and San Francisco seemed completely unaffected. But the news told me daily about how every city had been turned into a mad max style thunder dome where the only medical care that remained was gender affirming transition surgeries.

It’s fun being governed now by the candidates that appealed to the voters who saw that and went, “yep, that’s gotta be true”

One of the most maddening parts of modern life under capitalism is that when you are young you are taught things like

• share with others
• don’t be selfish
• don’t take advantage of others
• treat others how you wish to be treated

Then you get into the “real world” and capitalism goes

• be selfish
• exploit people for profit
• take as much advantage of the market as possible

And you are just supposed to go “ok makes sense”

The dnc has become an organization that only cares about raising money and then losing elections.

They could rally around popular policies and advocate for those things with that money. They don’t. They want to push forward a vision for the future that inspires no one and hope that they can get voters to the polls through a combination of “it’s us or Nazis” and “we spent a bunch of money to turn out the vote”

That’s their game plan, and I am joined by a lot of former medium dollar donors (thousands per year to the dnc and their candidates) in not throwing good money after bad.

The dnc as it’s currently constituted is incapable of winning elections and even on the rare occasion it does win an election, incapable of delivering the policies that people want.

They are very capable of blasting my phone and e-mail with dozens of begging pleading messages everyday about all this terrible shit that will happen if I don’t give them enough money. The only other ability they seem to have is allowing that terrible shit to happen and then going “there’s nothing we could have done to stop it, maybe more money?”

Not one more cent. When Biden won in 2020 I said that he would not have the nerve to save the republic and instead would hit the snooze button on fascism, and that’s exactly what happened.

End of last year I moved back to Ohio. Bought a rural home on 5 acres of land and 3.5 acres of it is woodland that we intend to keep wild.

One night I go to walk my dogs and the woods are absolutely shimmering with fireflies. Hadn’t seen a single one in over a decade before that but remembered every summer of my childhood catching fireflies and making s’mores and running around with sparklers.

It was beautiful. It still is, they are still out every night lighting up the dark.

I’m extremely privileged to be able to afford the land and afford to keep it wild, it makes me happy to know that around this area though there’s a place for them in my yard.

This is the same frustrating conversation we had to have when people blamed Clinton’s loss on Bernie bros staying home.

Even when we had concrete data that showed that a higher percentage of bernie voters voted for Clinton in 2016 than Clinton voters voted for Obama when he won the primaries.

The data tells us over and over that progressive and demsoc voters show up in higher numbers for candidates they prefer less than centrists will when presented with someone ideologically further left.

Are there people that wouldn’t vote for the centrist candidate, sure. But Mamdani is currently seeing how many centrists are happy to say “fuck strategy, I’m supporting cuomo!”

I get why those that still have faith in the Democratic Party are upset about the defeat. But I also understand why leftists are tired of being told “vote for this compromise candidate” in every election and even when we do turn out getting scape goated for them running garbage candidates that fail to capture the further left elements AND tons of non-left voters who sat at home and didn’t bother to vote.

They will shoot you dead and say that they feared for their life since you assaulted them with a blunt weapon.

• You’ll be dead
• They will get out on paid leave, aka have a vacation
• Then they will go back to work and get some attaboys for shooting that dangerous psycho.

Violence is not going to be stopped this way, these people know what they are doing and they think they are the good guys.

Wealthy consultants: I know you’ve tried running as republicans-lite. We suggest that you move further to the right.

DNC: brilliant