I feel so bad for this man, because even if he’s acquitted of all the charges, the insane right wingers will never let him have peace. They’ll hound him and his family forever.

Heck, even if he is guilty and the jury determines as such, it’s still not an excuse to torture him to death either.

“I don’t use social media and never have.”

So what are they going to do if someone fires back with this? Deny their visa because they didn’t agree to be spied on by a few of the worst companies on planet fucking earth? Is the government going to be able to somehow make me prove that I don’t have social media?

We have the stupidest people in charge right now.

US: “NATO members need to up their defense spending!”

NATO: “Okay, we’ll do it.”

US: “Actually, We’re leaving NATO.” 🤡

Change the constitution then. It’s crystal clear. We don’t live in a vibe democracy. You don’t jut get to pick and choose what laws you get to follow if you want to be a nation of laws at all.

The thing about ending birthright citizenship is that it would just create a stateless individual. Where would they even deport children of undocumented immigrants to? Are they going to make an El Salvadorian gulag for them too?

The former SCOTUS ruling on the 14th amendment was really clear - if you are born here, you are a citizen regardless of your parent’s legal immigration status. I don’t understand why the SCOTUS is even bothering to hear this case when even a constitutional literalist would have difficulty trying to weasel-word their way into a ruling that supports the Republican position on this one.

I can thing of few things more cruel than a state that looks at a literal child who was born here, lived here all their lives, speaks the language, attends school, has friends and family and a support structure and would otherwise be indistinguishable from any other American child born to American-born parents, and deport them to a country they’ve never set foot in for no real discernible reason other than they are anti-immigrant racists.

I still can’t get over that the dude’s name is actually Burger, and Burger isn’t being used as a mild slur to mean “American” like I’m typically used to seeing in these sort of greentext posts.

Real life is too wacky.

That’s $1,500 with a coupon and the highest tier healthcare coverage that very few people outside of tech workers actually get. You don’t want to know what the out-of-pocket cost for something like this would be.

Thank fucking christ. Now hopefully the AI bubble will burst along with it and I don’t have to listen to techbros drone on about how it’s going to replace everything which is definitely something you do not want to happen in a world where we sell our ability to work in exchange for money, goods and services.

Did she ever accomplish anything other than going to places getting arrested and changing absolutely nothing?

It’s got you here talking about it with your terrible opinions, hasn’t it?

Take a look at this image and tell me if you think these guys accomplished anything other than going to a lunch counter and getting arrested and changing “absolutely nothing”?

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.

Nobody seems particularly alarmed by this, least of all Finland. I doubt Putin is going to go from losing a war against Ukraine to losing a war against Ukraine and Finland and the rest of NATO too. Seems like this “buildup” has been there for a while and is only growing presumably because Ukraine is getting really good at striking targets inside of Russian borders.