But he’s correct. If you’re rich enough you can bribe all the seconds, then you can make extra moves and irregular moves. Heck, you can just have all the seconds declare you victor.
For extra points, hire guys with guns to make sure everyone at the tournament agrees with your rules.
This is the state of modern neoliberal capitalism from the view of billionaire oligarchs and multi-national conglomerate corporations.
This was a whole plot point of season one of The Boys in which Vought International forces Starlight to wear a skimpier costume (this after she was already sexually assaulted by The Deep).
Reality imitates art, I guess.
Americans are forced to participate in a malevolent system to survive.
I’m sure that the majority of smokers do not believe that tobacco production or consumption is a benefit to society.
What technology promise did he make that he kept?
His promise of self-driving cars turned into a huge pile of accidents, especially since he insisted (still insists) that autopilot operate on a single sensor. Waymo uses five.
It’s not like his companies did nothing. Getting his launch vehicles to land safely, vertically, was way cool, but a small step on the way to space colonies or space tourism.
The valuation of the stock is based on Musk doing what he’s always done, which is making seemingly impossible promises sometime in the future.
You know what he promised by 2025? A fleet of driverless Tesla taxis. xAI producing the first AGI. A human being on Mars planting a flag.
You know what the evaluation of SpaceX is based on? The promise of a Mars colony with one million human inhabitants, and space-based data centers. It’s going to be decades before it’s worth the IPO, if ever.
In the meantime SpaceX is in debt 20 billion, and is bleeding money. It lost $4.94 billion in 2025.
So it looks to me like a private equity project. Like Toys 'R Us or Radio Shack or Claire’s. Remember those?
And Nasdaq-100 is fast-tracking SpaceX into its portfolio after 15 days. Soon, pension funds and 401(k)s are going to feature SpaceX stocks. So when it does implode, a lot of worker-class folk are going to eat the loss.
You know who I bet will not be eating the loss? Trillionaire Elon Musk.
That is incredibly disappointing.
Or, you know, Google could go back to its link-ranking system for now until it figures out how to keep AI from hallucinating.
AI is still premature. Experimental. It should be regarded as such, like an early-access game.
Um, rich people control Israel.
As revealed in the Behind the Bastards two-parter on How The Liberal Media Helped Fascism Win ( Part one, Part Two on YouTube), rich Jews are aligned with the ownership class first and with their fellow working-class Jews second.
The current aggressive expansionism featuring genocide in Palestine (and beyond) is not popular among Jewish peoples, even the general Israeli population. But it is popular among the elites that control Israel… And curiously, the billionaires that control the United States.
While valid, the reason they’re encased in those big concrete pillars is to assure they’re safe for transport, and can survive accidents without leakage.
ETA: I should admit not ALL of our waste has been processed into vitrified HLW or packed for transport, but these processes are undergone before waste is shipped to a repository.
You’re right. John Oliver did an LWT segment on nuclear waste and how we have an overflow problem at many local sites, and meanwhile can’t get budgeting to complete the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. (It has some NIMBY problems, though it’s one of the most stable regions to put a deep geological repository.
But the storage overflow problem is approaching critical in some places. The US may not have enough repositories for nuclear waste, but we need them badly.
In the current era, I do not expect this situation to improve, and may get worse, especially since the regime is against renewable energy development.
I didn’t say other nations wouldn’t be better off without US interference. The US has caused a lot of problems and overthrown plenty of governments, sometimes for no greater crime than being an ideological threat by its presence, or refusing to let capitalist interests exploit their resources.
But the US is responsible for a lot of stability in the world. This is one of the reasons the dissolution of USAID has been so disastrous. It was a vector by which the US did good and created stability.
And yes, the fall of the US would mean that some military adventurism from the US would not happen, allowing some societies to develop in peace…but at the same time, other societies looking to expand violently will also be emboldened. It will be chaotic and unpredictable.
The US is showing a lot of the classic symptoms of approaching civilization collapse, from unmitigated climate change to polarization of wealth and power at the top, to the open, extreme corruption of government officials.
All the horsemen of the apocalypse are getting ready to ride.
But in the aftermath, we’ll learn all the ways that the empire stabilized the rest of the world, and conflicts between local warlords will break out across the world like hives.
That’s because the key ingredient for a data center is not an abundance of water and power, but regional officials who can be bribed to fuck over the local neighborhood.
In other parts of the world, data centers are regulated, required to not overwhelm the local infrastructure, and not bother the neighbors, but here in the US, politicians come cheap.
This is the Star Trek episode What Are Little Girls Made Of. and Peter Thiel is an android from the future trying to make sure his timeline comes to pass.
This is not merely a hypthetical. Vlad Tepes (Yes, The Impailer ) notoriously invited all his poor to a grand feast, instead to kill them all. (I think he burned them alive.) Usually in feudal and early capitalist societies, it was just enough to deny them basic necessities and let them die off, but this often would lead to an outlaw problem as some of the more able poors would turn to banditry and poaching to live.
In liberal societies, just as we don’t outlaw people anymore, there are some known good reasons to support low income, disabled and marginalized groups.
One of them is to cut off or discontinue the outlaw-to-professional-criminal pipeline. People who are forced to work but cannot for some reason will resort to poaching, banditry, fraud or any number of extralegal revenue-enhancement tactics. Criminal syndicates such as the Crips and the Bloods pull their numbers from demographics that are given no other choice by the society they live in.
Another reason the state might support it’s low-income demographics is in recognition that capitalist societies teem with social roles and efforts that contribute value to the society without compensation. Parenting is the primary one.
In fact, in the US, as social programs for low-income households have been defunded or rendered inaccessible (such as SNAP and Medicaid), millennials and zoomers are now choosing not to have children, and avoiding romantic relationships, so that the fertility rate is well below the replacement level 2.1 children. We’re not just not having kids, we’re not having sex.
Also, thanks to deregulation, and the failure of wages to keep up with inflation, a lot of the US is under-compensated. Much of the poor population in the US have jobs, but they’re not being paid a living wage. Infamously, Walmart workers still have to rely on SNAP benefits and Medicaid because their wages are not enough to afford a sustainable living. They still count as poor, and would be swept up if ICE were to start going after poor Americans. And then Walmart would find they have fewer applicants, and might have to offer better wages and benefits. (This happened after the great resignation when workers furloughed during the COVID-19 lockdown found they could monetize their home hobby, or just didn’t want their shit job anymore.)
But this isn’t to say these uncompensated or under-compensated people are useless or not contributing to society, just that what they do isn’t recognized by the system that rewards value with compensation.
Curiously, our political class and our ownership class both imagine they could dispose of the poor without ill effects, even as they directly depend upon those people to parent, to maintain homes, to organize communities and yes, even sometimes to do basic labor. At the same time, they’re also the ones screeching about how American women are not having enough (white male) babies.
Just as the US is suffering a shortage of farm hands to harvest crops, thanks to the persecution of immigrant workers, when we deny benefits and services to low-income houses, we’ll find that other work we depend on will cease to be done. And that will be accompanied by a new wave of organized crime… or maybe organized resistance against a state that has turned violent against them.
Disneyland has trams to take you from the parking lots to the entrance of the park. This is the next iteration.
I became a true believer in the pathway to a communist society. At very least I now understand how capitalism is so often doomed from within.
We are learning as a species that public relations (messaging, propaganda, whatever) is effective, and when the ownership class can put trillions into controlling the masses, it works.
I’d like to think there’s a counter for it, but the worker class seems to be willing to suffer a lot of misery so long as someone else is suffering more than they are.