You can nitpick all you want at best the links you point to mean we bought a little bit of time.

Also typically it is Democrats at the state level even buying that time. But give it another few years and the mergers eventually go through.

This is the problem with people in general. Us working class slobs think in terms of this year or even this quarter because we're so used to living paycheck to paycheck.

The people making us live paycheck to paycheck think in terms of decades. It took them 60 years to screw us over this bad and they still aren't even close to done. They won't be finished until we are all living in a techno feudal hellscape.

Basically 98% of the population living in the kind of abject poverty you saw on American Indian reservations before the casinos. That's where we are heading and at this point I don't think it could be stopped.

Part of the reason is because a guy like you looks at a handful of minor setbacks and can't figure out that they are just minor setbacks.

Living in a car-centric city becomes a identity marker for a large number of americans. It's the same reason you see so much homophobia over here.

It's not that they are particularly attached to car culture or hating gays it's that both behaviors signal to other members of the in group that they themselves are a member of the in group.

I bring up homophobia because you see it a lot here among our Christian extremists. It's an easy way to let everyone know that you are very likely part of that radical Evangelical sect. It has absolutely nothing to do with anything written in the Bible it's just a way to display your identity to other people in that in group.

This isn't something I figured out on my own. I had always just chalked it up to random bigotry. There's a biblical scholar named Dan McClellan and he's the one that pointed it out to me.

Once you see it being used for one thing it's obvious when it's being used for other things. Hell I do it myself in the nerd communities I hang out in. Not so much this one anymore because here I most we just scream into the void but the anime forums and whatnot that I hang out with outside of this dying website

Honestly I wonder how much a car would cost if we took all of the externalized costs and made people directly pay them in a way they could see.

Not just the taxes on the roads but the billions and billions and military spending to maintain a reliable supply of oil globally, keeping in mind that the supply of oil has to be globally maintained or American oil sellers will just sell it for the higher price overseas instead of giving it to you...

Not to mention also the enormous negative health effects and all the costs there in. How many hundreds of billions of dollars get spent every year dealing with the cost of unnecessary car crashes or heart attacks from breathing smog or whatever the hell breathing all the tire particulate does to our bodies that I'm not allowed to call smog because if I call it smog here everyone gets in a fucking tizzy because you can't see it and for some reason this entire website has decided if you can't see smog it's not smog...

Basically large corporations like to externalize the cost of their product onto consumers and the government and I suspect that if you slapped people with the real cost of building our entire transportation Network around 2,000 plus pound machines we used to pick up chicks or get picked up if you are a chick then I think there would be a lot less interest in them.

I just haven't figured out a way for chicks to get picked up without cars. Honestly if somebody figures that out they deserve 50 Nobel prizes.

You can bet your ass anyone demanding the end of Tesla subsidies is also demanding the end of oil subsidies.

The goal is walkable cities. Public transportation for almost everything except a handful of commercial uses and people who live out in The boondocks.

If you ever thought about how much you give up to have that big honkin SUV maybe the average American would be more receptive. Nobody thinks about all the indirect costs like the fact that we maintain hundreds of billions of dollars of military to make sure the Middle East keeps oil flowing around the world.

Remember it doesn't matter if America can make enough oil for itself if the price of oil skyrockets overseas than the people who own that oil aren't going to sell it to you at a low price.

And those people have a lot of money and power so you're not going to get to take it at the barrel of a gun if that's what you think.

That entire system is a giant clusterfuk. On the other hand I'm a nerd so I never experienced owning a nice car and using it to pick up chicks. And I'm a dude obviously I mean I'm on slash Dot so I never looked for a dude with a nice car.

I suspect that stupid experience is going to Doom our entire civilization. Mix in a little bit of general bigotry and tribalism and hand over the nukes to a bunch of religious lunatics and we've got a recipe for a good old fashioned Fermi paradox.

They're doing layoffs because when the stock market dips they use stock BuyBacks to artificially manipulate the market. It's got nothing to do with losing money and everything to do with market manipulation and shifting money to the 1%.

And for all you people saying I've got a 401k so I love the stock market have you been paying attention to what they're doing with cryptocurrency? Your 401k is going to be vested completely into cryptocurrency scams and dodgy failing stocks from well connected CEOs. They did the same thing with public pensions but those are completely tapped out so they're moving on to 401ks. If you're under 60 they're going to take that money from you.

What's happening here is that the fundamental social contract between employer and employee is breaking down. It shouldn't be surprised that social contract was made at the barrel of a gun and the other side has been working on breaking it down for close to 50 years. Pretty much ever since Barry Goldwater lost.

The last election represents the beginning of the end. I watched the news media do things like take a story of Joe Biden listening to a question from somebody off camera and run with that as "Joe Biden stares blankly into distance" and I watched the pro corporate candidate Donald Trump stop at Town Hall to dance for 40 minutes awkwardly and I was told that was him getting close with his fellow voters...

More importantly anyone who tried to reliably report on the pro corporate candidate last election was immediately fired. I saw over a dozen editors at places like newsweek, USA today and the New York times given their walking papers when they tried to honestly report on the election.

I don't think people understand what's happening and I guess I can't blame them when the news media is clamping down that hard.

We have had almost 50 years of zero antitrust law enforcement and rubber stamped mega mergers.

Doesn't matter what your industry is you're going to find 80% of it is owned by the same handful of billionaires and or shareholders and they are all going to be doing the same evil things.

So yeah you can quit and go elsewhere but the exact same policies and procedures are going to be at the exact same company because they're all owned by the same people.

And if you try to take your skills and start your own company you're going to find that capital is basically impossible to get because our economy is kept in a constant state of near collapse so interest rates are going to be perpetually high and no bank is going to loan you a dime.

And of course if you do somehow get something off the ground one of those mega corporations is just going to grind you in the pulp. If you're really really lucky then they will do a buyout to get some of the engineers you hired but honestly I don't even think they're bothering with that anymore. Lately they just bring in more h-1bs and run you out of business with a competing product at lower prices subsidized by their other businesses.

We spent the last 50 years indulging in moral panics instead of voting for politicians that would take care of us and this is what it got us. Honestly I don't think there's a future. We're just going to Coast into techno feudalism.

It's amazing how many problems our civilization has because we can't let things go that we no longer have any use for. Not even the name of tradition just that's how it was when I was a kid so that's how it has to be now.

I know a trans girl who was upset that the younger trans girls had it much easier than they did. They were more than self enough aware to realize that emotion was all kinds of fucked up and wrong but they still couldn't stop themselves from feeling it. It wasn't fair after all.

To be fair that was before several billion dollars were spend putting the entire planet into a constant state of panic over trans girls they've all got it pretty rough now.

The bill doesn't have much pork relatively speaking but it does have 7 trillion dollars in tax cuts for 1%ers.

When those tax cuts hit it's going to freak out the bond markets and collapse the entire world economy.

But Elon needs to be the first trillionaire so we are all expendable

That doesn't know that the only reason ethanol is in our gas is because of politics and the corn industry and iowa?

It's one of the first bits of corporate corruption you learn when you're a kid. You see the word ethanol on a gas pump while your parents are filling up and you wonder about it and it isn't long before you find out what it is and why it's there.

I guess it's a slow news day and all. They're certainly isn't anything else going on around America. No siree.

Congress should pass a law that you have probably already fucked up.

There is no way our current society is capable of dealing with this shit. We simply do not have the tools. So there is almost nothing more meaningless than expecting Congress to react to something like this in a positive way.

Folks just don't understand the scale of what's going on here. We are entering a third industrial revolution. We don't teach very much about the first two. But it's worth remembering the phrase nasty brutish and short.

It's not that they're making the same requests over and over it's that there is an unlimited number of them.

Will have all the training data before everything goes offline or behind paywalls or becomes AI slop.

Then the only ones who will have any access to data to train will be platform holders who have the ability to distinguish between real people and AI slop using various tricks you use to detect bots.

AI becomes Capital that is only owned by a handful of billionaires and they can do what they want with it and we just have to suck it all down because the alternative is drastic changes to our society that we are unwilling to make. We aren't for example going to control people's access to overwhelming wealth and power because we're convinced the moment we do somebody's going to steal our toothbrush and the beat up SUV we drive.

Somebody still has to pick the fruit. It's still cheaper to use slaves for some things.

Also McDonald's. They're using slaves now. If you're down south and you order a Big Mac is a good chance of slave is going to take your order and or make it.

Honestly surprised that's not bigger news but then our corporate media is well, corporate owned. Sane washing.

I don't think so. Remember you don't have to worry about chat GTP unionizing. In America up until Trump won there was serious effort to develop unions Nationwide. It was the major platform of our previous president. You wouldn't know it because he kind of kept it on the down low in an effort to prevent the upper class from just spending trillions shutting him down.

I don't think the upper class actually saw the threat but I do think Elon musk needed Trump to be president because musk's businesses are failing and he needs new government contracts and he wasn't going to get them from Joe Biden or Kamala Harris.

So 250 million and a ton of voters suppression later Donald Trump is president again and we don't have unions.

But as things continue to get worse due to mismanagement and increasing automation there's going to be another push. And that's going to make companies want to turn to more automation in order to take away worker power.

The best description of AI I have read is that AI exists to allow wealth to access skill without skill accessing wealth.

The problem is that they have been caught multiple times not just holding on to the money. They often shuffle it around and invest or spend it in places. Just like a bank would only without the FDIC insurance. So when there is a run on a stable coin it just collapses and you are out the money.

This happens periodically but because most stable coins are used for money laundering nobody really cares. If they start being used as integral parts of our economy it's going to destroy everything. It's going to be exactly like the depression before we started regulating Banks.