You're not expected to tune in for 5 days straight man. You're expected to pop in here and there watch a few minutes and leave.

It doesn't work though because arguments don't work anymore. Billionaires bought virtually all of the media so you can't get your message in front of people and even if you can it's going to be instantly counteracted by a deluge of right wing propaganda.

What they need to be doing is focusing on voter suppression so that we can shift the Overton window by winning elections but that is so boring so nobody on the left wing wants to do it. The centrists could do it but they would need encouragement and to be pushed by the left wing and all the left and the centrists can do anymore is bicker about policy. Mostly Gaza.

We wouldn't be having this conversation.

Somewhere in the ballpark of 7 million Americans were prevented from voting last year.

That put the climate change deniers in charge of the government and with it all the policy that matters.

This isn't the 1960s. Protests don't work anymore. The way they worked is the news media would cover them and the general voter would see them and react to them.

Billionaires figured that out so they just bought up the news media. They own everything now. So much so we've had to create entire new vocabulary to describe what they are doing. Alternative facts. Sane washing. Etc etc.

Basically you're not going to be able to get noticed or get your message out in any meaningful way. If you ever get any traction then they will alter the algorithm or they will fire the journalists covering the topics. I watched over and over again as Trump's dementia was on full display but anyone who started to report about it was either told to shut up or forced to resign.

The point is tactics from the 1960s do not work anymore. What we need to do is take back power and wield it and to do that we need to win elections. And to do that we need to combat voter suppression.

But that is so fucking boring. A 100 hour YouTube stream with all your friends is a lot of fun. Great for contacts in your industry too. Blathering on about polling locations and illegal challenges to signatures and registrations is dull as dishwater.

The major problem the left wing has is they are hobbyists so they only ever do the fun shit. There used to be a symbiotic relationship between the left wing and the centrists where the left wing would do the fun stuff and encourage the centrists to do the boring stuff and we would see progress. But lately the left just shits all over the centrist all day. Mostly because of a lot of Russian encouragement...

So every year we lose a little more and every year the same 1960s tactics that the right wing has long since adapted to keep getting thrown out there.

I can tell you that I work in it and everyone I know has their boss trying to replace them with ai.

Maybe it'll work maybe it won't but at least some of it is going to work.

And you know what it doesn't have to work 100%. If it works 20%, then your boss can fire 20%

And remember most of us here are older and better paid. We are going to be the first on the chopping block

but survival bias is a hell of a drug.

70% of middle class jobs lost since 1980 got taken by automation. But it's not like we don't have manufacturing jobs anymore we just have a hell of a lot less of them.

Americans hate nuance. We hate gradation. And we hate iteration. If something isn't black and white or doesn't work 100% out the gate we completely ignore it.

Here's the bottom line, the AI boom is going to result in massive amounts of automation. It's also going to result in Mass layoffs. Your boss will fire you and the guys who are left employed are either going to get a working ai, some form of automation, or they're going to have to work double shifts to make up for the broken automation and AI.

But your productivity is going to skyrocket, or you're going to get fired because your coworkers productivity skyrockets.

And just because there is nuance in how your boss fired you or forced you to work harder or replace you or whatever doesn't mean the economy isn't going to go into free fall and stay there permanently.

But fuck nuance amiright? Everything should be exactly the way it was when I was 12 and never change and if you say otherwise you're a bad person.

You give money to the right people in the government and the money comes right back to you. I remember years ago there was a study that show dropping $100,000 on a congressman have the best return on investment of any single thing you could put that money into.

I don't think it's quite true anymore because you can't compete with the billionaires. I remember a bitchy multimillionaire woman complaining she couldn't get the time of day from Congress because her bribes weren't big enough.

I wonder how much Zack paid for this juicy contract. Whatever it was I'm sure it was less than he'll get from my taxpayer dollars.

And Elon musk appears to be reinventing himself as a government contractor. Since the two governments supported businesses he runs are gradually collapsing he's going to need more taxpayer money to bail him out.

Must be nice to be able to draw from a never ending well of my money while taking 800 billion dollars from our healthcare system. If you live out in the sticks fun fact you're not going to have a hospital in 2 years

But will your economy survive? I know you're going to answer yes because there's a certain amount of pride that goes with not admitting that everything is collapsing around you.

But honestly when they want to take your house all they have to do is start jacking up the cost of the pills to keep you alive until you're forced to put a mortgage on it and then eventually you're going to miss a payment.

And sooner or later we are all going to need those pills. That's just getting old. If it's not the pills you'll need some minor surgery or maybe some major surgery or something.

Or of course you can drop dead and then they get your house then.

Our entire civilization and everything in it designed to protect you is either failing or being dismantled but it's extremely hard to admit that because it's terrifying. It also goes against everything you were taught when you were 12 years old and it's very very hard for people to get beyond those early childhood instructions.

The Christian extremists even have a name for it, 4 to 14. It's how they indoctrinate children so they can keep fleecing them for tithe.

Yeah but what about those of us who keep all of our images in Rhombicosidodecahedron aspect ratio? Nobody ever caters to our needs!

Leaking information has been a problem for a long long time. There have been models that can do this available since long before LLMs were a thing.

For example using a computer model it's child's Play to figure out I am actually an agent of SMERSH.

Just make fun of them instead. They are either trolls, right wing extremists trying to use conspiracy theories to get power, or scared desperate people trying to make sense of the world in the only way they know how.

It doesn't matter what group they are you're not going to reach them. Once in a while if they are family and you know them IRL you might get them to tone down the worst of it.

The reason people want to believe in this nonsense is that the real world is random and chaotic and often just fucks you up for no reason.

That's too much for a lot of people to bear so they come up with bizarre conspiracy theories to make sense of all the chaos.

If our civilization survives the number of people doing that will continue to fall. I have my doubts whether our civilization is going to survive but if you're going to spend time spend it on the people who don't fall for this shit. There is a concerted effort to prevent those people from voting or having the right to vote using common voter suppression tactics. That's a good place for any leftover energy you've got.

And if you just want to have fun go ahead and make fun of conspiracy theorists. They deserve it anyway

I mean is there like a menu with prices? I know there is for the presidential pardons but I didn't know about the lawsuits you could order.

The news media is completely owned by billionaires now so when it comes to getting information we are more or less on our own.

It's so bad we had to create an entire new vocabulary for it. Alternative facts and sane washing.

There are real journalists out there but they have a hard time keeping their jobs because the billionaires buy up any Media company they work for that starts to get traction.

I remember watching the website The Hill turn into right wing shills and being very confused because they were a left-wing site only to find out a billionaire had bought them.

Sooner or later everybody has a bad quarter and they either have to lay everyone off and shut down or they sell out to the devil and hope that they can hold on to their independence, and they never can.

It's a win-win for the billionaires because even if you don't sell out sooner or later you shut down and they win again.

I'm not sure we can get our way out of this. I don't think we really can anymore. Too many people, too many problems and too many people obsessed with stupid crap and moral panics. It's the same tricks in every country and it works every time

The Republican party is the authoritarian party. You will vote Republican if you're on the anti-floride train because you are already so far down the rabbit hole you will cheerfully trade your property and your rights for unscientific nonsense..

I figured as soon as I mentioned fluoride you guys would come crawling out of the woodwork. You are exactly proving my point. Good job.

I mean it doesn't matter you won. I mean you didn't they're going to take your house in a few years. They will use our medical system to do it too. Eventually you're going to start borrowing money to afford the pills to keep you alive and eventually that's going to be a mortgage and eventually you won't be able to pay that mortgage.

And you will have traded anti-floride for your house and I doubt you will know you did it but doesn't matter you're still going to be homeless.

You Feel like you got something from your government when they banned fluoride. I'm literally not going to argue with you on this point you are factually wrong. Especially in places that have poor access to dental care. There's no point to arguing with someone who's is wrong as you are.

But you are beautifully confident that you got something from your government. They take all your money and you get to Pat yourself on the back because you have secret knowledge and secret studies that nobody else has.

This makes you feel like you are in control of the world and all the terrible things happening around you are okay because you're in charge.

You are not. That's just a common psychological trick used by propagandists and authoritarians. But I'm not really talking to you. You are way way too far gone. I'm talking to all the other people who look at your comment and have a vague feeling that they are getting robbed blind because they know that they are going into more and more debt every year and it's only a matter of time before the bank takes their house even if they own it.

It's so weird to watch people trade property and security for unscientific nonsense but here we are.

And the anti-floride nonsense too it's because the Republican party is objectively terrible for the economy. The big beautiful bill they are working on passing is going to crash the economy. It gives 7 trillion dollars to the 1% on the national credit card while still cutting $800 billion a year in Medicare and Medicaid spending.

You can tell yourself all you want that those cuts are fine because fuck those people but when 800 billion exits the US economy you are going to be impacted by that.

So because the Republican party is objectively terrible for the economy and jobs they have to give their voters some reason to vote for them besides their pocketbooks.

So we get transpanic, anti-vax and anti fluoride nonsense

These little moral panics are the trade-off you make. You get to indulge in them and feel like you're in control and you have secret information. In exchange for that the entire economy is going to collapse, and you will eventually mortgage your house and lose it to a large corporation.

Doesn't seem like a good trade-off to me but what the hell do I know?

An updated covid shot this year.

The current shot though is better than nothing. You can and should lie about your immunocompromised status if you are not in the age group they are allowing it. They are not allowed to ask why you are immunocompromised and even if somebody does the list is enormous and includes things like depression.

Basically just use the same tactics used to get your weed card back in 2005.

lots and lots of people are going to die. And if we have another pandemic it's going to be terrifying.

Every single institution designed to protect you has failed or been disassembled. Good luck out there people.