Yea definitely a plutocracy.

We are deep in “palace court politics” right now where theres an autocrat wielding all the power and most of the news is about the relationships between the powerful members of the court.

Archduke hegseth is angry at the viceroy of Anthropic and so now their AI model is illegal. Did you hear that court jester musk has had a falling out with the mad king? He sent his messengers far and wide to tell everyone that trump fucked kids.

Our policies are controlled by the ultra wealthy donor class who have completely captured both parties.

I don’t see any clean way out of it, I think there are 3 likely scenarios.

1. AI works well enough to remove the need for our labor and allows the plutocrats to exert control over us. This one is the one they are pulling for and hoping for, theres a reason they keep talking about a “permanent underclass” that’s the future they see for you. A different class of humans, kept around as long as they are useful and ultimately discarded. I don’t think this one will happen mostly because I don’t think the AI we have today is on a path to AGI and as they iterate on this they will find that they can’t actually get rid of us.
2. AI weakens labors power and we continue the multi decade slide further and further into late stage capitalism. A perfect machine tuned to extract as much profit from you paying you the absolute minimum amount possible for your labor and charging you the absolute maximum amount for everything. A supercharged system of algorithmic gig work and personalize dynamic pricing that exists to make sure every ounce of your economic utility is funneled to the plutocrats. Right now, this is the most likely outcome.
3. They try for outcome 1 or 2, the conditions become bad enough that people rebel (either through violence of non violent political action, although they work everyday to close off that second avenue). Humanity realizes that we shouldn’t allow billions to suffer so a couple hundred ghouls can live in absurd wealth and bang kids. I had held out hope for this option, but it doesn’t seem like it’s coming any time soon. People seem to have moved past the Epstein files (or they remember but have accepted nothing will happen) they are ok with being paid unlivable wages and buy now paying later their next meal. Maybe not delighted about the situation, but ok enough not to start hurling Molotov cocktails.

We got here because the the wealthy played the long game. They found willing partners in the boomers to a new set of ideas that maybe the government is bad and shouldn’t restrain big corporations and that corporations are somehow always good. Little by little, bribe by bribe, they bought the regulators and we now live in a world where politicians run on cutting regulation, they run on not doing their jobs, and people cheer.

Society is about balancing power, not allowing too much to collect into one group because they will abuse it. That group can be any group, the government, the church, giant companies. The only metastable configuration we’ve found is when you have a couple of them actively fighting with each other keeping them in check. We are currently living through a period where one of those groups, neoliberals and corporations, have amassed most, if not all, of the power. It is unlikely to last forever, but it will last a while and probably be relatively unpleasant.

Gotta nuke something

Classic art of the deal.

A trump never pays, so it’s ok to agree to pay things yoy cant possibly deliver. You weren’t going to pay the things you could deliver, why let a little thing like “you dont control Israel’s army and their endless bloodlust” stop you from promising that they will do things.

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

DNC: brilliant

In the conversation with Fortune, Murrell added that he gave a $1.5m bonus to employees of Five Guys’ 1,500 US stores to try to make up for the chaos unleashed by the promotion at various locations.

Globally … FiveGuys has 30,000 employees.

So let me get this straight. This fucking moron dreamed up a dumbass promotion that made 30,000 employees lives miserable as angry customers demanded free burgers and most likely hurled vitriol and hate at them.

His big brain protection was to give every store $1000. $1.5M spread out amongst 30k employees is $50 per employee.

You think one of these employees could be mad enough to shoot you and then go “hmm… $50 ought to do it”

I sorta hope someone spend their $50 on ammo

Edit: fiveguys made $3.5B in revenue last year or about $10M per day and this guy wants a slap on the back for handing out 1/10th of 1 days revenue to the people that actually make that money for the self serving reason of not getting shot.

Edit: for those that would prefer I rerun these numbers for just the US employees

From the fiveguys website

We average roughly 25 employees per Five Guys location. Add it all up and we currently have more than 30,000 people working for Five Guys worldwide!

At our corporate office, we have around 250 employees.

So let’s take the $1000 per location (which I calculated with the number of locations in the US) and divide that by 25 employees per location and we arrive at… $40.

For those upset that I used revenue instead of profits, five guys doesn’t publish annual profit figures so I’d have to guess and I can’t imagine that would make you any happier. At a 10% profit margin it’s 1 days worth of profits.

It’s such a shame that all of human knowledge isnt readily available to this person. Oh it is, on the very device he’s using to post this, how embarrassing

Capitalism.

Now there are all kinds of things people think of when you say capitalism, the free market, democracy (for some reason), etc.

But I mean the idea that the guy that owns the means of production should get the value produced by labor.

If you boil it down to that, it’s kinda crazy. You want to start a company digging holes, but you don’t have enough money to buy a backhoe.

Fred has plenty of money and can afford a backhoe. He buys it and makes you a deal, you can use his backhoe and he will own the company, you go out and dig holes and he will pay you a couple bucks an hour.

Obviously he has to charge the people that want the holes dug more than he’s paying you to make it worth his while, and he has to recoup the money he spent on the backhoe in the first place.

Fred will never pay you enough to live and save up to buy your own backhoe. After a while he’s made back all the money it cost him to purchase the backhoe.

So now the situation is this. A customer wants a hole dug, you come and dig the hole, and Fred, who has done nothing and already recouped all the money he spent to purchase the backhoe, gets most of the money. And that arrangement just goes on forever. When Fred dies, Fred Jr will inherit that backhoe, Fred Jr will have never spent a dime for that capital, in fact Fred Jr will have had a very comfortable life paid for by the sweat of your labor digging holes.

Fred Jr will get most of the value of your labor for his whole life for doing nothing at all, just because he happened to be Fred’s son.

This is the way we decide who gets the rewards of all the work humanity collectively does (under capitalist systems) and it’s resulted in a hundred or so people so insanely wealthy we can’t even conceptualize how much money they have and everyone else scraping by.

And very serious people (often paid by those billionaires) will be on the news (or replying to this very comment) telling you how this is just the only system that makes sense. But listen closely when they do, they will always say it’s good because of free markets, or competition, or democracy or something that is NOT capitalism. Capitalism rarely defends itself by talking about why it’s good for the rich guy that owns the capital to get all the value, it always misdirects you to something else, a free market or freedom just generally. The freedom to pick between 10 different ultra wealthy companies that own everything and work to make them even more wealthy for your entire life.

The reason Dems are doing this is clear.

If Mamdani wins they can go “we endorsed him, he won because of the backing of the party”

If Mamdani loses they can go “see, we told you that we need to pivot further right. We told you. We didn’t sabotage him, we endorsed him for goodness sake”

Withhold endorsement and throw mud in the water all the way up to the end then try to slap a last minute endorsement on there so they can absolve themselves of any blame and pretend like the “time to vote left is the primaries” like they won’t ratfuck you after you win the primary.

In what scenario would a parent going “do not treat my teens STI in defiance of the treatment they are actively seeking” not be abuse and neglect.

This assassination attempt was almost definitely a false flag.

Let’s, for sake of argument, say it wasn’t.

The location has plenty of security, security that successfully stopped the gunman.

In what world would this mean “obviously we need more security.” The security worked, it has enough funding, also the thing that protects the president is the secret service which is part of the department of the treasury, not DHS.

So the secret service did their job and stopped a threat and for some reason that means we should give an unrelated part of the government more money.

I’m sure the loss of hers immunity in close living quarters won’t have any negative effects.

Real quick question, if someone wanted to dismantle our ability to fight and win wars how exactly would their actions differ from this administrations?

Vote blue no matter who!

Ok the voters have chosen Mamdani, all the centrist Dems who demand progressives not run spoilers are gonna vote blue no matter who right?

Right?!

These same CEOs will say they work sun up to sun down and then they just consider any moment they are awake “working”

• enjoying a lavished catered lunch on the company dime: work
• having drinks with other executives punctuated by the occasional sentence here or there about buckling down for next quarter: work
• sitting and barely listening to a presentation someone else put together and then making a semi-random decision based off a partial understanding after someone has boiled all the complexity away into two viable solutions that are only cosmetically different: work

And then after a long day of doing nothing of value they go back to their mansion and enjoy their 8 figure salaries and “read a paper” or “think about work” and consider that burning the midnight oil while all the material cares in the world are easily handled for them.

Fuck that noise

You can tell from the quality of his work that this might be the first time he’s done any kind of manual labor.

What a thrill for him to pretend he’s a working man. Probably got done went home opened a $12 microbrew and really let his hair down.

https://cuberule.com/

He can tell Americans they are in a new golden age all he wants, his hyper focus on it belies his anxiety.

People will swallow a lot of lies. Immigrants caused you to be poor, trans people pose some existential threat to you, if it were for woke DEI youd be better off.

These lies work because there’s no real way for the listener to validate it, you are giving them some reason why their lousy lot isn't their fault.

The lie that doesn’t work is “you have it good” because that person you’re lying to knows whether or not they have it good. They are paying the bills and if you tell them “actually the bills are cheap” even the most believing believer will have to compartmentalize that. They will either have to sit with the lie and accept it or contort themselves into a less blatant lie like “things could be worse”

Trump is at the bar chatting up the down on her luck, past her prime, divorcee, telling her how now that she’s met him she’s hot again, everyone is saying how hot she is, everyone is saying how rich she is, everyone is saying how much she’s winning. But when she looks in the mirror, or in the bank account, she has to believe him more than her own eyes.

That’s a tough sell, he has a cult so it might work, but it’s a real tough sell.

Ok I also had this question and everyone was just cracking jokes instead of answering it.

Business Development Representative is the most likely correct answer given the context

Wakes up and says he’s going to hit Iran 20 times harder today.

Finds out about mines and says… he’s going to hit Iran super duper hard.

You might want to save some room throughout the day for escalation you fucking moron.

The more disturbing thing that we are entering is a K shaped economy.

The consumer base of the United States has split, the wealthier part is doing better and spending more, the poorer part is doing worse and spending less. You have diverging lines like a K

One of the scariest things going forward is that the consumer base of America used to have an economic protection in that the economy depended on not crushing the consumers. With the split in the consumer base the poorer part now represents less and less of the GDP, down to near 10%. This removes the incentive to protect them and we will start seeing more and more bifurcation in the haves and the have-nots.

It remains to be seen if the have-nots will accept this, so far the American population has been pretty accepting of the slowly ratcheting person crushing machine that is late stage capitalism.

I wish people could really understand this.

Neoliberalism leads to fascism. Not like in a cartoonish they sit around in some fortress of evil planning a Nazi takeover.

Neoliberalism all over western society has shown itself ineffective at meeting people’s needs.

Neoliberalism wants free markets and limited governments. This leads to capital gaining a huge amount of power because the government categorically doesn’t want to regulate them. That power eventually turns to exploitation of the citizens and capture of the government.

Exploited citizens with an ineffective government get frustrated with a system that’s not meeting their needs. This is the dry tinder in which fascism catches fire, a charismatic person shows up and says “give me unlimited power and I can fix this quagmire you are in” and a lot of people go “fuck it, it can’t be worse than this” and you get a fascist dictator.

Neoliberalism leads to fascism not because they are the same but because neoliberalism creates the perfect environment for fascism to sprout and grow.