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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I think what’s wild is that particular group’s incredible thought process of “oh yeah, the current guy is just doing a hit job on this other guy because he’s running for President. He’s sending all these various agencies after him. blah blah blah…”

    And I’m just like. Or you know, simple answer is that guy is doing crime stuff and ought not to be doing crime stuff. To really over simplify the most recent crime stuff. The crime was he wrote the wrong thing on the sheet of paper. You look at the paper, it says it’s for lawyer stuff. You look at the receipts shows the money went to hide sex stuff. Lawyer stuff ≠ hide sex stuff. Ta-da!

    And a bit more detail. The whole argument that hiding sex stuff wasn’t political money. Literally a letter between crime guy and other person handling political stuff was, we need to hide this sex stuff otherwise that could hurt us in election stuff. Like I get it that there’s some folks wanting to believe that President guy is just mad at crime guy and wants to whatever him so that President guy can stay in office. But crime guy literally admitted crime stuff in letters he thought no one else would ever read. Crime guy is not a very smart crime guy.

    I don’t like current guy, don’t get me wrong. But crime guy is an idiot. I just don’t want an idiot back as President. There’s just way too many people hitched to an idiot here and willing to go down with the ship. Crime guy is an idiot and he’s getting smacked with a lot of the crime shit he’s done because he’s an idiot. There’s not any other way to slice this. Crime guy is just not good at anything and is coasting on mom and dad money still. If anything, that Crime guy is still floating on some money is a testament to Crime guy’s book keeper.



  • Yeah, I think that’s the bigger issue here. These devices pay their way by collecting data to sell off. What this “overhual” is indicating is that they haven’t quite figured out how to make these devices not only pay for themselves, but also, generate a net background profit for the company.

    The only thing I’m reading from this story is that Amazon is just aiming for more dollar signs from Alexia. I’m going tell you in the day and age of Siri and Whatever Google’s thing is, this is going to backfire massively on Amazon. This will likely collapse whatever paltry Alexia that’s out there. And I have a good feeling they’ll look at this collapse as “well the technology just isn’t a good money maker.” No you idiots, it’s not a mass profit driver. I get how something not drawing double digit percentage gains is a mystery to you all, but just because you cannot buy your fifteenth yacht from it, doesn’t mean that the technology is a failure.

    But it’s whatever, Amazon’s ship to wreck.




  • so why would we tolerate it from a judge who is in an arguably more important position?

    Because the person being tossed into jail could very well become the most important position. No nation is above political retaliation and the reality of a mob murdering the judge and daughter and then subsequently getting full pardons from that most important position is a non-zero value.

    Given the weakness that exudes from Congress on Impeachment, there’s zero ramifications for such a situation. And given the nature of Trump, there’s zero compunction that would ever keep him from this situation arising.

    Everyone fears the “official” acts that Trump can carry out. Smarter people understand the non-official actions that he can give a nod to and give comfort to. That’s how truly corrupt governments work, not by official acts, but the non-official ones.


  • Maybe if that’s the case going back to Kansas which has a better cost of living is a better choice than trying to live in a city or state with the highest cost of living?

    Not to deride your minimum wage tangent here, but there’s something to be asked here. Why does California have a high cost of living? Why does Kansas have a low cost of living? I think when you ask the question of why cost of living is so vastly different from area to area you start to get a better picture of why we have a lot of problems addressing wages matching that cost of living.

    It’s almost as if people pointed out that raising the minimum wage will result in higher costs for everything and thus raising the cost of living

    This has been a national thing. I feel like you’d might have a point if this wasn’t true literally everywhere. Even where I live in very rural Tennessee cost of living has gone up. Our county recently increased sales tax and property tax is likely to go up as well. Cost of goods like eggs have gone from 78¢ to $2.19 here from 2019 to today, with eggs at one point hitting $6.99 a dozen here.

    So there is a relationship between minimum wage and cost of living but that’s clearly not the case with California’s minimum wage increase that goes into effect next month. Everything, everywhere is increasing in cost. Which goes back to what I was saying. When you start asking questions on why cost of living is different, you get a picture of bigger factors that drive national cost of goods and services. And you see that touched upon in the article.

    “We suspect that low-wage workers’ high likelihood of living in three-earner (or more) households might be due largely to California’s high housing costs,” the legislative analyst’s office said.

    Housing is a massive thing everywhere and housing is flying through the roof. The reasons for that are complex and it’s absolutely a discussion, for perhaps elsewhere though (I cannot imagine that Lemmy comments are that great a place for such a trite diatribe). Minimum wage does indeed play a role but, and I could be reading your comment incorrectly, I believe that you are attributing a much larger weight to that factor than it deserves and forgoing the complexity of the issue by solely focusing on that sole reason.


  • In a 2-1 decision, judges ruled that “the age-verification requirement is rationally related to the government’s legitimate interest in preventing minors’ access to pornography. Therefore, the age-verification requirement does not violate the First Amendment.”

    WHY CAN PARENTS NOT DO THIS ASPECT?!

    This is the continual wild part of recent conservative bullshit. Everything the State is taking up is basically something a parent could step in and deal with.

    “My kid read a bad book that turned them into a frog! Which is also gay!”

    Well watch what your fucking is reading then and have a discussion about why you disapprove of it.

    “My kid is watching porn and now they can’t function in society and don’t want to get a $7.25/hr job of listening to Karens scream at them!”

    Then fucking don’t leave a computer in the their room perhaps? Maybe take their phone away at the end of the day? I mean or have a rational discussion about their ever changing body as they begin to become an adult? I mean any one of those is better than “OH I KNOW! I’LL LET THE GOVERNMENT PARENT FOR ME!!”

    And what’s wilder about the Conservative movement, the level of parenting has zero rhyme or reason.

    • Watching porn? — That’s Government parenting.
    • Working in a meat packing facility with blades so sharp they slice through literal bone? — Oh yeah that’s totally a regular parent thing.

    Fucking wild is what it is!

    I’m really struggling to wrap my head around where this line between Government overstepping and justified Government regulation is with them. If you don’t want your kid watching porn, then don’t let them fucking watch porn. Ideally you should have a talk about their ever evolving sexuality but clearly that’s just crazy liberal talk from me.

    I had some discussion with someone once about the 10th amendment and it relating to State’s banning abortion. And guy was like “Oh yeah this is a clear win for State’s rights!” And I’m like, the 10th amendment is setup that we have one of two winners at the end of the day. The State or the People.

    The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

    It says OR there. That means every “State win” is a “the people loss”. You do understand that right?

    Just fucking silence as that thought slow rolled into his brain’s processing center, that then subsequently hit the panic button because of overload.

    I just fucking can’t. DO you want Big Brother in everything or no? Because every inch you give to the Government helps them step-bro your ass.


  • Oh man! I was just about to say Texas! Oklahoma has its own version of this scheme. These oil companies, they absolutely do not want to pay decommissioning cost on this and they’ll use every trick they can find to avoid it as long as possible.

    Coal industry does roughly the same thing just different tricks. Everyone in the fossil fuel industry looking to get out of that whole “what comes next” problem.

    But can’t say much, recycling solar is nascent and hardly done at this point but the whole solar industry is brand new so hard to draw a conclusion there. Same for wind, most do eventually get landfill but there is interest at least in recycling, so we’ll have to see how that plays out.

    But the energy sector in general seems to always want to skirt the costs at the end of operation, never calculating the full cost into the revenue stream. Stop paying the execs so much and hold some of that cash back for clean up time. You know it’s coming, the responsible thing is to not act all shocked that clean up time has come and file bankruptcy. Execs that do this ought to be shot.



  • Gen X here. Mother died of cancer when 13. Father left us two weeks after that. Several years later, father penniless and died of an OD in a ditch in East Tennessee.

    Literally was trying to be left with the debt by the State of Tennessee, actually had to obtain a lawyer to show my legal declaration of becoming an orphan when I was a kid to get them to stop.

    So the only thing they left me with was a lawyer bill and about two years worth of court proceedings. So no, at least for me, we’re not getting anything from them.


  • thanks to the property assets accumulated by the generations before them.

    These people have clearly never heard of reverse mortgage. So take what they have to say with large heapings of salt.

    While they wait for their inheritances

    LOL. Yeah these people are taking the piss here. Many of the folks I know with boomer parents that have already passed have seen roughly 90% to 96% of the accumulated wealth either taken in medical expenses, obligated debt, or just straight up poor ass planning that left the parents near penniless in their final days.

    This whole story is predicated on ignoring massive costs that come at end of life that many boomers have not planned on. And one can easily objectively see then ignoring this by failing to account the massive upswing in reverse mortgages and filial responsibility cases.

    The boomers are not giving us anything when they die except headache.


  • Yes I saw some shit the other day about, “such and such reporting that sales are drastically down since blah blah blah. Where did it all go wrong?”

    Or “Gen whatever is choosing to part ways with blah blah blah. Here’s our guesses as to why!”

    And it’s just, NOBODY HAS FUCKING MONEY!!! That’s it. That’s all it is. There’s no preference. There’s no secret wokeness. There’s no underlying meaning. We are all just fucking broke!

    They took all the money, they refuse to give it back in wages, they jacked up the price, and we are tapping out. HOW THE FUCK IS THIS STILL A GODDAMN MYSTERY?!?!?!

    The only way someone can still be confused about what’s going on is if they’re on purpose being ignorant about it because, “mah market indicators!”

    We are all broke. That’s it, that’s the answer. Media needs to stop with the bullshit. The headline every day needs to be “The world is on fire by rich asshats and the rest of us are too fucking broke to do anything. We are all going to die painfully because of those rich asshats.” And that should be all that’s on the news every hour on the hour. The end.





  • I just want to note here for those about to journey into this conversation, there’s a major hiccup that didn’t exist before. The Supreme Court placed an new expansive interpretation of the Second Amendment in the 2008 Heller case. This has significantly altered how the second amendment is read in the United States. So what may seem like “brain dead easy” things to do, likely cannot be done as they would be unconstitutional.

    I say this because the question posed simply indicates “Present + Congress” which seems to imply, “which laws would you pass to fix gun control issues” and post-2008 that is no longer a thing. Any discussion needs to include at this point a conversation about the Supreme Court, the new understanding of the 2nd Amendment, and that the Justices currently on the bench will likely enforce their new expansive interpretation for their term on the court (which is a lifetime appointment).

    We are now at a point that we cannot fix this issue without a Constitutional Amendment, a reorganization of the Supreme Court (packing, impeachment, etc), an incredibly careful tip-toe around this new understanding of the second amendment, and/or talking about the underlying issues that surround gun reform (economic and societal issues).

    And we are seeing the consequences of Heller in things like 2022 Bruen which SCOTUS indicated that a “historic standard” should be applied to new gun regulation. This has lead to US v Rahimi where the Court of Appeals for 5th Circuit has removed the Federal protection that folks charged with domestic violence can still obtain a gun as “domestic violence” had no historical standard on which to base on. Which is an absolute astonishing level of logic there.

    We are no longer at a phase where legislation alone along the strict lines of “just gun reform”, this new understanding of the second amendment has forever (or at least as long as those Justices sit the bench) altered how we can approach this issue. We cannot just simply say, “let us figure out ways to regulate gun ownership in itself” that is no longer allowed. We can approach the issue indirectly: how do we increase the cost of Interstate gun ownership, how do we regulate the the dissemination of ammunition, how do we address the various issues that draw people into violent crime, how do we address the issue of school shootings at an societal level. But we have been cut off from direct approaches that regulate guns themselves except in the most extreme cases and even then, advocates are continually being handed new tools by the Supreme Court to bring about new challenges for those.

    Any meaningful debate about gun control needs to include the Supreme Court. Because given the current Court’s propensity to expand gun rights and the understanding of the second amendment, any law that might get introduced to fix the issue today, could and very likely would be overturned by the court. This has become a new chess piece in this game to be considered since 2008, prior yes this could have been a Congress and President issue alone, but post-2008, the Courts must be considered in the discussion. The Supreme Court too strongly embraces the new understanding of the second amendment to let any direct law be allowed to go unchallenged.


  • The thing is online access can happen anywhere and because hardware is firmly in the hands of the user, the user controls the dissemination of the data. There’s plenty of AI out there that can generate valid driver licenses with complete PDF417 barcodes related to the state in question.

    There’s no way Florida is going to commit the required funds it would take to police every single aspect. And social media sure as shit isn’t going to bend over and have that policing thrown onto to them freely. At some point Florida will require telephone carriers and ISP to play ball to some degree and then POOF, you’re now in Federal territory.

    That’s why all this state level law making is so bunk. It’s not a problem that can be solved by just saying “Oh, well <16 yo cannot get on.” Unless the State has some really deep pockets to invest in their own technology, Good Luck playing wack-a-mole.

    Additionally, there’s zero ways I would be scanning a driver’s license into some random website. Not with how every other day they leak massive amounts of information. So a lot of these states start getting what pornhub and what not are doing, “Oh you’re from Utah? Okay, well I guess you’re paying for a VPN for your porn.” And that’s ultimately what happens. Everyone just starts using a VPN because the State wanted to pass some “token” law to look like they were doing something.

    It’s all people ignorant of how technology works attempting to legislate technology. They are never going to be successful in any of this, but I guess whatever plays well for your base.




  • US Military (NATO) moving closer to Russia was a provacation that started decades ago

    Because Russia during the Soviet era gave Europe every reason to believe the Russian desire to return to 1850s borders. Which that was distinctly something that wasn’t going to happen because it would prompt the exact same situation that begat World War I.

    So yeah. Duh! After World War II one would think that “oh let’s finish this as oppose to leaving it hang like we did in WWI” would be something of paramount importance. Much to the chagrin of Russia who thought that they’d get a nice fat cut of the spoils with Germany’s defeat. Surprise the other two members of the Alliance wanted to kind of go the other direction and dismantle colonial Europe and Africa. That’s why Africa post WWII became, well, what it is mostly today.

    NATO and the response thereafter has been to ensure independent nations within Europe. Russia has wanted to revive the “glory days” of the Muscovy. So you tell me, who’s being provocative of who? Russia is still angry they didn’t get a lion’s share of Europe post-WWII seeing how they sent the most lives to die in the war, and the US was tired of having to deal with Europe every so often and isolationism just wasn’t fucking working.

    Have you seen that we have 800+ military bases outside of the US

    Yeah have you also seen the UK’s or France’s? Note anything about those countries and who’s who in WWII? Russia still wants that good old colonialism. I’m mean you need no further evidence of such than Crimea, or Russia’s attitude towards Georgia, or we we can keep going on and on.

    Now. The other guys UK/France/US, see they have moved on to, let’s call it economic colonialism. Now the Nation doesn’t technically have foreign governments dictating policy per se, but they use the allure of the dollar to ensure there’s a bias towards being friendly. Is it a better system? It’s pros and cons. It’s sort of how Russia attempts to play that same game with Baltic nations and energy, to which they’re abjectly losing on that front. US kind of top tiered the banking industry early in the game, which pros and cons to that too (see Housing Crisis and how US banks can bring down the world’s economy).

    But the point being is the military bases that being an argument for… What? There’s an economic investment that a lot of nations have put in, Russia included, why do you think they have bases in Libya and Sudan? Why do you think Turkey has the relationship it does with Russia even though it’s an EU member?

    Our US politicians/military would need to be for negotations, which they are not for, at least majority are not.

    Putin doesn’t want to negotiate. Just full stop. There is a projection of strength that Putin has to maintain to keep the level of support he has. The second he says “Oopsie! I guess I got a lot of our fellow citizens killed for no reason.” Is the second his key supporters turn on his ass.

    endless wars that are pushed for profits

    Who do you think is pushing Putin? You keep going on and on about the rich in the US, you keep forgetting rich assholes are the world around. Until the entire planet gathers around for Kumbaya and unites to destroy greed, guess what we’re going to have to deal with? It’s not a unique US issue, everyone likes to think that the US has some sort of monopoly on rich asshats, they do not. Putin has territorial aspirations and the rich are looking to profit from that desire. So don’t give me this crap that only rich US fuckers want war in perpetuity. There are rich shitheads in every country looking to provoke their nation du jour into some conflict that potentially enriches them. It’s just fun to punch on the US versions of them because the US has a lot of them, with the whole banking system being as it is. But they’re everywhere, Russia included.

    You seem to be going on and on about wars and rich people and I’ve got no complaint there, but how the fuck does that even fit into your “Oh NATO be provocating!!” Russia be doing it too. “Oh rich people just want to profit!!” Russia has that same fucking problem. I’m not seeing your argument for why the US and Russia aren’t exactly what I just said.

    if person A is acting shitty and person B is acting shitty, why are you expecting non-shitty behavior to come from either?

    Your commentary on rich vs poor, yeah cool. What’s that got to do with the price of tea in China? Russia wants it’s land, taking all that land would set us up exactly like what led to World War I. That, to me, does not seem like a good idea to let happen. Russia needs to fucking chill. NATO gets to stay because Europe needs integration not separation. The latter just keeps leading to global conflict, which seems less than ideal to most people.