I’ve seen this before, but I have to wonder: has anyone actually tested it? Like sure, you can imagine what licking asphalt would feel like, but have you ever just done it to make sure your imagination is right?

Folks. Publicly traded companies will ALWAYS compare the expected value of breaking the law with compliance.

Say it costs $100 million to follow the law. Breaking it comes with a $300 million fine, but only a 20% chance of getting caught.

They compare a 100% chance of paying $100 million to a 20% chance of paying $300 million.

Average cost of following the law: $100 million

Average cost of breaking it: $60 million

If we’re gonna do capitalism (which I would rather we not, for the record!), we have to make that expected value calculation break in favor of following regulations. If it is cheaper to break the law than to follow it, you’re not just losing money by complying: you’re giving ground to your competition. Fines need to be massive. Infractions need to get caught and punished. Executives need to be held personally accountable. Corporations need to be dissolved. Fines cannot be just the cost of doing business.

Fuck that defeatist bullshit!

Of the top 10 largest protests in US history, two have happened this year, and they were both largely in response to Trump.

Movements are being built, organization is happening, people are pissed. Excuse us for not jumping straight to violence without a plan like the J6ers.

God. The “Americans Bad” circlejerk on Lemmy is so lame.

I think you’re exactly right.

A few years ago, we saw a huge amount of mobilization for George Floyd. People fighting cops and winning.

After that, we saw a submarine full of billionaires implode & people cheered.

Recently, a health insurance CEO was shot to death in the street, and people rallied around the shooter as a hero.

Trump has been a uniquely effective vehicle for the ownership class to launch bullshit distractions at a population of Americans who are showing signs of class consciousness. Keep 40 or 50% of people mad at trans people and immigrants and DEI, and the rest busy trying to minimize the damage being done. Motherfucker said Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs in a presidential debate, and people somehow still take him seriously.

But he’s not long for this world. Dennis Prager has all the charisma of a bad case of trench foot. Rupert Murdoch is ancient, we’re already down a Koch brother, everything Elon Musk touches turns to shit, and I’m crossing my fingers that all the HGH gives Peter Thiel a heart attack.

The ownership class has got to make hay while the sun shines. Things are primed to turn around on them quickly.

Look at that dip right before 2020! Wonder why America dipped so much lower. Surely, face-masks as a way to prevent the spread of infectious disease wasn’t suddenly a controversial issue!

Republicans will ram through whatever shit they can whether it’s legal or not, and Democrats will trip over their own dicks and let the parliamentarian block them even when they have a majority.

I increasingly feel like voting for people is a bad system. I don’t want to pick someone to make all the decisions for me: just let me vote directly on the issue dammit. Tired of representatives lying to get elected or doing heel turns or chickening out.

Jesus Christ, yes, I am a comfort hunter. You think I get up at the ass crack of dawn every day for fun? You think I want to push buttons on a computer all day because I’m just weirdly into it?

No! I do this shit because I have to!

Fucking hell. I’ve already accepted that I have to make your company money if I want to live in a house. For the love of all that is good in this world, PLEASE do not make me pretend to like it. I’m already weirded out that you’re so into it.

2017ish

Representatives “punched” and “body-slammed” the ICE agents, she added.

LMAO. Super soldier democratic elected officials, defeating heavily militarized police units using unarmed combat. I believe it!

As usual, Republicans accuse Democrats of being much cooler than they really are.

You bring up a good point, but I don’t think religion necessarily involves the kind of unreality I have in mind.

A lot of religious claims deal with things that are unfalsifiable. Invisible forces, unreachable gods, consciousness after death, things like that. Not the most rational stuff in the world, but not obviously false on the face of it either.

Now, though, we’ve got folks believing things that are easily disproven. Climate change denial, anti-vaccine bullshit, the never-ending parade of moral panics churned out by the above mentioned propaganda machine, Jewish space lasers, pet eating immigrants, etc.

I won’t go so far as to say that religion never causes people to deny observable reality; it surely does. But I think the right wing media empire we have now does so intentionally and on a scale greater than any religious movement I can think of.

The bad news: The most evil people in the world spend billions every year on the largest propaganda machine in the history of man, and it enthralls a large minority of us.

The good news: That’s what it takes to maintain this! This many people living in a bubble of unreality is not natural! It is the product of a machine built by man, and all machines built by man are destined to eventually fail. Maybe the right person dies at the right time. Maybe the conflict between their narrative and reality eventually becomes too much. Maybe they lose control of the story and the movement splinters into hundreds of contradictory conspiracy theories that no longer move in lockstep. Maybe the magic just wears off one day.

He also loves money and has no principles. People doing something because they have values is just not something he understands.

A-fucking-men! Things can change fast, be ready to throw down!

I keep getting recruiters sending me in-office jobs on the other side of the country and not even telling me the salary range. You’re asking me to break my lease, uproot my family, and leave behind all my local friends. If your salary is low enough that you don’t want to advertise it up front, why would I ever even consider doing all that?

The media is gonna spin things no matter what. Dems should not let that stop them.

It burns my ass that some folks actually bought the whole “Trump doesn’t support Project 2025” bullshit. I cannot imagine being such a gullible, credulous moron.

You may also want to check the extruder arm. The stock plastic one on the ender 3 is prone to cracking.

Not exactly what you’re looking for, but Ad-Nauseum is a nice way to inject a ton of garbage into the data corps collect.

Right? Like in my ideal world, guns would be a hobby for weird nerds in the same way fencing is today. The one or two times I have felt like there’s even a small chance I may need to use a gun in self defense were terrifying and stressful.

Mutual aid!