Didn’t they also just relocate because of this ruling? I could be mistaken.

promoting a specific social and aesthetic vision

And also

proposed by Donald Trump

🤔

Would it help if you knew we paid providers billions of dollars in the 90s for fiber and they ran off with the profits, and we got nothing? So it took almost 2 decades after we paid them, to finally get gigabit speeds, on top of paying them again to do it for reals this time.

I believe first term Trumpgret to be more that they thought Trump was going to do things about [insert dumb ideology here] and he turned out to be [dumb ideology] personified, but they still believe in [dumb ideology]. Not that they regret the things he’s doing, more that this he not doing enough of.

For example, drain the swamp. They thought he was going to get rid of Democrats who they thought were the swamp. It turned out during his first term he needed some Democrat support so he met in the middle and that pissed them off and then associated him with the swamp too.

Or building the wall and making Mexico pay for it. It turns out only a small portion got built, and came from US or private (not even his) funding.

Second term Trumpgret from everyday MAGA i agree, i don’t really believe anyone truly regrets voting for him, just that they are now hated by their loved ones, and they don’t see the direct causes of them voting for him and his actions hurting their loved ones, therefore their loved ones cut off contact.

Trumpgret from the likes of Alex Jones, i believe comes from a place of they never really believed in the it from the start, they just saw the easy grift and now the easy money is to jump off the bandwagon.

Should we just convert to a Trump Cease Fire metric (TCF for short) instead of Scaramucci’s now?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal_Mafia

Their logic is to draft you, put you in high vis hand-me -downs that have had their previous holes patched up, and put you on the front lines with rocks until his problem solves itself.

Something about the smartest bears vs the dumbest humans.

God damn, it’s this shit right here that I’ve been calling out to my leftists circles whenever the topic of some messaging semantics change comes up. It doesn’t matter what terminology we agree on, bad faith actors from far-right think tanks will churn out BS and blast it on Fox news 24/7 until we sit down again and come up with new terminology because this new one isn’t reaching people like we intended it to reach. It’s a tactic to keep us from actually discussing ways to fix the problems, by instead focusing on those semantics and labels we affix to them.

What you’re describing is called a Growth Stock as opposed to a Mature Stock. I heard these terms recently when reading about the AI bubble and will just quote the relevant parts, because the author describes it better than I ever could:

Pluralistic: The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI from Cory Doctorow

You see, when a company is growing, it is a “growth stock,” and investors really like growth stocks. When you buy a share in a growth stock, you’re making a bet that it will continue to grow. So growth stocks trade at a huge multiple of their earnings. This is called the “price to earnings ratio” or “P/E ratio.”

But once a company stops growing, it is a “mature” stock, and it trades at a much lower P/E ratio. So for every dollar that Target – a mature company – brings in, it is worth ten dollars. It has a P/E ratio of 10, while Amazon has a P/E ratio of 36, which means that for every dollar Amazon brings in, the market values it at $36.

It’s wonderful to run a company that’s got a growth stock. Your shares are as good as money. If you want to buy another company, or hire a key worker, you can offer stock instead of cash. And stock is very easy for companies to get, because shares are manufactured right there on the premises, all you have to do is type some zeroes into a spreadsheet, while dollars are much harder to come by. A company can only get dollars from customers or creditors.

So when Amazon bids against Target for a key acquisition, or a key hire, Amazon can bid with shares they make by typing zeroes into a spreadsheet, and Target can only bid with dollars they get from selling stuff to us, or taking out loans, which is why Amazon generally wins those bidding wars.

That’s the upside of having a growth stock. But here’s the downside: eventually a company has to stop growing. Like, say you get a 90% market share in your sector, how are you gonna grow?

Once the market decides that you aren’t a growth stock, once you become mature, your stock is revalued, to a P/E ratio befitting a mature stock.

If you are an exec at a dominant company with a growth stock, you have to live in constant fear that the market will decide that you’re not likely to grow any further. Think of what happened to Facebook in the first quarter of 2022. They told investors that they experienced slightly slower growth in the USA than they had anticipated, and investors panicked. They staged a one-day, $240B sell off. A quarter-trillion dollars in 24 hours! At the time, it was the largest, most precipitous drop in corporate valuation in human history.

That’s a monopolist’s worst nightmare, because once you’re presiding over a “mature” firm, the key employees you’ve been compensating with stock, experience a precipitous pay-drop and bolt for the exits, so you lose the people who might help you grow again, and you can only hire their replacements with dollars. With dollars, not shares.

And the same goes for acquiring companies that might help you grow, because they, too, are going to expect money, not stock. This is the paradox of the growth stock. While you are growing to domination, the market loves you, but once you achieve dominance, the market lops 75% or more off your value in a single stroke if they don’t trust your pricing power.

Which is why growth stock companies are always desperately pumping up one bubble or another, spending billions to hype the pivot to video, or cryptocurrency, or NFTs, or Metaverse, or AI.

I still can’t get over the fact that one of the actors here played Columbo, and the other was in Austin Powers Goldmember. Wow, such talent!

It could be argued that even Hitler lacked the foresight until that last hour when it was discovered his armies were not coming to his rescue.

We know why this happened though. America, under Trump (and not really corrected under Biden), sold off their soft power, allowing other countries to walk all over us intentionally. And it’s only going to get worse under further Republican control. Meanwhile, Democrats have taken the mantle of neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism, so unless we suddenly elect an entirely progressive government and start to work towards normalizing foreign relationships, the kidnappings will continue.

Some folks would say half of America had always been either Nazis or Nazi sympathizers. But we just call those later groups, Nazis.

The time to do that and have significant public support behind them, has passed. Like I said, they shouldn’t have passed that $75 billion in the first place and kept the government shut down until every item they wanted was included, AND they had the public support to do so!

Now? Republicans will hammer them for not funding FEMA when there’s a massive snow storm getting ready to hit 3/4 of the country, or whatever bullshit they’re scheming up this round. When other crap is loaded into a bill, their public support for not supporting it faulters, i wish this wasn’t the case.

I want Democrats to win, and i don’t think this is the battle to do so. Safe Dems can vocally opposed this all they want, but until we start seeing immigration polls swinging 20-30+ instead of 5-10, Southern Dems in tight races will continue playing that “Middle”.

Fuck yeah, rip it top shelf bud.

To preface, i want ICE fully defunded.

That being said, this is a damned if you do, damned if you don’t. ICE already received that $75 billion which will allow them to operate for years. This $10 billion comes with some “restrictions” like body cameras, and reallocates some money towards oversight of holding facilities. Another chunk will need to go to other underfunded agencies like the Coast Guard, FEMA, and CIS.

Democratic leadership hasn’t indicated if they will whip house Dems into voting no, because it will depend on those running in tight districts.

The message needs to be sent via primaries. They should have never received that $75 billion in the first place.

And even that would require a software layer log that wouldn’t kick in until the software is fully booted. There would have to be a hardware layer controller logging spin up via firmware for that to work.

If they threw this into a cloaner, there’s really no way to tell.

But they wouldn’t even need to do all that, they would just shop around for a trump appointment judge in a nearby district, and then convince them to retroactively rubber stamp a warrant based on some flimsy probable cause, exactly like the Patriot Act was written for. No need to parallel construct.

I really have to thank my wife as it’s been a recent change for me, I was pretty isolationist. She’s been a “townie” all her life and since moving in almost 8 years ago, I’ve started to really see the benefits of community, like farmers markets and such.

I think the best thing for people is to get active in their local community and politics. My brother was pretty conservative going back a long while; mainly about wanting lower or no taxes. He then ran for and won his HOA presidency and quickly realized how fucked they would be if they just got rid of their HoA fees. They needed to dredge their lake but the previous administration signed in a bilaw stating they couldn’t raise the fees. They didn’t have the money for it outright, nor could they pay back a loan. He didn’t run again, but I’d like to think he learn a valuable lesson about public service that day, and the effort it takes to run a community.

So I’ve been protesting any company that’s publicly traded. Had the same cell phone since 2019. Moving funds into a credit union. Cooking meals at home. On the rare occasion we eat out it’s at a locally owned restaurant. Buying our produce at the farmers market and growing some of our own. For the stuff we can’t avoid, getting bulk items from Costco until we can source better AND local. And then socials, getting rid of all the major ones and switching to the fediverse.

I see comments like that either calling for Trump to be deposed, or yeah, a full on civil war against Republicans at that point. The second is from people who can view chess only a few more moves in advance than those saying the first and know that we have a presidential line of succession and it’s just as bad all the way down. But both are extremely naive views because this is a cultural problem with Republicans as a whole. Even if somehow you were to Thanos snap every Republican in power, the next election cycle will be just as bad, if not worse.

To fix, you have to address the militant individualism thats been romanticized by billionaires; the only thing that seems to have tricked down from them, who’s only purpose is to get people to vote to lower taxes, but mainly benefit the rich. Democrats should start running on lowering or cutting taxes out right for anyone making less than 350k, and watch the cognitive dissonance happen with the hard core Rs who made their whole identity about not getting taxed.

Then we continue to build up our communities and homesteading hobbies and primary any Democrat who gives an inch to these fascists.