I do agree that he is incredibly detached from reality and probably overestimates his support, but I don’t think that’s a factor in what he’s doing to destroy/fleece the government. I think he overestimated the competency of himself and the kids he’s having do all the coding work.

If a country doesn’t produce their own fighter jets (which only ~20 countries do) but needs to buy some, they don’t have a lot of options. And while it’s private companies that manufacture and sell the jets, the government of the manufacturing country isn’t going to let a business sell weapons of war to just anyone. The US doesn’t want to sell jets that might later get used against the US. So any weapons sales have to be approved by the US government first. Just like they don’t want to sell to an enemy, they don’t want the weapons they agree to sell to get stolen by an enemy. So they include technology (kill switch) than can prevent that from becoming a problem.

People don’t when the system works for them. The problem is when the normal system of government stops working and seems to be more of a hinderance than a benefit. Then people start looking for alternatives. Autocrats present an incredibly simple solution: give me all the power and I will solve all your problems.

Mostly because the only real exposure to electricity the people who came up with the “classical” elements had was lightning. I’m sure they experienced static electricity from time to time, but they probably didn’t associate it with lightning.

From their perspective, lightning is a very brief moment of extreme light, then maybe a fire if they can actually see the impact site. So it seems a lot more closely related to fire than we would suppose.

maybe there is a scientific explanation of why it isn’t

Nothing about the “classical elements” is rooted in what we would understand as science today. It was just people making guesses about how the world around them worked without the rigor of the scientific process. It was little more than wild speculation.

In my experience, a LOT of commercial construction companies prefer to hire inexperienced workers in order to teach workers “their way” of doing things. Residential tends to go for more experienced workers because they don’t have the time or money to train workers.

If you go union, the union will set you up with apprenticeship school and help you find a company to work for.

Doss that mean you had no experience with the topic at the time of hiring?

Yes

I don’t agree.

These fascists are all following the political ideology and strategies laid out by Curtis Yarvin under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug. He’s been in the orbit of people like Peter Thiel for 10+ years and has been very influential among the tech oligarch crowd.

His vision centers around creating a tech-oriented monarchy for America. At the top would be the president who would operate more like the Chairman of the Board in a corporate structure. Rather than governing on a day-to-day basis, this President/King would appoint a CEO to oversee the actual management of government. That’s the role Musk has taken on.

Trump appoints Musk to do the actual running of the country to accomplish what Trump wants accomplished while letting Trump seem above the fray (at least that’s the intention, Trump is too incompetent to actually stay above the fray). Musk isn’t a red herring. He’s not diverting from anything. He’s just the guy doing the job so Trump can go golf all day.

I think the only good messaging strategy they had the entire campaign was calling Republicans “weird”, and that got shutdown after like 2 weeks. Whoever killed that should be driven out of politics forever.

Obama was only voted into office because he is an extremely charismatic and charming person.

I think it had more to do with the conditions at the time. He was one of the few politicians with a national following from either party who had always vocally opposed the Iraq War. His chief opponent in the Democratic Primary was Hilary Clinton, who had voted for the invasion in 2003 even though she was opposed to the war by 2008. On the Republican side, McCain was still saying in 2008 that his vote to invade was a good decision and that he’d do it again.

It’s hard to remember now, but the Iraq War was a MASSIVE issue in the primaries and early general election in 2008. The country was almost unanimously opposed to it by that point, including Republican voters. W Bush was massively unpopular, and that was dragging down the entire GOP. Then the Great Recession hit and Bush/the GOP took the entire blame since they’d he’d been President for 8 years and they’d held the majority in both houses of Congress for most of the Bush presidency.

By that point, a corpse with a (D) next to their name could have defeated McCain. Obama is absolutely incredibly charismatic and a once-in-a-generation political mind. But 2008 was also a perfect storm of factors against the Republican Party. There was virtually no way a Democrat could lose that election.

I dunno. They successfully ignored the 14th Amendment, which banned him from serving the term he’s currently serving.

My guess is that he’s going to run. Some Democratically-controlled state is going to try to ban him from the ballot. It’ll get challenged to the SCOTUS and they’ll rule he’s allowed to appear unless Congress rules he’s ineligible under the 22nd Amendment. Congress will do nothing and he’ll be allowed to run again.

I’ve been with the same company for 17 years. I dropped out of college right before the Great Recession started. I had no prospects or ambition other than paying rent and keeping by stomach full. My dad sent me an ad from the classified section of the paper (actual physical print paper) for an electrician job.

I was impressed initially that the company did not lay off a single worker through the entire Great Recession. In fact, they promised every employee your full 40 hours every week regardless if they had enough work for it. There were months on end I was just sitting in the company office waiting for them to get more work, but at least I was getting paid 8 hours each day. They also paid for me to go to school for my electrical license and offered pretty good insurance.

I started as an entry level pre-apprentice, worked my way through the apprenticeship program and got my journeyman electrical license. I was a foreman for about 9 years before they promoted me into the office as a Project Manager.

At least with Reddit, banning 3rd party apps was just a byproduct. The overall point of paywalling their API was to prevent LLM AIs from training their models on Reddit user content without paying Reddit to do so.

Obligatory correction that capitalism =/= free markets and free markets =/= capitalism. Markets existed long before capitalism and will exist long after it.

Capitalism very specifically describes the economic relationships between owners of capital and workers. Without the exploitative relationship, it’s not capitalism.