I asked the Anti-Duckification League and they say he’s a swan. You’re misconstruing things and frankly we find it a bit weird that you’d read so far into such a banal hand gesture.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, we need to get back to our primary goal of making the use of the phrase “From the River, To The Sea” a capital crime.
Its a two party system and plenty of people looked at the options, decided “I’m going to vote for the least bad candidate”, and went with Trump.
That’s in part because Haris’s campaign sucked shit (she spent more time on the trail with Liz Cheney than her own VP), in part because Biden’s “booming” economy couldn’t seemed to rectify the same escalating wealth imbalance we’ve been drowning in since Ford/Carter, in part because generations of voter disenfranchisement have stacked the deck against liberals, and in part because 15M D voters didn’t show up between 2020 and 2024.
But the idea that “casual” voters of any strip don’t exist really ignores how many Obama-Trump-Biden-Trump voters just flit in the wind based on however they’re feeling at a given moment.
What’s more, if the US has an underlying ideology, it tends toward fascism. Liberals don’t want to grapple with that, so they end up offering up half-a-fascism to the moderate voter and telling the Radical Antifa Leftists to pound sand every four years.
But I don’t think Elon did a salute.
Okay, hear me out. What if the apartheidist xenophobe far-right suck-up with the media machine that front-pages Nazi shit on the regular… what if his arm just did that?
They’re in a media ecosystem that just won’t talk about this stuff. FOX News and Drudge Report are going to run a thousand “Random Black Person Acts Scary!” headlines before you’ve had your coffee, then lead into the latest Musk scandal with “Very Jewish Very Not-Fascist ADL says Elon Actually Cool And Good”.
This isn’t a question of self-reflection nearly so much as it is an accumulation of priors from outside sources.
How Israel continues to censor journalists covering the war in Gaza
Pretty deliberate, active, and well-financed operation by the Israeli state department and military to distort and censor information circulated about the war, particularly within the NATO block nations.
They’ve had a cessation of hostilities since 1953.
The Panmunjom Declaration, signed in 2018 by Kim Jung Un and Moon Jae-in even began the process of reunification.
If only every war was this peaceful.
NK is some sort of paradise
The bar for “paradise” is so low. Just living in a country where you don’t have chronic homelessness, endless war, and rampant medical bankruptcy seems to qualify.
No no no. Propaganda is inherently Russian.
There are no bots on Lemmy, bleep bloop.
‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza
The Israeli army has marked tens of thousands of Gazans as suspects for assassination, using an AI targeting system with little human oversight and a permissive policy for casualties
They’ve been checked out on serious political fact checking for some time. Now its all just “Meme is a meme. False.”
OK what do you propose we call it when there is a job that literally requires prior experience or certifications vs a job that doesn’t?
Any job can be regulated.
In Texas, cosmetology students must complete a minimum of 1,000 hours of instruction at an accredited beauty school to become licensed.
In Oregon, no such license is required.
Does this mean a cosmetologist’s status as “skilled worker” evaporates upon stepping off a plane from Houston to Portland?
Because you cannot tell me that it’s OK to hire anyone and teach them brain surgery on the job.
That’s exactly what professional hospital surgeries do. They identify candidates for hire and train them with their veteran staff.
Nobody is born knowing brain surgery. Nobody is born with a number of successful surgeries under their belts. Everyone starts from square one.
What makes brain surgery different from HVAC repair isn’t skill, its liability. If you fuck up a unit then you’ve caused a few hundred dollars in damage. If you fuck up a brain, you kill someone.
But they both require skill and experience to do reliably and efficiently.
even with the puniest of interest rates, you’d still make more than enough just off the interest to live somewhat comfortably
I’d go one step further and assert that wealth compounds and borrowing rates fall with your aggregate wealth. Treasuries are the safest of safe bets, but there are much higher returns to be had with some minimal risk that become accessible when you have large cash reserves and access to cheap credit. Home ownership is a classic example. Save thousands of dollars a year on rent by owning an appreciating asset you get to live in.
You don’t need $100M to make this work. $100k can turn a handsome profit through compound returns on investment. In a stock market that yields 7%/year, you double your money in a decade.
Let me start borrowing at the Prime Rate and the sky is the limit. I can take out a loan for 4.3% and invest in an index fund like the S&P that has returned 12.9% APY over the last 10 years. When I’m cleaning up 8.6% on my borrowed money, what’s the right number of dollars to borrow? Every dollar I can get my hands on.
The average national savings account interest rate (and you’d get a much better one with 100 million) is 0.42 APY.
Treasury Notes are 10x that rate. This mostly just illustrates how scammy and cheap your average bank has grown.
Which is why so many day traders end up going bankrupt.
Bankruptcy is a tool for discharging debt, not a metric for business failure.
You don’t bother declaring bankruptcy unless you have creditors. If you’re an unsuccessful day trader, nobody is lending you much money to begin with.
If I’m a construction worker who spent decades perfecting my skills so I get promoted to management
Tell me you’ve never worked construction without telling me you’ve never worked construction.
Or management, for that matter. You’ll get managers straight out of college overseeing career specialists on the verge of retirement.
Disappointed in your lack of punctuation. It really speaks to your absence of moral character.
Unskilled work means you don’t need prior experience or specific education to apply.
It means whatever the employers want it to mean. But anyone who has worked anywhere for a significant length of time knows the value experience brings in a role.
Whether you’re packing boxes or picking fruit or doing brain surgery, the speed and accuracy of your work is predicated on experience. Not something you get through a crash course or a certificate. You have to do the work to learn the work in every field.
That’s what makes “unskilled” labor a myth.
Hey now, don’t buy management long
Liberals deeply, passionately, fervently need to believe in some kind of cosmic justice for conservatives. But I’m surrounded by them deep down in the bleeding red state of Texas, and I’m sorry to report they’re thriving and multiplying.
Yeah, sure, they’ll bitch and cry like stuck pigs at the mildest inconvenience. But plenty of them still have fat bank accounts and big price-inflated houses they took the mortgage out on 20 years ago when land was cheap and college degrees with minimal debt and luxurious country club style mega-churches subsidized with public dollars and giant families with chubby little grandkids outfitted in all the latest MAGA apparel.
Like, the idea that you’ve got these armies of Crying MAGA voters who have sucked shit due to Republican policy is delusional. The army of billionaires showing up to the Trump Inauguration so they can kiss the ring and collect another few trillion in next year’s federal spending should let you know exactly how delusional.
Conservatives aren’t suffering and liberals would do well to stop pretending a friendly government is incapable of jerking its favored constituents off. Just because the last four liberal Presidents fumbled the bag for their base voters doesn’t mean Republicans can’t or won’t happily deliver.