rational_lib

It's funny that the evidence of Trump being a Russian asset is always some rumored connection with a KGB person, not the fact that he extremely reliably and consistently acts exactly like a Russian asset.

The average person (and to be fair, most psychologists) thinks of intelligence as the innate, fundamental characteristic of a person to think across all cognitive areas. However, this concept is not easily falsifiable and therefore arguably exists outside the realm of science.

For example, say I wanted to come up with a concept called "sportsness" which is the ability to be good at sports. I could test a bunch of people in a battery of sports-related tasks, and I'd probably get a nice bell curve where some people have high sportsness across all tasks and others have low sportsness across all tasks.

But does that prove the existence of sportsness? Or did I just measure a spurious correlation caused by the fact that some people are just more likely to be playing many different sports than others, or that some body types may lead to being better at sports related tasks, or some people are just better at handling the pressure of athletic performance tests, or some combination thereof? Of course most would say the latter, but then maybe some would defend the concept of sportsness by saying sportsness is just an emergent property of those things or something like that. But then is sportsness useful as a concept at all? You get the idea.

Also you gotta factor in inflation caused by the injection of $4.5 trillion of additional rich guy wealth into the economy. So even a lot of people making over $300k are probably going to be losing out after you factor in inflation caused by others getting more.

How are they going to stop it? Republicans have been trying to stop elections since 2017, they're not smart enough to figure out how. They couldn't even figure out how to schedule a press conference about it at the four seasons.

I can totally believe that someone who's never worked in the private sector has such a fanciful view of how layoffs work. My first job out of college was in the government. My views of what constituted "waste" were hilarious, like we got a flashlight (because we occasionally would go outside at night) and it was definitely a pricier flashlight, with some features we didn't really need. I told my friends at home, "Gosh, the government is so wasteful, look at this overpriced flashlight I got". Of course they made me turn it in when I left, but still.

Then when I got into the private sector I realized private sector waste is a whole different animal. Obviously there's the insane CEO pay packages, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Definitely I've seen some multi-million-dollar projects that never should have happened and were just the result of our slick salespeople. When I left one job in a layoff I had no way of returning a $3000 laptop because the person I'd return it to was laid off too. It ended up being a nice gift for an amoral friend. Of course layoffs themselves are crazy wasteful, you have tons of hard-earned knowledge walking out the door. They're almost always random and driven by a desire to temporarily boost the stock price as clueless shareholders are left holding the bag when the company collapses a few years later.

Point is government waste exists, but it's like a leaky faucet that drips a little. In the private sector, it's like a faucet that's constantly running on full blast because everyone is incentivized to maximize the rate of flow.

Well Trump can say whatever he wants, whether he actually can do what he says is another matter. In this case for example, congestion pricing has simply continued as before because Trump doesn't have power to change the laws of New York. When it comes to killing people, government employees are subject to the same rules as everyone else about unlawful killing, even if they were ordered by the president. Of course Trump can pardon his assassins for federal crimes, but states can still prosecute them and if nothing else the victims can still use deadly force to defend themselves without being guilty of a crime.

So legally speaking, Trump isn't so much a king as just some fat, old, possibly mentally-challenged man who can't be punished for things.

But in the technical sense, we're all kings and can do whatever we want. We've just agreed as a society that if people do certain things we all unite to help put them in a cage or whatever.

Trumpism has significant control over large parts of the media from which millions of Americans get their information. Fox and Musk’s platform X, among others, are not normal media outlets. Their basic function is not to cover the “news” but to spread rightwing extremist ideology.

Trumpism is utilizing the concept of the “big lie” in a way that has never, in this country, been seen. Day after day, blatantly dishonest statements and conspiracy theories are propagated – and repeated over and over and over again.

What is the solution to this? Because from where I sit, it looks like the strategy of plutocrats buying media and using it to push dishonest narratives in their favor is extremely successful and does indeed make what Bernie's asking for unachievable. And I don't see anywhere in the article a way to solve that problem.

I don't doubt the left can win on Lemmy. But the second Lemmy gets any actual power, watch out for the buyout.

Getting sick of all this observational humor.

Russia has been strongly suspected to use Tyler Durden in its influence operations to appeal to the US mainstream-to-far right.

All of Zero Hedge’s posts are written under the nom de plume of “Tyler Durden,” the anti-establishment character played by Brad Pitt in the film Fight Club. “We believe that not only should you be comfortable with anonymous speech,” Zero Hedge contends in its “manifesto,” “but that you should be suspicious of any speech that isn’t.” For whatever reason, people seem to go along with this, and it’s a strange sight to see the name of a psychopathic character in a Chuck Palahniuk novel cited as a source in a Congressional Research Service report and a scholarly law review article, or introduced as a guest on Bloomberg radio.

Neither Zero Hedge’s anonymity nor its Bulgarian connections and pro-Kremlin views have turned off some financially savvy readers.

modern Democrats are not an opposition party, ever. The news media is complicit as well.

The US political system is thoroughly broken but it's not changed much leading up to the Trump era, it's really the news media that made Trump happen right now.

It started in the 80s with cable news and continues today with toxic podcasts and social media. People are like your annoying ex-girlfriend - they don't want to be told the truth, they just want to be validated. Billionaires and con artists (and billionaire con artists) have figured out how to use newer forms of media to exploit that tendency and I think it's still getting worse. Eventually like all predators they'll overconsume their prey but there's a lot of suckers in the world for them to run through first.

I looked up the original thread and given that OP posts in r/Omaha, it's likely Don Bacon but since that's a small district it could also be one of the surrounding districts (possibly even in Iowa)

To me I'm not really sure what his reply even means. I think it's some attempt at a joke (because of course the government uses SQL), but I figure the joke can be broken down into two potential jokes that fail for different, embarrassing reasons:

Interpretation 1: The government is so advanced it doesn't use SQL - This interpretation is unlikely given that Elon is trying to portray the government as in need of reform. But it would make more sense if coming from a NoSQL type who thinks SQL needs to be removed from everywhere. NoSQL Guy is someone many software devs are familiar with who takes the sometimes-good idea of avoiding SQL and takes it way too far. Elon being NoSQL Guy would be dumb, but not as dumb as the more likely interpretation #2.

Interpretation 2: The government is so backward it doesn't use SQL - I think this is the more likely interpretation as it would be consistent with Elon's ideology, but it really falls flat because SQL is far from being cutting-edge. There has kind of been a trend of moving away from SQL (with considerable controversy) over the last 10 years or so and it's really surprising that Elon seems completely unaware of that.