Politically-motivated tea tax, what could go wrong?

The world just keeps getting more and more efficient at being dumb. Let's just count all the appallingly stupid things crammed into this small meme with 2 million views:

1. "Insurrection Barbie"
2. Celebrating the defunding of useful scientific research by a new government efficiency agency
3. This new agency is named after a cryptocurrency
4. The cryptocurrency in question was created as a joke to satirize cryptocurrencies, but became a top prominent cryptocurrency itself.
5. The "Department of Government Efficiency Agency" has 2 heads, both of whom have other primary jobs and were chosen in return for political support.
6. There is also already an existing government agency that does the exact same thing, called the "Government Accountability Office". But most people seem to be unaware of it, likely because it's not named after a cryptocurrency/dog meme.
7. This whole scheme was the idea of the richest person in the world.

Idiocracy didn't happen because of unnatural selection, it happened because social media unlocked a runaway chain reaction of stupidity.

Reminder that Fox News declared Michelle Obama a terrorist over a fist bump.

“It’s good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything,” Musk said.

Non-German, in attempt to change Germany, warns Germans of non-Germans changing Germany

My Elon-brainwashed relative alerted me to the fact that on twitter, the main rumor is that he killed himself to bring attention to the drone sightings being a secret Chinese gravitic propulsion technology.

God I hate that site.

Nobody actually knows who shot the headstone, it was discovered damaged in 2016:

Flint Taylor — one of the lawyers for Hampton’s family — recently journeyed to Haynesville to eulogize Fred Hampton’s mother, Iberia, a devoted mother and courageous activist who passed away in October 2016. He discovered this desecration of Hampton’s grave at that time.

As far as I can tell the notion that it's a police tradition seems to originate from a possibly sarcastic post on r/stupidpol on that other site.

But he was definitely assassinated by the police and the FBI, which is probably much worse.

The full quote is even worse.

My companies make great products that people love and I’ve never physically hurt anyone.

So why the hate and violence against me?

Because I am a deadly threat to the woke mind parasite and the humans it controls.

So basically he's saying - "I never harm anyone...the left only hates me because I'm a deadly threat to them (and that thing I made up to dismiss everything they say)"

Also, just wanna point out he's definitely killed/is killing people.

I used to be open to dating Republican women, Then I actually dated one. Now I'm no longer open to dating Republican women.

The fact that this guy posts this on X with a paid-for blue checkmark tells you everything about why Trump won and why he'll keep winning. The left has made almost no effort to win the information space. They just lose and then celebrate when some of the harm falls back on MAGA.

How about his for a change: Win. Try to win. Stop kowtowing to right wing information propaganda spaces that stifle the left like X, Fox News, and Rogan. Fight them like the right fights the left in the information space. True, you won't get to celebrate when your neighbor suffers from Trump, but it'll be because he didn't vote Trump in the first place.

When Ukraine's president surprisingly shifted towards Russia, the people engaged in civil disobedience until there was a new president.

What will the US do?

smashed into a military Blackhawk helicopter

Speaking from DC there's way the fuck too many low-flying helicopters around here. If it's indeed a blackhawk it's probably some military bigwig going to or from the pentagon a mile away.

I'm shocked that the administration of "Put the big boxes of top secret docs under the bathroom chandelier" would mishandle secret war plans.

For people too young to remember, a lot of people were against smoking bans. The argument was pretty simple: "Why not let the market decide? If you want to go to a bar with no smokers, go to one that doesn't allow smoking." This was persuasive to a lot of people.

But I recall that non-smoking bars were extremely rare and I would always end up smelling like smoke every time I went to the bar. The problem was basically that going to a non-smoking bar would exclude any friends that smoked, so bars that became non-smoking were limiting themselves to only those patrons who didn't smoke themselves and had no one in their group who did.

In hindsight, it betrays a fundamental problem with the "let the market decide" argument: there are situations where a small number of consumers with uncommon preferences can end up altering the whole market such that the majority of consumers are forced into un-ideal purchases. In the case of smoking at bars, it was actually better to say "Hey you few people who smoke, you're kinda fucking up everything and we do actually need big government to step in and stop you from doing that."

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.

shutting out a significant portion of your community without seeking their input first isn't a sensible move for such a foundational open source project.

Ironic when X shuts out anyone who isn't logged in and shuts out anyone who doesn't pay for a blue checkmark from having visible replies.

Having an X account isn't consequence-free - if it becomes where updates occur, people have to sign up for an account and subject themselves to nazis everywhere and all manner of crypto spam just to see updates. And they have to pay Elon tribute to be heard in response. It's crazy that anyone sees it as being friendly to users.

"He knows those computers better than anybody. All those computers, those vote-counting computers, and we ended up winning Pennsylvania like in a landslide.

Except that Elon actually doesn't know shit about computers. Trump is just rambling delusionally like usual.

The rain test was far more concerning because it's much more realistic of a scenario. Both a normal person and the lidar would've seen the kid and stopped, but the cameras and image processing just isn't good enough to make out a person in the rain. That's bad. The test portrays it as a person in the middle of a straight road, but I don't see why the same thing wouldn't happen at a crosswalk or other place where pedestrians are often in the path of a vehicle. If an autonomous system cannot make out pedestrians in the rain reliably, that alone should be enough to prevent these vehicles from being legal.

Secretary of State Marc Rubio also shared an article about Khalil on Sunday night and posted on X, "We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported."

Everyone regardless of immigration status has free speech rights in the US. Rubio is bragging about pissing and shitting on the Constitution. They cannot use immigration to suppress free speech, obviously. This guy needs to released by the courts immediately or American free speech is a complete farce.

I'll just point out the risk of what I'll call "Joe Roganing" here. Elon pretends he hates both parties while there's no election coming up. Then when the election arrives he "makes up his mind" and endorses Republicans. This allows him to 1) attract people fed up with both parties just to hand them to Republicans, and 2) have a credible that that forces Republicans to do his bidding.

The ol' Ellen Pao