• 3 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • Obviously the ultra wealthy can really abuse this.

    But if you are in a position where you can put money into a 401k? You will, “benefit” from this because the investment firms using your money are taking advantage of this. Whether you come out better than the massive losses that you have had lighting up your email (because this was the BEST time to turn on all the LLMs to let us know what is happening to our investments and why all these companies are down on a given day…) is questionable but… it is also questionable whether the ultra wealthy are actually benefiting either. Since you tend to not become an 0.1%er without a LOT of investments.

    Now, whether there is any form of long term stability is a very different question. Which is kind of “great” for getting across the point that: Either the market will stabilize and your 401k/pension will have value or we are all fucked.





  • This isn’t piracy since you are legitimately-ish getting stuff but:

    If you are actually in the US, check out your local community colleges. Depending on the college (and state), that may range from free to “you only need to sell a kidney once every four years”.

    A scumbag cousin of mine has been doing that for probably coming on 20 years now. He signs up for a course every other year, never attends it, and then drops it. Keeps his dot edu email active for “free” software and I think he also flips laptops and the like.


    That said, also consider actually attending the course. One night a week to learn a new skill or just keep the (questionable science of) neuroplasticity going.





  • The “funny” thing is that trump/musk/doge could have had SO many “easy wins”. Because… the US government is ridiculously bloated and inefficient. Even just “Development of Military Weapon X has been terminated due to being over budget and no longer fulfilling the requirements of the contract. Boeing or whatever the fuck has been instructed to terminate all R&D into Weapon X and to instead focus on continued maintenance and optimization of Weapon Y for the next N fiscal years”

    Same with government oversight. SO many policies are basically built around covering their asses ten times over (cough cough Challenger cough). And while there are very good reasons to do that (again, see the fucking Challenger), there is also a lot of room to reevaluate that and make things kind of worse but a lot cheaper in a way that most of the actual employees would love.

    Instead? It was just “let’s immediately gut everything while we decide if we want to just become a full president for life dictatorship”.


  • Addressed it below but:

    Anyone who has been around the block a few times knows that those rewards are almost never paid out. Government/cops decide that a hint “wasn’t enough” or find a way to give it to the “police department” instead

    And folk may or may not remember all the “I am not saying the UHC CEO was a good person but he was a father with a family and this was a tragic murder and is really bad” crowd. Large swathes of those fuckos would be smart enough to realize “face of the raid that caught America’s Rizziest Alleged Murderer” might not end well. Hell, they may even have grown up in a town/city where someone DID get a payout and subsequently had to move because local “gangs” (so the populace) would regularly vandalize their car or throw bricks through their windows.



  • Ah, apologies. Not a paid actor but instead an undercover cop posing as a mcdonald’s employee. That totally explains why absolutely nobody else at that mcdonald’s would have said “Yeah, I have no idea who that person was but they don’t work here” and so forth.

    Moving on:

    Why didn’t the anonymous person want the reward himself?

    Because anyone who has been around the block a few times knows that these rewards rarely ever pay out. Also, good odds the “good samaritan” would have been smart enough to realize they don’t want to be the face that brought America’s Favorite Alleged Murderer “to justice”.

    Why did Luigi walk around with the murder weapon for 5 days?

    He also, allegedly, had his manifesto on him. And he was more than rich enough to have booked a same day flight to a non extradition treaty country the afternoon of the shooting.

    Those are plausible questions we may get answers to during the case, but it does seem a bit weird.

    A lot of things are “weird”. Believe it or not but perfectly sane and rational people tend to not allegedly 3d print a firearm to allegedly stake out someone for days to allegedly plug them in the head for being evil sons of bitches.

    But “True Crime” podcasts and TV have rotted people’s brains into thinking a single anomaly instantly is the smoking gun. When the reality is… people are weird and so is life. One of my favorite “deprogramming” tools is to just point out the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand that kicked off WW1. If that were a movie it would be a comedy that even Adam Sandler would say was “a bit much”. But that was life.


  • Because it is nonsense.

    The crux of their argument is that it is too implausible that someone would decide Luigi was probably the shooter, be aware of the reward, and still ask a random employee to call it in. ANYONE who has worked a public facing job in food services or even a frigging grocery store has had plenty of “concerned citizens” tell them to be a cop.

    But, because that is implausible, it must mean that this was some huge conspiracy theory where a paid actor faked a call because the government used some super illegal search method instead (as opposed to just palantir or whatever).

    It is complete nonsense and is just a few notches below “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams”.



  • Aww, the dot world news mod team is gonna be so happy to know that the FBI is protecting their precious teslas.

    Which mostly speaks to why this is “a good idea”. People vandalizing swasticars was effective. It was a comparatively low effort action that people could do on their way to work or while out drinking with the gang. And it did an amazing job of putting the fear of labor in all the tech workers who “will just ride out the next 4 years”. They couldn’t just say “I am one of the good ones” anymore.

    So… get rid of that and we go back to “This is horrible and I really do care about whatever issue we think matters this week. But if you worked just a bit harder you would be able to afford groceries so…” that we see EVERYWHERE (even on this site).




  • Its not even that.

    It is throwing away your jacket because you don’t want to go out for lunch in the middle of the day. And then realizing you still need that jacket to get to and from work and having to buy a new one. And THEN buying lunch anyway because you are hungry.

    A few articles have done a great job of documenting it but it boils down to the problem being the fundamental argument of WHY they are doing this. Officially their stance is to move fast, break things, and then repair what they actually needed. Except those repairs cost a LOT of time and money.

    And… to add on to the brutally beaten metaphor: It also costs money to get rid ofy our old jacket because you can’t just throw it in the trash. You have to drive down to a good will to drop it off. Because government employees have PTO that needs to be paid out and so forth.



  • WWE is a special beast. They embraced The Internet a lot earlier than most media and their social media and astro turfing game is on point. It is why you’ll hear that every single wrestler on the planet’s life goal is to be in the WWE Hall of Fame ™ and why Roman “The Rock’s Cousin Who Was Such A Charisma Void That All His Lines In Hobbes And Shaw were cut” Reigns and whoever the hell is the greatest story ever told on television ™ and so forth.

    Spend a bit of time discussing wrestling and you rapidly realize you are talking to a “bot” in that different statements trigger the exact same response from different people.

    So it is less that The Fans think that cena taking time out of his busy schedule of caping for a rapist sex trafficker was truly amazing and more that people on twitter and PR folk on The Subreddit told them to think that and they are repeating it.

    As for the other aspect:

    Why is this in my sports news next to last night’s hockey scores instead of next to an article about who was the bitchiest on the lastest episode of Real Housewives?

    Because wrestling is “event television” in a way that only sports really is anymore. Andor is one of the greatest shows of all time but, unless you are doing a Reaction podcast, it doesn’t matter if you watch that episode from Season 2 tonight or tomorrow or a week from now. Wrestling and sports? People DO still want to watch that “live” because they are afraid someone will spoil the score of the Bulls game (in large part because we grew up with sitcoms where that was the joke). So, in that regard, it makes more sense to cover it with sports rather than to cut into a movie review with how taylor swift’s boyfriend caught a ball real good.

    Which… gets to the last point that is not WWE specific. A lot of people don’t have the time or money to watch it live. This mostly goes back to when PPVs were 50-90 bucks and when all weekly shows were on TV that a lot of “cord cutters” didn’t have. But it also just speaks to the general lack of an attention span. A LOT of the Internet Wrestling Community (IWC)… don’t actually watch wrestling. They follow live threads or watch clips and then they wait for Dave “It’s cool, he just didn’t like her tits” Meltzer to give them a star rating.

    It has become a lot more prevalent in the AEW era where we have “something else” on weekly TV (no. TNA didn’t count. I loved TNA but that shit was the #4 promotion even when there were only two on TV in the US) and the “AEW style” is still heavily informed by The Indies and New Japan where people try to tell a self contained story in every match rather than relying on six months of promos on TV. You will RAPIDLY notice that the IWC will barely mention character work that is not part of a clip released by the company or one that was so good that wrestling twitter clipped it themselves. A live thread might lose their shit over how much rotation a tall lady got on a powerbomb spot and then immediately “forget it” because wrestling twitter didn’t care and the company didn’t bother to release a clip of it.