Revving up your engines for fun in a residential area should be a criminal capital offense.

FTFY

Now there’s another shower thought.

What if one day airplanes just like…stopped working…

Well, feel free to keep calling for a recount. And I’m free to tell you why there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of it happening.

No, big turnout is still synonymous with a progressive candidate win.

Again, you’re living in the past. Back during the era of Obama, it was Democrats who were drawing out the infrequent voters. When turnout was high, Democrats did well. Now, it’s Republicans who are relying on the infrequent voters. The modern Democrats are very dependent on college-educated voters and other groups that turn out more reliably than Trump’s base.

And how Bernie or some other progressive would win is completely irrelevant here. We’re talking about how Kamala, a centrist Democrat, performed in an election. What happened 20 years ago is irrelevant. In the recent Trump elections - 2016, 2020, 2024, it is centrist Democrats like her who were hurt by higher turnout.

However, that being said, there’s literally a laundry list of election interference issues that should trigger a recount. And that includes speech by Trump himself that is suspect. Like he’s literally working with Elon Musk and Putin and you don’t think they may have done some bullshit? Lol. How gullible. You realize Putin has decades of experience rigging elections and using propaganda, and Musk owns Twitter?

Trump made a vague remark about having some plan in the House, a plan that they’ll never need. Do I doubt that Trump would willingly steal an election? No. But the point is that, as everyone has been trying to tell you, there is no reasonable way to pull off what you’re suggesting.

You are naive and clearly trapped in an info bubble. The simple fact is that far more people voted for Trump than did Harris. And this result isn’t in any way surprising. It’s the kind of scenario any Poli Sci 101 text would tell you could easily lose an incumbent an election.

If it were a close race at all, you would have a point. But we don’t do big national recounts just for shits and giggles. We don’t do them because you think someone’s vibe makes them a cheater. We do it when a plot is actually plausible. And the advantage Trump received is completely consistent with national polling, general economic sentiments, and Trump’s own past poll performance. There is simply no reason other than cope to hang onto the idea that Trump cheated his way to this win.

Seriously. How tone-deaf do you have to be? It’s condescending and treats people like children.

The inflation is actually something that could have been addressed with the proper messaging. They could have said, during the heart of it, “yes, I know inflation is bad. And we’re doing everything we can to fight it. But realize that this is happening because of the stimulus efforts we made during the pandemic. We printed a bunch of money and used that to keep everyone afloat while everything shut down. The alternative was that we would face a wave of defaults, foreclosures, and evictions not seen since the 1930s. We avoided that economic disaster. But in turn we have some higher prices now. We will be doing everything we can to crack down on any corporate profiteering…” And then they could have proceeded to make public examples of any company that engaged in price-gouging. They could have just flat-out told the American people, “sorry, but we’re going to have some higher prices. We are not gods, and this is the only tool in our toolkit we have for dealing with something the magnitude of what we faced in the pandemic.” If they had done that, just laid it out all honestly and on the table, I think they would have won this election.

Instead they just papered over it. First inflation was “transitory.” Then they just repeated “inflation adjusted wages” until they were blue in the face. Inflation numbers don’t really reflect the lived experience of most people. I recall getting shouted down several times on r/economics for daring to point out the flaws in how we measure inflation, how different groups experienced different inflation rates, and how the methadologies really have been hacked over the decades to keep rates low.

The blame still stops at the leading Democrats.

Consider this. How could so many people vote for someone who is such a clear threat to democracy?

Simple. Because despite everything they said, his opponents never actually treated him as a threat to democracy.

Biden appointed a Republican to run the Department of Justice, and that Republican sat on his hands, refusing to do any investigation of Trump until he was forced to do so by House investigative committees. It took TWO YEARS before an investigation even began. This delay allowed Trump to eventually run out the clock.

Trump should have been in chains on the day Biden took office. He should have faced trial in a military tribunal. Any attempt by SCOTUS to protect him should have been declared “a coup from the bench” and seen those justices charged as accomplices after the fact.

THAT is how you need to handle an actual threat to democracy. Trump should have been put on trial, through whatever means necessary. Hell, ideally he should have received a capital sentence for his crimes against the republic. He betrayed his country. He is guilty of treason. The man should have hanged for his crimes.

But that wasn’t how Biden treated it. Trump was an EPOCHAL THREAT TO DEMOCRACY, but not enough to risk angering conservative white voters in suburban Philadelphia. He was THE NEXT INCARNATION OF HITLER, but not so Hitlerian as to justify any kind of dubious legal maneuvers that a fascist like Trump would have no problem pulling off.

Biden and co have been shouting that Trump is a threat do democracy for the better part of a decade at this point. But they never actually treated him like one. Actions speak louder than words. Democrats said Trump was a threat to democracy, but they never actually treated him like one. The Democrats, through their actions, made it clear that they didn’t think Trump was a real threat to democracy, so the voters acted accordingly.

If Democrats were actually serious about the threat, Trump would have been tried by military tribunal, sentenced, and been locked away or put in the ground two years ago.

It’s not weird if you realize that we’re no longer in the era of big turnout being synonymous with Democratic win. And rallies are a poor indicator of voter sentiment. How many rallies for Kamala did you personally go to? Rallies are a vestigial remnant from another political era, when people primarily heard about candidates from local in-person gatherings. Yes, Kamala was able to get better rally turnout this time around than Trump, but rally-goers are a weird political rounding error. It just turns out that Kamala’s weirdos were a bit more fired up this time around than Trump’s weirdos.

We just came out of an era of inflation that America hasn’t seen in decades. More people are rent-burdened than ever before, and the amount of people accessing foodbanks is higher than it has been in generations. Liberals papered over this harsh reality with wonky discussions of median inflation-adjusted wages, and they shouted down any critique of how limited main inflation figures actually are at measuring economic well-being. Or worse, they pointed at the stock market. Democrats have also held the White House for 12 of the last 16 years.

Globally, centrist neoliberal parties like the Democrats have been eviscerated in nation after nation, election after election. The neoliberal economic model has failed to deliver the widespread prosperity it promised, and the inequality it has enabled has reached crushing levels. People are demanding change, and currently, they can only find that change, any change really, on the part of right-wing populists like Trump. Neoliberals are genetically incapable of standing up to the wealthy and powerful corporate interests.

Finally, while Trump is a fascist, it was incredibly difficult for voters to take that claim seriously. You can point out that he tried to overthrow the government. But then the average voter will just ask you, “well why isn’t he in prison?” Biden put a Republican, Merrick Garland, in charge of his DOJ. And Garland sat on any investigation or indictment of Trump for two years, allowing Trump to run out the clock. Garland made it impossible for Democrats to effectively run on the “Trump is a fascist” line, simply because the Biden administration didn’t treat him as a threat to democracy. He should have been arrested and sent off to face a military tribunal the day Biden was sworn in. But because Biden didn’t treat him as a serious threat, the voters didn’t consider him a serious threat either.

In short, there are plenty of reasons why Trump won and Kamala lost, and they have nothing to do with voter fraud. Kamala offered no real solutions to struggling Americans. Trump has a simple, if monstrous, solution that actually WILL help people with rental costs. He’s promising to deport 20 million people and thus free up housing supply. It’s a monstrous and cruel solution, but it is at least a short-term solution. Yes, Trump absolutely meets any standard textbook definition of a fascist, but Kamala was not able to win on that. If your party is in power, you cannot run arguing your opponent is a threat to democracy. As if they are, the voters will ask why you haven’t put them behind bars already.

What people miss about Fascism is that it actually does, at least in the short term, help working-class people. If Trump manages to actually deport 20 million illegal immigrants? That will, in the short term, actually lower the cost of rent. Longer term, you have to start having conversations about the supply of housing and the labor to build and maintain that housing. But in the short term, kicking 5-10% of the population out of the country will actually improve the budgets of millions of rent-burdened households. As long as you personally aren’t on the right’s current extermination list, you actually benefit from conservative crimes against humanity.

People are hurting. The amounts of people rent-burdened and accessing food banks are at levels not seen in generations. And the Democrats offered NOTHING of substance to help these people. Kamala offered grants to help cities amend their zoning codes…which might bear fruit 20 years from now. Kamala offered first-time homeowner assistance, but it was a neo-liberals wet dream of a policy, filled with provisos and qualifiers to make sure only just the most-deserving people qualify. She should have been out there campaigning for a huge social housing project - direct federal construction of millions of homes, coupled with a jobs-training program to quickly train thousands of new high school graduates how to be framers, carpenters, plumbers, and electricians.

She should have also come down like the wrath of god upon landlords. She was literally running against a slimy and corrupt landlord, yet she never once made that a center focus of her campaign. She should have been promising to lock up and throw away the key of any landlord, big or small, that used software like realpage. She shouldn’t have had a stump speech where she didn’t call for the complete breakup of Walmart and Amazon.

Those were things she actually could have done to tell people she was actually going to do something about just one issue, the cost of housing. But of course that didn’t happen.

You’re getting into conspiracy theory here. Trump did better than expected everywhere. Blue states. Red States. Blue cities. Red cities. Didn’t matter. There was a shift almost everywhere. And this is across a nation that uses radically different voting machines, forms of voting, voting machine providers, etc. It doesn’t make sense that the could all be rigged so perfectly. It’s insanity.

Yes, you can count “just in case,” but that way lies madness.

I voted for Harris. But in the first-past-the-post system, all that matters for a party is victory. That is how you judge the success of party officials. There is a whole class of extremely well-paid Democratic party officials whose ENTIRE JOB is to figure out how to select a candidate and sell them to the American people. That is literally their entire job.

The average voters is low-information, doesn’t pay attention, and assumes both sides frequently lie. (And they’re not wrong about the lying.) You can truthfully call the other side fascist, but the other side will simply say you’re the fascist, and low-information voters can’t tell the difference.

Voters have always been low-information. This isn’t anything new. The entire reason we have primaries is that it forces candidates to actually try their hand at mass appeal and to take the temperature of the electorate. Democratic leaders kept Biden in far too long, til it was too late to hold a proper primary.

You can blame it on those who don’t vote, but the truth is that most people pay attention to politics only tangentially. If you, as a political operator, didn’t find a way to reach these voters, you have failed.

Does the blame ultimately fall on those who didn’t vote for Biden? Sure. But the same is true of those who didn’t vote for Walter Mondale. It doesn’t mean Harris isn’t just as big a failure as Mondale.

And yet, without such people, these institutions will never change. If you want these institutions to be non-hateful, you have to get non-hateful people into them. We’re not going to get rid of Liberty University any time soon. And I would prefer to see it grow into a non-bigoted institution than to have it remain a bigoted institution indefinitely.

Sometimes you just have to work at places that are hostile to trans people, and you just have to hope they don’t find out you’re trans. If the only place that you can find a job in your field is at a Christian College, maybe you’ll accept the job and hope for the best. Potentially losing a job at some point in the future is better than not having a job today.

Full self driving should only be implemented when the system is good enough to completely take over all driving functions. It should only be available in vehicles without steering wheels. The Tesla solution of having “self driving” but relying on the copout of requiring constant user attention and feedback is ridiculous. Only when a system is truly capable of self-driving 100% autonomously, at a level statistically far better than a human, should any kind of self-driving be allowed on the road. Systems like Tesla’s FSD officially require you to always be ready to intervene at a moment’s notice. They know their system isn’t ready for independent use yet, so they require that manual input. But of course this encourages disengaged driving; no one actually pays attention to the road like they should, able to intervene at a moment’s notice. Tesla’s FSD imitates true self-driving, but it pawns off the liability do drivers by requiring them to pay attention at all times. This should be illegal. Beyond merely lane-assistance technology, no self-driving tech should be allowed except in vehicles without steering wheels. If your AI can’t truly perform better than a human, it’s better for humans to be the only ones actively driving the vehicle.

This also solves the civil liability problem. Tesla’s current system has a dubious liability structure designed to pawn liability off to the driver. But if there isn’t even a steering wheel in the car, then the liability must fall entirely on the vehicle manufacturer. They are after all 100% responsible for the algorithm that controls the vehicle, and you should ultimately have legal liability for the algorithms you create. Is your company not confident enough in its self-driving tech to assume full legal liability for the actions of your vehicles? No? Then your tech isn’t good enough yet. There can be a process for car companies to subcontract out the payment of legal claims against the company. They can hire State Farm or whoever to handle insurance claims against them. But ultimately, legal liability will fall on the company.

This also avoids criminal liability. If you only allow full self-driving in vehicles without steering wheels, there is zero doubt about who is control of the car. There isn’t a driver anymore, only passengers. Even if you’re a person sitting in the seat that would normally be a driver’s seat, it doesn’t matter. You are just a passenger legally. You can be as tired, distracted, drunk, or high as you like, you’re not getting any criminal liability for driving the vehicle. There is such a clear bright line - there is literally no steering wheel - that it is absolutely undeniable that you have zero control over the vehicle.

This actually would work under the same theory of existing drunk-driving law. People can get ticketed for drunk driving for sleeping in their cars. Even if the cops never see you driving, you can get charged for drunk driving if they find you in a position where you could drunk drive. So if you have your keys on you while sleeping drunk in a parked car, you can get charged with DD. But not having a steering wheel at all would be the equivalent of not having the keys to a vehicle - you are literally incapable of operating it. And if you are not capable of operating it, you cannot be criminally liable for any crime relating to its operation.

SpaceX has been paid extensively for services not rendered. The funds that are currently paying for their Starship development were ostensibly for a lunar lander. And they’re years behind schedule at this point. They haven’t even started on the lander itself.

I think we should indict Sam Altman on two sets of charges:

1. A set of securities fraud charges.

2. 8 billion counts of criminal reckless endangerment.

He’s out on podcasts constantly saying the OpenAI is near superintelligent AGI and that there’s a good chance that they won’t be able to control it, and that human survival is at risk. How is gambling with human extinction not a massive act of planetary-scale criminal reckless endangerment?

So either he is putting the entire planet at risk, or he is lying through his teeth about how far along OpenAI is. If he’s telling the truth, he’s endangering us all. If he’s lying, then he’s committing securities fraud in an attempt to defraud shareholders. Either way, he should be in prison. I say we indict him for both simultaneously and let the courts sort it out.

Take a look! It’s in a book! It’s Readin Raaiiinboow!!

I too am disturbed by the noted decline in Austin Powers references among high school students.

Pfft. I’ll continue to use my nonreciprocal Hall effect sensors in the way God intended - cooled by liquid helium. Some traditions are just worth preserving.

It’s worse than that. The US is a net oil exporter. We make all the oil we need at home.