Prelude to the Apocalypse

[Hoagtech]

Let's all wish Kamala a happy Birthday and "Donate Today!"....

[BryanM]

Hillary probably had the funniest money-begging campaign of all time. During the 2015 primary, the average donation to Sanders was five bux and some lint they found between the cushions. Hillary's average donation was over $200, because, well, why the fuck would you donate anything to Clinton if you're not personally raking in the dough from capitalism? The woman already had infinity money from the various PACs supporting her. (It was over $1 billion I believe, when the election was all said and done?) Her money was from finance industry bundlers, mainly. Some from the upper crest from coms and IT, naturally.

It made her look like she was on the side of the big guys, because she was. Her team, with all their tact and grace, naturally jumped on it and started hustling people for even a dollar, to get the average down. One of them, a miss Maddie, didn't wanna give Hillary her dollar, and the aggressive fundraising email became a meme.

Naturally, this lead into a resurgence in the popularity of the Aloe Blacc song, because it was mandatory that we post a link to it every time Hillary would come up in conversation. We ran that shit into the ground, just like I'm doing <---- here ---->

The sad, depressing end to this story, is this initiative worked perfectly. It did exactly what they wanted it to do. Millionaires literally had their butlers donate to Hillary one or two bucks at a time, so the average donation did technically go down. And Hillary could say the smaller number (which wasn't as monstrous as >$200) during a debate without technically lying, and all Sanders could do is nod his head and say "Yes, there are people who support you" without looking like an asshole.

It really puts the inequality of power into frame. A zillionaire can dump thousands into her campaign and PACs, and it costs them nothing. But when a peasant gives $15, that costs them 15 chicken sandwiches.

[Sengoku Strider]

Let's all wish Kamala a happy Birthday and "Donate Today!"....

Enh, that's just generic disingenuous PAC money grubbing. It needs some guy calling her "Mommy H" to achieve that real je ne sais cringe.

I can't even really take whoever wrote that seriously as a campaign operative with legit skeezeball politico game TBH.

Now this? This is ice-cold ruthless street-gangsta hustle. Whoever put this joint together was doing Allen Iverson supervillain crossups on elderly donors with poor eyesight:



The truly vicious part is it's for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, it doesn't even have anything to do with Trump.

To all the killas and the two hunned fifty dolla billas
For real fundraizas who ain't got no feelings

It made her look like she was on the side of the big guys, because she was. Her team, with all their tact and grace, naturally jumped on it and started hustling people for even a dollar, to get the average down. One of them, a miss Maddie, didn't wanna give Hillary her dollar, and the aggressive fundraising email became a meme.

At least whoever wrote this knows what the iron tang of blood smells like.

[BryanM]

Holy shit that thing is fucking, fucking evil.

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I thought the A/B testing over the years that's turned every fundraising email either into

A. Someone who sounds as thirsty as a boyfriend who needs a booty call, immediately

B. Someone who sounds like they'll die right this second without your support

Leave it to GOP leadership to dig into a new level of hell...

I'm been doing some terrible writing lately, and been thinking about that scummy psychological trick some writers use to keep their readers in a constant state of anxiety? Like in Prison Break? It's extremely effective in the short term, but once the anxiety goes away, you often realize there's nothing underneath it that was keeping you invested.

Maybe their psych team knows all that, and in this case, they need to get blood out of these elderly turnips before they cark it and that money is lost to them forever... Ah, I'm overthinking things. They have some slimey goblin somewhere doing the A/B thing as far as it'll go. It's AI min/maxing, all the way down ain't it.

[vol.2]

Don't know if this belongs exactly here, but this morning someone burned a gay pride flag on a front porch here in Baltimore and three houses went up in flames. It's very, very sad.

https://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2022/06/ ... ate-crime/

[BulletMagnet]

So the GOP commissioners of a New Mexico county are refusing to certify the results of a recent primary election there because, in the words of one of them, "in my heart I don’t know if it is right.”

At least the universe has once again shown that it has a sense of humor, albeit, of course, a sick one.

EDIT: Also, a quick reminder that not all rising commodity costs can be blamed on impersonal economic forces.

[Mischief Maker]

In case anyone had any doubts whether Movement for a People's Party was a total scam:

https://twitter.com/majorityfm/status/1 ... 3773114374

[orange808]

Hey, now! Not all SCOTUS leaks are equal.

(Only the "naughty" kind. Not the treasonous coup kind.)

There was actually an argument. That means there are Republican treasonous rebels plotting against the United States from the SCOTUS bench. We can be certain that Thomas was involved in the treasonous plan to destroy the republic.

Just another day in our usual news cycle, though. And, so the apocalypse continues as scheduled.

[Mischief Maker]

We can be certain that Thomas was involved in the treasonous plan to destroy the republic.

Yeah, it was called Bush v. Gore.

[orange808]

We can be certain that Thomas was involved in the treasonous plan to destroy the republic.

Yeah, it was called Bush v. Gore.

You made me grin, but I'm not kidding.

Putting Trump back in charge after he lost an election could have eventually ended the world as we know it. Same idea applies if China ever had a huge crisis of government. Everything is dangerously fragile.

This makes Bush vs Gore look almost quaint.

And, don't forget there are always other possibilities in the shadows. Let's say the military stepped in. Some would exclaim: "My hero!" But, are we sure about that? Would they be heroes? Maybe. Maybe not.

A moment of uncertainty could create new opportunities for other grifters to seize the moment--maybe even like minded individuals that would prefer to govern themselves (without Trump). Nothing would give your new martial law extreme right wing government more legitimacy than appearing to topple a coup and saving 'Merica.

It's all ridiculously fucking dangerous.

[BryanM]

2024 is going to be a massacre. A complete repeat of 2016. Ten thousand snakes will refuse to unite into ratfuck voltron to beat Trump. The embalmed mummy of Biden will lose by 0.1% in Michigan and Ohio, or whatever. At least those of you worried about our dictatorship giving up on the illusion of choice by installing one figurehead forever can take some comfort that, because he's not Dick Cheney, he might pass before the immortality serum will be effective enough to preserve him. We'll have his daughter instead! First woman president? (... somehow I think their misogyny is strong enough they'd put his failson in there instead. That would be a massively clear example of patriarchy putting to death any pretense of meritocracy.)

As for the #demexit crowd, I have massive fundamental disagreements with as well. Primarily because that's what democrats want us to do. They want us out of their primaries and committee seats. (In fact, that's literally the ONLY thing they fight for. Keeping normies and hippies out of power in their party.) It's not like you're obligated to vote for a vampire during the general election if the person you supported lost, instead of staying home and sipping lemonade. Ethics can be maintained, you don't have to become a monster that would vote for more concentration camps like Seder just because a D is next to your name in a registry somewhere.

Still probably would have gone along with "Fuck it, Jesse Ventura. Sure. This makes sense. For 'murica." if that 3rd party run happened somehow. Good, bad, at least we'd have more fuckin' trains instead of Tesla tombs.
____

Here's this week's escapist youtube video. Doomposting is less effective if we have less emotional investment in this world. It helps to know objectively good things exist within in it.

[orange808]

Another thing with Tesla and Musk is his complete contempt for anything practical. All he wants to do is make toys and play spaceman.

Yes. A full plug in electric luxury car with experimental self drive is a fucking toy. No, there are not charging stations in most places. It's not really transportation. It's toy to show off around your house.

The future of the automobile right now is the plug in hybrid and it's rather amusing that there are few models, because it's been obvious from the beginning that plug hybrids are the only viable path of adoption. As usual, the Japanese auto engineering culture seems to be most in touch with what's actually practical--rolling a station wagon (I mean, crossover! It's not a wagon. Oh, no. It's.. a wagon.) with significant range at a competitive price.

Anyhow, they are building a wagon that plugs in and gets you ~35 real world miles on a charge before switching to petrol. No need to install anything. Plug it in at home for a couple hours when you can and those miles are cheaper than gas.

Despite years in the business, Tesla has nothing to compete with the raw utility of Toyota's offering--and (apparently) Musk has no desire to actually sell electric vehicles to the public. He isn't changing the world at all. The real engineering to help adapt to the new petrol market and reduce emmisions is happening well outside of Tesla.

[BryanM]

Hybrids are pretty jank. You don't have to be an engineer to understand the cost and additional failure points of having to support two separate engines. Or trying to reach two different goals using a swiss army knife.

The Tesla business model was completely feasible on the surface: The roadster was meant for rich assholes to buy while they scaled their processes for the mass market. The ultimate goal was to eventually produce a boring 'ole $35,000 car. They're currently at... $46,990.

The driving range on their batteries is in the neighborhood of 300 miles. A five hour drive. If it took ten minutes to charge for every three hundred minutes of driving, well, have a happy culture shift of taking the time to go eat your chicken sandwich while sitting in your fine Wendy's restaurant.

Charging kiosks are just a matter of profitability. "How long until investing this $100,000 will net a return." We didn't have a gas station every five feet before the car was invented. A difference between the electricity outlet and an underground gas tank, is the kiosks could be put in next to any building. Would move the Wal-Mart gas station from five hundred feet away, to being right next to the building.

The logic back in the day for the kool-aid drinkers, was "No one is making electric cars. With oil exhaustion and global warming, if we're to have a future, electric cars will be a necessary part of it. Ergo, buying TESLA stock makes sense because if it fails, we're all doomed anyway." It's pretty rational~

Here in the wonderful scifi world of the future, we can look at some of their shortcomings.

* Their genius CEO (not the one who funded the company, Musk knifed that guy and buried his body in a swamp) invested too much into automation and discovered that the car corporations aren't complete idiots, that you actually need humans.

* The build quality of the cars themselves are shit. Misaligned doors and stuff like that.

* Their design contain some really stupid elements. The speedometer being located in the middle of the cabin on the console is stupid as fuckkkkk. But electronic locks are probably the most criminal element. A man and his dog were murdered by that shit. Not by Tesla, though.

* Their CEO seems more interested in busting unions, inflating gambling instruments, and getting handjobs from massage therapists than in doing anything else. Hiring stalkers to stalk your own employees, classy guy this one is.

* They never ramped their output up to meet the demand of even the pre-orders they've received.

* Oh, and it turns out the corporations that build cars have the capability to make massive numbers of electric vehicles, after all. They just kinda have to just flip a switch. Oops.

One of the things I was reminded of that is very very not normal and is actually very very evil: the autopilot is programmed to shut off when it detects an imminent collision. So the company can go "We're not liable! The autopilot wasn't in control at the time of the crash." (It is neat the self driving car is at a usefully deployable state, though.)

I've known this for years now, but never consciously recognized it as a big deal. It's the apocalypse, other things kind of over shadow it and this is completely in the bounds of our everyday evil: "Yeah, that's the sky. You look at it, and it's blue. Why are we talking about this?"



Anyway, the core issue is we're expending finite energy in order to move two tons of steel and fiberglass a few dozen miles back and forth every day, all to move one (1) person. Trains, bikes and microcars would be what a sane, rational civilization that took not fucking dying from self-induced suicide seriously would do.

We're too car-brained to change anything, and microcars are death traps with everyone driving around a giant murder machine from Mad Maxx.

Serious about the car brain. Look at any city. An asphalt desert.

Like in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where the aliens thought that cars were the dominant life form? Hence why the protagonist's friend is using the alias 'Ford Prefect'?



Anyway, in the alternate universe version of Musk where he's actually cool, the very least he would be doing is working toward the goal of 100% automated factories instead of giving up on his dream of getting rid of humans. It's sad that almost all research is done by public projects or poverty ridden science nerds in universities. The business of making money isn't interested in risk. Like how they waited for the immortality serum to show some commercial viability, before swooping in and pocketing everyone else's work.

It's as dumb as letting one guy own all the water or oil. Could you imagine a hellworld where oil and water weren't considered to be publicly owned resources???

[orange808]

America didn't have a really good network of gas stations in place until the late 1970's: nearly twenty years after the interstate project got underway in earnest. Before then, they invented signs telling you how far it was until the next stop. You vastly overestimate the feasibility and speed of a switch to all electric. And, there are still places that you can run out of gas.

Why won't the existing stations make the change immediately? You're right about profits. Virtuallly nobody that sells gasoline makes any money. It's a roller item. A roller is exactly what it sounds like, it rolls in business to buy other things. I have no idea why anyone would spend huge money to install electric charging stations (if the building even has the ability to add it easily) for so few potential customers. The only people making money if "well off" people swipe a card and drive away are: the power company and the bank. So, if I'm in a working class neighborhood and everyone is driving has powered cars, why do I upgrade? You aren't going to come in the building if you can help it.

What else is impractical? Joe Paycheck can't afford a new car of any kind--much less an electric. So, it's going to take a long time for cars to trickle down. And, that doesn't include the expense of replacing the battery for the new owner. People will learn quickly about buying a lemon used car with a bad cell.

Charging huge batteries takes a lot of juice. Installing an appropriate home charging station can help, but that can be very expensive. Many many homes are old and they can't handle the additional load! And, that's just the homeowners. People in apartments are stuck with circuitous and expensive charge stations. With gas prices hovering at ~$5 usd, we have reached some parity between buying a charge at a station and gasoline. That's not great. Need to reduce the profitability? What's my motivation to install it if it works like gas? It won't be profitable. It's gonna be a roller.

Trickle charge from your regular power outlet? You could, but the vehicle needs management from the app. You have preconditioning to deal with. It takes 7-8 hours to trickle charge. And, you really have to charge late at night to get good rates. (That's true no matter what.) Of course, if you have money for a luxury car, these headaches aren't nearly as bad. Wealthy people have a shiny new mcMansion and plenty of money to install anything they please. That ain't Joe Paycheck.

It's very shit for average people.

I also shouldn't have to explore and plan every single last mile I drive wondering if I am going to get stranded. The practical bottom line purpose of an automobile is transportation. That shouldn't come with so many headaches. Please don't tell me some shit about San Francisco. That's so divorced from reality, I don't even know where to begin.

I get that we're too late to save the world from emissions, but we can't pretend that practical concerns in the world don't exist. The world has a very small rudder. It will take decades to get the charging infrastructure installed and affordable second hand cars into regular people's hands. We can't turn fast enough; that's why this thread is so well named.

It's interesting that you hinted at monopolies. Because, we are going to shift transportation energy purchases to the electric grid. Electricity is delivered over dedicated infrastructure and it isn't wireless. That's a problem. We have a market failure issue on the horizon. How do we address that? Obviously, cable redundancy is a non-starter, so how do we encourage competition? What we are doing will not work; utilities are not regulated well enough to take on the huge transportation energy market. Left to their own devices, they will fleece us all. That's something we should be talking about right now--even as we move ahead, because the gasoline will eventually be phased out. Not that anyone will give it a thought. We'll all be "surprised" when it happens.

[BryanM]

The practical concerns of owning one today is absolutely more downside than up. Having to run an extension cord from your house to your car sitting outside under the sky and moon overnight, should you lack a super charger, is indeed less than ideal. (Seven to eight hours for 200 miles of range, at that low voltage.)

The kiosks I'm talking about are a lot more feasible for commercial outlets to install. The real bottleneck there (besides no one having electric cars yet making it an unprofitable use of space) would indeed be our shit energy grid.

The transition, should it happen in lieu of donkeys, will be a hard cut as these things usually are. I'd give it around twelve years at most for gas to be used in anything more than niche applications. If the will was ever there.

The will won't ever be there until we're bone dry, however. Those who have power are happy with the perfect utopia they have, if they wanted to change anything it would have been changed yesterday. I'd agree it'd be an impossible sell politically, if what ordinary people wanted mattered at all.

In the long annals of grifts and controlling other people's social status, cars are perhaps at the top for our country. Remember when they kept trying to push the idea of hydrogen cars, because they wanted to keep the gas racket going? It took like decades for them to finally give up on pushing them, when the physics said "this isn't gonna work, bro" from day one.

[BulletMagnet]

The order follows “constituents’ concerns” about the primary but does not clarify what those concerns are.

That’s on top of a hand-count audit already happening in all South Carolina counties.

Remember when Trump complained about mail-in ballots because counting the results took too long, and in his view every election's results should be announced the same day they take place? Wonder if he or his apologists have any deeply-held and entirely legitimate beliefs to express about this matter.

Oh, and also:

One post that spread widely this week suggested Barr was paid by Dominion Voting Systems, a company targeted by Trump and his supporters with baseless claims of vote rigging. “From 2009 to 2018, DOMINION PAID BARR $1.2 million in cash and granted him another $1.1 million in stock awards, according to SEC filings. (No wonder Barr can’t find any voter fraud!),” the post read.

Wrong Dominion. Barr was paid by Dominion Energy, a publicly traded company headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, that provides power and heat to customers in several mid-Atlantic states.

EDIT: That's not an insurrection, Mate! THAT'S an insurrection!

[Hoagtech]

Here's another RACIST Q-anon article about Oregon's overdose rate hitting 700% in one year after drug decriminalization.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... vstFbw_gac

After giving drug offenders a "hotline" card to call the hotline center received 91 calls from 1885 "citation warnings"

I think crime and public safety concerns are almost as Qultist and RACIST as discussing inflation and depression.

[Mischief Maker]

Here's another RACIST Q-anon article about Oregon's overdose rate hitting 700% in one year after drug decriminalization.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... vstFbw_gac

After giving drug offenders a "hotline" card to call the hotline center received 91 calls from 1885 "citation warnings"

I think crime and public safety concerns are almost as Qultist and RACIST as discussing inflation and depression.

Um... did you read the actual article?

There's a new synthetic opioid with a massively higher overdose rate that just hit the streets in Oregon.

Treatment centers weren't getting the dispensary tax money earmarked by the ballot measure because there wasn't enough bureaucracy in place to vet applicants fast enough. This is the fault of "small government" in action.

I realize that you were being sarcastic, as there was neither racism nor Qanon stuff in the article, but Daily Mail is still a garbage publication with a naked bias who deceptively quoted a republican talking about the overdose rate in Grants Pass increasing 700% and worded their headline to imply to the casual reader that the entire state of Oregon is seeing a 700% increase. Shame on them!

[orange808]

[BryanM]

I never really "got" the white rich people addiction to pain killers until last week. Woo, that was some cool shit. I could tell it was altering my brain chemicals when nothing around me was annoying me. When normally I would find lots of things annoying: the possibility of crashing into other cars, bothering to talk to people unnecessarily, or the enormous pain in the ass it is to continue breathing oxygen.

I think they gave me a little extra than normal, or I'm just getting old. I suspect it might have been a trick to make me feel better about paying the bill. The most I ever experienced before was light euphoria, a "walking on clouds" feeling for a few minutes. That stuff lasted like five hours.

Ah, and it's always cute seeing the youth trying to justify the boot with their imagined fears. Being an 80's kid when Robocop was a documentary... that was some real awesome hyperviolence. Not this sissy ass 2020 upper middle class epidemic of meth and opioids. Oh no, my ex-girlfriend's dad got a divorce because he got high all day. The world is coming to an end ;_; ;_; ;_;

Meanwhile, back in the 80's: Fuckin' crack wars and corpses strewn across the streets. Drug dealers back then were free range, man. It's not like today where your drug dealer is your doctor. Man, no wonder things are so much more mild on the violence front; doctors muscled into the market and formed their own cartels.

[Steamflogger Boss]

This is a dark day in American history.

[To Far Away Times]

This is a dark day in American history.

I say with no exaggeration that today could very likely be seen as the starting point for the rapid fall of America. You can't come back the same after rolling back human rights. It defines your moral character forever.

[orange808]

Everything is bullshit. Everything is arbitrary. Everything is invented in the moment for pure convenience. Always has been and always will be.

Same as it ever was. We gotta keep our heads down and stay out of the line of fire.

All I can do is vote. Let's hope the gun humpers don't think it's the 18th century. They're already winning; what more can they ask for? All guns do is kill and destroy things. Those people don't understand, but America would take the entire world down with us. We can't have a coup or a revolution--ever. America and China cannot fall down; the consequences would be truly apocalyptic. The next election is frightening.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

I say with no exaggeration that today could very likely be seen as the starting point for the rapid fall of America. You can't come back the same after rolling back human rights. It defines your moral character forever.

I'd agree, but honestly America's been on a steady decline for a while now. Its complete apathy with respect to rampant gun violence, its embrace of a conman president who openly attempted an armed coup, its promotion of antivaccination by its leaders... To see such blatant misogyny at the forefront is certainly a new low.

The conservatives apparently fantasize about becoming a country that allows women like this to die (and this is in the EU, yikes).

Apparently she's fortunately since been airlifted to Spain, a sane country.

[rapoon]

june of doom is rolling out as expected.

yesterday was a colossal win for the gunfucks; a dismissal of the two-step/means-end approach effectively dissolves a judges ability to consider quantitative and empirical evidence.

[GaijinPunch]

yesterday was a colossal win for the gunfucks; .

And now more targets for the "mentally ill" ones that kill people.

[Mischief Maker]

This is why I was a party pooper to all the #bernieorbust people in 2016. And so was Bernie Sanders.

Hillary sucks, total fascist control of the judiciary is worse.

Anyone who said Hillary was just as bad as Trump was either a moron or this guy:



https://youtu.be/A8OGbWZLSLk

[BryanM]

Why would this court manifesting in 2020 instead of 2016 have necessarily precluded them from doing this, this year anyway? They'd have had over two years to get around to it, it would have happened whenever they felt like it. It's weird they chose to wait this long in the first place, right?

The fash have power, and the corporate democrats will continue giving them more of it. There are no new lands to conquer, no new populations to enslave; it's cannibalistic capitalism from here out, boyos.

A Bernie Sanders presidency, if such a miracle were somehow be allowed to occur without the man disappearing immediately, would have scarcely done better at purging the party than Corbyn did his. If you want to feel hope or power, you'll have to find it in your personal life because electoralism and collective action? It's ultimately a hard binary win/lose, and we've got another couple decades of losing in us.

Brandon looks poised to eat shit this year, but it looks like fake TV doctor Oz might go down too? Enjoy the wrestling show for what it is. Taking it seriously and being invested in its outcome, for something you can't control, will just make you crazy.

(Seriously, the inflation number is crazy. And that's our new normal. The apocalypse manifests, with sprinkles and cherries or not, regardless.)

[BulletMagnet]

You can't come back the same after rolling back human rights.

The real kicker is the legal rationale used to justify it it; as plenty of others have noted, Roe was built on the foundation of Griswold v. Connecticut, which was ostensibly about the right to employ contraception (which, to nobody's surprise, the current Court is absolutely itching to make its next target), but on a deeper level declared that the 14th Amendment insinuates an inherent right to privacy in certain matters; Alito and company, by contrast, insist that if the Constitution does not specifically guarantee any particular right then the states are completely off the leash to impose whatever limits they want.

I really, really, REALLY want to hear from the keep the government out of my business crowd on this once they're done loudly and proudly celebrating the decision.

On a related note, compare and contrast with January 6th.

Its complete apathy

As you can see in microcosm on this forum there are plenty of US citizens who are incredibly concerned about the issues you list and more; the problem, as I've emoted on numerous other occasions, is that, in addition to those openly fighting for regressive policies, we have a sizeable self-styled "center" who love to consider themselves "above the fray" but somehow always end up either openly supporting the reactionaries (because the other side is always equally bad, my gut tells me so) or quietly acquiescing to whatever insanity the right proposes because making any manner of fuss in opposition to it is what would actually be "too radical".

To paint as blunt a picture as I can, there are multiple people currently testifying before the January 6th committee that Trump is a danger to democracy who also say that they'll still fucking vote for him if he runs again. I don't think I quite have words to describe my feelings on that, especially not ones for use with polite company.

[o.pwuaioc]

Its complete apathy

As you can see in microcosm on this forum there are plenty of US citizens who are incredibly concerned about the issues you list and more; the problem, as I've emoted on numerous other occasions, is that, in addition to those openly fighting for regressive policies, we have a sizeable self-styled "center" who love to consider themselves "above the fray" but somehow always end up either openly supporting the reactionaries (because the other side is always equally bad, my gut tells me so) or quietly acquiescing to whatever insanity the right proposes because making any manner of fuss in opposition to it is what would actually be "too radical".

I used to be the "center", but what's the "center" has shifted considerably over the past several decades. Although I should note that abortion has been a polarizing issue since the invention of the "pro-life" movement in the 70's.

To paint as blunt a picture as I can, there are multiple people currently testifying before the January 6th committee that Trump is a danger to democracy who also say that they'll still fucking vote for him if he runs again. I don't think I quite have words to describe my feelings on that, especially not ones for use with polite company.

Makes you wonder how many of them only turned on Trump to save their own skin. (Hint: quite a few of them for sure.)