Respect. He built something bigger than him and then knew that it was time to transition.

He…doesn’t…care…

He only needed to get voted in once (well…twice…the first was a trial run). He used the time to take control of every single lever of power through cronyism or outright criminality. Votes don’t matter because no matter what the votes say, the people controlling the election will simply say “Trump won”, and when the legal argument against the obvious election rigging gets to the supreme court, they’l affirm it. This is by design.

Or, also possible, Trump will simply not have an election using an excuse of “we’re at war” or whatever.

He doesn’t need you. He doesn’t want you. You can all die for all he gives a shit, so long as he and his rich friends keep making money off the presidency.

There is no “voting” your way out of this bullshit.

What an absolutely repulsive human being. Beyond the crimes. Beyond the egotism and narcissism, he’s just simply a repulsive, classless, amoral fuck-head.

He’s the guy that, if he hadn’t been born into wealth, would be Ken McElroy

Because there’s no such thing as no consequences. If I have the ability to rob a bank and get away with no consequences, there are still consequences for the bank guard that loses his job (or that I have to hurt in order to get into the vault). There are consequences for the people whose money I’ve taken. Just because there are no consequences on me personally, doesn’t mean there are no consequences.

Doing good comes from having empathy for other people, not because you’re afraid of personal consequences.

countless thousands before them have jumped up and down on that same floor for decades

Structural fatigue means that someday, all of that previous jumping will do enough cumulative damage to weaken the glass frame.

I have no interest in being the straw that breaks that particular camels back, as remote a possibility as it may be.

Well I wish someone had told me that before I went through with the surgery.

unless government oversight finally becomes so corrupt and useless that this concept is forced through.

So next week, you’re saying?

Three words…

Cock finger puppet.

IMO, consumers aren’t necessarily stupid as much as corporations have very expertly learned to weaponize FOMO through advertising; allowing companies like apple to inflate their profit margin from something reasonable to “whatever the consumer is willing to pay.”

Is that “capitalism”? Yes…technically. But to me, it goes against the spirit of capitalism, which at its heart sums up as “Farmer has a cow that produces milk. Farmer sells the chicken farmer down the road his extra milk and charges enough to be reasonable but doesn’t get greedy because he needs eggs.”

Corporations don’t need our eggs. They don’t believe they need anything from us and so don’t care about being reasonable about profit.

Its “capitalism”, but in my opinion, a perverse, stilted form that should have been kicked to the curb the moment Reaganomics started making it popular.

Life tip: No matter where you are, always seek out the weirdos. You’ll have a much better time.

I’m ready to move to a commune. But like… not a hippie Luddite commune that shirks all technology. Just one that isn’t fucking insane about the tech in their lives. basically one that rewinds a bit back towards maybe the early to mid 2000s. Where we had a of the tech in a still mostly uncorrupted form.

Its like “the village” for people who are utterly exhausted by corporate greed. Someone get M. Night Shammalamma or whatever on the phone.

6.5 Drachma, can be converted to 6 sesterces or six ducats.

Obviously I’m kidding.

simple solution. Either he gives up his business interests or the election is declared null and void. Third option is that the people remind him what happens to tsars when soviets rise up.

Those are his only three options.

At first I thought “Goth Clowns”. But then I realized that would just be mimes.

The truest truism that ever did truism is that “power inevitably corrupts”

Doubt I would ever do the VR headset. I simply don’t play the kind of games that work well with (or even need) VR. Although come to think of it, a VR Civilization VI game would be wild.

But the Steam Machine would be interesting to replace the old laptop I currently have running as my multimedia box on my television (streaming, retro gaming, steam mirroring, etc…) It would be more powerful than the well worn old dude I’m currently using.

Trump is too stupid to even know what the Aryan Fist is. My guess is he thinks he’s being iconic by mimicking the gesture he made when he was “shot” during the campaign. Which makes me all the more convinced that the entire thing was an act since everything Conservatives do is completely performative.

“work as much as you can, use as much as you need.”

You don’t need technological advancement to be sustainable if your population remains relatively small and static. Hunter Gatherers actually follow pretty much exactly the formula you described above and ended up with far more leisure time than their agriculturally “advanced” counterparts.

It’s never existed. Not in it’s pure form anyway. But neither has capitalism, or socialism either for that matter.

A theoretical system is always in some way perverted and coopted by the people implementing it. Humans are the weak part of the equation because humans are greedy and focused only on themselves and their own small group of friends/family. So scaling any political system up from theoretical to an actual national policy always ends up with a perverted form where one group ends up over another group despite the original theoretical intent of the system in question. That goes for Communism, Capitalism, Socialism, as well as religion too.

Humans suck and can’t have nice things without fucking them up.

If Jabba the Huts mother was a member of the Bene Gesserit.