Ohio has entered the chat

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Ohio

These same CEOs will say they work sun up to sun down and then they just consider any moment they are awake “working”

• enjoying a lavished catered lunch on the company dime: work
• having drinks with other executives punctuated by the occasional sentence here or there about buckling down for next quarter: work
• sitting and barely listening to a presentation someone else put together and then making a semi-random decision based off a partial understanding after someone has boiled all the complexity away into two viable solutions that are only cosmetically different: work

And then after a long day of doing nothing of value they go back to their mansion and enjoy their 8 figure salaries and “read a paper” or “think about work” and consider that burning the midnight oil while all the material cares in the world are easily handled for them.

Fuck that noise

I have thought about this a lot.

I have a theory that most people are fine, let’s say 90%

Then you have 5% that are antisocial in a clear and violent way.

Then another 5% that are antisocial in a non violent way, they can never have enough, these people become billionaires (or try to).

I think most societies and economic systems try to control those 10% and under capitalism the system established two mechanisms.

For antisocial and violent: state sanctioned violence, police to arrest, beat, shoot and a justice system to incarcerate.

For antisocial and nonviolent: capitalism attempts to harness the unending avarice of these people towards constructive aims. The strength of capitalism is that this sorta works for a while, greedy people that want more and more and more end up making things of value for society. Not on purpose, not because they enjoy making valuable things, but as a means to their goal, accumulating more money.

The problem with capitalist systems is that the mechanism intended to control the nonviolent antisocial people breaks down. Witb enough wealth they can undo the competition that causes their greed to accidentally make value for society. They capture the power in the society and continue sucking up more and more, never satisfied.

I’m not sure what the solution is, but I’ve become convinced that you can judge any economic systems based on how it controls these two groups. European democratic socialism is fairing a bit better because they seem to still be interested in controlling the nonviolent antisocial group, but that group is happy to slowly accumulate more and more wealth and power and influence. A few well placed bribes, a couple key votes go their way, and bit by bit they will tear down the constraints. The problem with constant vigilance against a group of determined antisocial people is that they only need a handful of victories to change the rules in their favor and then it’s game over.

America should serve as a clear warning of what happens when your guardrails come undone.

I’m sure the loss of hers immunity in close living quarters won’t have any negative effects.

Real quick question, if someone wanted to dismantle our ability to fight and win wars how exactly would their actions differ from this administrations?

Nothing says confidence in the capitalist status quo like outlawing any competing ideas.

I don’t think the popular vote compact would diminish the two parties.

As far as I understand it the compact says all the states in the compact will pledge their electoral college electors to the popular vote winner.

The popular vote winner is still just the candidate with the most votes nationally so all the incentives and structures that lead to two parties are still at play.

Third parties are suppressed in a winner take all system largely due to the spoiler effect, a smaller third party pulls votes from a larger party.

Voters would still be incentivized to vote for one of the two major parties witb the same logic as today, a vote for a third party has little chance of winning and so it largely has the effect of denying a vote to the major party you would most align with.

To be clear, I think the way we’ve arranged democracy in America is quite stupid and mathematically guarantees a duopoly of parties both of which become enmeshed with and captured by the donor class. A popular vote compact is better than the goofy electoral college, I just don’t think it really does anything to break the grip of the two party system.

This will certainly distract from the war he started to distract from the Epstein files.

Truly desperate times for him to head back to the “immigrants scary” well.

I have been THC free now for like 18 months. Loved getting high, still miss it sometimes, but same as you, less anxiety, more in control, more ambitious.

My spouse got me the book Paddle your own Canoe by the very funny Nick Offerman (Ron Swanson from Parks and Rec)

One really good piece of advice in that book that I took to heart was that I needed something to replace getting high. We moved out to rural Ohio around the same time and I made working the land my hobby.

Mowing, pruning, sawing, digging, there’s always something to do and in the end I have this nice sense of accomplishment. Getting high used to be my hobby, I’d get high and play video games or watch a movie or listen to music and it was great and sometimes I still miss it. Realizing that losing one hobby is a lot easier when you replace it with another hobby though ended up being what made this stick.

18 months later I still occasionally think “it would be fun to get high” but it has definitely gone from craving to passing thought that I can dismiss.

Whether you stay thc free or indulge occasionally I hope you have a happy and wonderful life.

The problem is that doing nothing causes the electorate to vote in fascists.

I think the argument I often see between Dems and those further to the left is so difficult because both things are simultaneously true.

• If people voted in the Dems it would keep the republicans out of power.
• The Dems failure to deliver causes people to not vote for them.

I think this is where my frustration lies with the party. The job of the party is to win elections and if they can’t articulate and then deliver on policies that cause people to vote for them, they aren’t doing their job. And people can be angry at those that don’t vote for the democrats because it gives the republicans power, but anger in one hand and not much else in the other isn’t going to make those people vote.

So I think the cycle in the meme is largely correct, except I’d probably replace “vibes” with “the consequences of the republicans awful governing finally fuck things up enough that voters kick them out and the Dems are the only other game in town”

If the Dems want to stop being the ticket of last resort after a failed pandemic response leaves a mountain of corpses and a broken society in its wake or literal world war 3 happens, they need to get in power and then use that power to make people’s lives better. Not just a little better around the edges, not just “oh you can stay on your parents insurance until you are 25, still participating in a fundamentally broken system but you get a slightly longer grace period,” not with benefits that phase in over a decade and can be undone by an opposition party before they take effect.

I don’t hold out much hope though, because the Democratic Party has shown me that when push comes to shove their donors win. And their donors make a lot of money from the systems being broken. Hard to cut out the insurance companies from healthcare when they are cutting you big fat election checks. Curtailing predatory loans would be easier if the fees they extract from the working poor didnt in part end up in politicians pockets.

Both parties are owned by the donor class. The republicans figured out they could say they are pro business and they could lie and say they are pro worker, their voters aren’t carefully double checking. The democrats try to do the same thing with a neoliberal twist, they want to keep business in check but are for common sense public private partnerships, proud capitalists who believe in the power of the free market with regulations. It sounds all well and good but the donors would rather not have regulations and those public private partnerships would be a lot more appealing if the donors made a bigger profit and they’ll have even more to donate next election cycle.

The grift grinds on and the democratic base gets outraged that “those stupid voters let the republicans have power again” but if the Dems aren’t doing anything to improve their lives, why do we expect those mercurial voters that swing around untethered with some vague sense that “this is all fucked up” would stick around. It is all fucked up, so many things in this nation are a fucking scam so some small handful of wealthy fucks can have just a little bit more. Sure their idea of “let the republicans have a turn” isnt going to make things better and in many ways will make things worse, but shits fucked up, Dems allow the shit to stay fucked up, those people are just reacting to the fact that things aren’t getting better.

Supreme leader trump hs declared that to protect capitalism domestic oil producers are restricted from selling on the global market.

Patriots must sell oil only to the homeland and forego the global markets.

CPAC has burst into chants of USA USA and free market analysts on Fox News are calling this an obvious win.

Comrades, trump has said if any privately owned oil fields produce oil for export he may have to seize the means of production. Truly a new golden age is upon us.

Additional context:

TSA is part of DHS (Department of Homeland Security). ICE and border patrol are also a part of DHS.

After ICE started shooting citizens, the democrats said “no additional funding without some reforms.” In trumps Big Beautiful Bill ICE was already given a huge chunk of funding for the next few years, but they would like more.

Democrats have been trying to fund TSA but want a separate vote for ICE. This arrangement recently passed the senate but republicans in the house voted it down because they think they can pin the blame on the democrats and force them to give ICE more funding along with the TSA.

I updated my comment to rerun the numbers for just us employees and it comes out to $40 per employee. So good catch, they screwed them over even worse than I originally thought

In the conversation with Fortune, Murrell added that he gave a $1.5m bonus to employees of Five Guys’ 1,500 US stores to try to make up for the chaos unleashed by the promotion at various locations.

Globally … FiveGuys has 30,000 employees.

So let me get this straight. This fucking moron dreamed up a dumbass promotion that made 30,000 employees lives miserable as angry customers demanded free burgers and most likely hurled vitriol and hate at them.

His big brain protection was to give every store $1000. $1.5M spread out amongst 30k employees is $50 per employee.

You think one of these employees could be mad enough to shoot you and then go “hmm… $50 ought to do it”

I sorta hope someone spend their $50 on ammo

Edit: fiveguys made $3.5B in revenue last year or about $10M per day and this guy wants a slap on the back for handing out 1/10th of 1 days revenue to the people that actually make that money for the self serving reason of not getting shot.

Edit: for those that would prefer I rerun these numbers for just the US employees

From the fiveguys website

We average roughly 25 employees per Five Guys location. Add it all up and we currently have more than 30,000 people working for Five Guys worldwide!

At our corporate office, we have around 250 employees.

So let’s take the $1000 per location (which I calculated with the number of locations in the US) and divide that by 25 employees per location and we arrive at… $40.

For those upset that I used revenue instead of profits, five guys doesn’t publish annual profit figures so I’d have to guess and I can’t imagine that would make you any happier. At a 10% profit margin it’s 1 days worth of profits.

As someone that lives near a lot of corn, one interesting thing people don’t realize about corn fields is that they “sweat” in the morning releasing a ton of water vapor which in the summer months often becomes fog and makes everything more humid and miserable.

https://www.npr.org/2024/09/03/nx-s1-5094251/corn-sweat-is-real-and-its-made-extreme-heat-in-the-midwest-even-more-uncomfortable

So a field of solar panels is actually probably nicer that a field of corn

It’s like how we are drawing down the strategic petroleum reserve. Roughly 200M gallons, aka 10 days worth.

And then after that… well obviously the war will be over and the supply of oil will somehow magically return to prewar levels.

How? Oh… well… hmmm… you see look over there sprints out of room

It’s even worse.

There’s no advantage here. He said this to have a fleeting moment of feeling special because he knew something private and had the power to reveal it.

That’s it. That’s all he got out of this, for a second he got to feel like a big man, and that was enough to smile and tell everyone someone else private medical information.

See how important I am, I know something not everyone else knows. Sure it’s terrible news for that guy, but I’m not that guy so why would I give a fuck. He said he would stay and lick my boots up until his death, so I guess the only real tragedy is at some point he will die and I’ll need to find a new person to lick my boots.

That’s what’s flowing through trumps rotten brain

My spouse identifies as non-binary and I try my best to use their preferred pronouns. That’s a more recent development and I’m used to calling them by feminine pronouns.

The first “she” is an old habit, my mistake.

This is very stupid.

My spouse was diagnosed later in life with a severe gluten intolerance. She went from enjoying beer and soft pretzels to being told “never again if you don’t want to shit yourself in public”

We have a simple rule. Bog standard gluten stuff is fine for me to have, sandwich bread, cereal, etc.

They told me that it was just very upsetting if I was enjoying some delicious gluten treat that they could no longer have.

I love my spouse, so I don’t eat delicious gluten treats in front of them because it would make them upset. Instead I figured out how to make lots of gluten free treats we can both enjoy together. Sometimes I miss the ease of getting a Popeyes chicken sandwich (I still can as long as I don’t eat it right in front of them) but I’ve learned to make gluten free fried chicken we can both enjoy.

Maybe other people would think this is silly, but the person I love is worth it to me.

Capitalism.

Now there are all kinds of things people think of when you say capitalism, the free market, democracy (for some reason), etc.

But I mean the idea that the guy that owns the means of production should get the value produced by labor.

If you boil it down to that, it’s kinda crazy. You want to start a company digging holes, but you don’t have enough money to buy a backhoe.

Fred has plenty of money and can afford a backhoe. He buys it and makes you a deal, you can use his backhoe and he will own the company, you go out and dig holes and he will pay you a couple bucks an hour.

Obviously he has to charge the people that want the holes dug more than he’s paying you to make it worth his while, and he has to recoup the money he spent on the backhoe in the first place.

Fred will never pay you enough to live and save up to buy your own backhoe. After a while he’s made back all the money it cost him to purchase the backhoe.

So now the situation is this. A customer wants a hole dug, you come and dig the hole, and Fred, who has done nothing and already recouped all the money he spent to purchase the backhoe, gets most of the money. And that arrangement just goes on forever. When Fred dies, Fred Jr will inherit that backhoe, Fred Jr will have never spent a dime for that capital, in fact Fred Jr will have had a very comfortable life paid for by the sweat of your labor digging holes.

Fred Jr will get most of the value of your labor for his whole life for doing nothing at all, just because he happened to be Fred’s son.

This is the way we decide who gets the rewards of all the work humanity collectively does (under capitalist systems) and it’s resulted in a hundred or so people so insanely wealthy we can’t even conceptualize how much money they have and everyone else scraping by.

And very serious people (often paid by those billionaires) will be on the news (or replying to this very comment) telling you how this is just the only system that makes sense. But listen closely when they do, they will always say it’s good because of free markets, or competition, or democracy or something that is NOT capitalism. Capitalism rarely defends itself by talking about why it’s good for the rich guy that owns the capital to get all the value, it always misdirects you to something else, a free market or freedom just generally. The freedom to pick between 10 different ultra wealthy companies that own everything and work to make them even more wealthy for your entire life.

7th Guest

That’s the classic in case you just wanted to know the most important piece of information they kept out of the headline to get you to click.