Exactly. Nothing wrong with a hero being at least middle-aged. Maybe they even have a spouse and kids they’re leaving behind, or the kids are coming with them on the quest.

Well, the plan then, if other countries start pulling away from US tech/hegemony as you suggest they will do, and are doing, is to use overwhelming military force with unending waves of AI-powered killer robots capable of combat in land, sea, and air. Use them everywhere, all at once, against everyone in a titanic billionaire temper tantrum the likes of which has never been seen on Earth. Because, if Karp and Thiel and Andreesen and all the other tech oligarchs don’t get their wish, they will absolutely attempt to totally annihilate the planet in a massive temper tantrum.

And the cake will be “free”, as in “each bite adds to your debt and you will serve in our army until it is paid off or you die in the line of duty. In the event you die in the line of duty, your debt will be passed down to your next of kin, who will be forced to pay it until their death.”

States are permitted to enter into compacts with each other without Congressional approval. Democrats everywhere are rediscovering federalism and all its wonders. One thing I’d like my state to do is open a public bank, like North Dakota did. They opened it in 1919, and it was one of the few banks that weathered the Great Recession of 2008 without needing a bailout while Wall Street was on fire. A few years prior, North Dakota was facing a $48M budget crisis. The BND kicked in $25M, reducing the need for layoffs and spending cuts. It does everything a private bank does, but its profits go into North Dakota’s general fund, instead of lining the pockets of investors.

Want to know the real kicker? It’s basically a socialist enterprise, in the reddest of red states. Republicans fucking hate the Bank of North Dakota, but it’s proven too successful and too popular to kill. It would be political suicide for them to even try.

allocating a few days a month to all fit members of a community to do work which no one volunteers to do.

I can agree to that as long as it’s a spelled-out condition of living in that community. As an autistic person myself, I like having expectations and conditions written out clearly and concisely, in mutually agreed-upon language.

Privacy is one of those things I feel that if not everyone can have it, then nobody should. If the billionaires and the government want my secrets, then I want all of theirs.

Yeah, let’s put everyone’s dirty laundry out there for everyone else to see. A system where everyone has everyone else’s leverage? Beautiful. Blackmail stops working because everyone already knows, but on the upside, I also know everyone else’s dirty laundry and corpses are buried.

This, exactly. A nice tidy way of keeping their hands clean. Deport them to a country with prisons where detainee deaths are common, or their government can be subtly coerced into killing the people our government sends there. When people demand answers, our government can just throw up its hands and say, “Well, how were we supposed to know they were doing that?”

Did you know that Northrup Grumman developed the standard USPS mail truck? They also developed the B2 stealth bomber. Northrup never intended for their truck to also be a stealth bomber, but Ted said “I’m about to do what’s called a ‘pro gamer’ move.”

This. The most valuable properties are neighborhoods where nobody lives. Honestly, HOA boards should kick everyone out and gate up the entire neighborhood, only sending in mowing crews to sculpt the yards.

Metaphysics notwithstanding, he’s narcissistic to the point of believing that he’s “one order of magnitude above human”. The rest of us? We’re the first stage on the rocket. He not only wants to live forever, he wants to live above we mere mortals, free of all our petty needs and desires. This world is his playground, his toy; created for him and other billionaires like him. And if he and they can’t have it, then, they’ve ultimately decided nobody can.

What’s worse are the rich, out-of-touch fucks who should know better, are so narcissistic and so afraid of death. What they fear about it, is that the world will continue on without them. They’d rather the world end when they end. As far as they’re concerned:

• The world as we know it did not exist prior to their being born into it.
• The world was made for them and their descendants to enjoy. All others are expendable tokens to spend as they please.
• If they are mortal, then the world should not continue to exist after their deaths.

This. If there’s actually a toilet, then how does it work? I imagine the toilet probably works like the replicators do. You notice how when anyone on board the Enterprise eats, there’s dishes, but no sinks/dishwashers? When they’re finished eating, they literally set the dirty dishes down in the replicator and they’re instantly returned back to energy. I imagine the toilets work under the same principle.

“I’m glad you changed your last name, you sonuvabitch!”

I don’t know if I fully agree. After 9/11, the conservative movement was attempting to change the consensus(Evil brown foreigners are coming to kill you and your family). The fact that a black man won the Presidency not once, but twice speaks to a failure to meaningfully change it.

“Blind box” in the tech context is an algorithm that hides its operations from everyone, even its own creators. You give it an input, and then it produces an output, without showing you how it arrived to that output.

Yeah, George would think he’s spotted some slick NFT grift or crypto rug pull that it turns out he was the one getting rug pulled, by Newman.

Yes, just like how tax preparation companies lobby to keep the IRS from just telling people what they owe in taxes. It keeps the tax prep companies in business.

Well, the show has been off the air for a long time, but I absolutely could see Kramer having an AI chatbot girlfriend, or George Costanza trying to get people suckered into an NFT grift/cryptocurrency side hustle.

Was PayPal always evil, though? The concept of it wasn’t. People wanted an easier way to conduct transactions electronically. Something faster and more convenient than, say, a Western Union money transfer order.