The people they’re discussing are on a detail loan from another agency, so they’re just going back to their original posts with their parent agencies. Whole thing is still shitty and stupid, but there’s been clear messaging that they’re going to rotate all of them regardless, so probably not worth resisting, you just go back to your original job.
TLDR The US is a mafia-esque arms dealer / financial scam that masquerades as a “moral democracy”. Capital won in America, and this is what happens.
Each person is not a member of a society or community, but is a competitor. We are atomized, severed from our families and communities and increasingly told we are commodities ourselves. This strategy works in favor of central power as it actively works to erode the ties between people, and that makes them isolated and unable to band together as easily.
Sure there’s individualism and other toxic mythologies that play some part, but the country has increasingly become a corrupt business that serves its board of directors and not its employees. I’m sure there are countless moments where you could make an argument that this process went into overdrive, for me it’s around Regan and after and the various policies that led to destruction of unions, led to offshoring and functionally turned the US into a financialized service economy. Maybe that’s just coincidence and the real cause was the collapse of the USSR, like I said there’s probably many moments/causal events one could make a reasonable argument for.
What we have now: some clown dimension right wing that would like to legalize sport hunting immigrants and the homeless while fire sale busting out the entire US govt, and a bloodless “liberal” center-right that merely wants to criminalize, imprison and then work for profit the people the right would like to sport-hunt, while funneling money to their friends and family. Both are fine with genocide, provided the weapons proceeds end up in the correct place. Those two political fronts represent a section of the populace that is likely less than .01%.
The video is fine, and it’s also quite amusing.
Yeah also: gators are known as predators. I suspect kangaroos are mostly foragers/herbivores (maybe they do a bit of opportunistic scavenging?)
Once you strip out all of the PR about democracy, freedoms, etc, the US really does fit pretty well as the single biggest threat to continued existence on earth: massive nuclear stockpile on a hair trigger, massive globe spanning network of carbon emitting and resource extracting enterprises, attempting to develop ai with minimal safeguards and autonomous weapons, etc.
There are other countries that do some or all of these things, but in aggregate, the US is, for now, gotta be the single largest threat. Possibly another country will take up this mantle in the future.
All that said, I’m not convinced at this point that it can be avoided. It may just be what happens one way or another with humans at these kinds of scales, or a natural progression of technology snuffing itself out. Doesn’t make it any nicer to contemplate though.
Yeah I basically agree with your point about the unpleasant logic behind such a move, and would only add that Greenland looks appealing if you’re trying to lock down the arctic from both sides of the continent—US has good arctic frontage on Alaska, and Greenland would bookend Canada and allow US more flexibility in countering Russia and expanding oil extraction.
I was trying to think about where this suddenly came from, and the first thing that kept popping up was Trumps current obsession with drill baby drill, the arctic is the last frontier for potentially easy extraction once all the ice melts and Canada, US and Russia have already been playing footsie there for a decade under the guise of science and commercial traffic trying to lay claim to stuff that was ignorable before.
Like some dude got in his ear and convinced him the future is in the arctic. It also adds some further explanation to Trump “joking” about making Canada a state. If it was just economic hardball / a new trade deal, they could leave it at tariffs and the like, but they keep saying they want to make it a state…
All of that makes me sick to my stomach, but as you say there is logic to it.
It really does look like a nuke. I guess technically it’s a nuclear reaction…
That’s a great info dump, thanks for posting.
Yeah that’s a fair point—like it’s fine as a brainstorming tool, but I’d never trust… uhh life and death details to it. And as OP mentioned, you can easily answer many of the questions with a web search.
Man that was painful to slog through, she was so… not participating in good faith, but kudos to him for remaining so calm while she blatantly mischaracterized what he’d said. Up there with that Fox News tucker Carlson interview with the teen vogue reporter where she calmly owns him and refuses to play into his schtick.
Maybe this is like when an FBI gets reassigned to billings Montana or Fairbanks Alaska—“it’s a real important job, we need our best guys on it, that’s why I’m sending you”.
It’s so amusing, I’m not a demolitions expert (tbh I would have thought an SF guy would have had better knowledge there, or at least better sources to go to) but the idea of trusting anything chatGPT said to help you lay out a plan like that… seems ludicrous.
Not sure, but one thing I do know: sewage treatment plants aren’t distilling the water before it it gets back into service. Guessing that would be very energy intensive at scale.
Right, or that back then they just didn’t care if you drank the battery because there wasn’t a hugely well-developed culture of lawsuits like we have now. Those fuckers in 1914-1950 were definitely down for a battery party, no doubt. The ones that made it now think that everyone had common sense because only the ones that did made it through.
Also very cool—the building in default modifiers to the command. Thanks for the great tips.
Wild had no idea—this is so cool. If you do this, does the original command also still function (so like I could rename to something easier for me, but hopefully transition to the real deal at some point/ properly follow help forums or suggested pasted commands)
That’s certainly a start but only 1.7 billion of that is listed as explicitly “high-income” unpaid debt. Even if you were to assume the 4.7 billion was entirely from high income, which I doubt, it’s still dwarfed by estimates of the missing taxes from the 1%. Per this fast co article an estimate of 168 billion per year is evaded by the top 1%. That’s 28% of the total evaded tax revenue estimate of 600billion. I’d speculate that if you included grey area practices for sheltering and hiding money, that liability would grow substantially.
I fully understand the IRS is understaffed and has been choked for funding, my general point is that this is deliberate, and meant to force them to focus on recoverable things like gig workers as opposed to the very wealthy who can hold them off with lawyers and clever accountants. If it were possible for them to go after these people, that would be the most rational use of their time—when I need to free up space on a hard drive or email acct, I target the largest files and attachments first.
Well, maybe so, but so far they’re going after… gig workers
I know they’ve said they don’t have the capacity to take on the really big tax cheats (ie the same people that pay lobbyists and gift politicians with trips and gifts), but recovering one or two of their dodged taxes alone would probably cover every gig worker who’s ever underpaid taxes.
Of course, that would only make sense if you thought the IRS’ primary function was to fairly enforce taxation and mutual support of our shared govt—whereas the older I get, the more it seems to me that it serves as a social disciplining function and a lever to adjust social mobility. If your have enough money, you never have to worry about them.
It’s because Biden just said oligarchy in a speech.