This is sort of like the depreciation tax benefit for private jets from the Trump tax cuts. I get it, I do, I just don’t care for the government offering extra help for the types of people in this scenario. Let them manage with their billions.

Haha OK op thinking it was a scam is not racist, calling it “a core value in their society” is a bit racist.

Market cap of Twitter was $41B, Musk overpaid at $44B,

Fidelity valued it at $9.4B late last year.

xAI paid $33B for it this year.

So this is a significantly worse overpay.

South Africa, so well known for being racist against white South African emerald mine heirs.

Sure, so they don’t have power right now. Republicans control both houses of Congress and the presidency. Blame the voters who wanted this scenario if you don’t like it.

Schumer is playing the long game trying to get power back at the midterms.

The fascists will do what they want either way. They only use laws when it is convenient for them to do so.

If that’s your actual stance, then none of what Schumer or any Democrat does, matters at all.

What the fascists wanted was to be legitimized by bipartisan support of their bill. They wanted the Democrats to consent in advance. To take the next small step willingly.

In what world is this the thing that matters? You’re really saying fascists would do whatever they want regardless of all laws or institutions, but…not really, the one man holding them back was Chuck Schumer, minority leader in the Senate.

Chuck Schumer has handed the country over to the fascists in exchange for nothing because he serves the same billionaires.

I see how you’re getting here, he does fund raise from Democratic billionaires, but the Internet Leftist urge to just dismiss anyone with any political power as not ideologically pure enough and thus the enemy puts such a small ceiling on the movement in terms of actual political results. Nothing to do with this comment thread it’s just something that annoys me.

There wasn’t a sudden realization from Schumer that flipped his opposition on Wednesday to his support on Thursday. That was his obvious cover to try to hide the billionaires he serves. Don’t fall for it.

He flipped overnight, ok. What’s the more likely scenario, he got some overnight polling that showed people were going to blame the Democrats for the shutdown so he switched out of political necessity, or he…secretly agreed with the Republicans the whole time but decided to pretend to oppose it for exactly one day for no reason.

Whoever controls the messaging can blame the other party for the shutdown. Democrats don’t bother to even have a narrative let alone control one.

Voters are not dumb, they just don’t all agree with you politically. They blamed Congressional Republicans in the Ted Cruz shutdown over Obamacare, and they blamed Trump in the shutdown over the Wall. Because those are the people who caused it. In this case, it would be the Democrats forcing a shutdown.

Whoever shuts down the government, loses. Republicans can’t just veto the bill or not pass a budget. But they CAN pass something Democrats don’t like and then blame Democrats for shutting down the government if they filibuster it. And voters WOULD blame Democrats, because they would be the party blocking the bill.

Run through the logic, after they stop this budget. Trump does whatever he wants while people blame Democrats, and eventually the Democrats cave and pass it anyway after allowing irreperable harm and harming their ability to take back the House in 2026, or they cave by letting Trump whatever he wants indefinitely.

This is the second time Donald Trump has been elected with full control of both the House and Senate. It is not surprising that an old man in the same scenario would behave the same.

We are 5 years to the day from the last pre-Covid event I went to, a baby shower. People from NYC were there too and I spent the next two weeks worried they somehow infected my clothes or something that was going to get me later because we had no idea how it spread.

If you need 50% more person-hours, hire 50% more people.

(Bernie Sanders caucuses with Democrats)

I want to know what the state of the art AI sex robot is right now. Because they have those realistic-ish sex dolls, and some pretty advanced LLMs that can chat conversationally, and longer term memory is starting to get into the LLM repertoire so your bot can remember things about you and reference them later.

I feel like we’re 3-5 years away from a high end AI prostitute startup becoming huge.

It’s not noon yet Trump isn’t in charge and the DOGE is already coming apart at the seams.

President has the authority to declare it ok forever or at any time. Not a great law IMO.

Not yet but the law gives the president authority to determine whether the company is a national security threat once it meets all the qualifications in the law. So his “90 day extension” is legally him saying “actually they’re not a threat” for 90 days and then “actually they are a threat” after that.

They’re shutting down instead of blocking new downloads, seems like a stunt. But the blocking of new downloads is obviously happening if SCOTUS doesn’t step in…that’s the law. That’s just what the law says.

I know the technicality is that it will be voluntarily stopping service rather than just ending new downloads like the ban says.

But “app will shut down when banned” is almost comically anti-news.

$176 billion/year could be saved by firing all military personnel.

$2 Trillion was more than the discretionary budget of the US. It literally couldn’t be done.

Which is why it was a stupid promise and literally anyone with any expertise could tell you that. Which shows you how unserious Musk is about this.

Now that he cut the promise in half and it’s still politically impossible but not literally impossible, I reiterate my request…say how you plan to do it. Give us a rough idea what programs are being cut, even the easiest 20%.

By having the conversation about the number alone, we’re buying his political premise. The money is not there for no reason, these are democratically popular government programs, that’s why they exist. So which popular programs are you getting rid of to save this money?

So they’ll be coming in every day to their offices in Washington right?

…right?