Left: “We should have socialized healthcare, education, and housing.”

I mean, there’s The Left[Hakeem Jefferies/Gavin Newsom] and The Left[Bernie Sanders/JD Pritsker/Jeremy Corbyn] and then The Left[the DSA kids distributing food and fresh clothing to my nearby homeless encampment]. These are three very different flavors of Left.

You: “Both sides are the same.”

A big part of the problem with liberal democratic politics is how deeply co-opted all these parties have become. At the end of the day, John Thune and Chuck Schumer, Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer, Mark Carney and Pierre Poilievre all bend the knee to Jamie Diamon and Jeff Bezos and Muhammad bin Salmon.

Wish it weren’t so, but that’s the world we live in.

Don’t forget the $1.4T/year they took out of the economy to squander on elaborate, invasive, predatory mass surveillance, serial racialized harassment, and overseas mass murder, in the name of peace and security.

Genuinely wonder how much mileage you could get if you just went on Truth or Rumble or 4chan or wherever reactionaries are pooling today and started posting a bunch of “These are the machines that the Deep State is using to control the weather” entirely unironically.

Slap in some numerology, blame California Leftists and Chinese Communists and George Soros. Get the QAnon-ers to bake on it. Might get a few of the more enthusiastic zealots to start seeing coal fired plants like Christian Conservatives see abortion clinics.

…made in 2018 by a Russian team. Way before the whole Ukraine war thing, you understand

Flipping through a history book on Russian/Ukrainian relations in the 21st century

Closing the book, putting it back on the shelf, whistling, and walking away

More seriously, I’ll never understand folks who hear “So-and-so is from Nationality X, so now I must/must not purchase products from them because of their bloodline.”

Billionaires thought they could bury Mamdani.

Too bad. He’s made of seeds.

It doesn’t even pay that well.

$34/hr to fuck around all day pretending to do law enforcement is a pretty sweet deal. With overtime, you can get into the low six-figure salary, just crushing candy on your phone until your shift ends.

The BBB kicks anyone who is single and without kids/with kids over 14 off Medicaid if they don’t work at least 80 hours every month of work, absent some really obnoxious paperwork requirements that may or may not have an agency to process them by the time the rule goes into effect.

Cops and other security workers regularly just get to sit around in their trucks playing Candy Crush and racking in overtime up to the six figures.

ICE just got a $175B budget increase in order to swell its ranks with a bunch of unemployed single men who need healthcare.

I’m not saying this is a deliberate policy decision but… it’s one hell of a coincidence.

Worse ways to get rolled.

Really says more about the disdain for western public transportation.

I’ll take coach seats on the Shinkansen over the driver’s seat of a Ferrari.

chinese companies are notorious for stealing IP

American companies sell the ip to China in exchange for access to capital and labor, then claim they’ve been robbed when the Chinese firms innovate and expand on the patents they’ve acquired.

The end result is a car company that produces better vehicles than anything an American or Japanese or German company can manage.

Curiously, these superior vehicles are “stolen” while the Teslas keep exploding under home grown technology.

The difference between “believable” and “logical” is as wide as a cardboard box with a cat in it.

Mamdani’s Jihadist plan to open municipally run grocery stores will destroy NYC with Shari Onions.

I’ve yet to see evidence to this effect

A lot of these subsidies (both in the US and China) are implicit. Chinese state rail networks operate at cost, allowing cheap transportation of materials and labor. American borrowing is heavily subsidized through the Fed Credit Window, which keeps rates in the low single digits while corporate bonds and consumer loans can be 2x-30x as high. Both countries cut corners on environmental enforcement and subsidize waste management. Both countries subsidize education and incentive R&D through their university systems.

The real benefit BYD enjoys - even above its Chinese peers - is vertical integration. They own everything from mining interests to technology patents to dealerships. This is a deliberate consequence of Chinese trade policy, which requires foreign investors to partner with Chinese nationals in order to own and operate capital. Consequently, Berkshire Hathaway - a large early investor in BYD - cannot dictate Chinese vehicle manufacturing policy from a private office in Omaha. Chinese locals benefit from the innovation, the domestic capital, the experienced labor force (which can migrate to local competitors), and the increased economic activity it produces.

China is insourcing it’s wealth aggregation, which has a cyclical compound benefit over time.

Yes, but all of these are bound by fundamental physical laws. Cause and effect. You are a deterministic machine.

You are a meat mech that operates on congruent biological principles. Therefore, everything you do is de facto “logical”.

people forget Hamas was backed by Israel. Doesn’t mean Hamas is an Israel asset

It’s the age old “backing moderate rebels” strategy. Divide and conquer. Netanyahu armed Hamas to undermine The Palestinian Authority, then turned them into a Boogeyman the moment they had an electoral win.

Hamas was an “asset” in the sense that it gave Israelis an excuse to continue ethically cleansing Gaza.

Just like they did with the Taliban originally to fight the Soviets.

So easy for westerners to ignore how the fundamental local appeal of the Taliban was to break the hold of the opium cartels (which the CIA/MI6 loved).

As soon as the US toppled Mullah Omar’s government, their allies in the drug trade rushed back in to rebuild the old opium trade. When they were finally pushed out 20 years later, the opium traffickers were pushed out with them.

Don’t forget the Lt governor has more power than the governor

That stopped being true decades ago, when Perry was granted a bunch of appointment power under the Republican legislature.

The Lt. Gov set the agenda in the State Senate, which made the position a bottleneck in the legislative process. But Senate Republicans are in total lockstep. The real legislative power rested with the House calendars committee for a few sessions, as the legislature was only in session for a few months every few years and the House could kill a bill by timing it out.

But of late, Abbott has excercised his ability to call “emergency” sessions liberally. And since he can get the agenda in these sessions, he can bully the House Reps into compliance by dragging them back over and over again until they concede.

you just really want me to be racist

I don’t think you’re racist. I think you’re clinging to this idea of the Transatlantic slave trade as some kind of necessary evil.

It wouldn’t have gotten as popular in the USA and Europe if all the early blues and jazz musicians were in Africa.

Cultural traditions have cross-pollunated without mass migrations on plenty of prior occasions. The Silk Road didn’t need to move legions of displaced people in order to bring food, clothing, and music into the Mediterranean. Neither did Dutch traders need to flood into Japan in order to convey their art and technology.

The idea that you need a mass resettlement in order to mix musical traditions doesn’t bare out in practice.

Cool, I never made that claim.

How do you think Africans came to be in the New World?

They probably needed to immigrate to a western country to invent it

Brits didn’t need to immigrate to the US in order to learn about American rock music.

single player games don’t come any where near the profitability of these multiplayer games

True, but they are still very lucrative. You can make them, release them, generate a healthy surplus, and roll that into making the next game with plenty of cash to spare.

Also, you don’t have half your dev team stuck supporting a legacy release, constantly fixated on juicing engagement and monetization. There’s a lot less overhead involved in a single-iteration.

Fortnite

Call of duty

World of Warcraft

Apex legends

Had truly phenomenal marketing budgets. It’s the same thing with AAA movies. 25-50% of the budget goes to marketing, on a title that eats up hundreds of millions to produce and support.

You didn’t need $100M to make BG3. You didn’t need an extra $25-50M to get people to notice it and pony up. These bigger titles have invested billions in their PR. And that’s paid out well in the end. But it also requires huge lines of credit, lots of mass media connections, and a lot of risk in the face of a flop.

For studios that can’t fling around nine figures to shout “Look At Me!” during the Super Bowl, there’s no reason to follow this model of development.