Because you literally act like a mouthpiece with your constant apologetics for the aggression and war crimes of a tinpot dictator.

How much does Putin pay you?

Look, just because the AI says it doesn’t work doesn’t mean you should stop using it! Things not working is normal in technology! It’s okay if everything gets worse!

The measures they use to say the economy is ‘good’ have one thing in common: they fail to account for value whatsoever.

They account for value in dollars, that’s true. But they fail to account for value in any sense that matters: the usefulness of a product or service on the one hand and the labor that produces it on the other. Instead, we look at wages, employment rates, profits, and prices. Those are admittedly easy to quantify and play around with, but they aren’t really anchored to anything meaningful.

For example, let’s say your company makes on-the-go smoothies, sold in grocery stores and convenience stores. You’ve got a quality product: a relatively thick smoothy with quality ingredients and a good variety of purees and juices. You product isn’t cheap, but that’s because you use quality ingredients, pay your employees a fair wage, and use reasonable labor practices in your bottling plant. As a result, people love your product and enjoy working for your company. Soon you come to take up a prominent position on shelves, because your regular customers will reliably buy up your stock.

Now let’s say you do an IPO. Once the board members have sway, they want to iron out some of these ‘inefficiencies’ in your company to increase their profits. First, they come for the ingredients. You wind up with fewer purees in smaller proportions, a greater proportion of inexpensive juices, and the most expensive ingredients dropping off the list entirely. Your loyal customers are annoyed that their smoothies aren’t as thick, but it’s still better than the other options, so they keep coming.

At your bottling plant, wages start to stagnate. Benefits aren’t eliminated, but a new management technique is introduced in which hours are spread out to make it difficult to meet the minimum to qualify. Shifts begin increasingly running on skeleton crews as hours are spread thinner. Of course, the same amount of work still needs to be done, so the employees are doing two to three times as much work as they used to.

Long-term employees who once made the company what it was start to see the change and look for other options before things get worse, leading to a fresh generation of new employees with no clue how much better the company used to be.

At the end your profits are up, employment is up, and you’re selling just as much or nearly as much of your product as you were before. If you only look at the numbers, it seems like this whole endeavor was a fantastic win for your company.

Except you’ve just made the world a little worse. The market presence you earned with your high-quality product no longer has an equivalent product taking it up, degrading the real value of the market itself. Employees are running themselves ragged making a perhaps flat or slightly rising wage per hour, but a wage that’s actively diminishing in terms of the labor required to earn it and the purchasing power it comes with.

Now what happens when you take this model and project it to the entire economy?

All the numbers say record profits, low unemployment, stocked shelves full of high-demand products. And yet the reality is that we have to work more to pay for less of shittier and shittier products. Even the people who win don’t really win, because they make a worse world for themselves where they can’t get a good smoothy.

The whole thing is a mirage that we’ve been killing our society chasing.

That’s horrible. Haldol is like a punch to the brain. They’re going to turn these poor kids into chemical zombies.

Good. I’m not usually one for wanting to see someone lose everything, but if anyone deserves it it’s this asshole. Imagine knowingly lying about dead children for a decade.

How the hell do these kinds of people live with themselves?

Do you subscribe to a worldview that includes compassion? This may disqualify you from joining our capitalist shit show.

Oh… Is this why my credit is garbage? I assumed it was the bank accounts I lit on fire when I was a teenager.

“Here I was, trying to burn down a building, and in swoops fucking Russia! Do prdele!”

Headline reads like the PM is annoyed that Russia botched the arson.

No, because they mixed up “parties’” and “party’s” and didn’t catch it, along with a couple of other weird writing quirks and clunky usages. Also it’s a pretty messy headline. There’s also a lot more descriptive and poetic language than is actually helpful for getting their point across. Like to the point that it’s wandering into New York Times levels of fluffing the length with flowery language. The writer could have used a couple of notes that they clearly didn’t get.

I agree with the writer’s position on the DNC’s failure to find their compassion and humanity on immigration. It’s the editing that needs work.

The Intercept really needs a new editor.

So, just to make this clear.

The original goalpost was: “The US is exactly the same as Russia.” This being in the context of an article talking about Russian librarians being imprisoned and active extreme suppression of the free exchange of ideas being organized by the Russian government.

There are certainly issues going on with libraries. John Oliver recently did an episode going over a lot of it. But the difference there is that these are largely organized by either fringe politicians or politicians in heavily right-wing states. I don’t really see evidence of it at a Federal level, which is what would be the equivalent to what’s going on in Russia. Even where some of this stuff is happening, it doesn’t seem to yet be as extreme as the situation there.

Is it a similar and worrying pattern? Yes. Is it ‘exactly the same thing’? Definitely not.

The US is extremely different from state to state, which can make getting anything done on a wide scale really chaotic, but it also means that we get to try new things and strike out on our own as a state if there’s popular support. That’s how we got marriage equality for queer folks, it’s how we legalized marijuana in a lot of states, and it’s what makes us able to do things like pass laws that protect people from other states’ repressive laws. We can do things like provide a safe haven for people seeking abortions who live in states where it’s illegal. There are states in the US that will literally take in trans folks as refugees from states with repressive laws. On the other hand, we have Florida, where there’s actually a no travel advisory for trans people because they’ll arrest us for trying to use a bathroom or having our gender on our driver’s license.

And like, all this stuff you’re saying is absolutely true. It is a huge mess of near unchecked capitalistic greed in a lot of cases.

But at this point we’ve moved the goal posts. Because they now seem to be “the US also has serious humanitarian problems”. Which, that’s true. But it doesn’t mean the same thing as “the US is exactly the same as Russia.”

We have our own set of problems.

It literally isn’t. Some states are pretty shit, but the US isn’t forcing people into exile for building libraries. And some states are great places where people have rights and the legislature is actually willing to protect its population from authoritarian policies.

What do you mean? We have better voter engagement among young people than any previous generation.

I wasn’t so much talking about having the knowledge to make it safe as like actually having some business being there. It’s certainly dangerous, just like it’s dangerous for anyone who’s living in proximity to that. But it’s not like they’re some idiot tourists, that’s actually the life their family has focused on. Like, it’s what they do.

If you read the article, Lloyd grew up in Haiti and went to the US for college, which is where the two met. They then moved back to Haiti together. They’re not some silly American couple with no business in Haiti, their family runs an orphanage and a school there.

Not really sure murdered missionaries trying to run an orphanage is a ‘lol’ situation.

I didn’t even know Kimmy Schmidt was Estonian.

The National Transportation Safety Board released a preliminary report about the crash earlier this week, which did not include a probable cause. Those findings will be part of a final report that could take investigators up to two years to complete.

“Without the final report, I don’t think the vessel is going anywhere” far from Baltimore, Duan said.`

In the meantime, he hopes nonessential crew members will be allowed to get off the ship and stay temporarily on dry land to “ease their mental stress.”

They could literally be stuck living on an immobile cargo ship for 2 years. That’s insane.

Good! We benefit from exposure to different circumstances, and immigration is a great way to do that!

A massive portion of what people tend to typify as ‘illegal’ immigration is actually asylum-seeking, which is in fact legal. Entering a country to seek asylum is not illegal.

What we probably should consider illegal, however, is the genocide, displacement, enslavement, and exploitation that was used to steal and develop the land the United States claims.

Especially in the case of Mexican immigrants, who are often literally trying to move to territory that was once Mexico, that shit is kinda wild. Like, you’re really going to sit there in the furthest reaches of encroachment on our southern neighbor and claim nobody has a right to come in? Not even asylum seekers? On stolen land? Are you kidding?