Well then they obviously don’t give a shit about government policy and are just mindless fools following the breeze. They can vote Democrat if they want, and their votes are welcome. But “not turning them away” implies actually trying to adjust the party’s positions to appeal to them. Sorry, but we don’t need to for example, throw trans kids under the bus, just to appeal to a bunch of idiots that happily voted for a known rapist. These are fundamentally not good people.

A climate of mild paranoia.

Honestly I wouldn’t mind paying for news. It has to be paid for somehow, and if we’re not paying for it, the billionaires are. At the same time, I don’t pay for news. The news subscription model is completely broken.

The idea of paying $20+ dollars per month made sense in a world where you got most of your news from your home town newspaper. And in exchange, that newspaper had the funds to do a tons of local and national reporting. But now? Most people get their news from dozens of different news sources. I’m not going to pay to subscribe to dozens of news websites, when I will only visit each one a handful of times. Each paper’s subscription prices assume that they’re going to your primary information source. But my main information sources are news aggregators.

What the industry desperately needs is some distributed payment platform. Maybe you sign up for a subscription clearinghouse for $50/month. The service then distributes your subscription funds to the dozens of different news websites you visit, in proportion to the amount of time spent on or stories read from each.

I want to support journalism, but their prices are just completely divorced from how modern audiences actually consume news. They’re still pricing their newspapers like it’s 1990. (Made up numbers), instead of trying to get $20/month out of 1 million people, they should be trying to get $2/month out of 10 million people. But every news site just wants to charge you an arm and a leg and trap you in their own walled garden.

And this is why Brian Thompson got what was coming to him.

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Exactly. Have people forgotten how Project 2025 explicitly wants to classify trans people and queer people more generally as inherently pornographic? Like, ultimately they fundamentally do not accept that trans folks just want to live as we are. They believe that people transition as some sort of public act of sex exhibitionism. They believe it is akin to child abuse for a child to be exposed to the concept of gay people existing. That is what they truly in their hearts believe. They believe that any LGBT content is inherently pornographic. If the theocrats can pressure Mastercard to shut down porn, they can do the same for any content produced about or by queer people of any sort. If they can pressure Steam, they can pressure YouTube or Nebula. As the smaller player, Nebula would be a lot more vulnerable to pressure. What would happen if Nebula had to choose between accepting credit card payments or hosting queer content creators?

Or imagine the worst case. Gabe is the world’s greatest prankster. He’s a true internet troll for the ages. He’s spent decades getting millions and millions of people dependent on his game hosting. He’s got hardware. He stands astride the game industry like a colossus. But the key is that Valve is still a private corporation. In theory, Gabe could do whatever he wants with it. Including, finally committing the last stage of his ultimate prank. One day…he just flips the off switch. Steam never enshittifies. It just shuts off forever without warning.

And thus, with one stroke, his master chess move concluded (to reasons comprehensible only to Gabe), he just shuts it off and walks away. His last words in public are, “it turns out, I was the greatest gamer of all the whole time…”

Yeah. It’s policies like these that I want to see Democrats propose. I don’t expect Democrats to argue for the abolishment of private enterprise or to move the economy to central planning. They’re Democrats, not Communists. And frankly, for-profit business has a lot going for it under many circumstances. Price mechanisms are often efficient tools for allocating resources.

I view capitalism like a fire. Fire is useful. It can cook your food, keep you warm, do useful work. But if you let it out of control, it will burn down everything and everyone you care about. That is how capitalism is. Conservatives worship the fire and want to let it burn uncontained. Communists hate the fire and want to snuff it out entirely. I want to keep it in a nice little box, thoroughly shielded, where we can get useful work out of it without letting it burn our house down.

Clearly, right now capitalism is burning out of control. And I want to see it put back in its box where it belongs.

But there are so, so many useful policies we could enact that would sand the hard edges off capitalism, spread the wealth around a bit, and allow everyone to live with dignity. You can have a system that efficiently allocates resources and rewards hard work and innovation…without having some Dickensian nightmare where most of the population has to wallow in misery.

And if we choose, we can choose to simply do away the very concept of billionaires. There is such a thing as a strategically dangerous level of wealth, a point where someone’s fortune becomes so great that they have a great ability to harm others. We shouldn’t have billionaires for the same reason we don’t allow people to own nuclear weapons - that’s just far too much power in the hands of one individual. The only way to obtain such power should be through the will of voters. When you have that much money, you personally become a threat to the nation.

I like the idea of a cap set at 1000x the median household income. It’s a nice clean number, but it has some real meaning. Consider the highest-paid employees who aren’t executives of some kind. People who make their money not through commanding others, but from the direct work of their own hands and minds. Think people like neurosurgeons and other medical specialists. Those people tend have their salaries cap out, at the highest, at the upper six figures. Imagine such a person worked a long career. And they lived like a pauper. They choose to be voluntarily homeless, literally sleep on the sidewalk outside of the hospital they work as a brain surgeon. They live off nothing and invest everything. At the end of their life? They would still struggle to die with a fortune 1000x the median household income.

In other words, 1000x the average family wage is about the largest fortune attainable through education, frugality, and hard work. And that’s only in the most extreme circumstances. The only way to earn more than that is to own or run a business and to make your money primarily through the arbitrage of the labor of others.

I just wish I saw Democrats talking like this more. Just honest conversations about the way wealth and income are distributed in society, and practical policies for how we might actually move the needle on a more equitable society.

Oh, you want solutions that make real progress, can work within a capitalist framework, and don’t require a complete revolution? Ok, here are some pragmatic policies that can help people without fundamentally changing the capitalist nature of the economy:

1. A maximum wealth cap. 1000x the median household income. All wealth and income above this level is taxed so high that trying to have a fortune above the cap is like trying to swim up a waterfall.

2. A co-op first model of corporate ownership. Each year, every private or publicly traded company must turn over some portion of its equity to its workers. Essentially mandatory stock options for all workers. No one works for a company without gaining an ownership stake in that company. Set the transfer speed low enough that if you found a company, you can still make plenty of profit, and it transfers to employee ownership slowly over say, 50 years. You can found a company and keep control over it until retirement, but your kids don’t get to become newly minted aristocrats by inheriting an empire. They can go start their own thing.

3. Universal single-payer healthcare. Enough said.

4. Opt-out unionization. Workers are unionized by default. No vote is required to form a union. Every private employer has a union by default. Workers, if they choose, can vote to suspend the union for a certain number of years if they decide they don’t like unionization for whatever reason.

5. Tax investment income at higher rates than wage income.

6. Higher tax rates for companies that require employees to come in to the office for jobs that can be done from home.

7. Wage theft must be paid back tenfold. Your boss steal $1000 in overtime pay from you? They have to pay you $10,000 if caught.

8. A return to New Deal-era restrictions on company size and market share. Make it straight up illegal to operate a business like walmart. Break up all the big national franchises.

There. Just a few reforms. These would have a massive impact on the power and wealth balance of the country, but they wouldn’t actually affect the fundamentally capitalist nature of the economy. People can still start companies, produce new things, innovate, and be rewarded for their efforts. We just make the economy more just and fair across the board.

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Zero. Dated for three years, married for seven.

Blue MAGA nonsense.

I mean every single swing state? Why would it be surprising for all the swing states to swing in one direction? They don’t swing randomly, they usually swing together.

One county in NY with ZERO Kamala votes?

Precinct, not a county. A precinct dominated by an orthodox Jewish community that all vote together. The congregation decided to vote for Trump.

Something like 12% bullet ballots in blue counties only when the avg is 1%?

Trump drives out low-propensity voters, and he’s way more popular than Congressional Republicans generally.

Voting machines connected to Starlink?

Voting machines aren’t connected to the internet.

Don’t be like Republicans. You’re better than this.

Not if they’re incendiary drones meant merely to land on a roof and set a building on fire.

You underestimate the destructive potential of even small drones. Quantity has a quality all its own. Imagine a swarm of thousands of drones, all cheaply built 3D printed things, made by a single individual or small group. They have one task. They fly to a fixed set of GPS coordinates and land. No targeting needed. No AI facial recognition to target some specific politician. No auto-gun mounted beneath a large drone. Just a dirt simple task. They just fly up, over, and down. Once landed, they send a small electrical signal to a small incendiary device, perhaps a thermite charge, installed at the base of the drone. Such drones could be made quite cheaply if made on a large scale.

Imagine fires being started atop the roofs of every building in a city. Oh, and the attack starts with each fire station being attacked by a dozen such drones. Imagine every building in a city being lit on fire simultaneously. Soon a firestorm develops, and the fire starts feeding itself.

Let’s say you needed 10,000 such drones. Maybe you make them for $50 each. That’s $500k to burn down a city. For the cost of a single building you can burn down every other building in a modest sized city.

We are approaching a point where a single determined individual, using the scale of resources regularly available to a single individual, could recreate the firebombing of Dresden.

Unfortunately now Google is ChatGPT. It provides its own shitty AI answers, and its search results have been corrupted by an ocean of slop.

Not my version of gay marriage. If they’re going to take away gay marriage, I propose we institute mandatory gay marriage. Anyone registered as a Republican will be eligible for mandatory forced gay marriage. If a gay person wants to marry you, you’re getting married! Also, that will have interesting interactions if the Republicans ever try to repeal the spousal rape laws…

I like the idea of the transition happening slowly over several decades. Basically you found a company, and you’ll be able to maintain majority control over it until you reach your retirement. You can have a vision and carry it through. You just can’t create a multi generational empire that makes your children and grandchildren into newly minted aristocrats.

I mean, obsess over performative semantics if you want. I just want to see the bastards hang.

At this point, I support just dissolving the US completely. The Constitution you learned about in school is dead and buried, and John Roberts killed it. Every four years we now hold an election for national dictator. This nation just isn’t worth saving. It had a good run, but frankly, we can do better. We can write far better constitutions than what the Founding Fathers managed. We have a lot more experience and a lot more examples to draw from.

I support granting all 50 states independence. Then they can come back together into whatever new nation or nations they want to form. The US as a functioning democracy no longer exists. We’re just playing pretend that we still live in the same nation.

Sorry, I already had to flee a southern state when you rat bastards decided to take my civil rights away. You’re on your own. At this point I’m in favor of just dissolving the US completely, granting all 50 states full independence, and letting them come together in whatever new nation or nations they wish to form.

You are no longer my countrymen.