Yeah, this is one of those terrible ideas even if you thought that, in theory, you were onboard with ‘anti-DEI’.

Out of the blue the wrong person gets randomly pissed at you and invokes the highly subjective clause and suddenly you owe them $1.5M…

For one thing the filibuster standing rule can be ditched by simple majority. Neil Gorsuch’s nomination is in fact an example of the Senate overcoming the filibuster if they want to. The SC nomination was so important to the GOP they did it.

However, the consequences of the government shutdown are not as important as having a conservative majority in the supreme court to the GOP. Or the GOP are intentionally delaying as a strategy to try to let the narrative of blaming the democrats sink in before they ‘miraculously’ overcome it and take credit for fixing it after the democrats ‘broke’ it.

Work with a food bank and this is spot on, except they do get food donations that make sense from farmers and food service companies. But people buying food at the grocery store will do worse than the food bank can do with their connections, experience, and volume.

I still wonder if they are banking on making 2025 just such a miserable year that it’s comparitively easy to make 2026 feel good.

Turn SNAP back on, dial back the tariffs. People feel a remarkable improvement in food security and prices. Might still be in worse shape than end of 2024, but people will tend to remember change in experience rather than their experience in absolute terms.

The narrative will inevitably be that somehow the GOP figured out how to overcome those pesky democrats and restore the things that the democrats broke.

If things remained persistently broken, then the narrative couldn’t really overcome people’s actual experience. They strongly branded and made it clear that this was the Trump show, he’s got the executive branch, the legislative branch, and the judicial branch. When it comes to ‘right now’, it’s hard to ignore that reality. But once they make it ‘last year’s problem’, then mental gymnastics can resume to blame the democrats.

Hell they could resolve this crisis by ultimately letting the democrats have what they are asking for and the voters would still credit the GOP with restoring the benefits that the democrats are demanding. They’ve already set the stage by saying democrats want to give all the money to illegal immigrants (which they explicitly don’t) and so there will be some BS to claim they ‘compromised’ by getting the democrats to give up illegal immigrant eligibility (they aren’t eligible and were never asked to be) and then take credit for the ‘good’ version of the outcome.

Even if it passed the house, wouldn’t Trump just veto it?

Remember even in his first term the GOP lost the midterms.

His first term was bad, but not nearly as bad. We didn’t have military occupation of our own cities. We didn’t have masked men abducting people off the streets into unmarked vans. We didn’t have a trade war with practically every other country. We didn’t have massive inflation after a prior year of massive inflation. We didn’t have suspension of food security. We didn’t have farmers being undermined by all this while a huge bailout is done to a foreign country. We weren’t mobilizing our military for an apparent invasion.

So the Democrats might have a chance. Removal from office may not be on the table, but at least some check on executive power might be exercised. We may be stuck with a PJ2025 executive branch for at least the next couple of years after that, but at least maybe there can be some mitigation. It’s at least worth a try.

Depressingly I wouldn’t characterize the last decade of elections as being as much a Republican or Democratic loss as much as pretty much every single election being a loss for whomever the perceived incumbent of the time.

I think I’d rather have fruits and vegetables than impossible beef. To me it tastes worse than beef or vegetables just being their natural selves.

I read that maybe beyond meat does it better, but haven’t bothered to try it.

With many bearaucracies there’s plenty of practically valueless work going on.

Because some executive wants to brag about having over a hundred people under them. Because some proceas requires a sort of document be created that hasn’t been used in decades but no one has the time to validate what does or does not matter anymore. Because of a lot of little nonsense reasons where the path of least resistance is to keep plugging away. Because if you are 99 percent sure something is a waste of time and you optimize it, there’s a 1% chance you’ll catch hell for a mistake and almost no chance you get great recognition for the efficiency boost if it pans out.

To keep in mind that another true believer is RFK Jr. While a true believer in some ways can be less vile, they still can be even more dangerous than the ones running a con.

Keep in mind she wasn’t in the inside of politics until the Biden term. It could be that she was a true believer in the talking points that everything wrong was the Democrats fault and that maga would “drain the swamp” if they just had a chance. His first term the kept claiming deep state and dem inference. Now she can’t help but to see how it is and his second term is so much more openly corrupt.

In the first term he just was terrible to those trying to cross the border. If you were already in, his first term was largely nothing if you don’t care about others.

This term has been going after people already here, and rounding up and us citizens and looking to remove legal status for those that have it.

We’re they the ones who also ended up leaking personal information about the people reporting?

Hey, they aren’t so tone deaf as to think avocado toast is all that stands between this generation and home ownership.

It’s actually starbucks coffee: https://fortune.com/2025/10/22/corcoran-group-ceo-says-just-as-tough-to-get-on-the-property-ladder-today-as-it-was-30-years-ago-stop-buying-starbucks-coffee-gen-z-millennials-real-esate-advice/

the highest turnout of registered voters and young voters in American history.

This is one of the problems with how we’ve pushed the messages like “rock the vote”, that you should vote, no matter what, or you’re being a bad citizen.

If you can’t be bothered to actually try to be informed, then you shouldn’t feel pressure to vote. Sure, you should be allowed to vote no matter what, but no one should be pressuring you to vote even with lack of interest.

We should be emphasizing you should get to know the candidates up and down the ballot, not just getting your mark on a ballot.

Risky joke, woosh is very likely.

Yes. Musk’s net worth including his stock is a bit shy of 500 billion, and Tesla market cap is about 1500 billion. His net worth includes all his assets that he could possibly leverage.

Actually he doesn’t. Most of his ‘wealth’ is Tesla shares already. Even if he could toss everything he has just toward controlling more of Tesla, and if the shareholders accepted it at current market value, he’d only have a third of the company.

Tesla is crazy over valued for a company that has only been able to be a car company that is in 14th place, yet assessed as being more valuable than all the 13 more successful car companies combined…

Yeah, the PayPal one is so spot on.

He had a company that I guess was like CitySearch that no one ever heard of and managed to win a lottery of selling it to Compaq who thought they had to do something in this whole dotcom thing.

Then he founded ‘x.com’, a failure of an online bank while Paypal took off. Then, somehow, in the wake of being merged in he talked the company into letting him be in charge, despite his company pretty much the relative failure in that relationship, and he nearly tanked it before being kicked out. Despite this for a long time he got credit as ‘the paypal guy’, despite his only contribution being almost tanking it after losing to it initiallly in the market. Again, won the lottery because he had such a share and eBay tossed so much money at it.

He’s supremely successful at taking credit from others when things work out.

I’d research Chilipad harder if I were in the market again. At very cursory glance it seems like less of an uphill battle. I could be wrong and they could be douchey, or their engineering somehow sucks, but maybe they are good too.

FreeSleep is what I would do if they try to force the subscription on me, but I probably wouldn’t buy the product hoping that I can change their firmware against their will. I don’t want to give money to a vendor I would just be antagonistic with.

If they announced they formally endorsed use of FreeSleep as an ‘advanced alternative’, ok, but that isn’t going to happen.

This is spot on. Note these asshats eventually caved and added local controls when customers kept saying how horrible it was to use the phone. The local controls are explicitly disabled unless the cloud service has recently approved the bed to allow the local controls to work. You have to use the phone to enable the local controls. The phone can’t do anything locally except tell it how to connect to wifi. If you don’t have the subscription or grandfathered in before the subscription, the local controls do nothing.

Well, unless you jailbreak your cover with FreeSleep.