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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • He isn’t going through congress or obeying court orders.

    Congress rubber stamped Trump’s cabinet and actively facilitated his budgetary demands. Hell, they passed the Lake Riley Act before he took office. Bureaucrats who put up any kind of resistance have been fired en mass while Congress and the Courts did nothing to object. He’s faced no meaningful resistance.

    He doesn’t need to go through Congress because Congress is bending over backwards to appease him. He doesn’t have to respect the Courts, because the Roberts Court seems intent on clearing his path.

    An opposition legislation/court gives the bureaucracy a foundation on which to refuse compliance. Nobody is offering that.


  • He left office in 2020 because the military leadership wouldn’t back him and the Mike Pence wing of the party was sick of him.

    Very possible that he gets kicked out because Peter Thiel is tired of him and wants a replacement.

    But who replaces Trump? If the Dems decide to re-run Joe Biden and Marc Anderssen joins Mike Bloomberg in chairing the DNC, what do you win by electing the Silicon Valley Certified Democrat over the Silicon Valley Certified Republican?


  • Garbage in, garbage out.

    We’ve got a mass media that exists to pump everyone’s brains full of Fear, Uncertainty, and Distraction.

    From local “If it bleeds, it leads” news coverage to shopping aisles full of celebrity gossip and fad diet magazines to damned near every radio channel in America being operated by two companies that are owned by white supremacist families… we’re all living in a soup of ignorance and hate. We have been since we were born.

    Is it any surprise more people are angry at Muslim migrants than local mega-churches? That foreign governments are more vilified than domestic lobbying firms? That the homosexual agenda is scarier than climate change?

    Whining about “the people” seems short-sighted when you’re living in the shadow of the Big Racist Propaganda Machine.




  • I don’t really understand what you mean by this.

    I mean there’s a very big difference between living in the comfort of the core under a liberal regime and living during a reactionary pogrom.

    I’d say that it is… so-called “philanthropy” is a perfectly liberal way of “humanising” the intended beneficiaries of liberal ideology - ie, capitalists. It’s no different than the aristocracy “humanising” themselves by tossing alms to the peasantry.

    Sure. The only real difference is technology and scale. But the scale matters a lot, because its easy to see a straight line between a lord’s lackey distributing alms. It is significantly more difficult for someone to understand why AEI shills and Ford Foundation hacks keep showing up on NPR to parrot right-wing economic talking points couched in progressive verbage. It is more difficult to understand the scale of Walton Family wealth or the degree to which cryptocurrency speculation has been used to hijack Congressional campaigns.

    Larger and more complex systems are more difficult to resist, in no small part because they become difficult to recognize as a material problem rather than just a foundation of daily life.


  • the truth of the matter is that even leftists themselves have largely fallen for the propagandistic myth that liberalism is (somehow) “less” right-wing than it’s fascist co-conspirators.

    I believe the line is “fascism is imperialism returning to the core”. But if you’re living in the core, there’s obviously a huge difference.

    liberalism fetishises the very “ideals” that all but ensure the power and privilege of the already-wealthy at the expense of everyone and everything else

    When aristocrats run your schools, you’re going to get an academic view that’s very friendly to their place in the world.

    But that isn’t strictly an issue of liberalism, it’s the corrosive consequences of philanthropy. Powerful and privileged people fetishize themselves. The rest of us are left to rationalize what we see and hear from a privatized media.


  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoLate Stage Capitalism@lemmy.worldTaxes
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    2 days ago

    divided the profits by the number of employees.

    Well, firstly, the profits are after administrative expenses, so you’re counting your bosses twice in this math. Would make more sense to use EBITDA as the baseline. Or, at the least, net revenue

    Secondly, the benefits of your code don’t end with the fiscal cycle. They end when the code is retired. If you’re the guy who programmed Notepad, for instance, that’s been paying dividends for nearly forty years.

    It’s not perfect, it’s napkin math

    You’ve got to be careful as napkin math can get incredibly deceptive. You can quickly find yourself a victim of Hollywood Accounting with employers/contractors who insist they’ve never turned a profit, despite enjoying a lifestyle that would suggest otherwise.





  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worlddoctors
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    2 days ago

    If someone wants to be fat, they can be fat.

    This isn’t a binary choice.

    Denying that is akin to vaccine skepticism

    Fad diets are the height of pseudo-science and routinely harm their practitioners.

    It’s not a coincidence that vaccine skeptics are regularly peddling weight lose programs and other quack remedies that don’t work. Guys like Dr Oz and RJK Jr are at the forefront of both grifts.



  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worlddoctors
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    It’s terrible primarily because of risk of concussion and other injuries.

    Also, because being - for instance - basketball height is hard on your body as you get older.

    But telling LeBron James that he’s overweight and he’s going to die if he doesn’t lose weight does nothing of benefit. He’s not going to get any shorter and he’s not going to retire just so he can give up a professional’s career requirements.


  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldLife is unfair to landlords
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    2 days ago

    You give the yokels far too little credit. Quite a few of them are convinced it is the liberals who want to means test away their quality of life and expose them to the predation of foreign markets.

    And they’re often right. DLC liberals were perfectly fine with Midwestern deindustrialized, education privatization, military expansion, and corrosive financialization. The problem is that they’re boxed in, with nowhere to go. Conservatives ensconced them in a media monopoly, screaming a partial truth - that liberal business interests have fully compromised their wing of government. That’s made selling “we’re all you’ve got” an incredibly powerful message on the right. Even as the Congressional paymasters tip both parties generously.


  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worlddoctors
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    2 days ago

    Fat people are fat because they eat too much.

    You can have the same diet your entire life and fluctuate in weight significantly.

    If Bob has a “slow metabolism”, then Bob should stop eating desert

    Anything else? Breakfast, lunch, and dinner? Is your singular goal your weight or do you have any other considerations?


  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worlddoctors
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    2 days ago

    They see a ton of people whos problems are irrefutably due to their weight.

    Weight is a symptom not a cause. Metabolism, age, injury, psychology - these are causes.

    burn down capitalism and replace it with a system that doesnt incentivise companies to use the cheapest least healthy ingredients, or tell the patient unless they lose weight they’re going to die.

    Everyone dies. And big people have existed far longer than the advent of processed sugar. But asking people to adopt unhealthy eating habits in pursuit of a tiny waistline isn’t healthy.

    Too often I see people conflating “Looking healthy” with “looking pretty”, absent any of the trade offs necessary to maintain appearances.


  • I was able to refinance my home at 2.8% during COVID. Now I’m paying less than $2k for a 2200 sqft home. I’ve got neighbors who are paying $4-6k for equivalent housing.

    My mom, who bought her home in the 90s, has the mortgage fully paid off and only owes real estate taxes (around $12k annually) on a 5000 sqft property.

    A lot of landlords simply inherited their homes or had enough credit to buy cheap units during the dips.

    They also do a shit job of maintenance. But it can’t be overstated how much of this property is either owned on extremely low interest credit or fully paid off.


  • I mean, you can go one further and establish public utilities that ration resources per capita instead of charging a vig on top of the production cost.

    Why do I need UBI and wages if I can just claim a vacant apartment and be guaranteed power/telecom, of which their are millions nationally?

    We could divert the tens of billions (converted to energy/man hours) we’re throwing away on AI subsidies and everyone can live a comfortable middle class life free of charge.


  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worlddoctors
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    2 days ago

    Are they doing that or is this just a “stupid idiot is clearly just cheating” blanket retort?

    Had a friend who was overweight and got into long distance running. He went from 300 lbs to a lean, mean 140. Then he injured his knee and had to give up his sport. Simple diet didn’t work, he steadily put on 100 lbs over the next two years.

    Another girl I know cleans straight through 3000+ calories a day easy. Never went above 120. In fact, if she’s not housing down food she gets weak and anemic.

    That’s got nothing to do with intake and everything to do with metabolism