At some level extreme governments are the same, Left or Right. At that point the polarity of the government doesn’t really matter to anyone except the people looking to escape it. They’re authoritarian dictatorships, oligarchies, kleptocracies, whatever…they just pay lip service to whatever form of government they claim to run “for the people” and hoard wealth and power to the top. So it may be a “leftist” government on the surface, but it’s just an authoritarian one in all the points that matter.

He always screws the people that do jobs for him. Can’t believe his voters thought it wouldn’t happen to them.

CEO’s will buy upper body armor and write it off as a business expense.

It’s a Hydra. Cut off one head, there’s 5 waiting to take this guy’s place.

Let’s look at it this way - they were already going to be dictatorships, the dictator picked what he told the people they’d get. Most of the big ones all say Power To The People as they’re pushing their way to the top, but as soon as they get there they make themselves permanent. Some of them took a pretty good stab at it like Mao or Stalin, but they killed their people in droves to make it happen. Once that happens you gotta stay in power or they’re going to kill you. And of course, with themselves at the top of the heap, they took everything for themselves and The Party, and The Party became the end all and be all instead of actually advancing the country.

Um, there were more than a few Gen X that got hurt by vending machines. We didn’t have an immunity to that.

However, a skill we did have to exploit vending machines in the pre-digital age was to learn which alternating buttons you could press rapid-fire to get two sodas instead of one.

We were willing to overlook that as long as our elections worked and we could have a peaceful transfer of power.

One party wants to change that. If they’re effective, then we can say we’re like Russia.

Riding on the coattails of cyberpunk shows they shouldn’t have canceled - The Peripheral.

It was just getting into some really great storyline and characters…poof…canceled.

Yep. It’s messed up that the heads of corporations have driven the legal system to the point that they are in essence completely insulated from the consequences that their leadership inflicts on anyone not a well-paid manager at their company.

From the constant pressure on wages, benefits, and the grind for frontline workers to environmental damage to the enshittification of the product…and in this case the rejection of care could directly have life altering consequences.

Send a boilerplate condolence which arrives a day or two before the final bill. Nothing matters as long as the BoD and shareholders are happy.

Healthcare holds two of the top 10 slots in this list for the most profitable industries, arguably holding the third slot if they were combined, and probably holing the top slot if pharmaceutical research was included. We’re getting f’d for “care.”

We can certainly imagine.

Did you even read my disagreement with the OP or did you just skip to my disagreements out of context?

Spare me your histrionics. Just stop.

War is a blunt instrument. No Russian general is checking Ukrainian’s shopping lists. No Israeli official is checking what tiktoks the Palestinians are watching.

No, it is NOT all identical. You’re manufacturing scenarios that don’t exist. You’ve jumped from war to authoritarians to corporations just throwing as many darts at the board as you can while pounding the table and making huge leaps to conflate everything. There’s zero logic to your rant. Whatever.

Stop changing the subject to make yourself right.

You said “war” first, then you changed to “authoritarian governments.”

Pick one.

Don’t double down on your absolutist answer.

Yeah, tactical information. Locations of troops, resources, roads, bridges, opposition location, etc etc.

Not what I bought at the store.

Let’s not conflate the two.

Trump’ll pardon all the Jan 6’ers in jail when he gets into office. Actual insurrectionist criminals.

It undermines what we liberals value: playing by the rules without exploiting them for our own selfish benefit. Yeah, the rule is that you can do this as POTUS, but it looks bad, and can be selfish or self-serving the way trump does it. His way is straight up corrupt. We don’t want to be like that. It separates us from them. So even if this saves HB from further persecution by the Talibangelicals, it still feels like we collectively get mud on us when Biden pulls the same stunt trump does.

When you’ve essentially already got everything the only thing to do is try to get more.

Meh. Pseudo-wisdom.

The wealthy rule with or without your information. They did just fine before the advent of scraping every data point about you off the internet, your phone, or card swipe. Your info today is just another datapoint in some company’s portfolio to be bought and sold.

Authoritarian governments get that way to protect wealth and power. It’s not your personal information that matters as much as what you say that matters. If you cannot be safe in expressing dissent and keep that private, then you’ve lost.

If it’s like a frisbee, yeah, but it still curves. Now start it spinning like spinning a coin on edge. The curving will be much more dramatic.

Ive seen this claim a dozen times. It’s a disc shape. How this thing isn’t going to start flipping and curving its trajectory, or just plain old running out of energy due to air resistance, and not making it out of earth’s atmosphere is beyond me.