Democrats sit here and use memes to beat themselves up over being such a shit bunch of losers and Republicans would have claimed victory even if Trump lost and very likely would have had their followers shooting guns about it. Yeah there’s a disconnect somewhere.

Well, I mean… not much better.

I thought Trump was a shoo-in? Christ knows that’s the message these people are getting over and over again, drummed into their heads so they can get good and pissed off when they’re told the truth.

Windows 10 users, I’ve been using kill-update.exe for years now to only update Windows when I damn well want to.

Disclaimer: before the inevitable dogpile, yes, this is bad practice. Yes there are many reasons why you might not want to do this. Yes, allowing your software to update itself whenever it wants is safer. No, I don’t care. If you don’t care either, this software might be for you.

For those without Spotify.

Huh. Well, everybody I hung out with knew about it. IIRC moderation was tacked on after USENET had already taken off. If a newsgroup wasn’t proposed with moderation then it couldn’t be moderated, so most of them weren’t. It’s pretty wild that they didn’t understand how desperately necessary it would be. In order to get a group to be moderated you’d have to get a proposal for an entirely new group through the committee, which was nearly impossible. The process was so slow and bureaucratic that the web literally just showed up and stole it all in what seemed like overnight. I remember when I switched over… it was like 2002, 2003? I’ve never had as much fun on any web forum as I had on USENET though. Those were fun times. And don’t get me started on the web’s lack of threaded discussions. Drove me NUTS.

Yes pardon me I left off the word “largely” before “unmoderated.” We all knew it was possible, but it didn’t matter because, as you point out - nobody really did.

Which doesn’t really change the point does it. These people are de-facto kings ruling us; their wealth subverts the entire idea of democracy. You can’t tax them out of existence without taxing their wealth because none of them have any actual income. Banks fall all over themselves to fund anything they care to do.

In any case, 2% isn’t going to do fuck-all even if it gets passed which is hardly a certainty.

Google buying Dejanews, the largest archive of all messages, and merging it with the travesty that was (and still is) Google Groups just about killed the whole thing.

Well that and the fact that it was unmoderated which eventually led to it being populated almost exclusively with mentally ill troll savants. USENET by the end was the digital equivalent of a horror zoo of abused monkeys slinging shit all over everyone and themselves.

There’s a great video about this whole stupid ordeal. If you haven’t seen it, check it out.

Problem? Singular?

A concentrated effort by bad-faith actors who understand that the only thing Americans love more than being told they’re right is being able to feel smugly superior. Tap into that with the power of social media and voila.

Le Coq suggested that when simply considering the 10 biggest fortunes in France, the tax would bring in no less than €13bn for the state.

A 2% tax on billionaires. Give me a break.

The point isn’t to bring in money, the point is to eliminate these blights on society by any means necessary. How bad will the world have to get before something that looks like this happens? When the world was more civilized - the world conservatives constantly pine for - the ultra-wealthy were taxed over 90%, because we knew that too much power in the hands of a single person was immensely dangerous. We knew this intrinsically from generations of being ruled by kings, but we got firsthand experience with it from them constantly fucking up the economy.

There was shame in being wealthy. Hell, there was shame in being rich when I was growing up - it was understood that you couldn’t get mega-rich without stepping on the necks of the working class and being horrible people. It’s nearly Christmas - go rewatch It’s a Wonderful Life for crying out loud. 1946!

“by now, we know that the vaccine was not safe or effective.”

Also yet another a dangerous moron who thinks they’re a fucking genius.

Hot take, English got it wrong. I’ve never heard a frog make a sound like “ribbit”.

It’s a real thing. Super common in the Southern US when I was a kid.

Forget “they don’t think he’s talking about them.” They actually really care about the border. Are they brain dead? Trump killed a bipartisan deal over the border for the sake of politics and they are rewarding this behavior. That’s just plain stupidity.

heh. Yeah, that’s right. Turd Ferguson, it’s a funny name.

It was big in Dragon Age.

This really just amounts to remnants of The South (and those allied to the cause for whatever reason) attempting to destroy the federal government.

Now if only they could do the same with the stock market. But the conspiracy theorist in me believes that all this manipulation is being done hand in hand with certain arms of the government in order to maintain the government’s appearance of solvency and to control inflation in the face of what appears to be nearly unlimited spending. Just keep moving around fake money using a million different utterly opaque methods.