Not just Elon. It’s the hedge fund playbook. Aquire a company, strip it for parts, collect profit, move on to the next business.

The Federal government is being liquidated as a going concern. Elon is leading the charge because he’s the most successful in his field.

I remember when the China, France, a Latin American consortium… even Cuban released their versions of the COVID vaccine, and US officials fell all over one another insisting they didn’t work.

I wonder how the US will respond if we lack any kind of for-profit answer to another pandemic. Will our demolition of the FDA mean we can acquire medication abroad? Or will the US crack down on vaccine tourism out of paranoia?

Seems like the US might abandon even the pretense of being a global pharmaceutical leader in the rush to return to its quack roots.

Does the Networking Effect suddenly no longer apply to internet applications? Seems like we’re just seeing people gradually migrate from older and less functional applications like Twitter and Facebook over to newer and more functional applications like BlueSky and RedNote.

Sure. Same with the US Invasion of Iraq. “Six days, six weeks, I doubt two months” per Donald Rumsfeld.

But that was to sell the war. The real theory of the conflict was going to be that it would repeat South Ossetia / Abkhazia and Crimea. A rapid land grab intended to incorporate a heavily pro-Russia border territory that wouldn’t escalate for fear of reprisal.

What Russia got was an enormous escalation (fueled by NATO) and a protracted conflict. But the conflict didn’t benefit Ukraine, for the same reason an armed revolt in Crimea or Georgia wouldn’t have benefited either of those territories. All it produced was a new Chechnya / Afghanistan. A killing field that obliterated the accumulated wealth of generations and the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Nobody is coming out of this ahead.

It’s weird to see “leftists” endorse imperialism

Leftist: “Damn, this war is killing so many people and wasting so many natural resources. Everything in the region is getting worse the longer it drags on. It needs to stop.”

Radical Centrist: “You only want to stop the war because you love Hitler.”

Leftist: “Also, Israel needs to stop bombing Gaza.”

Radical Centrist: “More antisemitism! You’re only proving my point.”

Leftist: “War is Bad.”

Radical Centrist: “Just what a Fascist would say.”

If it was purely economical, it never would have started. The only things the last two years has accomplished has been to decimate the military readiness of Central Europe and inject fascist politics into the bloodstream of every country inundated with refugees.

Nobody is winning except the Hitlerites.

Going to start threatening to bomb Texas if it doesn’t hand over its oil reserves, at this rate.

Balatro is a Poker Game in the same way that Gin and Bridge and 52 Pickup are Poker games.

It’s the thing American IP companies care about the most.

As always US wants the data, they just don’t want anyone else to have it for free

I guarantee you that American data is going to Chinese companies. Temu has your data. Alibaba has your data. Bilibili has your data. They’re just getting it by purchasing from American data centers.

It’s hardly willful. The media machine that got Trump through the door has been a hundred billion dollar multi-generational campaign dating back to the Nixon Administration.

Roger Ailes, Paul Weyrich, and James Dobson dedicated their collective careers to guaranteeing a large section of the US population would be deluged with fascist propaganda. And Sheldon Adelson, Robert Mercer, the Koch Family, the Ford Family, the hiers to the Hoover Institute, and a few dozen other riechwing billionaires financed their efforts.

This isn’t just dumb people all stupidly flipping the Trump switch by coincidence. It’s the product of sustained industrial tier media manipulation by people whose personal fortunes are predicated on misinformation.

Circus subscriptions just went up again.

There are only two kinds of people on Lemmy.

• People who left Reddit to escape the verbal diarrhea that overwhelmed the site.

• People who left Reddit to spread that diarrhea.

sigh The @sh.itjust.works domain is full of the latter.