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Cake day: April 1st, 2026

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  • Have you ever met an executive? Have you ever met any actual capitalist?

    They aren’t particularly smart people. They just have no physical capability for empathy. That is how they can exist. AI is good enough to reduce workload. It is fantastic especially at correcting speech and translating.

    You know what worker class needs corrected speech and translating but otherwise can be taught to do most office and entry level jobs? Outsourced workers.

    Companies slowed outsourcing customer-facing positions due to backlash from obvious accents and poor cross-cultural training. AI has allowed them full steam ahead. While real time voice masking is a little expensive right now, AI chat agents are good enough to be used while having an outsourced worker listen in, feed ‘correct’ lines to the AI (or simply skip incorrect lines) and actually perform the actions.

    GAN ML is also good enough, as it turns out, to figure out how to complete many office tasks with full desktop screen captures.

    If you combine these two things, and add a little marketing spin, what you have is a very clear plan to eliminate 50-70% of labor cost in the US – that is the majority of customer service and office administration workers.

    Right now it’s AI facing, (statistically) Indian outsourced agent backed solutions. Eventually those outsourced agents – which have the totality of their job recorded, every mouse click, every key press, every single word said to their coworkers and managers, every single blink, all to train AI – will be out of a job too.

    Nevermind this ends capitalism, as without a consumer base there will be no companies, but oh wait, techbros and capitalists are pushing for UBI. . . Isn’t that weird they’d be pushing an objectively socialist idea… I wonder if that’s related.




  • Brake rotors are $500-$1500/set, pads are $50-$200/set, Friction and rust welds are common enough to damage other parts of the knuckle over the expected life time meaning that bill can easily turn into a $2k-$5k repair, totaling the car depending on the age.

    Eliminating regular maintenance costs and production costs for a system that works essentially just as well (and can work better in an emergency if you don’t care about saving the associated motors) means cheaper cars, both upfront and over time, with the only downside being luddites afraid that two decades of EV data from a few dozen million cars isn’t enough to prove safety versus hydraulic.



  • They absolutely are. When a building collapses due to the safety inspectors being bribed, it’s not the rich people that die – they live in the nice buildings. When an investigation into fair wages gets bribed away who suffers? The workers.

    When a politician spends his career working against the workers who suffers? The Workers.

    China at a local level is incredibly directly democratic, with workers voting on most things. Directly going against the will of the people is harming those people’s essential right to self determination, compromising their safety, and denying them all other rights afforded by China’s constitution.

    While this isn’t actually how money works in any country, the workers pay the wages of the politicians, they demand honest service, and the whole system is based on the idea that can be done.


  • No not in the US. While most Americans (~70%) are within 10 miles (16km) of a grocery store as foreigners would recognize them, the other 30% have either a Dollar General or Family Dollar. Just those two choices. Sometimes both if they’re lucky. For ~10% of Americans they are 30 miles (48km) or more from a grocery store and usually 10 miles from a dollar store.

    With rising gas prices and the lack of infrastructure across the majority (>80%) of landmass in the US, many rural Americans have to have 4x4 vehicles in order to just drive to their job and back, so an extra ~3 gallons of gas for groceries doesn’t make sense as anything but a monthly expense; and even then statistically the only thing they could get to is a Walmart which is the most common grocery store in the United States; or just as bad a Kroger Brand company or Albertson’s brand company. Those are the three grocery stores that statistically exist for >95% of the US population, and theoretically if you’re banned from one in a specific brand family you’re banned from all in that brand family.



  • That is an opinion, sure. Another is that you stop separating ‘The StAtE’ from ‘The People,’ because it decent societies there is no effective difference. (Actually in all societies, there is zero difference whatsoever, but we really aren’t here to talk about implied consent)

    The state doesn’t need to be infallible, because people aren’t. But we can be sure beyond a reasonable doubt. If a mayor of a province that has directly harmed hundreds of thousands of people and was found with literally 40 tons of Gold and Cash says they’re innocent, they have a pretty large hill to climb. We can be reasonably sure he at least had something to do with the bribes, and we can be reasonably sure a poor student from a poor family turned extremely low level politician did not find a way to hoard 40 tons of gold and cash through legitimate means. On its face just that evidence pushes that beyond a reasonable doubt, but beyond that the offender still gets a guaranteed defense in court. The one referenced obvious lost, because of course he couldn’t defend those actions or explain away 40 tons of gold and cash, but he had the chance to push some, ANY doubt into the mind of the jury.

    This also isn’t like the US, evidence can’t be thrown out of court and doesn’t have to be approved by the court; meaning any exculpatory evidence the defense can find can and does get introduced. If you’re innocent and can prove it in any way, congrats. If you find a filing mistake by the People’s Prosecution, congrats. If you can prove a flaw in their methodology, congrats. ‘The State’ doesn’t set the narrative, the court only exists as a way to to guide the jury on what the law is. It has no relationship with the prosecution.

    And yes, the death penalty is reserved for those that cannot be rehabilitated. A man does not come back from literally decades of taking bribes. A man cannot change that drastically overnight, it is pure naivety to think otherwise (and ignorance of psychology). The Norway style of keeping mass murderers alive forever just to… say that they didn’t kill them and feel smug about it does nothing for public safety, and just costs money. All for a smug since of superiority about being kind to people that want to kill you. China was under a dictatorship less than a century ago, they had this whole big revolution about recognizing and not being kind to those people.


  • You’re vastly overestimating the American market’s shrinking impact on the global economy. China (and international firms using Chinese manufacturing) have been targeting the Chinese domestic market, the growing SEA market, and working to open the EU market (because EU leaders have to realize eventually they can’t possibly compete against China in electronics manufacturing eventually). This added onto the fact the American economy is at it’s lowest point in history (when factoring actual CoL and median Debt-to-Income ratio) and has no signs of slowing its freefall means the FCC has as much power on the international market as Kenya does.

    Markets outside the US will likely default to the EU regulatory standards which are close enough to Canadian standards they would just need to pay for the certification costs to pass in Canada.

    On the plus side the Nvidia/AMD duopoly will unironically come to an end due to this. Chinese chips are only 5-10 years behind (besides AI Compute chips which are almost on par with Nvidia now) and are around 100x cheaper.