I’m a software engineer that is also deeply uninterested in chasing shiny new things. I think another factor is that tech that I did care about has somewhat stalled out.

I’ve had iPhones since a I think the iPhone 4. I’m on the iPhone 11 which released back in 2019, I only really upgraded because my iPhone 8s battery was crapping out.

There’s just nothing exciting about these newer devices, same form factor, same OS, same basic functionality. And in a similar fashion, anything new is stuff I don’t really give a shit about. Oh it can do some kind of ai thing I don’t want, no thanks.

I’ve tried to see it as a positive. I have lots of stuff that I’ve filled my life up with, things that are meaningful to me. I think that’s what took up the space I used to fill with reading about and getting excited about this new gadget or that one. Now I’m excited to go see my niece’s Christmas recital or bake cookies with my wife to take to a friends of the library event.

Doesn’t hurt that every company seems to be in a non stop contest to see how little they can give the consumer for the maximum price while installing as much revenue generating spyware as possible.

I think the day of the church shooting (the more recent one) there were two other mass shootings.

It is quite odd to become numb to this. I remember coming home from school and seeing the columbine shooting on every channel, it being a discussion for weeks and months.

They used to be rare enough to be named. Now they are so common I have to qualify which recent church shooting I’m talking about. I saw a headline recently that just said “3 mass shootings today” and I didn’t even bother to find out the details.

The details barely ever change, the response is always the same nothing, the people in power just don’t care. Over time even if you do care you just become exhausted. There’s literally not enough time to process one mass shooting before the next.

And now fascism has arrived and has decided it wants to make war against the citizens, so it’s a bad disarm. The loudest gun owners are excited about this turn of events, but they aren’t the only gun owners.

Part of me thinks this is all to the benefit of the owner class. A scared population is easier to control, just promise them safety. An isolated population that has no third place to go to due to the threat of violence is easier to exploit. They don’t fix it because it’s working just fine for them.

You can tell from the quality of his work that this might be the first time he’s done any kind of manual labor.

What a thrill for him to pretend he’s a working man. Probably got done went home opened a $12 microbrew and really let his hair down.

Evergreen tweet

For those that don’t want to give X the traffic

Violence is NOT the answer. The answer is opens history book

uh oh

frantically starts flipping through pages

uh oh. oh no. no no no. uh oh

I agree with you there.

I think that’s part of the issue with neoliberalism, since it doesn’t care to reign in the abuses of the elites.

It’s interesting how the frustrated masses though are so ready to pick someone that’s clearly on the side of the ruling class.

I think that’s the part which might be more prominent in western culture right now. This paradox where people’s lives are made worse every day by businesses, businesses jacking up their rent, businesses gouging prices, businesses invading their privacy. And they finally have enough and go “we need someone to come in and run this country like a business.”

It’s amazing to watch millions of people have legitimate complaints and be completely unable to identify the source of their misery, so much that they hand it even more power.

It’s a good question.

Here are some facts we have to accept about the world first

• as long as authoritarians point their abuses inwards there’s no amount that causes the international community to put a stop to it, especially not against the United States.
• those with authoritarian power rarely surrender it willingly
• institutions do not historically stop fascism

So we are already down the road, whether we collectively want to admit it or not.

Here are some things you can do that might lessen some damage but are unlikely to stop the train

• vote for neoliberals. Go for it, it’s better than the alternative. But if putting neoliberals into power stopped fascism, then electing Biden in 2020 wouldn’t have been followed with trump in 2024
• protest, at least the peaceful do nothing protests that are allowed here. If your protest doesn’t make those with power worry then it’s almost really a protest but a state sanctioned pressure relief.

I would consider myself further left than any party and I hear people that share my views say that you should organize and build community solidarity. These are nice things, we should care for our neighbors and through tough times community can be a major source of strength. Not super likely to topple fascism but could make living through it better.

I see 3 scenarios where fascism fades into, well not really the background but the middle ground.

1. Trump dies. He’s an old sick man, if he dies there will be plenty attempting to take the mantle up. Apple is still Apple without Steve Jobs but there not really a Steve Jobs replacement.
2. Trump starts stupid wars. Stupid here being war with NATO, like trying to take Greenland by force. A war with Iran is also stupid but unlikely to turn people against him.
3. Sustained general strike. This could actually work but the people of this country dont seem to have it in them.

I think we should also understand that the ability to maintain an authoritarian state has improved since Hitler and Mussolini. Hungary, Turkey, the Russian Federation are all examples of effectively authoritarian dictatorships wearing the trappings of democracy to some degree.

America has long been a nation bought by lobbyists to do the bidding of the wealthy. It’s not too crazy to think that we end up just zombie marching along with just enough trappings of democracy to say “it’s not too bad yet” for a long time. We have the national guard occupying US cities while a masked police force abducts people off the streets and illegally traffics them to other nations to be imprisoned without due process and disappeared. There are many red lines that have been crossed that could have been when people stood up, but everyone is waiting for something. That thing might never come.

I wish people could really understand this.

Neoliberalism leads to fascism. Not like in a cartoonish they sit around in some fortress of evil planning a Nazi takeover.

Neoliberalism all over western society has shown itself ineffective at meeting people’s needs.

Neoliberalism wants free markets and limited governments. This leads to capital gaining a huge amount of power because the government categorically doesn’t want to regulate them. That power eventually turns to exploitation of the citizens and capture of the government.

Exploited citizens with an ineffective government get frustrated with a system that’s not meeting their needs. This is the dry tinder in which fascism catches fire, a charismatic person shows up and says “give me unlimited power and I can fix this quagmire you are in” and a lot of people go “fuck it, it can’t be worse than this” and you get a fascist dictator.

Neoliberalism leads to fascism not because they are the same but because neoliberalism creates the perfect environment for fascism to sprout and grow.

Wait until you get denied healthcare because the AI review board decided you shouldn’t get it.

Paper pushers can absolutely fuck your life over, and AI is primed to replace a lot of those people.

It will be cold comfort to you if you’ve been wrongly classified by an AI in some way that harms you that the AI didn’t intend to harm you.

I remember when I first saw them, the cyberpunk aesthetic was interesting.

Having seen them in real life though, the fog machines and laser light show were definitely doing a lot of heavy lifting.

In real life they look out of place and instead of looking cyberpunk they end up looking more retro-futurism.

To me, at least, as someone that likes the cyberpunk aesthetic, I was kinda excited for the cybertruck too. If not for it specifically, than for it opening the door for other people to adopt more sci-fi designs.

Sadly every time I see one in person I think it may have set things back instead of moving them forward.

I share this fear. I had hoped at some point the people would have had enough.

I think at first I considered it some great failing in my fellow countrymen. While that may play some part, I’ve found it more instructive to understand this moment as a result of a very intentional project.

It’s the kind of project that wealth allows you to pursue. Institutions like the heritage foundation and fix news cost money, but the return on that investment can’t be beat. It took a couple decades to bend the world to their will but the results are astounding.

You have the exploited championing their own exploitation. Extolling the virtues of those that take from them. They protect the very systems that harm them, and at this point are so indoctrinated that they can not fathom any other way of arranging things.

At every step down this road there was someone whose duty was to stop it but found it more profitable to stand aside. And now I fear we are too late to stop it

This is not true.

• 75,019,230 (48.34% of the electorate) voted Harris
• 77,303,568 (49.81% of the electorate) voted Trump
• 2,878,359 (1.85% of the electorate) voted for a third party candidate

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/elections/2024

A plurality of the electorate voted for this administration, not a majority.

In the 2024 presidential election, 73.6% (or 174 million people) of the citizen voting-age population was registered to vote and 65.3% (or 154 million people) voted according to new voting and registration tables released today by the U.S. Census Bureau.

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025/2024-presidential-election-voting-registration-tables.html

So of the 238 million voting age citizens, 77 million (32% of the voting age citizens) voted for this administration

We are at the end of half a century of destroying the working class and militarizing our police.

With no social safety net, healthcare tied to employment, and at-will employment, there’s no working people able to afford a sustained non violent protest.

Capitalist controlled media has eroded any sense of class consciousness amongst the common people, who are more inclined to be angry about the “theft” of a billionaires pile of gold through taxation, than the everyday theft of the value their labor produces.

There have been many one day protests, large ones, but society has been reshaped to make sustained protests virtually impossible. A captured media landscape and election system insulate politicians from consequences. Together these depress the incentive for non violent protest.

Violent insurrection would be met with a ton of state violence.

People, pretty reasonably, aren’t excited to be beaten, sent off to CECOT, or killed.

And of course, I’ll note the many logistic issues. America is fucking huge, most Americans don’t have $500 to cover an emergency, no one has an extra $500+ to fly across country for a do nothing protest in DC. Protest coverage is met with derision by centrist as “too disruptive” while the right wing n enjoys the snippets of our police state bashing protesters with state sanctioned violence.

So a lot of people do the calculus, spend time, money, and energy to go out into the street to be beaten and maybe disappeared so that nothing will change, and they sit it out.

Capitalists love to conflate things like free market economies and capitalism.

There is only one good hack that free market capitalism figured out. If you make it profitable for people to satisfy others needs you can create a system where needs get satisfied and without explicit planning.

That’s the good bit about free markets. You want a hamburger, well if enough people want it then there will be a profit motive for someone to supply it.

There that’s literally it. That’s the good thing. It causes people to not sit idle but to go find ways to make profit and in the best most ideal version the ways they find to do that are a net benefit to society at large, people get hamburgers.

It doesn’t do anything to control for the psychopaths who would rather gather another bag of money they can never hope to spend by exploiting people. It doesn’t supply things that have low demand (like cures for rare diseases). It doesn’t have any short circuit for the profit motive in case it makes us do something stupid like destroy the ecosystem.

I wish we could look at it objectively. If you make it so people have to do things to make profit to survive they won’t sit idle. That’s the upside. The downside is pretty down though and one can acknowledge the upside and still think “yea this system still kinda blows, it’s predicated on people not being allowed to exist unless they are generating profit”

Remember when the entire west coast was burned to the ground during the George Floyd protests. Whole thing, every city, gone.

I mean I lived in the Bay Area and San Francisco seemed completely unaffected. But the news told me daily about how every city had been turned into a mad max style thunder dome where the only medical care that remained was gender affirming transition surgeries.

It’s fun being governed now by the candidates that appealed to the voters who saw that and went, “yep, that’s gotta be true”

This is the same frustrating conversation we had to have when people blamed Clinton’s loss on Bernie bros staying home.

Even when we had concrete data that showed that a higher percentage of bernie voters voted for Clinton in 2016 than Clinton voters voted for Obama when he won the primaries.

The data tells us over and over that progressive and demsoc voters show up in higher numbers for candidates they prefer less than centrists will when presented with someone ideologically further left.

Are there people that wouldn’t vote for the centrist candidate, sure. But Mamdani is currently seeing how many centrists are happy to say “fuck strategy, I’m supporting cuomo!”

I get why those that still have faith in the Democratic Party are upset about the defeat. But I also understand why leftists are tired of being told “vote for this compromise candidate” in every election and even when we do turn out getting scape goated for them running garbage candidates that fail to capture the further left elements AND tons of non-left voters who sat at home and didn’t bother to vote.

I’m enjoying the idea of someone going IRL hunting and their only training is the Pokémon games.

Just out in the woods, gently tossing pokeballs at very confused deer.

Not just people, the economy will end up paying the price.

Tariffs have horrible second order effects.

Every companies outputs is some other companies inputs.

American companies end up locked out of more affordable vehicles as inputs. That cost then gets baked into its output, which is some other company’s input. Then just keep following that chain.

The best broad blanket tariffs can hope to do is trade long term competitiveness for some short term price increase.

Americans will wonder why other nations eat our lunch in the coming decades. Well that foreign company could buy the cheaper machine to produce the widget, their raw materials cost less to deliver because the transit company that ships it in charges a better rate because they have lower vehicle overhead. Since they have 2 dozen suppliers for their components both foreign and domestic they are forced to compete on quality and price.

American companies will become even more bloated and inefficient

It’ll be interesting to see who wants to hire this guy going forward, who wants to work with him.

I’ve worked in startups for about 20 years, I can’t imagine him being very welcome at one of those.

In any of the larger tech giants I imagine he’s going to run into plenty of engineers that don’t want a thing to do with him.

I imagine he’d be welcome at the right wing tech dumpsters that shit out things like truth social.

The thing is after this “high” I would think he would be insufferable even to those that could stand his politics, I can’t imagine going from riding high thinking you could rewrite the social security office with AI to doing your weekly standup about how many sprint points you accomplished on that bug that keeps showing “No Truths” under trump every time there’s a surge in traffic.

There’s a reason so many child stars crash out. Reaching those heights, being told you are some sort of wunderkind that early in life doesn’t set you up for success.

He may have to learn humility and grow through sheer necessity.

“Technologist” is a hell of a glaze for this douchebag.

He’s a child that thought AI was magic and could fix everything being taken advantage of by the worlds richest man to tear down necessary functions of the government.

He doesn’t have the life experience to realize how awful his choices have been. He has two paths ahead of him. He can either double down and make money continuing his grift with people politically aligned with the horrible project he aided. Or he can try to learn and grow and somehow come to grips with the shame of what he’s done.

Everyone in America has to give out their social security numbers to every fucking company and government department because it’s the closest thing we have to a national ID.

Why can’t we have a real, secure, National ID system? Because it’s the mark of the beast!!

But now that RFK Jr wants to hunt people for sport I’m sure they will fall in line.