Does it really matter?

Musk just killed the US budget bill with a bunch of tweets that were explicit lies, and people lapped them up. Bizarre, obvious AI slop gets tons of engagement on Facebook.

And there are zero consequences.

Trump and Musk embraced a post truth world, so maybe it’s time for their opposition to stop pretending like America can (as a whole) think critically and fight fire with fire. Maybe it will accelerate the fall of the platforms that enable them.

And then congress with actually do something about it…

Is it a separate charge?

He can still be convicted for 1st degree.

It would still be better if quality search (not extracting more and more money in the short term) was their goal.

Not if they’re anti vax too. I know a nurse, a family friend, who was anti vax during covid…

This is a good point.

But does the modern ground have missile launchers? Maybe conventional ballistic missiles? They could level airbases as well.

Again it seems like this battle depends on topography and “first strike” timing.

I swear, that picture and her profile look AI generated. That smile… WTF.

I say 6 months.

The irony is that Gemini Pro is actually better than ChatGPT (which is not saying a ton, as OpenAI have completely stagnated and even some small open models are better now), but whatever they use for search is beyond horrible.

As if humans weren’t fiercely tribalistic forever. Other species beat each other to death, too.

The post may be right, but getting a bunch of homo sapiens from far away not to club each other to death is, historically, a hard problem, and countries and passports are kinda a stepping stone.

If the trial is televised/streamed, it could be an OJ type thing that keeps going.

But… probably, yeah.

Depends on how many missiles each side can afford.

On one hand, modern AA is extremely good, and if the ground force is peppered with SAMs and forward recon/detection, a modern airforce will struggle mightily, depending on the terrain and intelligence.

On the other hand… can the bombers just launch a boatload of cruise missiles, spotted by the WWII ground forces? This is even more expensive and impractical, but it would work.

So I think modern ground wins with a sane budget, and modern air wins with an “infinite” ammo budget.

Wealth redistribution programs are great and urgently needed. Medicine needs to be largely socialized. But doing that is not going to fix it overnight… all the inefficiencies and leeches stuck to the system will get worse unless they are progressively, individually addressed.

And cutting military only goes so far.

I am trying to reiterate that these social programs are not a magic bullet, and a little bit of that deficit hawk gutting and even “breaking” things is kinda needed too, especially in places neither party will like. Realistically, gutting the military would not cover it either.

Axios broke this down much better than I could: https://www.axios.com/2024/11/16/elon-musk-trump-department-government-efficiency

Social Security: This popular program eats up 20-25% of total federal spending. It supports retirees, disabled individuals, and survivors. Trump has promised to never cut it. In fact, he wants to eliminate taxes on benefits, which would increase the deficit.

Health care: Think Medicare (for seniors) and Medicaid (for low-income individuals). This is another 25% of the budget. Trump has promised to protect Medicare and a lot of his working-class base benefits from these programs.

Defense: The Defense Department and related military spending constitute about 13-15% of the federal budget. Republicans typically want more defense spending, not less. And it’s hard to see the shift to space-based warfare costing less.

Interest on the national debt: This one sucks the most for America because you get nothing in return. Interest payments are growing rapidly, now around 8-10% of federal spending. The only way to save money here is to radically cut the debt. Trump’s agenda does the opposite.

Safety-net programs: Programs like food benefits (SNAP), unemployment insurance and housing assistance collectively make up about 10%. Trump won with the support of people who get these benefits, so cuts could be a hard sell.

Case in point: The expense for entitlement programs goes almost entirely to the benefits themselves, not any administrative bloat involved in issuing checks. For example, the administrative cost of Social Security is only about 0.5% of outlays, $7.2 billion last year, Neil Irwin points out.

So even if somehow you magically cut that in half, you’ve only cut $3.6 billion in spending — trivial in the context of the federal budget.

The article points out the futility of doge, but it also applies to “finding” money for massive increases of these programs.

Clearly not. Trump campaigned on breaking a broken government open. The doge department and such carries a lot of waste reduction branding, TBH some of it may be a good idea. But fundamentally, there is just no way to balance the budget without, well, taxing the living shit out of billionares and massive stock trades, instead of giving them even more breaks. Even Musk’s dream of gutting research, medicaid and such is just not going to counter it.

Part of this is self inflicted by Democrats too. They pushed neoliberalism everywhere. Surprise surprise, that turned large swathes of the world into billionaire tax havens, and now that’s a massive problem unless they can get others to cooperate… again, another very weak point for Trump.

So much of American politics is pure theatrical bullshit and politicians get away with ridiculous behavior because the American people are, as a whole, mind bogglingly stupid.

TBH one of the stupidest things politicians believe is that earnest, honest campaigning would win in an age of social media bubbles and extremely complex issues.

Trump screws up so much in his campaigns, and I find it amusing that everyone is scratching their heads trying to figure out how this helped him… It didn’t. He won in spite of beint a terrible candidate running a shitstorm campaign because he’s populist, and he didn’t campaign like its the 1950s.

You want to win, you have to lie through your teeth and pander enough to make an influencer blush, and Democrats are going to keep losing till they figure that out.

No one is operating in good faith on fiscal conservatism anymore, especially not the progressives/socialists. That’s their whole issue… the social programs come first.

There have absolutely been debt hawk voices in congress saying good things, but they have been increasingly drowned out over time… which is unsurprising, as voters apparently don’t care about it anymore. And just forcing nationalized healthcare is not going to work overnight either. It would stop things from racing away, sure, but the whole system needs to be squeezed and fixed without breaking it or it will just make things worse.

We need a sustainability party.

But not branded as that of course. They need a campaign so dirty it would make Trump and clickbait influencers blush.

I don’t get it… just how many people have to even interact with trans athletes IRL? Or have some “scare” with a trans person in a bathroom? Or be forced to watch something ‘woke’ or whatever. Who TF loses sleep over this?

Meanwhile, this is why we’re miserable:

And this is one of many reasons we will get even more miserable (as an increasingly large part of the US budget will be interest… not even going to think about climate here, or how much steeper that line is now):

And we just obliterated the two groups who wanted to do something about it (liberal socialists and debt hawks) and elected both of their polar opposites all in one package who openly swore to make those issues significantly worse.

…I know Lemmy will hate this, but maybe the Democrats need to “adopt” and reform the old fiscal conservatives in the GoP. Basically become this “tax the rich” party, where taxing the living shit out of billionaires and saving your children is literally the party creed instead of a hollow neoliberal byline, but balancing the budget and trying to reduce spending attracts entities that would traditionally skew Republican.

There is obviously public sentiment for this, and the tremendous irony is Trump is the only one sucessfully tapping it.

A few dems are ponding joining too: https://www.axios.com/2024/12/13/donald-trump-elon-musk-doge-democrats

Conflicts of interest, definitely…

But on the other hand, I’d rather see it diversely staffed and chaired rather than Musk surrounding himself with more acolytes to egg him on.

Eh Intel’s data center GPUs suck. Gaudi was okay, but gained no critical mass and is being phased out, Xe-HPC is being phased out and was hardly used anywhere, even Falcon Shores keeps getting delayed and looks to be in trouble going by statements about focusing on “consumer inference.” They seem dead in the water here, which is very worrying.

The MI300X is actually good, but AMD totally blew it by ignoring a few glaring software issues and not seeding development with consumer GPUs, hence it’s not gaining much traction. The MI300A (the big APU) basically isn’t available or cost effective in any cloud instances.

I’d say one major difference is that most US citizens are just ignorant of what’s going on and don’t contort themselves to support whatever war crime Netanyahu is committing now or play “what about X country.” Yeah a few old gheezers remember when Israel was fighting for survival, which is apparently who Biden caters to, but they are living in a different decade.

If the US, my country, invaded Mexico for being “A proxy against the US” and isolating us or whatever, I would sure as hell want China and Russia to send the narcos nukes for us being such morons, and would take every opportunity to give my government the middle finger, not justify invading a country with a microscopic fraction of our military power. I would hope we fail, miserably, so maybe the lesson sticks this time and the president gets kicked out, no matter what the Mexicans actually did.