Turning On The Giant Faucet Of Bullshit - US Politics February 2025

The revolution will not be televised, brother - the revolution will be inside.

I’m in the same boat Scott is (and also do not know how to make the account name changes necessary). There are too many other things to worry about already, you know?

I think this form of worry is either borrowing trouble or kind of narcissistic. Don’t talk yourselves into being intimidated or comply in advance!

Trump knows I don’t like him.

NASA told to delete all mentions on all websites of the following subjects:

DEIA
Diversity (in context of DEIA)
Equity
Inclusion
Accessibility
MSI
Minority Serving Institution
Indigenous People
EEJ
EJ
Environmental Justice
Underrepresented groups/people
Anything specifically targeting women (women in leadership, etc.)

so what message are they taking out to the galaxy.
Gene Rodenberry would turn in his grave.
Bye Bye U.S. Empire

On January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight, killing all seven crew members aboard, five men and two unmentionables.

explosion was the unmentionables fault

Every day just feels like waking up to fresh slap in the face or punch in the gut.

so what message are they taking out to the galaxy.
Gene Rodenberry would turn in his grave.
Bye Bye U.S. Empire

reciprocal tariffs (an equivalent tariff on any country that puts them on U.S., supposedly), and blanket 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum imports.

i don't know very much at all about how this affects international manufacturing, customs, etc, so this comment was really helpful:

LGM commenter MacK sent along the following helpful primer:

Has Trump ever actually run any sort of business of was he just a poseur? Because this isn’t simple at all…

I have to question whether Trump has ever even read a tariff schedule, which is the central document from each customs jurisdiction that US customs is now going to have to get its hands on and make sense of – not to mention US customs agents, who would only be familiar with the US tariff schedule but now have to get their hands on something like 130 different jurisdictions schedules.

And having worked with them, I can tell you that they are extremely complicated things. First of all it’s not just that countries don’t charge the same tariff on all imports, not even the United States does not or the EU. Rather there are different rates on different imported products, and often what would seem to be the same product attract a different rate depending on Its condition and level of processing. Then in more complex products there are water content rules, what percentage of the product comes from Country X which gets a low rate for whatever reason, and what percentage does it incorporate from Country Y which doesn’t…

So try and work work out how this is going to operate is hard. They’re about 130 custom jurisdictions in the world, that is to say they’re 166 members of the WTO, but the EU and EEA have a common external tariff, so that’s one set of rates. So, US customs and US customs agents (the private people that specialising clearing goods through customs and making sure the right amount of duty and tariff is paid) are going to be trying to work out on every single item important in the United States how much has to be paid? That is going to bring US ports to a screaming halt.

But it’s not just that. As the British discovered with Brexit manufacturing has changed over the last three decades to what is known as “just in time“ manufacturing, where components arrive just before they are incorporated in the next step of the production. This saves manufacturers an awful lot of money because they don’t have a huge inventory of input components to finance. The problem is the British discovered is that any delays in the port system causes absolute chaos at the manufacturing point. It’s entirely conceivable that this idea of reciprocal tariffs if applied to components coming into the United States will cause so many delays that people will actually be laid off or sent home from factories.

And now let me throw in a new wrinkle, the 25% tariff aluminium and steel is going to result in reciprocal retaliatory tariffs on the United States. [They] will not be initially published in the regular tariff schedule of countries shipping goods in the United States, which means they’ll be yet more delays while someone tries to work out what id actually the tariff rate right now on our equivalent going into country X or country Y.

hopefully Customs isn't gutted out by the doge (uuuuugh, this word becoming part of life now)! ironically, though, out of all possible applications of "replacing human workers with AI", making sense of 130+ extremely confusing tariff schedules and spitting out a recommendation (along with its source) actually sounds like something AI _would_ be able to accomplish, and probably with fewer errors and definitely way less complaining than the humans

Star Linking across the universe

(sorry to bring my ai bullshit off the ai thread - i think the status quo thought on ai is "there's no way ai can do anything humans can" - and unfortunately, i think that's wrong in some cases, and also that asking whether or not ai can do things as well as humans is the wrong question. for our courageous business and political leaders, the question is whether ai can even plausibly do it at all, not whether the quality is as good as a human. businessmen like to employ robots because they don't get benefits, they don't talk back, and they work 24/7. if there are complaints about the "quality", the answer is, first "good enough", and second, "if it's not good enough for some people, it will be later because ai will continue to get better and learn rapidly, while humans will continue to want days off and the beta work/life balance")

we need a big labor org to create an AI that outperforms C-suite execs and then gin up shareholder lawsuits against every corporation that doesn't use it for fiscal negligence

basically what we need is a giant robot humanoid form that does battle with monsters in our big cities

(dr. sbaitso could probably already do better than most c-suite execs)

what we need is a sentient fucking guillotine

Dave’s not here

I’ve been working on an AI project for five years or so and whenever I present I mention the “human in the loop” methodology we’re using and everyone lets out a sigh of relief.

Do the people on the left propagating guillotine memes and usage have a real understanding of the history of its use in the French Revolution? Like … you might as well be arguing for a sentient gulag.

No, but see, this time, only bad people will be killed.

The machine will know who is truly counter-revolutionary!

There was a weird Superbowl ad where some kids come into a bodega talking about how AI is going replace all of our jobs, then the woman behind the counter has a flashback to the 80s where her now husband is a kid talking about how computers are going to change the world. Then in the present she looks at her husband and says "I think we're going to be just fine."

I am really confused about the message: the 80s kid was certainly right about computers, so that means the today kids could be right about AI. I guess it's just "People will always need bodegas."

Hmm... who was it an ad for???

Did an AI write that?

The guillotine had a long post-revolutionary history of being used to carry out the death penalty on ordinary criminals on behalf of the government of France and was last used on an Algerian immigrant in 1977. It's just as much a tool of the reactionaries as the gas chamber, firing squad, or electric chair.

I know this is all so he can try to push crypto, but jesus christ this would trigger a massive global economic collapse that would make 2008 seem like nothing:

I suspect this will just end up being something Old Man Trump said on a plane and we won’t hear about it again. But after recents, who are we kidding? Anything is possible. On Air Force One today en route to the Super Bowl, Trump told reporters that DOGE analysts (whatever that means) had found “irregularities” in U.S. treasuries and that the U.S. may not be obligated to pay some of them. “Maybe we have less debt than we thought,” he said.

Needless to say, this is quite literally violating the express language of the 14th Amendment which says: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”

If financial markets actually thought Trump was serious about this, that he would follow through on this, they’d probably go completely haywire. As I said, I think — unless and until we hear more — they will think this is just the old man ranting.

One other point worth noting is that Trump seems to be basing this on some analysis from the DOGE boys. This appears to have been one of the DOGE boys’ main goals at Treasury, getting access to details about what kinds of payments Treasury makes, the answer being close to everything the U.S. government does outside of the Pentagon and some of the Pentagon stuff too. The Treasury also services the U.S. debt, which is what we’re talking about here. I’m less clear on what access to which part of the Treasury Department these guys could have gotten to get information about how the Treasury Department sells and services Treasury notes. But all that detail aside, imagine thinking that by downloading a ton of data and having a few days to analyze it you could make the determination that a significant amount of the U.S. national debt wasn’t real and didn’t have to be paid. It’s hardly the craziest thing we’ve seen over recent days. But it’s still worth noting how nuts that is.

https://defector.com/salesforce-is-using-a-hallucination-to-sell-ai

The thoroughly solved problem of obtaining the food that you want from an establishment that sells food—at least as, if not more, thoroughly solved than the problem of water falling from the sky onto your body—now requires AI to ensure that people don't incorrectly get what they didn't order?

It is simply wild that Salesforce has this opportunity to highlight to a mass audience, even indirectly, their best and most promising use-case for AI, and here they are aggressively pitching an inscrutable solution to a non-existent problem.

There was a weird Superbowl ad where some kids come into a bodega talking about how AI is going replace all of our jobs, then the woman behind the counter has a flashback to the 80s where her now husband is a kid talking about how computers are going to change the world. Then in the present she looks at her husband and says "I think we're going to be just fine."

I am really confused about the message: the 80s kid was certainly right about computers, so that means the today kids could be right about AI. I guess it's just "People will always need bodegas."

― Iza Duffus Hardy (President Keyes), Monday, February 10, 2025 11:16 AM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Hmm... who was it an ad for???

― realistic pillow (Jon not Jon), Monday, February 10, 2025 11:18 AM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Weirdly enough, Coca-Cola:
https://www.marketingdive.com/news/coca-cola-westsides-finest-kenya-barris-campaign-trail/739251/

Apparently White House economic advisor Kevin Hassett said on CNBC this morning that Trump wants to fight inlation by increasing labor supply and lowering aggregate demand. So their strategy is slashing jobs and shrinking the economy? Seems like that may not go over too well.

it is completely disingenuous to pretend to not know exactly what i mean when i make a guillotine joke.

You want to kill the King's wife

i think the point was that the joke isn't funny

If you ban one Van Horn Street three will rise up to take his place.

Fork in the Street

i can’t tell whether that’s aimed at me, milo, but if you’re comparing me to VHS i don’t really know what to say

Three will rise up

ah

it is completely disingenuous to pretend to not know exactly what i mean when i make a guillotine joke.

Unless you are arguing that the contemporary equivalents of Hebért and Saint Just (both of whom have ideological similarities to contemporary leftist thought) should be executed?

Sarahell, I want the rich and powerful to be executed. that is what the guillotine represents in the public imaginary, despite its historical inaccuracy ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

To me, those jokes evince Stalinist authoritarianism but hey …

My proposal to shift all guillotine references to “Ipatiev House basement” (alternate version: get Romanoved) was not adopted at the last Council of Posters. Until that’s reconsidered, we just have to assume most people can understand symbolism used for more than 200 years.

Or at least that the people who pretend they can’t understand will spend more of their time scolding college kids in Che shirts or something.

I'd be more amenable to discussing such rhetoric if I thought there was even the slightest chance of it ever happening during my lifetime. It won't, so let ppl have their revenge fantasies imo, Lord knows the rich do nothing to make them seem less justified.

xpost

we need to bring back the trotsky ice axe now more than ever.

It would be nice to find a corner of the internet free from fake-macho revenge-killing fantacists, but here we are.

in the old days the rich would at least die in wars occasionally? they would make some duke a general and he'd get blown to bits in france somewhere. not anymore. they all live to be a thousand.

now that trump has abolished the penny i gotta say: i might agree with him there. fuck a penny. especially when you read this: "It cost 3.69 cents to produce and distribute a penny last year..."

Trump must really hate Lincoln