You can have sci-fi that showcases cool technology and how it relates to society. We’ve done it before, and it’s some of the most popular and influential sci-fi ever created. It’s called Star Trek (communicators, transporters, medical scanners, replicators, holodecks, etc). But even utopian sci-fi like Star Trek is mainly centered around conflict, what it means to be human, and other philosophical and existential questions. A show that’s only about how cool the tech is, really isn’t a show at all. It’s an advertisement.

Intuit has been doing this for a long time, just in case anyone was wondering why $1 million seems like a low bribe. And it goes beyond preventing you from filing your taxes for free, with one of their goals being to make it as much of a pain in the ass as possible, so you are too frustrated to do it yourself.

This if from a 2019 Pro Publica article:

But the success of TurboTax rests on a shaky foundation, one that could collapse overnight if the U.S. government did what most wealthy countries did long ago and made tax filing simple and free for most citizens.

For more than 20 years, Intuit has waged a sophisticated, sometimes covert war to prevent the government from doing just that, according to internal company and IRS documents and interviews with insiders. The company unleashed a battalion of lobbyists and hired top officials from the agency that regulates it. From the beginning, Intuit recognized that its success depended on two parallel missions: stoking innovation in Silicon Valley while stifling it in Washington. Indeed, employees ruefully joke that the company’s motto should actually be “compromise without integrity.”

Internal presentations lay out company tactics for fighting “encroachment,” Intuit’s catchall term for any government initiative to make filing taxes easier — such as creating a free government filing system or pre-filling people’s returns with payroll or other data the IRS already has. “For a decade proposals have sought to create IRS tax software or a ReturnFree Tax System; All were stopped,” reads a confidential 2007 PowerPoint presentation from an Intuit board of directors meeting. The company’s 2014-15 plan included manufacturing “3rd-party grass roots” support. “Buy ads for op-eds/editorials/stories in African American and Latino media,” one internal PowerPoint slide states.

He was one of the “homegrowns”. Any bets on him going to CECOT?

When they say, “Garcia is an MS-13 terrorist,” we need to say, “What do you offer as proof?” and keep asking until they provide said proof, concede defeat, or resort to force towards their questioners. Like it or not, we need to do the same for Democrat’s claims that he is a “family man”.

We absolutely do not need to demand proof that he is a “family man”. That is the “innocent” part of “innocent until proven guilty in a court of law”. The onus is on the state to prove he committed a crime. End of story.

So if you think all protest is good protest, then by all means, put on your “Palestine lives matter” T-shirt and start throwing rocks through people’s windows in broad daylight.

So you think people in this thread want all protest to start out as a riot. That’s not what anyone is saying. We are saying that when a disruptive peaceful protest turns into a riot due to the aggression of police or other agitators, the legitimacy of the protest is not diminished.

Are you saying the Stonewall Riots were an unnecessary part of the struggle for gay rights? Also, what effective tactics do you think veterans of the Civil Rights movement taught the gay rights protesters? Do you think they taught them to be demure and to not disrupt anyone’s day? Is that how you think the Civil Rights movement played out?

Do you mean Guantanamo? Yeah, it’s similar, and just as repulsive and illegal. In fact, what they did set the precedent for what Trump is doing.

So I had to look it up, and apparently Trump signed an EO on February 25th designating MS-13 as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization”, which makes no sense because it’s an American gang.

But that doesn’t matter, because on March 15th Abrego Garcia was deported without ever having been proven to be a member of MS-13. No presumption of innocence, no charges filed, no access to a lawyer, no chance to ever argue his innocence in a court of law. You know, that whole “due process” thing that we used to care about.

Regardless of what you think of this man, his rights were violated. That means your rights were also violated, because if the rights of the US Constitution don’t apply to everyone, then they don’t apply to anyone.

And never, ever criticizing the Right. These people cheer for Trump more than the fucking MAGA crowd.

I mean, the whole reason he came here in 2011 was because MS13 was threatening him and his family. And Trump just handed him over to the largest concentration of the most violent MS13 members on the planet. It would actually be a miracle if he survived the first day, and it’s been a month.

You’ve actually subtracted from the conversation by spreading false information that the rest of us have to go and correct.

Wanna know the difference between Abrego Garcia and Rittenhouse?

I’ll give you a hint: One of them was afforded due process.

Here’s another thing that you might not know. Being a member of a gang is not illegal in and of itself (freedom of association). If it was, the KKK and the Proud Boys and Patriot Front and all those other chud gangs wouldn’t be allowed to exist. So it doesn’t matter one iota if Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13 or not. The only thing that matters in terms of deporting him are his legal residence status, and his criminal record. And guess what? He was here legally, having been given “withholding of removal” status by an immigration judge, and he has no criminal record.

A black woman expertly played a flute and MAGA insisted that it was “to remind you that nothing you care about has any value.”

Sounds good in theory, but most of the places rich people live have very strict code enforcement for how your house/yard can look. Then again, you can just take a note from Bezos with his illegal hedge fence and consider the fine part of your property tax.

“The Gang Solves The Housing Crisis”

There are some really good quotes from famous painters in the late 19th and early 20th centuries saying that photography is devoid of all artistic merit, and that it should never and will never be taken seriously as an art form. Every time a new tool comes along, the art community freaks out. It happened with the invention of the camera, it happened with the invention of digital art software, and we are currently watching it happen with AI. Eventually, it’ll just be another tool in an artists toolbox.

And oil drums full of HGH that ballooned his torso like mister Creosote from Monty Python.

This is exactly what Ted Bundy did when his first love dumped him.

He fell for a woman called Diane Edwards while in college, and they dated for about a year. She was everything he thought a woman should be; beautiful, smart, successful, and from a well-off family. She dumped him because she saw him as “pitifully weak”. Psychologists believe, and Bundy himself all but confirmed, that this was the catalyst that would fuel his homicidal rage towards women. It’s also believed that Diane heavily influenced the type of women he killed; young white college students with brown hair parted in the middle. He began killing women the same year Diane dumped him.

Five years later he was married and living a double life as a serial killer. During this time, he sought out and reconnected with Diane behind his wife’s back, and Diane was impressed with his transformation. He was on the cusp of a successful legal and political career, and he seemed a lot more masculine and sure of himself. She was smitten and wanted to pursue the relationship. They even got as far as discussing marriage. That’s when Bundy dumped her and cut off all contact with her, getting his “corrective experience” moment, which clearly did nothing to heal the trauma of rejection that spurred one of the most terrifying episodes of serial murder in history.

Elon Musk doesn’t need to beat the bullies to get closure. He needs therapy. Or rather, he needed therapy, and he needed it many years ago. At this point, he’s in his “dumping Diane” phase, where he’s already hurt so many people and he’s so far gone that no amount of therapy would help him. He’s already too addicted to the monster he’s become to ever want to heal himself. His need to have these corrective experiences, like Bundy with Diane, is strictly to feed the monster’s ego.

I don’t think that’s true really. I really think that some people don’t think their decisions through to the end, or at least halfway through. Just look at brexit, after the vote passed, people were googling the consequences lmao.

Brexit is a perfect example of “dumb” intersecting “cruel”. 33% of Leave voters said they voted in favor of it due to immigration. A thinly veiled excuse for “too many brown people in my white country”. Brexit has done nothing to elevate the white population or reduce the non-white population (the cruel part), but it has done a lot to fuck over British trade (the dumb part).