Easy, I can tell you for free that they have been tampered with.

When you put it like, that, that sounds like exactly what they’d want off the coast of Venezuela right now.

For sure. They shouldn’t have blown up the other boats either, but spilling the oil into the sea would certainly have been bad.

Huh, I wonder why they seized it instead of shooting it like the others? It couldn’t possibly be for the oil, right?

No shit

Edit: Mamdani should run for president, he’s by far the most popular Democrat right now, and for good reason.

Edit 2: Darn, he legally can’t. Still, it would be great to have any actual leftist run. And charisma helps too.

How about we adapt by raising taxes on you assholes and funding social programs?

I don’t think it counts as “the fog of war” if there is no war.

And why did you attack it again if you thought there was no one alive?

They weren’t already?

Maybe if more of “the economy” went into the pockets of consumers they’d have money to buy phones as often as they used to.

I am a big fan of cats. However, if they live outside, they are feral. And they should not be allowed to keep living outside.

My preferred solution would be for people to take them in and feed them, but you definitely should not be feeding them while they are still living outside. Outdoor cats cause a lot of destruction to the ecosystem by overhunting small animals such as songbirds, even to the point of extinction.

Blahaj!

I get the impression that Trump’s brain is so far gone at this point that he’ll agree with anyone who meets with him.

That’s a narrower time period than the US. A decent number of people have Christmas decorations up already in the US, and Christmas stuff has been in stores for a while already.

Sending everyone 2 grand would be much more effective than spending the equivalent amount of money on a corporate bailout. A corporate bailout would do nothing to help all those people out of jobs. They don’t have stocks. They don’t have useful skills, if they’re trained for AI specifically.

2 grand is not enough, but it would absolutely be more useful to give the money to them than to give it to their employers.

The democrats absolutely should oppose a corporate bailout. I have no faith that they would actually do that, but they should.

I also highly doubt that Trump would actually follow through on that 2 grand thing.

Okay, but hear me out.

Take the amount of money that would be spent on a bailout. If you go ahead with the bailout, then the majority of that money goes to the wealthy because they are the ones who can afford most of those shares. Some working-class people get aided, but most of the money goes to maintain or even increase the power of the wealthy.

Now, take that same amount of money, and put it towards ACA subsidies, or any other social program that aids the working class. Now the vast majority of that money goes to those who really need it, and it lessens the pain which the working class would be burdened with following the crash.

You can put some of that money directly into useful research grants that aren’t AI related as well.

Whatever your concern is, you can spend the money directly addressing that concern with much more efficiency than a corporate bailout that benefits mostly the wealthy.

You can help the people by funding social programs like social security, healthcare (medicare, medicaid, and ACA subsidies or better yet a full single-payer healthcare program), food assistance, housing assistance, education, childcare, direct monetary assistance for the working class (such as tax breaks or UBI), etc.

You can put the people before the companies by not bailing out the shareholders of stupid investments like AI, by cracking down on labor violations and monopolies, and by seriously increasing taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals in order to fund the social safety net. Reducing spending on the military industrial complex would probably help too.

Neither 401ks or corporate pensions are a good solution. They place a burden that should be caught by a social safety net on each individual, and further pressure each individual to engage in capitalism in order to secure their retirement, giving more power to the employers. Retirement should not be tied to employment, same as healthcare.

“Retirement savings” are a scam.

They shift the social responsibility of caring for those who cannot work for pay into a personal responsibility. Retirement should not be something that you have to save for by bending over backwards for corporate overlords to get a well-paying job and putting away a tiny share of your tiny share of the profits for later. Retirement should be part of a robust social safety net. People should be cared for in their old age (and at every age) regardless of whether they would be able to earn enough wages to put away retirement savings.

To younger generations, the idea of retirement savings is laughable. Not just because it’s so far away and it’s dubious whether society will even last that long, but because the social safety net is in such a bad state that able-bodied young people are suffering at a massive scale right now. We aren’t even earning enough to pay our cost of living, let alone retirement savings. The system is deeply broken and needs much deeper and much wider fixes than a bailout only for those lucky enough to have retirement savings in the first place. Not to mention that most of the bailout money would go to the wealthier shareholders that have more shares.

We need the rich to be taxed much more and for money to be distributed as aid to all who need it, not just those who have retirement savings at stake.

I disagree with both of those takes.

I think the point is that the people should be “bailed out” before the shareholders should be. There should be a safety net in place robust enough that stupid risks like this can be allowed to fail without essentials and ordinary people being caught in the fallout.