I’m surprised they haven’t just started building 5g chips right into the tvs. That’s the end goal here. Just make it so the devices don’t even need your cooperation to phone home.

TO HELL WITH SPAIN, REMEMBER THE MAINE!!!

The universe is an anomaly. It’s a miracle life is even possible at all.

Obviously, the only rational explanation is that you were abducted by aliens. They beamed you up, experimented on you, wiped your memory, and sent you back down. It’s the only rational explanation. Or maybe it was the devil. The literal devil. The guy with the horns and pitch fork. Again, the only rational explanation!

Are you ok?

Nah I’ll buy the mobile home used off Craigslist. The car will be of similar quality. I’m committing to the bit!

Of course!

Well if money is no object, I’m guessing I’m a sociopathic billionaire in this scenario. With that in mind, I’m going to live in Manhattan. Specifically, in a home that flaunts wealth in the greatest act of poor taste imaginable. I will buy up and bulldoze an entire block of dense Manhattan real estate. Then, surrounded by skyscrapers on all sides, I’ll live in a mobile home with a block-wide chain link fence around the property. There will be at least three cars on blocks in the yard.

Monkey’s paw version: you’re a shapeshifter like Odo in DS9. You have to consciously model every aspect of your form. Imagine the most detailed image of a human you can in your mind. That’s the fidelity with which your form will be represented. You can only take on a form that is as detailed as your understanding and perception of an object is. Your form is more of a human-shaped animate object than an actual human being.

I vote “novelty vacuum sealer.”

Now I just need to find a 3D artist willing to make my vision for a Charlie Kirk fountain a reality…

“ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien. ICE using a mobile biometrics app in ways its developers at CBP never intended or tested is a frightening, repugnant, and unconstitutional attack on Americans’ rights and freedoms.”

Now they have a way to effectively revoke someone’s citizenship. All they have to do is change your status in the app to “noncitizen.” No need to go through the court. Just have some code that lets them flag citizens as noncitizens. They want you gone? Just flag your identity in the app as a foreign national. The agents in the field then scan your face and it reports you as an illegal immigrant. You object and show them all your legal documents, but they’ve been told the app is infallible. You’re taken to detention, and the guards there simply scan your face and report you as an illegal every time you protest. “The app is infallible” they repeat. Before you have a chance to challenge it in court, you’ve rotting in a prison camp in rural Liberia.

Eh. The point is not to ensure everyone takes care of their health. The point is to make sure no one makes the space uninhabitable due to their BO.

Are you going to protests every day?

I would also distinguish between investigations and drag nets. If they’re specifically looking into you and your business, then glasses won’t help. If they just want to identify 90% of people at a pretes pretest, these may be useful.

States rights were also a profound force against slavery.

If conservatives in Britain can elect a woman as the leader of their country in the 1980s, then the US can elect a woman in the 2020s. We have a problem with misogyny, but I refuse to believe that even though enough conservative Britains could overcome their prejudice to get a woman elected in the 1980s, progressives in the US can’t somehow manage it in the 2020s.

Reality check. A few points swing would have resulted in Hillary of Kamala winning. These were close elections. I’m sure sexism was a factor, but their unpopular policies and corporate fakery were what really killed them.

This wreaks of the centrism “common sense” that keeps losing us elections. It’s built on the assumption that moderates are innately more electable, while history has shown this is anything but the case. It’s a kind of magical thinking completely divorced from reality.

The flaw in this thinking is that it assumes that there is a large population of political moderates waiting to be appealed to. This is what’s cost Democrats the working class - abandoning workers rights and benefits in the hope of wooing suburban conservatives. And it’s failed election after election.

It fails because there aren’t actually very many true moderates. If you poll people who are politically unaligned, it’s not that they’re unaligned because they lie right between the parties. They’re unaligned because their politics simply don’t match to the existing partisan alignment. Think someone that is pro-gun rights but also supports Medicare for All.

Running performative centrists doesn’t do anything to appeal to these voters, it just makes your candidate come off as inauthentic. Some issues just don’t have reasonable compromises on them. If one party wants to greatly restrict the civil rights of some minority group, taking the centrist position of only restricting their rights a little bit still makes you look like a monster to anyone with a conscience.

This is why centrists fail. Almost no one actually had beliefs that are in the dead middle of the political spectrum. Appealing to these mythical voters is a strategy that fails again and again.

Historically, the first step in removing the dictator is letting the fake controlled opposition party burn to the ground. Voting in corporate Dems is no different than voting for the fake opposition parties the Soviet dictators used to let run so they could brag about getting 99% of the vote.

We already tried your strategy, and it failed. We got some short-term wins, but at the cost of long-term defeat. In 2020, we followed your approach. We picked the useless corporate centrist because we saw him as more ‘electable’ and because we needed to get Trump out of office. And of course, what everyone on the left predicted would happen, happened. The centrist did very little to actually change the conditions that lead to Trump in the first place, and predictably, Trump won again with an even larger margin.

You need to start looking beyond just the election in front of you. Short-term thinking is what has got us into this mess. We’re so unwilling to take a short-term loss that we make short-sighted decisions on “electability” that ultimately end up losing us elections in both the short and long term.

Your strategy results in Kamala winning in 2028 and Steven Miller becoming president in 2032.

Oh she could easily be the candidate. She could get the nomination the same way Biden got it: a coordinated manipulation campaign by the DNC. In 2020, they arranged for all the centrist candidates except Biden to drop out at once, while leaving the progressive vote split between Sanders and Warren. Kamala could easily end up with the nomination.