atmavatar

> What kind of illusion must one be under to believe that employers would ever pay you the same amount of money to do less work?

Because supposedly, the new tooling (in this case, AI) allows them to produce the same or greater output despite doing less work. Workers are under the perennial illusion that they'll ever benefit from productivity gains, but that hasn't been the case since the 1970s.

"Alien" is the term referring to the person. "Illegal" is merely a status.

It's arguable that "illegal alien" is itself dehumanizing, implying that a person can be legal or illegal merely by existing, when in reality, it's the actions they perform which are legal or illegal. In this case, the action is entering the country without following proper procedure, which is more like trespassing, except at a country-level rather than individual property level.

Shortening the label to "illegal" removes the last vestige of reference to the target as a person and further cements the idea that a person's existence can be good or bad.

Declassifying documents is completely within Trump's purview, but surely selling classified documents runs afoul of the emoluments clause in Article II, Section 1.

I snagged a handful of games from a local BBS.

Ahh, the childhood trauma of downloading Doom 2, getting about halfway after 7 hours, only to have the whole download screwed up because one of my parents picked up the phone.

A company that's grown large enough to make its shareholders worth multiple hundred billions of dollars is itself too large.

One of the bigger failings of the US government over the last half century is allowing corporations to grow and merge their way to become as large as many have. Stronger enforcement of anti-trust would have both significantly reduced wealth inequality in this country as well as siphoned off much of the growing political power corporations have relative to regular citizens.

We cannot be living in Idiocracy. In the movie, President Camacho actually cared about solving the problems facing his citizens, finding the smartest person on the planet and putting him to work to fix them. It's also worth noting that nearly all of said problems were the result of ignorance rather than malice.

In reality, Trump is deliberately exacerbating existing problems and creating new ones, perhaps as a smokescreen for all he's doing to enrich himself and his buddies at the expense of the rest of us.

He/she isn't right, though. Capital punishment, at its core, is an emotional rather than logical response to a criminal offense.

It serves no purpose in preventing future crimes. First, because you've already caught the criminal, the proposed alternate sentence of life imprisonment without chance for parole already handles preventing that individual from committing further offenses. And second, it's been proven repeatedly that ratcheting up punishment as some sort of deterrent doesn't work because most people committing crimes either believe they're going to get away with it or aren't in a frame of mind to care about any penalties (e.g., crimes of passion).

It also fails to be an efficient way of dealing with a caught criminal. The combination of incarceration time, resources spent on appeals, and the cost of the actual execution methods makes death row inmates more expensive than lifers. We actually pay more to put people to death than we would jailing them for the rest of their lives.

Instead, people fight so hard to keep capital punishment around because it scratches the itch for vengeance.

> (which is usually done in a technically legal fashion)

Alas, the Roberts court effectively ruled that it's not really a bribe if it falls short of the third party saying they want the government official to vote/rule a particular way for a particular price, the government official does as asked, and he/she sends the third party a written invoice for services rendered.

Even should that happen, I'm pretty sure Justice Thomas would find the larger offense is that the invoice failed to include sales tax.

Remember our Supreme Court's recent bribery scandal wasn't that a number of justices were accepting gifts but rather that they hasn't disclosed them properly. We're perfectly OK with third parties bribing the judges on our highest court so long as the judges fill out the correct paperwork.

Can you provide some examples?

The only major game in recent history I'm aware was labeled as particularly woke is Dragon Age: Veilguard, mostly due to a particularly cringy (and presumably self-insert) scene where Taash lectures their parent. The character was made even more irritating by regularly refusing to address Emmerich by his name in dialogue.

However, what turned me off from the game and roused most of the discontent I saw had to do with the removal of one of the bigger RP elements the prior games had: the ability to get into significant arguments with companions and even dismiss them entirely or cause them to leave on their own.

The exponent doesn't have to be as large as it currently is.

The wealth inequality we see now is largely a function of every Republican administration in the last half century passing tax cuts for the wealthy while simultaneously dismantling unions and failing to enforce anti-trust, allowing market consolidation the likes of which we haven't seen since the gilded age.

The result is that wage growth completely disconnected from productivity growth to the extent that subsequent generations are now poorer than their parents' generations.

None of that happened naturally - it was the result of repeated policy changes by the government.