Reinstate Eberhard and Tarpenning.

You know, the actual founders, who got forced out after the fascist Afrikaner failson pulled the same corpo tissy tantrum bullshit he did at Paypal?

All Musk did was follow the general strategic plan for the company that Eberhard and Tarpenning had laid out.

Then, when that outline was run out, and Elon had to actually think of something else, it all became a total shitshow, quite rapidly.

Can you provide a source proving you were born yesterday, or can we all agree that’s a generally reasonable assumption?

Here’s Walmart:

https://united4respect.org/reports/walmart-political-spending-2024/

Amazon:

https://united4respect.org/reports/amazon-political-spending-2024/

I very much hope I do not need to explain NewsCorp’s ‘political contributions’ of all kinds to you.

Or WaPo, which Bezos personally intervened in, to prevent them from endorsing Kamala.

… The person you are incredulously doubting made a broad and general statement that is broadly generally true, but I am guessing you would want a comprehensive analysis of every company and corp in the US to validate the truth of it…

… When, as demonstrated above, it takes an entire organization to figure this shit out for even a few major corps, because our laws regarding political donations have been fucked since Citizens United, and you have to do a massive effort of sleuthing to untangle the nested shell corporation like structure that is now commonplace in PACs.

Costco is probably the only major retailer that leans more Dem than Rep.

…In the event qualifications are relevant to you for assessing claim veracity, I all say this as a person who has degrees in Econ and Poli Sci, one of many specializations being Poltical Economy, who has worked for MSFT and a Fortune 500 import export middleman firm based out of Seattle that is 100% certainly shitting its proverbial pants right now.

King of the Hill aired from '97 to '09.

… There are too many episodes for me to be able to pick out exactly which one this is from, what year it aired in…

But uh, fairly commonplace, reasonably affordable smartwatches, with the kind of functionality described… didn’t really become a thing until roughly the mid '10s.

Yes, there were earlier ‘smartwatches’, or things that could be argued to fall into that definition… but they were extremely niche, quite pricey.

Apple’s first smartwatch didn’t come out till 2015.

Smartphones, with touchscreens, did not really even exist at a reasonable price point, with significant numbers of people using them untill the latter third or quarter of KotH’s seasons.

Like I still remember having some clamshell, phyiscal keyboard ‘smartphone’ in 08 - 09.

EDIT: As fate would have it…

I just got back from a PT appointment.

… The driver (local charity service for the broken and broke)…

Yep. She was from Iowa.

We got to talkin’, I told her about my (former, before being goddamned maimed) line of work.

I had to… spend most of the conversation explaining that software development… and IT… generally refer to completely different things and require significantly different skill sets.

But uh, she was very cheerful and upbeat, with meaningless folksy aphorisms applied wildly out of context, to go along with a bafflingly out of touch assesment of how easy it will be for such a bright young man to find a job. (I am 35.)

… What a world.

I can’t really tell too much of the … specifics of your business from what you’ve said, and that may be intentional on your part, which is entirely reasonable, don’t want to doxx yourself…

…but hey, as long as you are at least being realistic with your employees and not promising things you can’t actually promise, you have both my sympathy and empathy.

… I am not even sure you aren’t just a sole proprietorship, given that you never use ‘we’ and always use ‘I’ and ‘the business’ interchangeably.

But I must caution:

Fortunately, I have a good relationship with my supplier, and parts of these orders are going to sit on the shelf with my name on them to be picked up in the near future, helping push out my cost.

I have never met a small business owner who does not say they have a good relationship with their supplier, unless they are actively suing them, or just about to do so.

Usually its more like ‘great’ or ‘outstanding’, or ‘rock solid’ if they really have 5 to 10 year plus history with them, with either 0 hiccups, or very good communication when hiccups are or are about to occur.

… Good luck.

…

I used to do executive level reporting and analysis for a fairly major international logistics middle man coordinator.

I can only imagine my old office now, everyone running around with their hair disheveled, fielding non stop phones ringing off the hook.

Like uh…

https://content.govdelivery.com/bulletins/gd/USDHSCBP-3dca7b6?wgt_ref=USDHSCBP_WIDGET_2

That is the ‘de minimis’ exception, for individual orders of less than $800 being exempt from tariffs… which was how SHEIN and Temu and Alibaba/express… sent the US cheap consumer (and also many industrial) goods directly from manufacturers in PRC/HK … this is the closure of that exception or loophole, formally, in the CBP customs rules.

Thats all now at a 120% tariff, so your 40 dollar youtuber plushie is now… 88 dollars.

Starting June 1st, up to 200%, or 120 dollars.

I’ve seen reports that basically everything on SHEIN has roughly tripled in price already, as of this weekend.

… Everyone who has a dropshipping side gig, or merch store or some kind of ‘i use tiktok to sell scented candles i picked out the scents for and designed the container’… yeah thats all pretty much done now.

Fucking yeeeeeehaaaaw, this gonna be a wild ride.

… There are a lot of domain specific, contextually distinct ways one could interperet what you just said.

Could you be more precise?

I can think of at least two, totally different, practically opposite in meaning, ways of interpreting your comment, off the top of my head.

Oh, sure, a 23 yo intern and some VC bro fuckwad yeah, ok, yep, no security clearances whatsoever but fuck it, they just have Q clearance level access now, they just have SIPRnet access, their own accounts.

We already know other members of Elon’s parade of imbeciles at DOGE can’t even fucking figure out how to not expose their own remote logins to other government systems, and they’ve been getting those accounts hijacked by IP addresses in fucking Moscow already.

What could possibly go wrong?

DOGE continues to be the grandest scale, most insane, ongoing ‘cybersecurity event’/‘treason’ in history.

If anyone other than these fucks, in this exact situation, were doing this, they’d be getting black bagged by people who don’t exist and sent to facilities that don’t exist… possibly to many seperate facilities, at the same time, in many pieces.

I don’t even know what to say other than to drop into Tom Clancy lingo and say these fascist morons are actual clear and present dangers that warrant sending the guys that you’d send to go after the Rainbow Six guys if one of them goes rogue.

This is the Garry’s Mod version of GMan waltzing and trapezing into Black Mesa with a hoard of T posing Kleiners with physguns stuck in their crotches flailing about behind him, and then giving the two Kleiners that didn’t accidentally kill themselves by flinging props around, giving two of them just direct access, personal, remote log ins to, uh, the trunk lines set aside for for only secret, top secret, and all kinds of compartmentalized classifications levels of info.

Gman’s employers could be mapping out the network as we speak, spreading out laterally and trying to figure out ways to embed themselves with persistent presence.

jfc.

Oh weird, I misread that as public being skeptical of the idea of Elon’s life expectancy projecting forward beyond Q4 2025.

Hah!

What a silly mistake I made!

… Sadly, the first thing that comes to mind, upon reading your comment…

First, we take Manhattan… then we take Berlin.

… I am hopeful that I can make it either to, or at least nearer to Canada, into a blue state, within the next year…

I am fully expecting shit to get very bad, very fast now.

… At least I am white… as sickening as that is for me to say… it does make me less of a target.

…

Spent the better part of two decades telling my friends and family that what is happening now … is the trajectory we are on, and we must enact change now, while we still can, to avert this path.

… I don’t talk to any of them any more, as they all thought I was insane…

They didn’t believe ‘it could happen here.’

And now, it has.

And most of them would either entirely deny that it ‘has happened’, as they are neck deep in QAnon/MAGA insanity…

…or they would tell me that simultaneously they don’t remember me explaining how and why this could happen, how it became more and more likely as the years went by… and also, at the same time, just remember me being hysterical, about something, vaguely, for no reason they can remember.

Welp we’ve got farm labor, cold turkey ‘detox’, no cell phones, communal bunks type rehab camps for… everyone on either hard drugs, or any kind of medically prescribed anti depressant or anti psychotic.

Thats still on the bingo card from RFK, to my knowledge, that hasn’t happened yet.

We’ve also got concentration camps guarded by I guess Blackwater (whatever they’re calling themselves now) for all homeless people, a few miles outside of major cities, and of course a 0 tolerance policy for existing in a major city while homeless.

That hasn’t happened yet, but Trump has outlined that idea a couple of times.

… that one will be super-fun as the economy crashes.

Yeeee-up.

Because we do not live in a Democracy with regular election seasons.

We live in a fascist oligarchy, which must constantly beam propoganda into the minds of its citizens.

…

Trump basically never stopped campaigning during the entirety of the Biden term, nor even for his fist term… despite being the President.

US political ad seasons are notorious for being … way too long, up to a year… compared to most functional demcracies, where this ad season is often several weeks, not several, or many months.

Trump ratcheted this lengthy American political ad season into just literally all the time.

Before him, a sitting President running ads… during the middle of their own term… I think its literally unprecedented. Sure they’d give addresses and speeches to the public in extraordinary situations… but not run what amount to campaign ads… just all the time.

This is the power of money and media in the digital age.

Tell the lies often enough, and they become real to the enthralled. Literally right out of Goebbels playbook.

It truly now just is cult reaffirming propoganda, in the derogatory 1984/dictator sense of propoganda

Trump has stated many times he’ll serve a third term. Told people they’d “never need to vote again.” He fully plans on being President untill he dies.

Yep.

This means the 4th Amendment is dead.

Oh, any LE agency wants to search your house? Your car?

Uh, hrm, which very vaguely suspected migrants live in your building, your neighborhood?

2 miles away? Whatever, close enough.

Ok, now you’ve got ICE at your door, on the flimsiest evidence, connected in the flimsiest way, to a person suspected on a different set of flimsy evidence…

… And they are just searching your place because random guy may have been in the area, might have burgled you, whatever, who cares, we’ve got a warrant, lots of guns, do not interfere with our investigation.

This comm does actually have a rule that you are to replicate headlines precisely.

Have… have we all learned yet, by now, that basically 90% of managers and bosses are literally idiots who only understand buzzwords, vaguely, uselessly?

… Their jobs are easier to automate than ours.

Reminder that during Covid, Elon bought a bunch of CPAP machines (for sleep apnea), sent these to various hospitals, claimed he sent them ‘respirators’, and then claimed it was a conspiracy against him personally when hospitals told him ‘these are not respirators, they will not work, we cannot use them’.

That sounds very much like certain white trash family members in my family/extended family, and family of neighbor kids I grew up with.

Utterly shit people who have objectively fucked up or failed at nearly every opportunity ever presented to them, never seek out or attempt to create their own opportunities… but also somehow just infinitely smug and self confident about basically just random unremarkable nonsense details of their lives.

And of course, are never wrong about anything and are literally incapable of genuine introspection.

I mean, I’d appreciate it!

The entire history of the phrase ‘wrong side of the tracks’ also comes to mind.

They would all arrive at the market and insist on being able to open carry slung AR15s, and then be utterly baffled by the concept of a weapons check.

Like… even in ‘the West’ (yeehaw cowboys West) it was pretty common to have a weapons check at bars… because they quickly learned that if you don’t do that, well, patrons don’t enjoy the risk of getting their balls blown off while trying to throwback a shot of whiskey, because two other idiots nearby got into a fight.

Literally the fabled Tombstone, AZ, did this, as a city wide ordinance.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gun-control-old-west-180968013/

Gun control is older than almost half the states in the union.