“Burden of my safety always lies on others only”.

In product liability cases?

Nevermind that children would have access to a vending machine.

Deliberately trying to get transwomen killed. Fascist state doing what it always does.

You’re absolutely right to push back on this. 20mg was not the recommended dose, after all. Google is an excellent source of reliable information and it’s always best to consult with a search engine any time you’re researching recreational drug use.

Libertarian-ass response. “If you get yourselves fucked up using our product, you simply should have known better”.

I mean, we’ll jump to 1930s on reflex. But this is a pattern that’s repeated itself internationally, from Apartheid South Africa to the juntas in the Pacific Rim to Fascists in Argentina and Chile.

Economy shits itself. Social Democrats come in to deliver milquetoast reforms. The economy recovers somewhat, but never enough to actually relieve the social pressures of the moment. And then the democratic system starts vomiting up radical candidates of all stripes, while bourgeois capital attempts to ride the tiger into the next full recovery and/or national emergency.

The wheel of fortune doesn’t always land on Fascism. But it’s definitely a possibility.

Most of the money getting funneled to Nvidia came from them in the first place.

NVIDIA’s not getting most of its money from OpenAI. OpenAI doesn’t really buy anything from NVIDIA. They buy rack space from Oracle, which then builds out new datacenters with NVIDIA chipsets. And Oracle’s primary revenue stream is from its business Cloud Services, of which OpenAI is a small fraction.

Trying any drugs at random at a concert without someone who’s real about dose and expectations is kind of…well, a bad idea in general.

How on earth is this an argument in favor of weed-gummy vending machines?

you know what you’re good for before digging into those

That’s an absurd expectation.

I don’t know what the happy medium here is on labeling and access

I mean, just for absolute starters, I think giving THC the same regulatory treatment as alcohol and cigarettes makes sense. Even past that, regulatory limits on per-unit dosage and warning labels on packages that aren’t 2-pt-font and maybe even a nurse or pharmacist on hand at point of distribution to give you someone with more experience to talk to would be a vast improvement.

Everclear tastes like such ass even mixed with anything it has to be diluted down to like, wine strength to be drinkable generally from what I’ve seen, or at least cocktail strength.

One experience I had in college that stuck with me was that, as someone gets drunker, their ability to self-regulate alcohol intake disintegrates. This is to the point that some of my friends who are 100 lbs skinnier than me were going shot for shot by the end of the night. And that always ended in disaster.

The fact that Everclear tastes like ass doesn’t dissuade someone who is already 3+ drinks in. Especially if they’re just pounding them.

Voting can definitely bring change. Look at Zohran Mamdani in NYC.

Zohran is a nice change of pace, but we’re way to early in his administration to know whether he’ll bring concrete social change to the city. New York has had decent mayors before. And they’ve left their footprints. But they’ve also had plenty of corrupt shitheads and racist asshats who climb into Gracie Mansion right on the heels of their betters.

But if you’re not satisfied with voting alone then you can get more involved with politics.

The fundamental problem with electoralism - and this is a critique that easily goes back to the first Obama campaign - is that election day often disperses the force that the campaign had originally assembled. What’s notable about Zohran (and a lot of the DSA affiliates) is that they come into office and maintain or expand the organizations that put them there.

Compare that to say, the Beto Campaign in Texas or the Fetterman Campaign in Pennsylvania or Polis in Colorado. Win or Lose, they disintegrate within a few weeks of the votes being counted. Often, they produce legacy candidates that act in direct opposition to the people who put them there. And that sows distrust in the movements that produced them.

So I might argue that you get involved in an organization you like first. And then you make decisions within that organization collectively. And sometimes that means supporting a candidate. Sometimes that means recognizing there’s nobody worth voting for in a given race and agreeing - collectively - that you’re not going to support anyone. But the root of the organization is in the organization, not in the voting.

Just going out and slapping buttons and saying “Okay what’s next?” is a sucker’s gambit.

White Americans do have class consciousness.

They absolutely do not. And the problem is in the construction. “White” isn’t a material condition, it’s a club that certain ethnic cohorts are invited into or expelled from at the demand of the Bourgeois Class. Look at the Hispanic cohort and how they were ushered in during the Reagan/Clinton/Bush Era, then violently jettisoned under Obama/Trump/Biden/Trump.

But those shakeups are exactly what allow revolution to happen. When you have a sudden massive displacement of middle-class people and a shift in economic conditions, the social conditions for a mass movement can roll through a country like a landslide.

The reason that there won’t ever be a leftist revolution in the US is that white Americans are not part of the proletariat class

I mean, Marxists have been misplacing the site of the Next Big Revolution pretty much since the first newsletter. I don’t think it’s safe to just write off any country or region or conglomeration of people, because the material forces that produce a revolutionary consciousness are fickle and temporal. Nobody was looking at Cuba in the 1950s and saying “This place will be a Soviet satellite in another ten years, no problem”. Nobody was looking at South Africa under Apartheid and predicting a full dismantling of the colonial state inside the end of the 20th century. Nobody was thinking “the next mayor of New York will definitely be a Muslim from Astoria nominated by the DSA” a year ago.

You can’t be prescient. All you can do is be ready.

Lolz. Any money Fetterman rooks from a GOP donor is money that’s not going to a race where it would be more usefully spent.

Let that ogre-brain zionist simp dial for dollars from the wealthiest shitheads he can find. If he’s going to be a lead weight around the necks of his friends, the GOP can have him.

How do I tell them if I’m not on Facebook? That’s where they are.

Mueller Time energy to this story.

Like, Susan Collins doing crimes is no surprise. She’s had a long and tawdry history of saying “I could never support this horrible thing” in public, while holding her hand out behind her for Mitch McConnell to slide in a bribe. And the Pentagon being a wellspring of kickbacks and bribes should be a shock to nobody born more recently than yesterday.

But is anyone going to do anything? I’m not holding my breath. Maybe if they get Alvin Bragg on the case…

Russia trying to buy off Donald Jr is such a bonehead move on two fronts. It makes their corruption look obvious. And it misses the fact that Donald Trump hates his son and would never take his advice to begin with.

Now, bribing Jared Kushner or Scott Bessent or Howard Lutnick? That’ll get you some better mileage.

“I don’t do politics” could mean a lot of things.

Which is where the critique falls apart.

I’m not saying you need to endanger yourself by talking about politics

It doesn’t have to rise to the level of existential threat. Plenty of people don’t feel comfortable voicing outside views in front of what could easily be a hostile audience.

What’s cowardly is presenting the “I don’t have a politics” person as nebulously white and atheist and male, while the counterpart is explicitly brown and muslim and a woman. The bitter truth is that it’s far more often the opposite. Women and religious/ethnic minorities are the ones who are perpetually under pressure to “hide their power level” so to speak. Either because they really do fear some kind of physical or social reprisal. Or because they just don’t want to have a screaming match with a MAGA shithead at a BBQ they didn’t want to be at to begin with.

It’s the Entitled Asshole who feels the need to vomit political views into every discussion and “have a debate” on every issue.

when people do have the social capital to spend on supporting those who can’t easily express their views, they should take the time to understand and help them politically

Who the fuck says they’re not? Do you think it’s your job to audit someone else’s life, to see if they’re doing enough and for the right people to meet some bar you’ve set for sufficient political engagement? It’s none of your fucking business.

Believe it or not, Trump’s become dumber with age.

Keeping foreign technology out of the reach of US consumers has been a big part of Trump/Biden/Trump-Era tech policy.

And as hardware prices skyrocket, access to compute approaches a monopoly position.