Feels a little like an Eldritch corporation that doesn’t totally understand humanity, but produces simple guides to existence in a an effort to ease the suffering of our poor squalid souls.

That’s how the capitalists getcha. Back in granddads day, they just made sure you lost enough fingers in the machinery to keep from counting. Nowadays they gotta keep you too busy to realize they stole two hours instead of one.

Yeah, I remember back when depressive humor was funny because it was sad. Then, a few things happened in the last decade and now it’s funny because it’s true.

While true, sitting around watching Netflix has the advantage that it takes none of the nonexistent energy remaining after a full day of work + chores + you only get two hours before bed.

Yeah, I’d never liked Hulu because Comcast was behind it, and I will forever hate Comcast, but the enshittification of streaming services is essentially an intended return to the structure of cable packages.

ATT owns HBO (HBOMAX). They’re merging with Warner Bros and Discovery (owns Discovery+). Hulu is now majority owned by Disney after Disney purchased 21st Century Fox, but was originally established by News Corporation and NBC Universal (owned by Comcast). Comcast also owns Peacock streaming through NBC.

Basically all of the Netflix competitors had cable companies dive into them to do a quick name change and reclaim their market share. It’s also when Netflix lost most of its library, because they pulled all of the licensed content they could to their own platform. Disney+ was one of the few non-cable services, with even Paramount+ being owned by Paramount Global (CBS Entertainment Group), which is the cable arm of Paramount Pictures that owned everything from BET Networks to Comedy Central and Showtime.

At this point, streaming services are literally just cable with a paint job.

God gave us four fingers and a thumb, so we can properly hold mice by their fluffy little tum.

… Why does Saddam Hussein have an enormous erection?

Y2K: Passed ✅

2038: “Wanna see me do it again?”

Ha ha, well I have absolutely no faith that we will collectively solve that unless 32 bit systems stop working on their own before then. If Y2K happened again today, there’d be a handful of companies handed billions of dollars to fix everything, and it’d wind up half done with demands for more money.

Hang on, hang on… What if we check twice?

Have you never seen shorthand for one thousand? Kilometers abbreviates to km.

Jesus. That feels a little dark for a normal meme community. At least, I can’t see them hitching a ride after that in anything outside an ambulance or a hearse.

*chuckles*

“I’m in danger.”

I don’t really see how those things are related in any way, since the majority of the population haven’t really been economically dependent on the productivity of the land beneath them in quite some time. The reason why liberal states fund while conservative states are constantly struggling with their budgets is because of unsustainable economics favoring businesses while shuffling the burdens onto individuals instead of corporations. It has literally nothing to do with swimming pools in Vegas unless somebody passes a bill banning private swimming pools in Vegas, which seems counter to your desire for freedom. Also, why would states merge and shrink?

Honestly, if you want people to move away from economically uninhabitable areas like Phoenix is steadily becoming (primarily because surviving it will only get more expensive), you’re gonna need a large, well-funded federal government to foot the bill for getting millions of people to move away from the Phoenix area. That’s millions of units of housing that need to be built elsewhere, millions of tons of possessions that need to be moved, businesses that need to relocate, and employment and healthcare to be managed.

I genuinely don’t understand how you arrived at your political solution, especially when it sounds like the problems you want solved are fundamentally incompatible with the Republican party, and simply not perfectly catered to by the democratic. Which, makes sense because literally no party in the US is advocating for deleting the federal government and becoming a loose federation that California will inevitably conquer in a bizarre inversion of Manifest Destiny.

I’m baffled, but you’re also rather polite about your strange political dream, so I wish you the best.

That’s absolutely wild, genuinely terrible, and intends something basically no different than what we already have. The biggest difference would be all of your conservative areas immediately collapsing without funding from liberal areas lol. I mean, your whole plan is basically just not having the United States anymore, and assuming that states will continue to play nicely with one another when they no longer have any higher authority to hold them to rules and regulations.

States already have different laws on abortion, gun ownership, taxes, and “personal freedoms”. People can already move. This is just such a strange political take, I almost don’t know what to say.

They’re also kinky by the same logic (if you manage to survive).

This does not spark joy.

I mean, a comment about prostitutes generally a fair distance away from new tech releases lol.

To authorize repelling a slowly gathering military coup? That’s an incredibly low bar to commit treason, since honestly, even at the highest levels military bureaucrats aren’t going to be much wealthier than 10 mil. Unlike Congress, there’s a much closer eye kept on the finances of military leaders because they’re paranoid about foreign nations bribing them. It’s physical national security, which is one of the few areas that money doesn’t hold absolute power.

Even if they stood to lose a few million, there are plenty of genuine patriots, as well as people smart enough to realize that overthrowing the government by force does not mean the law instigating it gets repealed, but that the entire legal structure of the United States is no longer functioning. That’s fifty different militias reporting to states, Naval, Army, and Marine branches with hundreds of billions of dollars in ordinance that’s explicitly empowered to not follow unethical or illegal orders. It’d be a disaster for the coup throwers unless they managed a movie villain level simultaneous takeover of the Pentagon.

I’m not saying a coup is impossible, but the idea of rich people successfully overthrowing the American government by “hiring an army” is so cursed to failure that I almost don’t know where to even start. Could they cause unprecedented chaos and potentially kill a large portion of the government? Possibly. Could they succeed? Absolutely not.

Also, this whole chain completely ignores the fact that Congress would never set the cap at 10 million. I doubt they’d set it at a hundred million. My bet would be one billion, where it wouldn’t actually affect any of them. Were they to actually pass a 10 million dollar cap, the world would be such a different place that we wouldn’t need to worry about a handful of grumpy generals inciting treason.

What do you mean “now what?” lol. Assuming an American-centric or Euro-centric point of view, they would use their extremely expensive military armaments that can’t be purchased in large quantities by private organizations, and crush the rebellion. The government is the government because they have a monopoly on violence.

I mean, really. Their money is in banks subject to the oversight of the countries they’re trying to raise an army against. People may be relatively cheap, but they still need to be paid quite a bit to attempt to fight the military head on. Freeze their accounts and they’re screwed. Musk’s entire fortune isn’t even a single years worth of funding for the US military, and even if all the billionaires pooled their money it would take years to accumulate the excess hardware that is allowed to be sold and then train their PMCs on hardware. Years that they wouldn’t have if a bill was passed to cap wealth inequality.

We may yet reach the corporate dystopia where businesses can directly challenge governments, but we’re not quite there yet. At least not in the first world. Russia may have shot itself in its confusion, but that’s because the rich already are the government there.

I assume it’s 4.5k rupee, since Gurgaon is in India. No idea what that means in practice though lol.