Conceptually at least, if you never get hit, your premiums paid for the repairs of other people that did.

That’s the idea, no one knows if they will get in an auto accident. Most people cant absorb the cost of the ramifications. Instead of every person saving the full amount to replace their car, pay for hospital stays, make someone else whole (which is a ton of money out of the economy and you know for sure a lot of people wouldn’t be responsible enough to do that) we recognize that the number of people exposed to being in an accident is less than the number of people that will be in an accident.

Everyone pays into the pool, if someone has an accident they get to take more out than they put in by design.

That’s where your money goes if you never get in an accident. Insurance companies also make a profit by managing that pool of money, and they are incentivized to only insure good drivers or collect more money from bad drivers (which is why rates go up if you get in an accident)

The alternative is that everyone starts their own savings account, one that would almost definitely cost more money, and the number of people that would just not save anything is probably pretty high because they would know that they can’t realistically save up enough.

I’m a software engineer that is also deeply uninterested in chasing shiny new things. I think another factor is that tech that I did care about has somewhat stalled out.

I’ve had iPhones since a I think the iPhone 4. I’m on the iPhone 11 which released back in 2019, I only really upgraded because my iPhone 8s battery was crapping out.

There’s just nothing exciting about these newer devices, same form factor, same OS, same basic functionality. And in a similar fashion, anything new is stuff I don’t really give a shit about. Oh it can do some kind of ai thing I don’t want, no thanks.

I’ve tried to see it as a positive. I have lots of stuff that I’ve filled my life up with, things that are meaningful to me. I think that’s what took up the space I used to fill with reading about and getting excited about this new gadget or that one. Now I’m excited to go see my niece’s Christmas recital or bake cookies with my wife to take to a friends of the library event.

Doesn’t hurt that every company seems to be in a non stop contest to see how little they can give the consumer for the maximum price while installing as much revenue generating spyware as possible.

I’ll second godot.

One of the hard things when getting started is trying to cobble together all the tools you need, and godot packages good enough solutions for everything you need to get started.

It’s very approachable and the docs are pretty incredible. The docs cover a huge range of information, there are step by step tutorials and all the reference information you need. The thing I was surprised by was how much else they had, there’s an entire section of vector and matrix math and it’s all from the point of view of game dev so it’s just what you need to know.

You don’t have to read it all upfront, but it’s really nice to have a resource you can go back to when you start wanting to dig a bit deeper and have this amazing resource freely available and written specifically for the engine you are using.

It’s also frustrating that they let a seat be stolen.

McConnell invents a rule out of whole cloth and blocks an appointment.

The Dems could have played hard ball, they could have gone with the line that the senate was fulfilling its role of advising and consenting by not holding a vote. They want it to be read as a rejection, make them hold a vote, say that no vote means they are fine with it.

Republicans exceed their powers every time they have them to reshape this country to their vision. Democrats refuse to use the full scope of their power to accomplish anything.

Repeat ad nauseam.

I would also be in the target audience I think.

I’m a software engineer, been one for 20+ years. Built my own PCs before.

I’m just not super interested in doing it anymore. A reasonably priced steam box that just works out of the box without any troubleshooting and is a common enough hardware profile for developers to put in the effort to make work so I don’t have to burn the precious hours of my life fixing stupid bullshit to play a video game, yes, take my money.

I have been into AI Safety since before chat gpt.

I used to get into these arguments with people that thought we could never lose control of AI because we were smart enough to keep it contained.

The rise of LLMs have effectively neutered that argument since being even remotely interesting was enough for a vast swath of people to just give it root access to the internet and fall all over themselves inventing competing protocols to empower it to do stuff without our supervision.

Jokes on MAGA then they don’t even want that stuff for their in group.

It’s a bunch of poor people voting to let the wealthiest amongst us have more and more and more with nothing in return than a license to be awful and a vague sense that they are owning the libs.

Executive orders shouldn’t have the ability to make law or ignore laws. The legislative branch passes the laws and the executive branch is supposed to faithfully execute them.

An executive order is meant to lay out how the executive departments should carry out the laws passed by the legislative branch. And if they overstep that by failing to faithfully execute the laws or creating their own laws out of executive orders, the judiciary is supposed to act as a check.

Our constitutional order seems to have completely failed. The legislative branch is in a state of permanent deadlock, except when it comes to tax breaks for the uber wealthy and defense spending. So EOs have expanded in scope and the judiciary has just shrugged and decided that the whole separation of powers and checks and balances thing isn’t worthwhile anymore.

It’s gonna be a stupid fucking wearable pin of some sort. That’s why they are being so coy about it, it’s the same dumb thing that no one wants.

The reality is that google and Apple have locked up the smart phone market and extract a tax out of the tech bros. You want to sell digital goods on their platform, Google and Apple take their cut.

They all really really really want there to be some way for you to consume their LLMs without having to pay that tax. (This is the same reason meta was so keen on the metaverse before shifting to their rayban glasses)

It’ll be some dumb puck, you’ll talk to it, it’ll talk to you, maybe (but I seriously doubt this) it’ll be some kind of headset. There’s only so many form factors human beings can realistically carry around with them everywhere.

Definitely easier but I think photoshop is probably the closest.

You still needed some amount of skill, but there was also plenty of people with those skills willing to use them for free (or for a small fee)

Definitely easier now, but at least the invasion of privacy aspect has been experienced before. Seems like we didn’t really come up with anything as a society for it though.

I think the incentives will likely align to not regulating this. The thing that society would likely try to regulate is if these fakes end up blasted all over social media, but the social media companies dont want to be regulated so they are incentivized to stop that. Personal consumption, while off putting, is probably not going to rankle enough feathers to be a priority.

I suspect you end up where we are at, it exists, you can use it, you can search it out, but it doesn’t show up on the larger platforms because they are incentivized to prevent it voluntarily to avoid regulation.

The more disturbing thing that we are entering is a K shaped economy.

The consumer base of the United States has split, the wealthier part is doing better and spending more, the poorer part is doing worse and spending less. You have diverging lines like a K

One of the scariest things going forward is that the consumer base of America used to have an economic protection in that the economy depended on not crushing the consumers. With the split in the consumer base the poorer part now represents less and less of the GDP, down to near 10%. This removes the incentive to protect them and we will start seeing more and more bifurcation in the haves and the have-nots.

It remains to be seen if the have-nots will accept this, so far the American population has been pretty accepting of the slowly ratcheting person crushing machine that is late stage capitalism.

Don’t worry. There is a small army of well paid McKinsey consultants right now reassuring the DNC that while economic populism won for Mamdani it would never work outside of New York. They will tell the ghouls bought and paid for by big money donors that yesterday wasn’t a complete loss, Liz Cheney could get some sympathy votes on the ticket if the DNC is just brave enough to make her the VP nom and pivot to the center.

Obama should 100% run if trump tries to run again.

That said, I think Obama running on a platform of hope and change and then delivering the ACA is one of the reason the left stopped showing up to vote.

Feels like one of the more significant rug pulls. My company told us today they are changing health insurance for the next year to try to stay ahead of ballooning costs and so now as an American I get to play this super fun game called “which of my doctors will I have to replace or go bankrupt” and it’s fun partner game “will any of the medications me or my spouse need to live financially ruin us in a month.”

Did the ACA make things better, yea for a lot of people they can “access” this wonderful clusterfuck of a system when they couldn’t before. Did it fix the problem, nope.

The reason Dems are doing this is clear.

If Mamdani wins they can go “we endorsed him, he won because of the backing of the party”

If Mamdani loses they can go “see, we told you that we need to pivot further right. We told you. We didn’t sabotage him, we endorsed him for goodness sake”

Withhold endorsement and throw mud in the water all the way up to the end then try to slap a last minute endorsement on there so they can absolve themselves of any blame and pretend like the “time to vote left is the primaries” like they won’t ratfuck you after you win the primary.

In what scenario would a parent going “do not treat my teens STI in defiance of the treatment they are actively seeking” not be abuse and neglect.

I love the UCSB. They are also intentionally completely toothless, so cutting them serves literally no purpose.

They had no authority to regulate anything. What they would do is come in and investigate after a chemical disaster and then make recommendations to prevent it in the future.

We got rid of the people that would tell you nicely why your chemical plant exploded and how to not have your chemical plants explode.

I think the day of the church shooting (the more recent one) there were two other mass shootings.

It is quite odd to become numb to this. I remember coming home from school and seeing the columbine shooting on every channel, it being a discussion for weeks and months.

They used to be rare enough to be named. Now they are so common I have to qualify which recent church shooting I’m talking about. I saw a headline recently that just said “3 mass shootings today” and I didn’t even bother to find out the details.

The details barely ever change, the response is always the same nothing, the people in power just don’t care. Over time even if you do care you just become exhausted. There’s literally not enough time to process one mass shooting before the next.

And now fascism has arrived and has decided it wants to make war against the citizens, so it’s a bad disarm. The loudest gun owners are excited about this turn of events, but they aren’t the only gun owners.

Part of me thinks this is all to the benefit of the owner class. A scared population is easier to control, just promise them safety. An isolated population that has no third place to go to due to the threat of violence is easier to exploit. They don’t fix it because it’s working just fine for them.

It is also infuriating because Biden spent his term dealing with the fallout of Covid.

Americans got totally fucked during the pandemic. The government handed out a one time payment to some of the population that wouldn’t be enough to cover a months rent on a single bedroom apartment.

They then did the paycheck protection program where they handed out gobs of money to business owners. These “loans” were forgiven and plenty of wealthy business owners just ended up pocketing piles of money.

So you have an incompetent trump government failing to do public health policy, then only helping the owner class, causing massive inflation.

The republicans always do this. They take over a healthy economy, pass policies that supercharge it in the short term but are completely unsustainable in the long term.

The economy crashes, the voters put a democrat in office, the democrat spends their term cleaning up the mess, and then gets shit for having a crappy economy.

You aren’t revealing some mystical secrets of the universe I’m too dense to understand.

I know the DNC would love to blame their electoral failure on third parties. They aren’t a shitty uninspiring party that cant articulate an authentic compelling vision for the future, it’s the stupid voters. These dumb dumb voters just won’t vote for them because they got tricked, hood winked into voting for, I forget who was the spoiler that cost Harris her victory. I know people like to blame Bernie for 2016, even though the actual data clearly showed Bernie voters loyally voted along with the party in greater numbers than Clinton voters did for Obama.

You think you are being the adult in the room stamping your feet and throwing a tantrum that the dumbass voters dont want to vote for the garbage neolib party that offers them nothing. I’ve got an adult sized wake up pill for you PARTIES HAVE TO WIN VOTES! And if your solution is to tell everyone, the party is fine we just need these dumbass voters to fall in line, you’ve got bigger problems than arguing with some guy on Lemmy.

The inside strategy has given us two trump presidencies and has directly led to the current situation we find ourselves in.

The progressive caucus is the group that needs to divorce itself from the DNC.

Progressive policies are widely popular and the progressive brand is not marred by the same unpopularity as the democrats.

They should continue to run under the democratic ticket while converting their caucus machinery into a viable replacement party that can displace the DNC. Instead they currently act as an organ of a failed party that has proven time and again that they are unable to win elections.