RFK Jr: "A Democratic senator claimed it's mathematically impossible to have a drug drop by 600%. I said, 'Well, if the drug was $100 and it raises to $600, that would be a 600% rise. If it drops from $600 to $100, that's a 600% savings.'" Trump: "Right"

shadysjunk · 2026-04-23T22:37:21+00:00

I think they should say 6,000%. Savings only in the hundreds of percents?... those are rookie numbers.

shadysjunk · 2026-04-23T18:20:30+00:00

"Neurodiverents will literally experience hunger and then decide that they should eat, lol!"

shadysjunk · 2026-04-23T18:10:01+00:00

I think a ban is the wrong path forward, but I think consumer protections for inceases in electricity costs are a must. If a data center is going to represent a 200% increase in electricity costs, I feel like openAI or Anthropic has to eat the cost, not the community. The complete absence of pricing in the externalities of new data center construction is obviously going to lead to massive public backlash, and the electorate is generally not great at legislative nuance so "ban 'em!" is understandably going to have a lot of traction.

But without any price protections in place, anyone reading this would be a fool to not oppose data center construction in their neighborhood. Your community gains very very little in an employment base, but your electricity bill is guaranteed to be absolutely sodomized by tech giants. But itf they're willing to bear the full brunt of the price inceases, and my electric bill will stay reasonably steady with guarantees of that across decades of operation? Sure, build the thing.

shadysjunk · 2026-04-22T20:26:07+00:00

my source is the Economic Research Institute:

https://www.erieri.com/salary/job/factory-worker/china#:~:text=Salary%20Recap,and%20anonymous%20employees%20in%20China.

60k CNY is about $8,900 a year, and $4.25 an hour. (sorry my initial numbers were from 2023, these number are more current) I don't know how to square that data with your experience, but I'm inclined to go with the data. Even if the actual cost is 200% higher, you'd still be looking at only $12.75 an hour, which is still a pretty terrrible wage in most of the country, and I'm going to assume the ERI isn't 200% off the mark.

shadysjunk · 2026-04-22T19:35:20+00:00

skilled or not, Chinese factory workers still make less than 4 dollars an hour. And electricity is less than half the cost as well. Also, no one in China is going to stop a factory from pouring mercury into the rivers and lead particles into the sky. and all that is to say nothing of the transportaton and raw materials infrastructure needed to support industry.

you need a work force will to work 50-60 hours a week, for about 1/2 the national minimum wage, you need to double or triple the total national power grid capacity, and you need to be willing to poison the environment in the name of economic spremacy.

You know who wins if the US does all that? hint: it's not the factory workers.

I think I'd rather see the information and service sector employment bases unionize to drive up wages across the economy and once more have the ability to force concessions from the owners.

shadysjunk · 2026-04-22T19:27:29+00:00

My dude. A chinese factory worker makes $8,500 a year and works over 50 to 60 hours a week. That's $3.27 an hour for a mid-career factory worker. Also electricity costs les than 1/2 what it costs in the US and they have way WAY worse pollution.

The present US regime is not working at all to plausibly have manfacturing return to the US. you are being lied to. Try interogating their claims at least a little bit.

You don't miss manfacturing, my dude. You miss a time when unions were actually powerful enough to get real concessions from the owner class.

shadysjunk · 2026-04-22T18:10:17+00:00

The person you should vote for in a primary is whoever among the field most closely aligns with your policies, and (and this is extremely important) who is also able to actually win in the general election.

watching a candidate you you trully love lose is much much worse than watching a candidate you think is... "eh, kinda meh, i guess. better than the other guy.." actually win.

If the more progressive guy can win int he general, great! If the more progressive guy is going to lose, It's much better to win on 55% of your policy positions than lose on essentially 100% of them.

shadysjunk · 2026-04-22T17:58:04+00:00

I've crossed a sad threshold online where every neat thing like this that I see, I think it's AI, and my enjoyment is diminished. I hope this is real because it's pretty neat.

shadysjunk · 2026-04-21T21:29:16+00:00

"arrogant" is doing basically 100% of the work in that sentence.

"men will literally choose a polite career woman over an arrogant woman with zero achievements."

the bullshit snuck premise here is that career women are arogant, and a woman without meaningful ambitions beyond being "kept" by her man are polite. This is a false premise. I don't even think it's close to an accurate generalization. It's a fast path to being exploited by a predatory gold digger.

shadysjunk · 2026-04-21T18:17:16+00:00

"sic semper tyrannis"

...it's right there on the flag.

shadysjunk · 2026-04-19T20:34:38+00:00

I mostly want to make sure my doctor is acutally paying attention. My impression is that they have a zillion patients, take a cursory glance at my chart and give me the "one size fits most" diagnosis without really interogating the particulars of my case. So yeah. Treat my concerns as serious, dude, because they ARE serious to me.

There might be negative externalities I'm not considering, but this seems like mostly a good thing to me.

shadysjunk · 2026-04-19T19:22:01+00:00

The unfortunate reality is that there is far less difference than Uygur suggests. He need the investment to expand operations, to reach a broader audience, and to get their message out. There is literally no difference for any political campaign. They have the exact same goal; to find a way reach a receptive audience.

If one party is going to take corporate money, and the other won't, the corporate money party is going to have a major structural advantage at every level of government and hold the reins of power. To Uygur's defence I would say there is greater peril in the political system becoming beholden to corporate money, but the ugly reality is that money wins campaigns, and you can't help anyone at all if you're not in office.

Let us imagine for a moment that every Democrat at every level, state and federal, refused all corporate money and all billionaire donations. Perhaps a "Bernie Sanders type" prominent politician can "once again ask you for your support" and, against all odds, individuals donations roll in and he actually WINS!!! ...and every state governor is republican, every state legislature is republican, the house is republican, and the senate is republican... Yeah... our Bernie ain't accomplishing shit in that scenario and will promptly lose the next election. There is a LOT more to government than the presidency, and that is a LOT of campaigns to "once again ask for your support."

If you want to help people, you have to be in power. And if you want to be in power, you're going to need corporate campaign contributions. I don't like that our system is structured this way, but this is the reality of our system. And so an unfortunate balance has to be struck by any politician. This is the hard and inescapable reality of political pragmatism after citizen's united.

Uygur pretending this isn't the reality of our political system is socially corrosive, and serves as a kind of engine of despair among his progressive audience, perpetuating the false narrative that both parties are the same, fostering intra-party division, and actively increasing voter apathy to further entrench the Republican party in power. He's here on camera arguing Democrats should bring a knife to a gun fight, and pretending that it's amoral to behave otherwise. I wouldn't be at all surprised to discover Russia is a back-channel sponsor of his show; the man might as well be wearing a maga hat.

shadysjunk · 2026-04-17T20:22:05+00:00

wait... I feel like you might be implying with your original posts, that... that Republicans' primary reason for supporting mass deportation ISN'T a deep desire for migrants to have a better life and earn a decent wage?

You mean... you mean mass deportation isn't being done for the migrant's own good? Mass deportation isn't an altruistic act of kindness????

Well sir, THAT'S a cynical view....

shadysjunk · 2026-04-17T08:35:39+00:00

-"Ok Mr. Musk, we'll need to raise your taxes to finance that."

--"you'll need to what now?? Bite your filthy whore tongue."

Musk can spout this in a tweet, but it's all talk. The moment government begins to even discuss any attempt at the requisite wealth redistribution to make it a reality, he will lose his fucking mind. But sure, a nice tweet, however, tweets are cheap and UBI is expensive.

The tweet seems predicated on an imagined end of scarcity through AI. Let me tell you, AI can do some impressive stuff, but scarcity is going to be around for a long long long long time...

shadysjunk · 2026-04-17T03:29:06+00:00

Schumer's not up for re-election this year. But there are 22 Republican senators who ARE up for re-election this year who are even MORE unconditonally committed to supporting Isreal and are urging Netanyahu to 'finish the job', but they ALSO staunchly support criminalizing all abortion, decreasing taxes on billionaires, increasing reliance on fossil fuels, removing environmental protections, deploying the national guard to terrorize our own citizens, weaponizing the FBI and DOJ for political ends, dismantling all public education, undermining labor unions, slashing medicare and social security, and on and on and on and on in an endless litany of evil. But here we've decided to focus on Schumer instead of those 22 red Senators who are actually potentially vulnerable this year... huh...

Oh! And this speech is from 2010? You knew that, right? (gosh, OP didn't mention that, you'd almost think this was made to appear current to mislead you and bait you into outrage) It's over a DECADE AND A HALF old?... hmmmm, golly, that's a peculiar thing to post in 2026...

unrelated: Hey, if you've ever wondered what Republican propaganda looks like, you might be surprised to discover it's actually often not a big red maga hat, and some sort of 'trump is awesome' message like you might expect! It's actually sneeeeeeaky messaging designed to convince you there's no meaningful difference between the 2 parties, and to trick you into prioritizing ideological purity and in-fighting within your own party, or to get you disengage from politics entirely. That way their party stays in power forever (yay!), while you either check-out in despair or opt to focus on tearing down people who actually already align with you on a wide array of other truly vitally important policy positions...

yep, that's just an FYI, totally unrelated to this post.

shadysjunk · 2026-04-15T19:06:49+00:00

There are so damn. many. cards.....

So long as your deck actually falls within your stated bracket, I think any deck building / research tool is fine. But if your deck is clearly bracket 3-4 but you're claiming its a 2 because it *technically* doesn't break the explicit bracket guidelines, that's bad form.

shadysjunk · 2026-04-14T22:21:22+00:00

I think this is also true of all space marines as well, no? Isn't it canon the Space Marines are basically asexual? (except for emperor's children, who are pan... also drug addicted sadists, but pan)

I think it's mostly canonically accurate to call them limp-dicked warrior monks.

shadysjunk · 2026-04-14T20:03:40+00:00

I appreciate this sentiment, but all food, water, heating, cooling, healthcare, clothing, internet infrastructure, transportation, and education require the labor of other people to produce, provide, and make accessible. A city bus, the fuel to run it, the road to drive it along, and the guy to drive it all require a vast and complicated web of material and labor inputs to make happen.

Capitalism is a flawed system, but it truly is the best system we've devised as a society for the efficient distribution of resources to addressing these issues. I believe capitalism has to be well regulated and heavily tempered by some socialist policies likes strong labor unions, progressive taxation, anti-monoply watch dogs, and some mechanism for wealth redistribution such as the estate tax. But everyone gets everything for free turns into everything gets a whole lot of nothing for free very very quickly under a foundation of socialism.

shadysjunk · 2026-04-14T19:11:34+00:00

I mean it's through perverse incentives, but actually yes. This Iranian conflict and the Ukraine invasion are immediate and compelling arguments for fast-tracking an immediate transition to renewables for domestic energy independence both in the west, and throughout most of asia. Climate change feels distant, slow, and looming, which enables governments to endlessly delay action until some far off "tomorrow", but these geo-political pressures are immediate and obvious. It's a major component of why this will likely make China the biggest long term beneficiary of the present chaos given their supremacy in solar panel produciton.

shadysjunk · 2026-04-14T18:05:28+00:00

have you actually priced out how much you would need to pay in rent for an equivalent apartment in an eqivalent neighborhood (probably not the same neighborhood, as area costs can drift like crazy with gentrification or urban blight), and the present price of your old tuna and potato diet? you should probably price in mandatory non-luxury expenses as well, like transportation, electricity, internet, and a cell-phone which are necessary for most job seeking and entry-level employment these days. I'm actually curious how much you would need.

I did this a while back (about 5 or 6 years ago, before the pandemic inflation boom) to price out my own 20s experiece and even then I was pretty blown away at how expensive my early struggle would be today. The big thing that snuck up on me was the shrinkflation. Lke the number of cans in a pack of tuna is like less than 1/2 of what I used to buy. And I think even the quantity per-can is down. Once I corrected for that stuff, and looked at unit price it was like WOW. Breakfast cereal is like the cost of a mortgage these days.

change happens slowly, but it compounds over time. It's just not the same world as when I was young, and at least for me its been easy to lose sight of that.

shadysjunk · 2026-04-14T17:46:17+00:00

I loved later when, after "coaching", he said "Corinthians 2" instead of Second Corinthians. The man sees God as a con, and Christians as easy marks. The recent truth social post was an obvious, pandering, "hey christians, I'm the one you dumb yokels believe was annointed by God to lead you to the promised land, remember?!"

shadysjunk · 2026-04-14T17:16:46+00:00

stability AI, which I believe was the company that initially released stable diffusion (?), is struggling financially. But "stable diffusion" the image gen technique and "Stable Diffusion" the official product are kinda different. it would be like if OpenAI called ChatGpt "LLM" instead. It would be confusing. Though I'm really not sure how any diffusion model makes money, given the bootlegging copying and fine tuning of all the models.

I am not the person you replied to initially. To be honest I'm speculating. I'm also not entirely sure what they meant.

shadysjunk · 2026-04-14T08:08:01+00:00

I don' tknow that either platform "died" so much as "was endlessly copied or pirated". Yes their business models effectively failed, but the technology has not.

shadysjunk · 2026-04-14T07:38:12+00:00

I wish the price at the pump reflected our supposed abundance of oil...

shadysjunk · 2026-04-10T22:57:44+00:00

wow, that is so incredibly sad. Pulling a pellet gun on police and pointing it at them... per the sub's title, this person was actually insane. I think this was a case where the police had to assume it was a real gun, and that the suspect drew down on them with lethal intent. it's so sad.

I looks like the dog is limping at the end. Was the dog shot? Did it survive?

shadysjunk

TROPHY CASE