It won’t. He’ll be lucky to make it to trial at all. Good chance he’s found suicided to death in prison, like good old Jeffery E.

moreover the idea that Marxists have never achieved change ignores the existence of the USSR, Cuba, PRC, Vietnam, Laos, and so forth.

The Westoid Brain is incapable of appreciating AES. Everything is either Not Real Communism or a book club that contemplates their own navels indefinitely.

When the SRs in pre-1917 Russia celebrated “an end to theory” as a unifying principle and claimed “assassinations transfer power,” they were wrong. Assassinations create temporary voids taken by those closest to the spot, always another bourgeois and never a transfer. What is required is organized effort to rise above the Bourgeoisie as a class so that Capital is controlled by humanity, and not the inverse. It was the dedication to theory and organizing the working class that proved the Bolsheviks, and not the SRs, correct.

Need that vanguard party to occupy the vacuum and initiate the reforms. It can’t just be stochastic violence.

That said, guys like Luigi aren’t operating in a vacuum either. They are the consequence of their material conditions (in this case, excruciating back pain in a country that refuses to deliver medical care in an efficient manner). So it seems trite to get mad at a man who was subjected to these horrifying economic forces. This stochastic violence is a consequence of the contradictions in the capitalist system, not a solution to it or an avoidable symptom of it.

You have to read guys like Luigi (and Thomas Matthew Crooks and Dylan Roof, etc, etc) the same way you’d read a cork going off a bottle you just shook up. Or the hurricane that slams into your coastline after decades of climate change. Praising/villanizing Luigi for offing a CEO makes about as much sense as praising/villanizing a tornado that levels a gas plant.

Remember when the railroad threatened to strike and nacy pelosi said they would throw them in jail if they didn’t go to work…fucking unreal.

There’s a great WTYP on this, detailing how the inability/refusal to strike has resulted in an exodus/early retirement of train engineers sufficient to knee-cap the industry already. Increased incidence of train derailments, higher rates of rail jams and mechanical failures, and generally slower delivery times are all the result of the decline in experienced and knowledgeable industry workers.

None of this matters to the train management, which has reaped an enormous windfall in profits at the steady marginal decline in network efficiency. Monopoly means you either pay the cartel for degraded service or you ship using a more expensive method.

Solidarity will be hard to achieve because those threats will be too much for people on the ropes in their day to day life to endure.

Its important to recognize modern capitalist control as a form of hostage taking. “Pay us the ransom or your critical infrastructure get its”, even as we’re receiving fingers and earlobes in the mail with every passing year.

Solidarity is about liberating these critical components of infrastructure and operating them for the benefit of the public. The goal isn’t to shut down these institutions, but to run them without profiteers leeching the excess revenue. That’s why some of the most effective popular economic protests don’t involve suspending services, but operating them while refusing to collect fees for service.

The Biden policies were working. He literally prevented us from a goddamn recession, and because a handful of companies (nearly all of which donated considerable sums to Trump) jacked up prices for consumers, people act like it was Bidens fault.

Presidents have emergency powers to cap prices, prosecute private interests for exploitative behavior, and even nationalize industries in the face of a domestic crisis. Biden sat back and allowed greedflation to sap the goodwill that his Inflation Reduction Act was intended to engender. And then Harris - who very early on floated the idea of capping prices and taxing gougers - ran away from the idea in the face of corporate media pressure.

Sitting back and taking it as the conservatives fuck you is a policy failure. Same with Israel (where Netanyahu actively campaigned for Republicans while Democrats ran around apologizing to them) and with Musk and Thiel (Biden kept rubber stamping contracts to Starlink and Palantir even as Silicon Valley dumped billions in media resources into Trump’s lap).

These are policy failures. Giving your political enemies tens of billions of dollars to fuck you with is a policy failure. Biden failed. Harris failed. The Democratic Party failed. That’s why they lost.

If you think the miracle Biden pulled off is bad

Handing out cheap loans and subsidies to private industry isn’t miraculous. We’ve been doing it since the FDR Administration (arguably since the Lincoln administration) to keep the engines of industry pumping. Fucking Dipshit Donny figured out how to pull the “Cheap Money” lever all the way back in 2019 when COVID was threatening a collapse.

But when all the money flows into the pockets of the rich, while food and rent and gas costs inflate, you’re going to have a bad time even if NOT doing keynesian economics would have made things worse.

Yep, the DNC is a private organization and can mostly operate however they want.

Democracy!

they didn’t spend any time building up their own case for what they would do differently

She came straight out on TV and said she wouldn’t do anything differently. That was her case. “You know Biden? The President 60% of the country hates? Great guy! Did nothing wrong.”

There was plenty of time to run a good campaign after Biden got replaced, they just chose not to for some reason.

She was the VP for four years and if you pull up her highlight reel it all sucked. Going south of the border and telling war refugees “Do Not Come” like some kind of reverse Statue of Liberty. Calling student protesters opposed to the Gaza Genocide anti-Semitic while she hides from Netanyahu during his psychotic Congressional address. Letting Manchin and Sinema walk all over her in the Senate.

What kind of campaign was she going to build on top of that legacy?

Dems told their dud QB to hand the ball off to a lame running back and watched her crash face first into a Joe Rogan’s Audience full of dorks crying about a dead squirrel. I don’t think it is possible for these people to run a campaign better than “We’re not Trump”, which is what they ultimately choose to do.

The company is faceless and doesn’t care how much you abuse the worker bees as long as they get your money.

Hey now, sometimes the company employs security that’s extremely bored, incredibly racist, and looking for a low income punching bag to hassle.

Just. Don’t. Go. To. Macdonald’s.

Best advice on the menu

If the toddler kicked the knees out from another notorious fascist family? Absolutely.

If the first thing Donald Trump did in office was arrest every Cheney and toss them into Gitmo, I would feel significantly less bad about him winning the election.

He won’t. And that’s one more reason why he fucking sucks. This is all just theater, before the Cheneys are back to cutting the GOP checks for special O&G industry favors.

Mainly because the governments already have access to everything and I mean EVERYTHING.

There’s limits, largely around the speed and accuracy by which data can be ingested and processed. You can look for everyone somewhere sometimes and someone everywhere sometimes and someone somewhere at any time, but it takes a ton of digital resources to monitor everyone everywhere all the time. For the data to be meaningful it has to be interpreted.

Manned checkpoints allow local state actors to make decisions in near-real time relative to immediately present information. The classic example is someone with a stale warrant or notice on their record. The sheer volume of delinquents makes pursuing every individual troublesome, but as soon as a known offender steps across a checkpoint the police can pounce on the individual offender in that instance. If you’ve got a five year old traffic ticket, a police officer can be in your face about it as soon as they run your ID.

I doubt a hotel receptionist would make use of a pubkey cryptography.

If you’re just flashing an ID like a badge, maybe not. But as soon as the hotel tries to use the information to do anything (even as trivial as adding it to their local systems) there’s a good chance it’ll get bounced or hung up. A fake digital id is worse than none at all. Its a big red flag saying “Look harder at this person, they’re suspicious!”

There’s already a containerized Personal / Work split in the OS. You’d think the partitions could be made smaller.

But then Google is as deep into the NatSec industry as any other tech company. Even if you have containerization, there’s little reason to believe Five Eyes doesn’t have a back door.

That means if I used the digital version, they would had unlimited access to all my digital life. Photos, emails, chats, from decades ago.

Bare minimum, it would take a substantial amount of time and resources to harvest data from every phone of every driver passing through a particular checkpoint. Not that I’d ever recommend handing over my phone to a cop, but this kind of data transfer isn’t trivial. And its not clear what a street cop is going to do with 10 GB of accumulated vacation photos.

On the flip side, if you have an Automatic Backup feature on your phone, its going to a cloud computer somewhere. And that cloud computer is almost certainly compromised by the state digital security agency (and probably a number of foreign security agencies). At that point, it doesn’t matter if you’ve got a physical id or a digital one, just knowing who you are is enough to tie you back to that digital archive.

But… again, what is it that front-line state agents are planning to do with all this data? That’s never been made particularly clear.

the chinese government is an absolute hypocrite here once again

Going tit-for-tat with the US on investigations of rival tech companies isn’t hypocritical, its retaliatory. This is a strategic response to an escalating tech sector trade war.

Nvidia is probably the defacto monopoly corporation that deserves an anti trust probe the least because competition isn’t even trying

NVIDIA has acquired 23 different companies in the last 5 years. Six in 2024 alone. Back in 2020, they straight up bought out ARM for $40B, eliminating an enormous chunk of their domestic competition. This was a strategic prelude to cornering the manufacturing of AI-centric hardware.

These mergers never should have been allowed to take place. They’ve squashed anything resembling competitive pricing and created a choke point in distribution that the bigger tech companies have exploited to crowd out competitors in the nascent AI industrial space. In a sane world, an anti-trust claim would be open-and-shut. NVIDIA is caught red-handed in the act. They’re straight up bragging about it to their investors. Its the singular reason for their skyrocketing stock price.

The only incentive rivals have, at this point, is to get large enough for a company like NVIDIA to buy you out. There is no competition because the market has already been cornered.

Doubling our police budget to assist in the protection of health insurance management supply lines.

It’s not a crime if the President does it. Or so prior presidents have told me.

John Wick was an awesome series of movies.

They’d burned through the premise badly inside the first two films. And that’s before you read it as Equilibrium with the serial numbers filled off.

Which is a shame. All that money on effects and direction and talent. Nobody thought to hire a screenwriter worth a shit to make any of the theatrics meaningful.

Free to campaign. Free to fundraise. Free to conspire within the party and continue to build support.

And then the opposition ran a prosecutor mostly known for her reluctance to indict white collar criminals.

No shit he won.

Four years ago, really. He should have exited 1600 Pennsylvania directly into the back of a squad car.

Instead, he was free to continue doing crimes while rebuilding his base of support for another bite at the apple. Not a huge surprise, given the US’s long and ugly history of turning a blind eye to corporate goonery, financial malfeasance, and organized crime. But depressing, given how much of this was a predictable consequence.

Guy was convicted on 34 counts but never even got to sentencing. Pathetic.