He’s just going to get people killed. But that’s ok he doesn’t give a shit anyways, so it’s moot. What are a few thousand dead peasants when we could make big stock number go up?
So I visited Bangladesh one time, and learned they have insanely high rates of cancer there. Why? Well it turns out that (among other reasons) the farmers had been injecting formaldehyde into their vegetables because it made them last longer on the shelves, and therefore sold better.
This is what you get with no regulations. A sick and dying population.
“regulations are written in blood” is a quote for a reason
I spent a decade living around Africa, and this kind of thinking is common. DDT was what everyone put on the tomatoes because pests mean loss of food. Who wants that?
Lack of relations is only about living in short-term survival thinking 24/7. Long term effects mean nothing.
DDT isn’t going to cause health problems for the people in Africa. It will cause problems for some birds near the top of the food chain however.
It’s just the easiest example to use. I have maybe dozens more examples that require more storytelling and setup.
Ever had someone try to sell you a car with visible drywall screws holding the bumper on, like you were the dick for pointing them out?
DDT won’t fuck you up if you die in your 20s from unrelated causes
Go read about how horribly adulterated food was in Europe and the US in the 1800s and before. They’d add sawdust to flour, chalk, toxic metals, rotten meat was sold regularly, etc. Patent medicines were essentially drug trafficking or just scams. Soldiers in the Spanish-American war were supplied with canned meat from the US Civil War. I saw an old film from the time the Pure Food and Drug act was passed showing a can of meat being opened and it literally shot out from the gasses inside.
Exactly
Funny thing with that book it was intended to reveal the horrible working conditions in the industry but instead the public latched onto it as revealing how foul and adulterated food had become.
Well, the Libertarians and Republicans had their heads poisoned with total rot like Ayn Rand’s horrible sci-fi, and then spent the past several decades screaming about how derrp, we don’t need no regulations!
Now I guess we all get to find out along with these dolts.
Not to mention the US falling 110% into the cult of individualism. Individualism is fine if it is balanced with the needs of society as a whole. You can’t even get people to chip into schools and roads, shared resources, anymore.
Do you have examples of this stuff happening in continental European countries? I’d love to jump down that rabbit hole.
In the past I’ve read descriptions of systematic bad practices in the industrialized Uk, but I can’t recall reading about similar things happening in other western European countries. Nothing systematic anyhow. I’d image that the french would have had a(nother) revolution if anyone had tried that stuff with their food.
Enjoy!
I think the English were just better at recording it.
https://victorianweb.org/science/health/health1.html
https://edu.rsc.org/feature/the-fight-against-food-adulteration/2020253.article
Here is one in Asia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esing_Bakery_incident
France passed a food adulteration law in 1905. Many countries were cracking down on it around this time along with the US with the Pure Food and Drug Act under Teddy Roosevelt.
Examples of food adulteration in France in the 1800s:
https://review.gale.com/2020/01/08/wine-adulteration-in-the-nineteenth-century/
Copper-colored vegetables: French beans, cucumbers, and samphires were often colored green with copper. This could have fatal consequences.
Beer: Brewers added substances like copperas, quassia, liquorice juice, and Nux vomica to make beer bitter.
Wine: The wine industry was affected by the Phylloxera epidemic, which destroyed a large proportion of vines. In response, wine adulteration increased.
Confectionery: Arsenic and mercury compounds were used as colorants.
Mustard: Lead chromate was added to mustard.
Meat: Animal health became a concern as meat consumption increased.
Many thanks for the links, was interesting.
Just by the existence of food standards laws, we know that there must have been food standards problems. Stuff like mayonnaise composition being put into law, must mean that there had been a mayonnaise quality problem or worries at a certain point in time, I just can’t find any specific info on when or what. Those scandals were probably recorded just as well in the news papers of my small country, but if no one writes a new article or paper about the scandal 50+ years after it happened, then that info won’t turn up in an internet search query.
You have to remember that musk literally, unironically, thinks we’re npcs. He actually genuinely does not think that the masses of poor people are actually people.
So no, he won’t fucking care.
He should maybe remember that the deathclaws that punish you for skipping straight to New Vegas are also NPCs.
He paid someone to get past that part for him.
You got a little extra negative there.
Not negativity, you can’t overstate the direness. Just grammar.
He actually genuinely thinks that the masses of poor people aren’t actually people.
Yep fixed, fat thumbs on a tiny phone screen
So he’s Homelander. That’s wonderful.
He fucking wishes.
Pretty sure that level of delusion is comparable to Chris-chan. Which is fitting because if there are two people I want nothing to do with outside of homicide its them. Musk because he is a sub human Anglo African and Chris-Chan because im pretty sure id default to mercy killing them.
How is Chris-chan on one level with musk? I believe you, I just genuinely do not know
General disconnect from tbe underlying functions of reality. In the case of Chris-Chan its a matter of their mind being scrambled by underlying mental health issues and decades of trolling, in Musks case its moreso a matter of being a rich being corrosive as a baseline and him being so narcissistic and maladaptive also a lot of ketamine.
Frankly I pity Chris-chan, as for Musk I would revel in his death.
scrambled by underlying mental health issues and decades of trolling
Hey wouldn’t it be fun if a large group of people spent twenty years convincing a seriously mentally ill person that they have various girlfriends (and trick them into sending porn to those “girlfriends” - usually teenage boys), that Nintendo wants to make their OC official, and then finally that they are an interdimensional goddess with magical powers that needs to have sex with their mom?
The “Liquid Chris saga” almost seems innocent in comparison to the later shit - but realizing that they probably believed that there was an imposter who had stolen their girlfriend and that Nintendo had been tricked into making the imposter’s Sonichu series… like that’s really fucked up.
Like, wtf is that other than a mass psychological torture and bullying campaign? Why did no one at any point intervene?
There were attampts at intervention but they largely failed, the fact of the matter is there was and is very little legal framework for this type of shit and what does exist is wholly insufficient.
Personally I am of the documentarian branch when it co.es to observing lolcows, observe but dont interact. If content dries up then thats generally good. Dont harrass dont bother if theyre doing something illegal collect evidence and hand it over to the police, if the police do nothing then you can break them. Serisouly imagine if folks did to the Zoosadists what they did to Chris-Chan.
I’m glad to see fellow Christorians out here.
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From my point of view from the other side of the Atlantic, you guys in the US don’t have enough regulation as it is. There’s only one class of people that benefit from removal of the regulations you do have, and that’s the top 1%. It’s just going to allow them to do all of the following to make more money, at everyone else’s expense.
1: Treat their employees worse than they already do, AND put them into dangerous situations legally. 2: Cut corners to save money at the expense of safety. Think airlines, airliner manufacturers, car makers, construction. The list here could be endless. 3: Well, finance/banking regulations. That will be a field day for the finance sector I’m sure.
I mean the list is potentially endless. But the three points above will keep you busy for long enough I reckon.
No, I don’t really feel safe even this far away. We’re not immune to all of this anywhere in the world.
Your list has most of the highlights, but you’re missing 2 really important one: 1. food safety. I guess Americans don’t care what is being sprayed on their vegetables or what diseases their meat might have. And 2. environmental. Burning rivers, even more wildfires, smog in all your cities, toxic waste in your lakes, etc. Don’t think they won’t start polluting like crazy if they can.
All regulations means ALL regulations; even the ones most people would think are so common sense they don’t expect them to go away. They will. If it makes more money, they’ll get rid of any and all regulations.
Yeah I stopped at three when I realised I could be there all day when it comes to regulations that private companies need to adhere to. But I would agree those should have been on my abridged list too.
Ha, oh I get it. You are exactly right, the list is pretty much endless!
Number 3 is interesting for me… The finance sector is pretty aware of the need to control stupid risk taking, and the don’t want another GFC, so I guess they’d (broadly) want to keep some of the regulation around that. What else is there? General bad acting and things like excessive fees? That also seems to be a risk driver, in the long term, as it leads to e.g. increased loan defaults… Where do you think the key problems would be?
Edit: whoops, this was supposed to be in reply to @r00ty@kbin.life
What makes you think big finance likes to keep regulation? Someone’s loss is another one’s profit. Some people become very very rich from financial crises.
Because market crashes are not good for anyone in the sector… Hence I think the regulations brought in via the FSB in response to the GFC were broadly accepted (though probably with varying degrees of willingness).
And? A lot of the big banking execs, and the rest of the billionaire class in general, seem to largely understand that we’re at the theoretical limit of “line goes up”. They’re happy to squeeze the last bit of juice out of the lemon before they retire to some bunker in New Zealand or whatever.
Long term thinking is dead in much of the corporate world. The focus isn’t on next year, it’s on next quarter if not next week. A market crash would be easily predictable for a lot of financial firms now - they know what to spot, and the housing crash in 08 showed them that they can jump out pretty scot-free no matter what.
… seem to largely understand that we’re at the theoretical limit of “line goes up”.
I’m skeptical of this. I think they are disconnected from a few fairly fundamental realities. Do you have any links that might convince me otherwise?
The rest of it I agree with, but I don’t know if that’s relevant for their interpretation of market crashes, because I think they see them as internally driven… I might be wrong here though.
Decades upon decades of progress are going to be gone by the end of this.
We’ll spend the rest of our lives living in a system slowly being rebuilt, if we even get that lucky.
There goes our futures. And we voted for it.
Truly a shit nation full of shit people.
The wounds are too deep for rebuilding, imo. Even if we do get the chance, there’s just not enough Band-Aids, political will, and time in four years for the democrats to repair it. We’re facing the complete implosion of our federal government and its legitimacy along with it.
The worst part is that there’s not enough of an organized opposition to stop it, or even really slow it down. Neither major political party acts in favor of the people; major news outlets and social networking tools are owned by billionaires; a sizeable chunk of the country is perfectly OK with getting ratfucked so long as José next door gets it worse. We aren’t facing the implosion of the USA into a TechnoFascist Hellscape, we’re LIVING IT.
Then be the political organization. Call your elected official. Meet with your local advocacy group or non profit. They are organizing you just have to find them.
B-bu-but grandstanding uncommitted Jill Steiners told me not to worry and they’re all the same though!!?
Well, keep in mind that Biden was indecisive about Gaza…
Dude literally parroted the IDF and shut down any actual war crimes investigation. He was very decisive, in the wrong way.
He bears culpability for Trump winning for two reasons. Because it’s idiotic to expect the key Arab American demographic in Michigan, a key battleground state, to vote for a pro Gaza Genocide party. And because he didn’t know when to get out of the way. He tried to hold on for so long the Democrats couldn’t run a primary or actual campaign.
Biden’s legacy is death and Trump’s return.
No no no, the culpability is 100% with the American people. They had two options: the dude who agrees with everything the IDF says and does and the dude that goes far beyond the Israeli far right wildest dreams. There was no other option. It was a choice between a bad sandwich and a pile of shit and people focused on how the sandwich age and lack of caviar. Enjoy the shit! Maybe you can have some more at Trump Gaza Resort.
Lmao blame the people… Yup. That’s a winning strategy every time.
Blame the people for the candidate the people elected? After half the world warned about him for 8 years? How could I!
That might hold water if the Democrats hadn’t made the same warnings about every Republican since Reagan.
Biden was the right vote over Trump, even on the issue of Gaza. However, it’s fucked up to minimize Biden’s culpability in the Gaza genocide this way. He wasn’t indecisive, he was complicit and was actively involved in helping Israel lie and obfuscate. Maybe we as a country deserve Trump, or maybe we don’t, but Biden and Harris did not deserve to win.
I don’t agree with the last statement.
There’s “continue with previously agreed weapons shipments to Israel” and there’s “let’s make Gaza a parking lot, invade Greenland, and ship these brown people to Guantanamo, citizens or not”.
Biden/Harris were not perfect, but they were the proverbial one-eyed person… vs a blind donkey.
Don’t forget that Trump is also talking about shifting control of Gaza to the US for some godforsaken reason (it’s beachfront property and his real estate mogul friends will make tons of cash building resorts on mass graves and skeletons).
Context is important to discern meaning. Biden, the person, deserves nothing better than a jail cell. Harris too, on some level, though she’s not as directly complicit. I voted for Harris anyways, because it was worth accepting that grave injustice to keep Trump out of power.
It was worth accepting that grave injustice to prevent and even bigger injustice.
We warned against Trump not because we dislike the guy, or his hair or his ties, we warned people that Trump would be even worse than whatever they/you disliked about the Biden admin.
It took him weeks to propose deporting 2M people from their own homeland and building a Trump hotel on the beachfront property left behind.
Are you just reading every other sentence or something? I voted for Harris. I didn’t need you to tell me to vote for Harris. I’d rather see Harris in prison than the Whitehouse, but I’d rather see Harris in the Whitehouse than Trump.
But, if we want to talk about warnings, I warned people like you that preaching at voters was more likely to make them stay home than vote for your candidate. Pointing out why Harris was better than Trump on Gaza was good, but the constant preaching and harassing attitude could easily have lost Harris the election. The fact that it didn’t end with the election is insane. It shows that your motivations were to virtue signal instead of helping Harris win.
What the fuck is “deserve”?
Representative democracy is the system where people get the government that they deserve.
Don’t worry. WW3 will be the world against the US within the next decade.
Is a decade ten months now?
Feels that way
Yes, but the libruls made them do this, because woke/dei/crt and the trans. The amount of actual TDS (transphobic derangement syndrome) out there is something to behold.
The crazies are obsessed with trans and other bullshit that has no impact on their lives (b-roll of migrant caravans, poor people living high on the hog on steak and lobster, etc) that they are completely willing to end democracy over it. Not even fucking kidding. It’s one thing when you see the elites saying democracy is over, it needs to be shunted aside so they can rule, it’s quite another when they have convinced a lot of stupid peasants to say the same kind of shit. As if the peasants’ lives won’t be remarkably worse under what the elites have planned…
Imagine us growing up at the peak of civilization (1999, per the Matrix) and not knowing it.
Now we’re going back to the 1800s with robber barons and 20 hour/7day workweeks.
The future is a foreign land.
With RFK Jr pitching in, you’re going back hundreds of years.
Most of them are just caught in the gears of history. It’s not as if voting was ever mandatory or generally made available to the working class.
But yes, a nation asleep at the wheel for the most part. It’s such a pity.
Voting ourselves out of a democracy was always a choice.
You are …and only a handful of people are going to be better off for it. It’s fucking wank, and it’s not just USians that are going to feel the hit, cause many other countries will use you as a blueprint.
I say we get rid of all patent and IP laws too and see how he does.
Now THAT is a good idea
Throw copyright on the pile too, lot of billionaires coating off that shit
No, that like that! -fElon
Probably okay honestly. IP isn’t as strong of a barrier as the infrastructure to build the product. And he has both a car factory and a rocket factory. Twitter is the only thing that might annoy him but it’s already being cloned so there’s very little there to protect anyway.
This is how you can fight back and help us. This would be very effective.
All he gonna do on that front is to empower his and others’ AI companies even further…
I feel like I’m a crazy person, but I’m starting to believe the conspiracy of tech billionaires trying to dismantle the government to create network states. I’m almost certain they will gut the SEC eventually as well, so they can deregulate cryptocurrency. This was a summary I’ve recently read: Day One of Venture Capital Takeover.
Everyone should google Network States and the cities these VC billionaires are trying to create. Stuff like Próspera, Pronomos Capital, Praxis Nation, Bitcoin City in El Salvador, Afropolitan in Africa etc. etc. The same website has long page on it: The Status of the Network State. They are essentially creating sovereign states or cities that aren’t beholden to any local government laws and use their own deregulated cryptocurrencies, so that they can control all the rules and power within.
I have no idea how trustworthy the site I linked is, but I can’t see what they would gain from lying about it
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Both Peter Thiel and Musk are incredibly dangerous to America’s democracy. Here’s another choice quote from the site:
Peter Thiel has held “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible” for many years. In 2022, he ripped up $100 dollar bills on stage at the Bitcoin Conference, stating “Bitcoin is the most honest market in the world. It’s the most efficient market… It is telling us that the central banks are bankrupt, that we are at the end of the fiat money regime.” In a 2024 podcast, he stated “Liberalism is exhausted, one suspects that democracy, whatever that means, is exhausted, and that we have to ask some questions very far outside the Overton window." PayPal was originally founded to replace the US dollar. Peter Thiel stated in his book, Zero to One: “PayPal had a suitably grand mission — the kind that post-bubble skeptics would later describe as grandiose. We wanted to create a new internet currency to replace the US dollar.” PayPal’s “co-founder” was Elon Musk, showing both parties aimed to replace the US dollar from a very early date in their careers. Marc Andreessen has also been instrumental in financing the rise of Bitcoin.
Let’s not forget about JD Vance, the current Vice President, who after a talk Thiel did at Yale Law School, described it as “the most significant moment of my time” at the institution. He later went on to be mentored by Thiel and joined one of his VC companies. He also received about $15 million dollars in donation from Thiel for his Senate campaign in 2022 which was ultimately successful. This was the largest amount donated to a single Senate candidate ever. Forbes published a good timeline of Thiel and Vance’s relationship last year.
I started reading that as a song and then it’s like the music stops and the singer just breaks down on stage.
Which is a pretty apt description of me the past few days. It was weirdly therapeutic so thanks I guess?
Bitcoin City in El Salvador will never happen now, because they no longer have it as legal tender.
That’s hopeful to hear, but just reading the article, two things stand out:
The reform eliminated the word “currency” when referring to bitcoin, but says it is “legal tender.” Despite the lack of clarity, it lifts, as required by the IMF, the obligation to accept it in transactions or debt payments, a key condition for it to be “legal tender,” according to economic analysts. With the change, “if someone owes you money and wants to pay you in bitcoin, you can refuse to be paid in bitcoin, but you cannot refuse if it’s legal tender,” economist Carlos Acevedo explained.
The government, she assured, will continue buying bitcoin and having reserves in this cryptocurrency. According to the National Bitcoin Office, El Salvador has 6,050 bitcoins worth $634.8 million. “President Bukele continues buying bitcoin, we have a Bitcoin Office, we have the Bitcoin Law, bitcoin can be used in El Salvador. It hasn’t been an easy road,” Mayorga summarized.
They are just removing it as “legal tender” to meet the conditions for an IMF loan and will continue investing in bitcoin.
For a fee and a background check, one can become a citizen of Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong, Inc., which operates as a sovereign entity within the various territories around the globe in which it has franchises.
Peter theil has been working on it for at least a decade
In my experience, if you have a boss that bitches about OSHA and how they’re totally unnecessary, you’ve got a shitty boss. I’m talking the kind that would get you killed to save a nickel and then go on about how they’re the real victims of you going and getting yourself killed like that.
Yeah, as someone who has to design around Osha, I fucking love them. It’s incredibly convenient to have “safe enough” written down and with requirements that I can tell the money people I’m professionally obligated to not knowingly contribute to bypassing. And the recommendations are great, “we won’t stop you, but if you get sued you’re at fault” is excellent.
Without this, employees will still get hurt, they’ll still sue in accordance with the employers legislatively maneat3e requirement to maintain a safe working environment, but now without chevron and without Osha recommendations and requirements I have no idea what the judge will decide. And furthermore I don’t have a handy guide to safe enough. And without that I’m left grappling with management and my conscience and my limited knowledge of something related to but not fully my field.
I feel the same about the EPA. These regulatory bodies are great reference tools to obligations that remain.
So US citizens should be able to import Chinese Teslas clones for half the price, right ?
No. He’s saying THEY get to ignore all regulations. Not you.
Does this mean I csn buy a Hilux?
Can you not buy a Hilux in the US as it stands?
Nope. Chicken Tax.
We get the Tacoma because pickups have to be huge here to make manufacturing them in Mexico worthwhile or something.
Bigger trucks are allowed to be less fuel-efficient
Also yes. Which is so unbelievably stupid.
Remember that we’re not allowed to call for violence, but it’s okay when Elon does things like this, because allowing industry to poison whole towns isn’t violence, it’s just capitalism.
Sharing the names of Musk’s helpers? Not okay.
Letting nuclear plants operate in a way that risks big swaths of the country uninhabitable? Totally cool.
This horrible for sure, but it’s worth noting they just made it so there are no on-paper repercussions for industry poisoning people. Poor people in rural areas have been getting poisoned (and/or driven from their homes) all along. Major media and unfortunately even EPA officials (as we saw for East Palestine) seem to just ignore or bury it most of the time, similar to the treatment environmental activists have reported when there’s an oil spill/leak and media don’t want to touch it. Here’s the latest example I’ve heard about recently. (I’m not specifically trying to follow this stuff incidentally, but I’m always interested in who corporate media tend to ignore or treat unfairly.)
It’s all going according to plan…we are so fucked
“Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard. It seems to me most strange that men should fear; Seeing that death, a necessary end, Will come when it will come.”
Julius Caesar, ACT II Scene II by William Shakespeare
My power company fucked up my autopay, they then preceeded to not tell me, then they shut off my power without a note or an in person heads up, leaving it indistinguishable from a regular outage until it was dark and my neighbors lights turned on and their billing department was closed for the night. In February.
I’m saying this because all this was illegal thanks to regulations. I reported it to the government because it was danger, irresponsible, and a dick move. I think a lot of people think of regulations as stuff like wheelchair ramps and no knowingly giving entire towns cancer, but it’s also shit like this, that you have to tell people that you shut off their power for non-payment and warn them before you do so they don’t have to spend a night eating takeout by candlelight for no reason.
If industrialists can pollute wherever they want, we should be allowed to live wherever we want. Private property is just a regulation at the end of the day.
Rich people can afford private well-armed security guards… (No, the police don’t count since we’re not doing regulations any more)
Well time to stockpile then
The police are the weak armed security guards for rich people…
All this bullshit from someone that never even took a US civics class. And likely has little to no idea of US history.
He learned enough. Accrue enough money, and you can do whatever the fuck you want.
Shhh the poores may figure it out!
Crashing two planes in his first week wasn’t enough, huh?
He’s starting with planes, but next he’ll be crashing rockets in your backyard and charge you for the cleanup.
Musk does not clean up environmental messes. He just makes them.
But that was the fault of the DEI - the secret shadow government responsible for all things you don’t like.
Side note, Im still not buying this “Worlds richest man” Label.
I believe that title still belongs to Vladimir Putin. his wealth is not published though. He Robbed a vast nation blind to the point that he is a living god in Russia.
Putin has Musk and Trump by the balls, for sure.
I think its less of a master giving orders to a dog dynamic, and More of a “I’ll have mine, you have yours” dynamic.
I still dont know if they are fucking crazy enough to try it. but this is whats in the back of my mind with this aggressive and jingoistic rhetoric against Canada, the EU, and Ukraine.
America may have stepped down from the stage of the Free world, and the Free world may very well be finished. but whats left of it still has nuclear weapons.
He mostly lives off debt with tesla being the collateral. Of tesla shares tank hes going to get margin called so to speak
I’ve been reading for 20+ years that the real richest in the world are oil barons in the middle east. I believe a few people are projected to have up to a trillion dollars in assets/wealth etc, but they aren’t celebs or post about it via publicly traded organisations etc.
Who knows though
I mean the House of Saud is worth over a trillion dollars I believe.
Putin could also easily have over a trillion dollars in assets, but they’d obviously be hidden. Does he? We’ll never know.
If that’s how Putin got rich, Elon is soon to catch up
