WoodScientist @ WoodScientist @sh.itjust.works

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6 mo. ago

Not if they're incendiary drones meant merely to land on a roof and set a building on fire.

You underestimate the destructive potential of even small drones. Quantity has a quality all its own. Imagine a swarm of thousands of drones, all cheaply built 3D printed things, made by a single individual or small group. They have one task. They fly to a fixed set of GPS coordinates and land. No targeting needed. No AI facial recognition to target some specific politician. No auto-gun mounted beneath a large drone. Just a dirt simple task. They just fly up, over, and down. Once landed, they send a small electrical signal to a small incendiary device, perhaps a thermite charge, installed at the base of the drone. Such drones could be made quite cheaply if made on a large scale.

Imagine fires being started atop the roofs of every building in a city. Oh, and the attack starts with each fire station being attacked by a dozen such drones. Imagine every building in a city being lit on fire simultaneously. Soon a firestorm develops, and the fire starts feeding itself.

Let's say you needed 10,000 such drones. Maybe you make them for $50 each. That's $500k to burn down a city. For the cost of a single building you can burn down every other building in a modest sized city.

We are approaching a point where a single determined individual, using the scale of resources regularly available to a single individual, could recreate the firebombing of Dresden.

Unfortunately now Google is ChatGPT. It provides its own shitty AI answers, and its search results have been corrupted by an ocean of slop.

Skyscrapers and large office spaces are on paper horrible investments and have an awful time filling enough vacancies to offset their upkeep. The only thing that makes them a “safe” investment is that every company uses them as a way to bank equity. If those same companies pulled the rug from under themselves they would all lose that safe equity piggy bank.

This is just the sunk cost fallacy though. You can inflate the paper value of assets by playing games like this, but the bill always comes due in the end. Yes, companies that do this can juice their books a bit in the short term, but they're harming themselves in the long term. They retain a bit higher book value for their real estate, but they make whatever goods or services they provide noncompetitive in the marketplace. They have competitors who aren't bogged down by past bad real estate decisions. Those competitors can outcompete them on price and can attract better talent. Meanwhile, they're stuck in their ways, fruitlessly trying to inflate their real estate holdings, all while their revenue is plummeting because they can't attract good people and have to charge higher for their services than their competitors.

It's just the sunk cost fallacy. You could inflate the book value of real estate by doing all sorts of foolish things. You could create a subsidiary and have that company rent out some of your floor space for absurdly high rates. But you're ultimately just robbing Peter to pay Paul. Those commercial real estate properties have already lost their value. The value was lost the minute it was proven that work from home was a superior work model.

These companies are going to go bankrupt at a mass scale when the next recession rolls around.

Fuck, these companies might actually be violating the law. Deliberately choosing unproductive business practices just to cook your real estate books is something Enron would do.

Oh, the CEO should also be caned....rectally.

I like the idea of the transition happening slowly over several decades. Basically you found a company, and you'll be able to maintain majority control over it until you reach your retirement. You can have a vision and carry it through. You just can't create a multi generational empire that makes your children and grandchildren into newly minted aristocrats.

I mean, obsess over performative semantics if you want. I just want to see the bastards hang.

Nah. SCOTUS will never let that happen. Rendition him and his ICE goons to countries like Venezuela. He and his ICE gestapo will have caused the deaths of countless Venezuelan citizens. They're fully within their legal rights to charge him and his agents with crimes against humanity. If Trump can rendition innocent people to third party countries, we sure as hell can extradite the guilty to face trial. Don't even try to use the US justice system, not while SCOTUS is so openly corrupt. Just ship all these bastards off to the home countries of their victims. Let them do with them as they please.

We need to rendition Trump to Venezuela or other applicable country. They can then try him for all the deaths of their citizens he's caused in his numerous concentration camps. SCOTUS can take its presidential immunity ruling and boof it up Kavanaugh's ass. If we can't try him and all his ICE goons here, then we can send them all somewhere where they can be tried. Trump is sending innocent people to random countries. No reason we can't do the same with mass murderers.

We need to start taxing companies more that put undue burden on the infrastructure and environment. Do you require your employees to come in to an office for work that could be done from home? You should have to pay a double employer payroll tax for every employee you do this to. We need to start taxing the vanity of CEOs.

This CEO should be immediately canned for incompetence. Anyone who can't understand the sunk cost fallacy has no business running any organization.

Work should provide ownership. Worker-owned co-ops should be the default form of business organization. We should write it into corporate charter law that any business over a certain number of employees must gradually transition to a worker-owned co-op. For example, maybe every company over 30 employees must transfer 2% of its equity to its employees each year. This would mean after about 35 years, the business would be majority owned by its employees. Business founders and investors can still make plenty of profit, but you prevent the accumulation of generational wealth. You prevent the formation of an aristocracy by slowly transferring the ownership of company's from their founders to their employees over time. (And obviously you have a lot of other policy details to make this work, such as not just having a flat threshold. Always have to point this out as the "umm aktually" brigade likes to confuse aspirational policy descriptions for actual legislation.)

I want Democratic politicians to start talking about the proper response to this. I don't expect them to endorse people trying to perform armed raids against these facilities, but they need to start talking about holding people accountable. I'm sorry, but if you're working at a concentration camp, you need to be in prison at best, and possibly even hanged for crimes against humanity. We need to start talking NOW about putting all these ICE agents in jail when this is all over. These people are criminal scum who need to be prosecuted for their crimes. And to head off any possibility of a blanket pardon, we need to be talking about using extra-territorial rendition to try these people for crimes against humanity.

A presidential pardon will not save ICE agents from this legal liability. Even with a pardon, these agents can still be tried in the International Criminal Court or other body that practices universal jurisdiction for crimes against humanity. And even beyond that, there are dozens of potential nations to send ICE agents to for their crimes. After all, they are committing crimes against humanity against the citizens of dozens of nations. If the ICC isn't viable, we can extradite these people to Venezuela, Mexico, or any number of other countries. These countries can then try them for the deaths of their citizens at the hands of ICE agents.

We didn't domesticate corn. Corn domesticated us.

If you do, post a link, I'll watch it!

I love the old Melody Sheep version.

Quite possibly. Look, we're in a state of cold civil war. On the path we're on, we're likely to end up in a hot war that will destroy all our infrastructure, level our cities, and leave millions of us dead. We could do all of that, or we could simply admit this isn't working, go our own separate paths, and find a new way forward.

The US is honestly too big for its own good. There's a reason the oldest nations on Earth tend to be much smaller than the US. Nations as large as the US either break apart or collapse into dictatorship and authoritarianism. The only way to hold such a large nation together is with an iron fist. Frankly, I would rather have smaller countries and retain democracy than lose democracy in the name of retaining a large single nation.

I'm at the point where I think we need to dissolve the United States entirely. The Constitution you learned about in school no longer exists. Congress is as ineffectual and cowed as the Senate during the Roman Empire. SCOTUS has completely abandoned the Constitution, but we all still pretend that its rulings are worth even reading, let alone following. The president is completely ineligible for office due to taking foreign bribes and leading a rebellion. SCOTUS believes sex discrimination isn't sex discrimination. And the presidency's powers have been expanded through emergency power after emergency power. And entire departments, which Congress only created because they were intended to operate independent of the president, now have been completely supplicated due to rulings by a corrupt Supreme Court.

We are caught in a cycle of ever-elevating abuse and violation of norms. Republicans are always the first one to break norms, but once the precedent is set, Democrats adopt it to. At this point, we're basically electing a national dictator every four years; the core principle of the Constitution - separation of powers, no longer exist. And it's a coin toss whether we'll even have elections in 2028.

I'm sorry, but what are we even doing here? We have two parties that are fighting every four years for control of the national dictatorship. This has made the stakes of every election overwhelming. And both sides are thoroughly convinced of the irredeemable wickedness of the other. Why are we still doing this? We have options.

Government is meant to serve the people. The people are not meant to serve the government. If a government no longer serves the needs of the people, then that government, Constitution, or entire nation can simply be dissolved.

It's time for a peaceful dissolution of the United States. Grant all 50 states independence, let them come back together into whatever new nation or nations they wish to form. Let them write a new Constitution or Constitutions based on the compromises of our own time, not those of 250 years ago. Yes, there would be negotiations that need to happen, but that's happened through countless other national breakups.

And if you think the Constitution precludes this, you haven't been paying attention. There is a very simple way to end the union forever. Someone just needs to run for president on that platform. SCOTUS has given the presidency near dictatorial control over everything in the executive branch. Someone could run for president on the following platform:

"I will be the last president of the United States. Elect me, and I will grant all 50 states full independence. I will fire every single federal employee. I will not collect any taxes. I'll surrender control of military forces to the states. I will not resist any attempts by states to withdraw from the Union. In fact, through these actions I will force them to do so. If Congress or the Supreme Court object, I will ignore them. I will have a clear political mandate to dissolve this failed union. And those voices that want to deny the American people their future will simply be ignored."

That's literally all it would take. Congress and SCOTUS can piss and moan all they want. They'll find themselves meeting in abandoned buildings with no electricity and no one guarding the doors. They can pass whatever silly resolutions or rulings they want; they'll be pissing into the wind. In the meanwhile power will be completely dissolved to the states, and they'll be working with each other to form new regional nations and write new Constitutions for them. Once the back of the existing federal government is broken in this way, there will be no putting it back together.

Our nation was built by human beings for the service of human beings. If we find that this nation is no longer serving the needs of the people, it can simply be peacefully dissolved. If a president were elected on platform of openly promising to do this? They would have such a political mandate that there would be no stopping them.

Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are men!