He was arrested, tried, convicted, and then released by one of Trump’s USAs only to get arrested and tried again decade later. Incidentally, Bill Gates got on a plane with Epstein in 2014, five years after his original conviction. I’m convinced the only reason Epstein eventually got put to a permanent end is that he ran out of money.

There really is no end to the amount of bullshit rich people can get away with.

accusations against “high profile” people shouldn’t just be taken as proof

Yeah. I find it highly suspicious that a guy who got famous for being the loudest misogynist on YouTube would be accused of practicing what he preaches. This would be like if someone accused Mike Tyson of hitting him. Or Tucker Carlson of lying. Or Ben Affleck cheating on his wife. Or OJ Simpson of committing a murder.

You have to take this shit with a huge boulder of salt, because… come on. What are the odds?

I hope the truth comes to light

Hearts out to all those possibly wrongfully accused rapists and sex traffickers. Andrew Tate, Harvey Weinstein, Neil Gaiman, Ron Jeremy. Really hope we can clear aside the dozens and dozens of testimonials from people accusing them of wrongdoing and find a piece of evidence I won’t casually dismiss.

Deal with the root to cause, while also limiting access to dangerous weapons.

Doing either seems beyond the capacity of the modern electoral system. Popular ideas are incapable of permeating a lobbyist firewall in the legislature. Meanwhile, any act of violence just gets folded into our “War on Crime” which justifies more cops and more surveillance and more media hysteria around evil foreigners.

It’s a two minute task, but it happens randomly between the hours of “romantic dinner with my wife” and “ten minutes after the baby finally went down for a nap”.

there’s a world of difference between how much damage someone can do with a knife vs someone with a gun.

Sure. But you can play this game with lots of things. A fertilizer bomb can do far more harm than a hand gun. A shiv is more deadly than a fist.

By all means, regulate away. But the scary thing, at it’s root, is the individual who has decided to throw their life away on some El Paso Walmart killing spree. Selling hand grades at Target won’t make anyone any safer. But it’s the media screaming about Latino Invasion and White Genocide that’s got people really worked up to begin with.

This is a white-paper proposal for a clean-up effort that nobody wants to fund. The CEO of Ocean Cleanup has been pitching this fix since 2012. This isn’t even a new idea, its just been going through permutations of refinement since the initial proposal, with funding coming primarily from private independent donations. But we’re talking tens-of-millions raised on a project that needs 100x that amount.

And it does not appear to include the cost of physically processing the removed waste, just collecting and moving it to another location.

Given the stinginess of state governments when it comes to waste cleanup, I’m not holding my breath.

Nikki Haley couldn’t win the GOP primary for the same reason Kamala Harris couldn’t win the Dem Primary. They’ve got these very fancy resumes built up through a lifetime of insider political brown-nosing and horse trading. But they were still trapped under the glass ceiling, by organizers and mega-donors that don’t respect women.

Hilary - for all her flaws - did “crack the glass ceiling” by hitting a critical mass of insider support that women, up until this point, hadn’t enjoyed. That won Harris a place on Biden’s ticket four years later as a kind-of concession to the PUMAs. But Haley was never going to manage it, because the racism and misogyny in her party is that much thicker. There is no large active feminist wing of the Republican Party.

I don’t think the GOP is realistically going to be able to put up a woman candidate unless the base of the party is drastically altered. Democrat insiders tolerate women, begrudgingly. Republicans hate them at a biblical level.

Wait, the people who criticized Joe Biden or the people who are claiming nobody has criticized Trump for his age?

Seems like this whole thread is just rage-bait.

Until a politician grows a pair nothing is going to change.

Trump took a bullet wound to the ear and he’s still saying the same old stupid bullshit.

I don’t think this is a question of growing a pair. The economic and social incentives to stay the course are simply overwhelming.

America has systemic issues which are by and large a result of what the system was designed to do.

And systems like this are resilient, intransigent, and self-perpetuating.

The slavish devotion to our gun policy is like a contagious mental illness.

Restrictive gun laws and ban shit.

I don’t have the power to do this. Only the politicians owned and operated by the gun lobby have this power, and they’ve been moving us in reverse.

Fuck 2A and all the assholes screaming about them.

I don’t think shoving my dick through a hole in the 2nd Amendment is going to do anything to reduce gun crime. I certainly don’t think trying to shove my dick into a guy screaming about 2A rights is going to fix things.

fuck the constitution. It needs revising.

It is very difficult to redefine the Constitution via legal channels. Especially if you’re just some angry internet guy. You’d need enormous sums of money, a willing media, and a political class that responds to social pressure.

And even when guys like Mike Bloomberg enjoyed most of that, they failed to achieve more than local reforms thanks to the aggressive partisan pushback from conservatives in his old party.

Germany wants to get tough on knife crime with stricter laws

shrug Definitely better than people being able to walk out of a 7/11 with a pair of 9mms, I suppose.

But at some level, this is a people problem, too. Social anxiety inflamed by fascist social media. A 24-hr news cycle that tells people they are being immiserated by evil foreigners. School bullying in buildings where you’ve got 40-60 student class sizes and teachers with barely more than a six-month certificate expected to manage the room. Rising rates of malnutrition, homelessness, and general poverty. And this endless deluge of people telling one another “The civil war is happening any day now”.

You’re going to have people freak out as a result. This is a pressure cooker of a social system and climate change is only going to make things worse. Whether its gun crime or knife crime or people just trying to bite one another in fits of rage, the volume of hate we’ve ingested combined with the commercialized scapegoating of anyone we’re told its okay not to like means… Violence. You’re going to get more violence.

Country that insists we have a “mental health crisis” providing absolutely zero mental health care to people who are clearly showing all the symptoms of said crisis.

Feels like that bulletproof glass is infringing on my 2nd Amendment Rights.

I also think this. But now that I’ve thought it, what’s the next step?

Whose a good little guy? Whose a good little guy? You did such a good job! I’m so proud of you! Yes! You’re an apex predator! You get so many chin scratches!

Reminded of Ted Cruz running around the House and whipping opposition to a government funding deal ten years ago. This led to the historic shutdown of 2013 - the third longest in history - which lasted 16 days and furloughed 800,000 state employees while leaving another 1.3M with delayed paychecks. It was one of the proximate causes of the 2014 downturn and was explicitly listed as the reason for US Government Debt being downgraded to AA from AAA by a number of major private credit agencies.

Four years later, similar tactics under the entirely Republican dominated legislature lead to a 35-day shutdown in 2018. This daisy-chained into the COVID crisis of 2019/2020, sparking a series of flash-crashes and then a final economic plunge in February as the pandemic death toll was swelling and hospitals filled up.

All that is to say, this isn’t a “Trump” thing. Republicans hate the government, love shutdowns, and don’t really care who it hurts so long as it wins them some ideological victories. And while you can definitely argue that the 2014 and 2018 shutdowns hurt their election prospects in subsequent years, what they really salvaged from these fights was permanent reductions in the scope of the federal workforce combined with significant shifts in national priorities (federal debt reduction overtaking climate change and health care reform as top-line priorities).

The Republicans have found a way to extract long term concessions from the federal government via some short-term incumbency defeats. And since they always bounce back as a party, and these incumbents always go on to cushy gigs in the private sector after falling on their swords in the political arena, I’ve got to say that it appears to be a winning strategy in the end.

Trump may lose the Presidency, but Trumpism as a policy appears to have cemented itself within the GOP Congressional majority. Democrats still don’t seem to have a remedy for the decay these shutdowns cause, nor do they seem particularly opposed to the privatization that fills in the gaps these shutdowns create.

Admirals James T. Kirk and Jean Luc Picard absolutely malding right now.

Super computers have been doing this sort of stuff for decades without much problem

Idk if I’d point at a supercomputer system and suggest it was constructed “without much problem”. Cray has significantly lagged the computer market as a whole.

the main issue is on training for LLMs inference is pretty computationally cheap

Again, I would not consider anything in the LLM marketplace particularly cheap. Seems like they’re losing money rapidly.

So what happens if he wins? Would this guy just flip again and support him?

Absolutely. Of course, it won’t matter because he’s not on the Trump inside track anymore. He’s just grifting from the periphery.