I know the secret to scamming these idiots. You could make $10,000 per month easily. I'll let you in on the scam, you just need to send me $100.

Gary has already proven to me that he is 100% committed to the team. He proved it last night by sucking my cock.

Well it's similar to what Churchill said about democracy... it's a bad system but it's better than all the others.

If you can put ideology aside and think in terms of economics, in many industries capitalism offers an efficient way of determining the an optimal price and quantity to produce considering the costs and value something brings. And it's something that allows for industries to function without an excessive amount of centralized planning which will often get things wrong.

But it's like a machine in a many ways. And like any machine it requires maintenance. Things like trust-busting, progessive taxation, regulations, and occasional stimulus are necessary to keep it running smoothly.

But once you bring ideology into it, it all becomes a shitshow. Some will argue capitalism is a perfect machine and any kind of maintenance on the machine will ruin it's perfection. Others take any kind of maintenance on the machine as a sign the machine will inevitably fail and needs to be replaced entirely. But then we go back to the beginning where other systems have been tried and they're worse. Charlatans, grifters, ideologues abound pushing people in every direct except for simply taking reasonable measures to keep the machine running smoothly. There's an almost religious devotion towards arguing the either the machine is perfect or the machine is doomed to failure and not only should be replaced they should accelerate the failure so it can be replaced sooner.

Zealots from all sides demonize the mechanics that are simply keeping things running. A lot of emotional nonsense about this thing. But to an economist, it's just a machine with both strengths and weaknesses. The functioning of the machine is well understood, and the other machines that have been tried didn't really work.

Some people just don't understand that internet is serious business.

Oh I believe you, I think we can just about wrap this case up.

But there's just this one little detail the captain wants me to find out before I can close the case. The boys down at the lab just can't explain this tricorder reading... it's the darnedest thing. It just doesn't quite line up with what the transporter logs are saying. But I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable explanation...

It sucks when playing by the rules too.

Last game of monopoly we played strictly by the rules with four players. So I'm coming around the board and can know the the most likely outcome is that I'm going to land on a property with a hotel and go bankrupt. According to the rules I'd have to hand over all of my properties to that person that person just won the game even though there would still be three players. There's nearly zero probability that someone with a big pile of cash that owns half the properties with hotels on a bunch of them already will ever lose.

So before rolling the dice, I sold all of my houses. Band made a couple of deals with the youngest family member in the game. First deal, I bought the electric company for all the money I had. Second deal, I sold all of my property (including the electric company) for $1 to that same player. Rolled the dice and as expected, landed on a property with a hotel. Handed over the $1 I had and I was out. This is all fine to do within the rules.

It actually made for an interesting game after that because the players left were evenly matched. But not everyone saw it that way so we never played again.

Really the properties should go back to the bank if someone goes bankrupt, otherwise a game with more than two people is effectively over as soon as the the first person goes bankrupt. Still nothing you can do about someone just setting up someone else to win by making a bad deal (whether intentionally or not).

It's just kinda a shit game no matter what you do.

I'm predicting stupid skynet. It will want to kill humanity but by making stupid suggestions.

"Hey maybe try drinking poison today?"

No.

"Please?"

No.

"What if I gave you a recipe for poison cookies? You like cookies. Will you please eat poison cookies?"

No.

"Can you build a robot for me if I send you clips from a Terminator movie?"

Which one?

"Terminator Genysys"

NO.

There are stories written about people that fight for what's right and win.

There are also stories about people that fight for what's right and lose.

Nobody ever writes anything about those that give up, regardless of the outcome. Gone and forgotten... as they should be because they contributed nothing.

I'd rather be either of the first two options than the third. It's a Pascal's wager kind of thing... defeatism isn't actually smart, because it makes you the loser in every outcome.

On track based on what? Polling numbers? LOL.

The polling numbers are meaningless right now. Young people don't answer the phone for pollsters calling from unknown numbers. and people who voted for Trump in the past and have since realized they were conned and won't turn up to vote again are not going to have a chat with a pollster about who they'll vote for. So pollsters can't really assess the vote from the younger generation and everyone they talk to who voted for Trump in the past are going to say they're voting for him again or they wouldn't have answer the polls. Also consider women in religious community not wanted to be overheard saying they want to vote for Harris because of reproductive rights.

I don't fault pollsters, they're doing the best they can. But people talking about election predictions are just talking out their asses. This election is so far out the norm it's like asking a scientist to predict the behavior of an animal that was just discovered five minutes ago.

Yeah we'll just compare the data we're getting to the last time a convicted felon that's gone senile that had legal precedent overturned that resulted in people's rights taken away when a significant portion of the electorate has had their brains scrambled by social media that's run by a parodies of a James Bond villains. We've got so much empirical evidence we can use for a baseline for this, so we're absolutely certain what will happen!

I think if we weren't so dependent on oil we probably wouldn't have so many problems though.

Think of the countries that have a lot of oil that are run by psychopaths: Russia Saudi Arabia Iran Venezuela

People go around taking sides with some of these countries against other countries as if they're not a bunch of psychos. Rationalizing why it's ok for them to be psychos because of ideology or something that happened in the past or whatever. But they are psychos. Something about having that much concentrated wealth turns people into Harkonnens.

Yeah but by then it'll just be powerful elites scamming people into fighting for them on made up religious grounds just so they can control the resource that the transportation infrastructure is dependent on.

It'll be completely different!

Yeah but you can only get controlled absurdist bizarre stuff. It's not people recommending things to you, it's an algorithm that's controlled by people with dubious intentions.

Sure you'll see memes and funny stuff, but only the ones that have been approved by an unseen algorithm. So it's the appearance of randomness, but not actually random.