It’s amazing how good an Aztec looks after seeing the Cybertruck.

give credit where due to Biden for waiting so damned long to step aside

He deserves more credit for appointing an attorney general who sat on his fucking hands for four years. Using the power of the executive branch to prosecute flagrant criminal actions was the only way this mess could have been forestalled.

It sounds way too coherent. It’s actually a decently-written blurb and has too little ALL CAPS. I think they messed up the AI that writes his tweets.

Big midterm surprise?

This is the depressing thing. Even if they do somehow lose their grip over public opinion, a fake terrorist attack would be all they’d need to restore themselves. Good thing Putin has no experience with faking terrorist attacks …

Even Hitler didn’t try to do this with Germany.

Hitler “fixed” Germany’s economy by basically borrowing a bunch of money and then attempting to destroy the people who had loaned it to him (Jewish financiers were a large source of the borrowed money, as was the Soviet Union - a little-known but majorly important part of the Ribbentrop Pact and related German-Soviet agreements).

Rogan literally said Musk “saved us” - before the election no less.

He’s too weak to make a proper job of it.

He got booed at Chappelle’s standup show

Even as much of a hot mess as Chapelle has become, I assume that Musk had to pay him to come onstage with him. I wonder how much it was.

Lol a quarter? I doubt even the real ones comprise a quarter.

Eh, I don’t think he’s been upgraded to the liquid metal version yet so you’d probably be OK.

female candidates with male VP’s named Tim

Man, I had to look up who Hillary’s veep candidate was. Feels like that election was about 60 years ago.

I think we need to go with the Zelensky model (comedian-turned-politician) rather than Zelensky proper. My money’s on Jon Stewart and/or Bill Burr.

Just forget about the “trust fund” because as I mentioned, it’s not central to the way the SS system works. Social Security is simply a system whereby a large base of workers pays taxes to fund the (modest) retirement of a much smaller number of retirees. These are rough numbers, but: the average man starts work at age 21 and retires at age 65 (meaning he pays into the system for 44 years); the average male retiree then dies at age 76 (meaning he collects SS benefits for 11 years). So on average, four workers pay SS taxes to support one retiree. The average SS benefit is $1,583 per month, which means the average worker needs to pay just $396 per month in SS taxes for the system to remain solvent indefinitely. The median annual salary in the US is $59,384 (or $4949 per month) which means the SS tax rate only needs to be 8% (it’s currently 6.2% because the trust fund is being dipped into). Any shortfall could be easily made good by 1) raising the tax rate, and/or 2) raising the cap on taxable income.

This is why the “Ponzi scheme SS” meme is bullshit. A Ponzi scheme provides fake returns to investors by returning part of the money invested by new suckers; as soon as you run out of new suckers, the scheme collapses. Social Security does not in any way rely on perpetually finding new suckers, it only relies on the demographic reality of human beings having a much longer working life than retired life.

No, what happened during the Reagan administration is that the government recognized that decades in the future, the predicted change in the age pyramid would mean more retirees and fewer workers to support them. So rather than slightly increasing SS taxes in the future to cover this, they started increasing SS taxes immediately and investing that overpayment in Treasury bonds (this is the origin of the Social Security “trust fund” which is routinely misrepresented as the entirely of the SS system). This SS trust fund money is primarily what allowed Reagan to run enormous deficits (“fiscal conservative” lol) without causing interest rates to spiral out of control.

There is absolutely nothing about Social Security which is in any way like a Ponzi scheme. It is simply a pension plan applied to the whole country instead of just an individual company.

To benefit from information, you have to be able to filter out the nonsense. Most people have no baseline to work with and are taken in by anything presented confidently and repeatedly.

A few years ago I watched a clip of Musk giving a tour of a sort of museum SpaceX has that shows the evolution of their rockets. At one point he was talking about how the more recent rockets had fewer “fiddly bits” on the outside.

There’s not even pictures of the inside because long term tenants live there.

Lol there aren’t pictures of the inside because the tenants have destroyed the place and are refusing to pay rent, and the landlord - having learned that investing in rental properties is not always the money-printing panacea it’s cracked up to be - is desperate to escape from the situation.

can be ditched by Elon as scapegoats if the need arises

Needs a catchy phrase to go with it. How about “Night of the Long Knives”?

Fun Hitler fact (as if there is such a thing): the phrase “Night of the Long Knives” was coined by Hitler himself in a speech given shortly after the event, although he used the phrase to describe what Ernst Rohm had allegedly been planning himself. The media instead attached the phrase to Hitler’s actions, much against his wishes.

He might very well “need” the money. People generally evolve spending habits that meet or exceed their incomes, even when those incomes seem impossibly huge by us normal people’s standards.