Maduro’s grip on power relies fundamentally on electoral manipulation.

All the “Maduro cheated to win the election” stuff comes from the same people insisting Biden cheated to win in 2020 and Obama cheated in 2008.

Following the contested 2024 election, Maduro launched “Operation Tun Tun” (Operación Tun Tun), a brutal crackdown described by experts as “state terrorism”.

Were these experts affiliated with Elliot Abrams?

Conservatives do love self-owning with the anti-Castro rhetoric

But what about those on the left?

Idk about the rest of y’all, but I’ve been volunteering with the Houston Chapter of Food Not Bombs at every opportunity.

There’s far fewer of us than cops, and we’re more focused on keeping our impoverished neighbors alive than getting in gunfights with the police.

But maybe that’ll change. I guess we’ll see.

Who wants to be the first to martyr themselves getting turned into Swiss cheese after firing the first shot?

Thomas Matthew Crooks tentatively raising his hand

Where are the bearers of arms who bear arms in case of government tyranny?

They’re the guys in the ICE uniforms, more often than not

“My stupid parents have fucked up my life” is a classic trope of the Faerie Tale genre.

Heretical trigonometry has no place in God’s poop disposal system.

what happens when your profile starts to match up with someone who commits crimes?

I’d dismiss this as fanciful ten years ago. But we’ve got ICE agents staking out grocery stores and flea markets looking for anyone passably “illegal”. Palantir seems to have made a trillion dollar business model out of promising an idiot president the ability to Minority Report crime. And then you’ve got the Israeli’s Lavendar AI and “Where’s Daddy” programs, intended to facilitate murdering suspects by bombing the households of relatives.

I guess it wouldn’t hurt to be a little bit more paranoid.

I gotta say, I’ve never really found the appeal of the self-propelled vacuum cleaners. They’re incredibly finicky and prone to getting snagged on surfaces. They don’t have particularly good suction and their waste storage is minimal. Tons of moving parts that wear through easily over time. Belts, fans, and wheels all get worn away from the device’s heat and exhaustive regular use.

The time savings is minimal and the expense is extraordinary. I just don’t think its worth the trouble.

I see someone has found the LinkedIn joke accounts

wasted

Putting on the “They Live” glasses

deliberately paid out to those complicit in the imperial occupation

The thing about Anarchy is that, for many people, the cashless society where you own nothing and are fully removed from the machine of industry is already here. Its just called “poverty”.

The problem is that this kind of poverty isn’t equally distributed. You’ve still got this large, heavily armed occupying force that preserves money, capital, and the painful prodding of induced productivity for everyone else.

“Everyone and everything will end in my lifetime. I’ll be here to see it all crumble just before I am incinerated in the blast.”

is another popular escapist fantasy.

No one wants to believe they’ll just have to hobble through a slow and painful decline.

You really think companies in America with monoplies would lower prices just because their costs went down?

So, theoretically, there’s a point at which induced demand through lower prices can raise profits. Having a monopoly on an elastic good only benefits you when you’re onboarding new clients at an escalating pace. Private energy companies looking to increase energy consumption overall may well take an upfront haircut on the retail price in order to encourage more people to adopt hardware that consumes the commodity.

But - over the long term - sure, the incentive is to capture more revenue in pursuit of higher profit. And that means raising prices faster than inflation.

That said, a public investment, could be pursued as a loss-leader. Public money invested in publicly owned utilities raises the availability of low-cost energy for private consumption. This is spent in pursuit of higher overall economic growth.

Our utility bills would be cheaper if the government invested

So much of the price of a thing is bound up in the administrative overhead and profit extracted at every step of the delivery process. You can pull a kwh of energy out of the ground, in the form of a lump of coal or a liter of gas, for pennies on the dollar when it is eventually sold retail. And that’s before we consider the pricing impact of artificial scarcity that occurs under the ERCOT model of wholesale electricity auctions.

By contrast, the TVA system has kept prices below (often far below) the national market rate simply by operating at-cost as a public enterprise. Energy companies in socialist states - from Sweden to Iran to China - can even retail electricity at subsidized rates (below cost of production) as a loss leader intended to spur high value domestic energy-hungry industries like steel manufacturing and chip fabrication.

Getting to green energy now that the global economy is flush with dirt-cheap high yield solar panels and market-competitive lithium batteries definitely cuts the raw labor / machine costs of fossil fuel extraction. And they defer the tail costs of fuel waste pollution management as well as the associated ecological and human health knock-on effects. But even sticking to the old fossil fuel economy is cheaper under a public system when the costs of operation aren’t inflated by the demands of private administrators and investors.

Internet in 2005: “Don’t trust anything you read in the newspaper, watch on TV, or hear on the radio. The real truth is here.”

Internet in 2015: “You can now read the newspaper, watch TV, and listen to the radio on the Internet! The real truth is here.”

Internet in 2025: “AI gibberish”

Stop threatening me with a good time

Appropriate, given the context