Non-Americans watching the US struggle to decide between electing a professional career politician or a racist serial sex offender with 34 felony convictions and the IQ of a spoon

Anyone have suggestions on a camera which can do clean HDMI output at 4K60fps? I've really been loving my GH5 for YouTube and streaming, but the autofocus isn't great and I've resorted to manual focus because it has no face tracking capabilities.

Does anyone know much about those account recovery scammers who claim to be hackers who can help you recover lost social media accounts or hack your ex? Are they individuals/small groups or large organizations like the call center scams?

There's a couple who've been using my real name to scam people and I'm annoyed enough to take out a couple of low level scammers, but not yet annoyed enough yet to spend time dismantling an entire foreign organization.

For those with a short term memory:

You really don't need to wonder how Trump would have handled the Middle East. On his 6th day in office he signed an executive order banning Muslims from entering the US. 3 months later he dropped the biggest non-nuclear bomb the US has ever made on Afghanistan for no reason other than he really wanted to drop the biggest bomb they had. Then to round out his first year in office, he gave Jerusalem, the most religiously significant place on earth for Muslims, Christians, and Jews, to Israel, resulting in the UN calling an emergency security meeting where every single member voted "wtf, no", only to get overridden by the US' veto power.

Sure, Biden and Netanyahu absolutely deserve to be dragged kicking and screaming down to The Hague to face a war crime tribunal, but if you think Trump isn't going to make things 1000x worse, just go ahead and save me the time by writing "I told you so" on a sticky note and stapling it to your forehead.

@divclassbutton I don't think it's possible to win more than making money from getting sued lmao

I still think the absolute funniest tax policy was what Ireland did. They basically became a tax haven for foreign corporations to attract all the rich multinational tech companies and generate a ton of tax revenue in the process. The EU wasn't happy about it, so they sued Ireland and won. The outcome of the lawsuit was that Ireland had to charge back taxes + interest to the companies it gave tax breaks to, making the country even more money in the process. Probably the most "don't hate the player hate the game" economic policy I've seen in a while.

Idk if it’s an ADHD thing, but I’ve notice sometimes when I reach a certain level of extreme sleep deprivation I become significantly more productive that my baseline state.

One thing I thing I do think the US does a lot better than the UK in terms of elections is having a couple months window to flee the country following an election. In the UK if Trump won he'd be in office within like 24 hours of the election and I'd be so fucked

I really don't encourage rolling hatred of Biden's handling of certain issues onto Kamala. VP is a literally useless position. For all intents and purposes her job was to just be a backup dancer for whatever Biden is doing.

Reading between the lines, I think she would have handled a couple of key issues much better than Biden did, she's just not making her position clear before the election because doing so would harm her chances of being elected. I'd bet money that she is going to be a lot closer to what you want than Biden ever was.

Secondly, if Kamala wins, you will likely never have to worry about Trump ever again. The majority of the Republican party despises him, they just ran the numbers are realized they can't win without him. He holds the key to the MAGA cult, and if he runs as an independent it splits the right-wing vote and they lose the election.

If he loses a second time in a row, it literally doesn't matter since they can't win with him either. their best bet is to get rid of him themselves. He has a ton of court cases hanging over him, and if he ends up it jail he loses his influence and ability to split the vote in the next election. Their voters won't even remember him in 4 years never mind what they did, so they have the perfect opportunity to put an end to his tyranny for good, and I think there is a good chance they take it.

The bigger a margin Kamala wins by, the more likely it is that the Republicans party will take Trump to a farm upstate and therefore the more likely it is that the US can go back to having semi-normal elections instead of narrowly avoiding the complete and total collapse of democracy every 4 years.

US visas are ridiculously strict and specific. Student visas don't come with work permits or a SSN, so he would not have been allowed to work at all. Also, if you drop out of school (which he did), you lose the visa and have to go back home.

In order to start a company his best best bet would be a H1-B, but there's two problems.

1. The company petitioning for his visa is his own company, which would indicate he'd already been working illegally, making him ineligible for any future US visa.

2. H1-B visas typically require you at least have a bachelors degree, which he didn't since he dropped out.

I'd bet money Elon's two degrees from UPenn are the result of investors pulling some strings to get him admitted into those programs and ensure he'd pass, then someone restructured his company to disguise the fact he'd already been working illegally, so they could have his own company petition him for a H1-B.

Like, this guy wasn't just an illegal immigrant, he'd have had to commit straight up fraud on multiple occasions to have had any chance of getting legal status.

I'm so glad someone actually investigated this. I've always suspected he was an illegal immigrant. None of his story makes any sense if you're familiar with US immigration. You can't just go to school in the US as a foreigner, drop out, then start a company.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/10/26/elon-musk-immigration-status/

I've seen a lot of wild things during US elections, but the PAC paying for ads in Jewish neighborhoods claiming Kamala supports Palestine and then running the same ads in Muslim neighborhoods claiming Kamala supports Israel is by far the wildest.

What's even wilder is a significant amount of money come from Elon Musk, and he's potentially their largest source of funding, but it'd be basically impossible for the average voter to figure out where the money came from because it's all routed through multiple dark-money PACs which don't disclose donors.

It took a bunch of different investigation from NYT, WSJ, and WaPo to figure out where the funding was coming from. 404 Media wrote a nice piece which briefly summarizes all the different PACs involved and who investigated them.

Business cost inflation be like:
"I could do cool live hacking demos if I had a powerful VM server capable of running an example corporate network that's accessible from my studio over LAN"

"hmm, getting a server wouldn't cost too much, but I'd be pretty hot and noisy, so I'd need somewhere away from my studio to host it. Shouldn't be too hard if create a fiber bridge between my studio and my network rack with a bit of extra network hardware"

"Oh wait, The network closet doesn't have enough space for a server, and there's nowhere else I can put it where it won't be annoying, so I'll need a bigger house first"

Then I total the cost and suddenly I'm looking at $180k in expenses just for making slightly better YouTube videos

I've always known that marketing budgets are way bigger than cybersecurity budgets, but I don't think anything ever made me want to cry more than when I started getting influencer proposals and realized my entire cybersecurity salary is basically just 2 Instagram post per month

@jerry It's back to Pre-Google web browsing, unfortunately. Cultivate a list of good source and websites, then use them directly.

One of the things I've learned the hard way doing contracting is even if it's true, you cannot operate from the mindset of "I need money" and "some money is better than no money", because this is what the person you're negotiating with is betting on.

They're not only going to lowball you, they're going to make it sound like that's the absolute highest they can go, and some will even legit walk away if you refuse their offer, then come back later and offer you more. I've had ones where they say half my minimum fee is the highest they can go, I restate my minimum fee, they walk away, come back a month later and offer me 4x what I was asking for.

After like a month of being genuinely so burned out I didn't want to work, I got a way better idea of what the actual fair value of my skills was because I just kept unconditionally declining every offer, which resulted in most companies walking away but some going 10x, 20x, and even 50x their initial offer. Taking only 2 of the high offers I received made me more than taking every "highest we can go" offer back to back and just working all day every day.

The crazy part is, you expect that they higher they're paying the higher their expectations, but in my experience the more they're paying the more reasonable and realistic they tend to be, because they've usually done this before, whereas the genuine low offers how no idea the value of your skills, work, or how long what they're asking for should take.

My mid 5 figure contracts usually contact me 8 months before their deadline, we'll have an agreement within 6 months of their deadline, they'll set clear expectations, assign me a point of contact to check in with along the way, and always be available to help should I have any question.

On the flip side, 80% of the 4 figure contract I've taken, I've immediately regretted. For the same amount of work, one literally asked me upon signing the contract if I could submit my the project by the next day, and when I clarified that they want me to do the entire project in the space of 1 night, working over night, they said they could give me an extra day "if I really needed it".

One of the things that worries me most about the next election is tech. The two biggest threats to tech companies right now are anti-trust and regulation (both of which they wholly need and deserve). Their business models rely on exploitation, and GenAI is basically just copyright infringement as a service.

They see Trump as an easy path to a world in which tech CEOs get to play kings. Not only is Trump pro-deregulation, but will likely also try to gut the DOJ and several other agencies out of spite for coming after him, and those agencies just so happen to be the ones that also handle antitrust.

I think Elon might have actually had a psychological breakdown and become completely untethered from reality, but the rest of the tech CEOs and founder suddenly putting their weight behind Trump is a very deliberate attempt to use him as a tool to weaken the federal government's ability to keep them in check.

I think gig working services are a great example of how capitalism's main point of innovation is making things worse in every way imaginable, which convincing people to just kind of deal with it.

It went from you could call your local takeout, they'd offer free deliver within a certain range, then you just tip some high school kid $6.

Now you get doordash, who charge the restaurant a 30% commission, which the restaurant passes on to you. then you pay a service fee, delivery fee, benefits fee, credit card fee, coming up with new fees fee, and a tip on top of that.

Then, despite the delivery costing more than my entire order, the driver makes less than minimum wage, my food arrives cold, and the restaurant takes the heat for any delivery issues.

I've got to the point where I've just started stealing gig workers. I offer to pay them directly to run errands for me. They make more than the service/agency pays them, I save money not funding some techbro's yacht, and they do a better job because there's an ongoing relationship.

Also, fun fact. If you Google "United Nation" right now, the first result is Israeli government propaganda

When it got leaked that the RoboTaxi would have supercar doors, I thought it meant like Scissor doors which are designed to rotate upwards so you can enter/exit the vehicle easily in tight spaces and don't have to risk hitting things with the doors.

But instead they've made some weird cross between scissor doors and gullwing doors, which open diagonally upwards. From what I've seen it looks like to even open the doors at all, you'll need more clearance than you would need to fully extend a regular car door (which is rarely actually necessary), then on top of that it needs vertical clearance too.

I doubt we'll have to worry as they're never actually going to release it, but the door design would make it completely useless in an urban setting. Need to get out in traffic? Nope. Next to a parking meter? Nope. Parking lot? Nope. Walls? Nope. Nothing screams urban friendly design like a car with a 3 meter wingspan.