Not the person you responded to, but my actual answer is that’s because all of the national political parties in the U.S. are corporations whose business is politics.
They’re basically glorified staffing agencies that invest a lot of money into marketing. Instead of stocks, the wealthy buy ownership with donations or other arrangements coordinated via PACs.

This has been the approximate state of affairs for decades and became the de facto standard with Citizens United.

Re: The reception of your comments - I think people hate to see that reality. Facing it feels inescapably hopeless. Polite fictions are far easier to maintain. But in a brief skim of your comments, your positions align with me — even if now I’m angry and sad for the reminders of how dog shit this is.

Honestly, Tesla’s quality is far less than most vehicles.
Apple has a lot of fair criticisms leveled against it, but their products are at least built as well as their competition. Unless I’m woefully out of the loop. That’s also possible.

Thank you. Things are definitely better. I can’t say I’m normal. I mean, I trauma dump on strangers on the internet in the name of interesting anecdotes, but I think I threaded a needle that few manage to thread. I’m more or less financially stable, with a solid career, comfortable prospects, and a good home life with someone who grew up under equitable circumstances, and also managed to escape the cycle, so we have a good understanding/acceptance of each others foibles.

Oooh, boy.

Shortly after my parents divorced, my mom both fell more heavily into drug use and moved us (me, and two of my sisters) halfway across the country to the magnificent town of Throckmorton, Texas.
My mom found a dealer, who became her boyfriend, and they wound up spending a lot of time together. So much so that sometimes they’d take us to abandoned houses and leave us there for hours before they came back. My mom was going through a phase - she wound up dyeing her hair so much it somehow looked orange in the sun and green in the shade. But she also was sort of falling off being around the house. Sometimes it was just a day, then a day or two. We learned she lost her job, which was a problem - the house we lived in was provided by her employer. One Friday she left.
When Monday rolled around, we didn’t go to school. The school called that afternoon, and we were honest with them. Our mom was gone and we didn’t know what to do. By Wednesday, they had managed to contact our grandma, who had extended family nearby, and they swooped in before CPS.
We were eventually mustered back “home” to where more immediate family lived, and we floated for a long time. Not quite a year, but long enough that we moved up a grade and we celebrated NYE at my grandma’s.

My mom emerged from wherever she’d been. She convinced my family to bring us back to her, to come live in a battered women’s shelter in Abilene - not far from where she’d disappeared. She was in AA, and NA, and even briefly went back to college.

She never told us believable or consistent stories about what happened. It was always a tale of woe and coercion. Once she told us her drug dealer was an FBI agent that was using her to conduct sting operations and threatened to put her in jail if she stopped helping. In another, it was kidnapping. It was never that she got strung out and tried to run away.

And that may not have been it either. Because after my mom died a few years ago, my sisters, who stayed close to the places we mostly grew up (I fled half a country away), found a weird creative writing exercise: A mother’s letter to a son she gave up for adoption. Odd, but my mom was odd and increasingly tried to get into more creative pursuits as she aged. But then they found a police report that said she got arrested for attacking her boyfriend. The report indicated that she was pregnant. Then they found paperwork from a hospital - standard pregnancy stuff, dating to the time period she was in the wind. The last thing they found was another police report, this time from him assaulting her, indicating she was about 6 months pregnant.
And that’s all we know. We don’t know if this pregnancy came to term - my mom had 6 miscarriages that we knew about. We don’t know if an adoption took place or is she left the kid with her drug dealer - who is now apparently a church alderman (one of my sisters looked him up from the info on the police report).

My mom was both very prideful, and quite racist. Our working theory on why she took this secret to her grave is that it reminded her of her failings and, you know, that she boinked someone she was racist against.

Preamble: My parents divorced when I was young, my dad died a few years later, and I never really got to know him. Plus I have childhood trauma and ADHD, so I don’t remember a lot of my childhood. My parents weren’t great people, and life was pretty rough and tumble growing up.

When I was in my early teens, I found a newspaper clipping from before I was born in some scrapbook or memory box. It was a short little crime blotter story that indicated my dad had accidentally shot himself in the face, because he had mistaken a snub-nose pistol for a lighter while drunk.
I do remember that he had a big scar on his face, but I sort of assumed it was because he liked to get in fistfights for fun.

My mom, a serial liar, confirmed the story, and it’s what I and another one of my sisters have believed for decades.

I mentioned the event in passing to my oldest sister a few months ago and she balked, and immediately began laughing. After she composed herself, she explained that she was home when it happened. The real story is that my dad had ripped someone off in a drug deal, and they did a poor job of trying to kill him. The whole drunk/lighter thing was to avoid additional questions by the police.

So, you know. Gun in a thrown shoe. Sure.

I work on a small team and recently realized my boss is falling victim to survivorship bias. Another colleague and I handle our work, which is mission critical to the org, competently and fairly opaquely, only raising issues as they arise. However some other members of our team have less critical but more visible work that they tend to bungle. The department invests hiring dollars, training efforts, and materials purchases in service of remediating those issues. But my colleague and I are both burned out, eyeing the door, and fully aware there’s no one who understands what we do or is capable of doing it within our organization - aside from each other, but our respective scope of work is non-overlapping and there’s truly not wiggle room to cross train or support each other’s work. I’ve said all I know to say to leadership about this issue but they seem willfully ignorant.

When one of us goes, I think the other will follow quickly. Hiring takes almost 2 months at my work, so the gap/lack of knowledge transfer will make for a huge shit show.

Dicks of Hazzard

🎵 Just good ol’ peens, never meanin’ no harm. Beats all you ever saw, been in trouble with the law since the day they was born. 🎵

And in a very real way, if you’re allowing customers access to source material so they can programmatically manipulate it at a time that online services are rapidly enshittifying, it’s contrary to their business goals. A ripper that upscales is probably trivially easy to use.

And plus, who knows what a client upscaler will hallucinate across multiple models and technology platforms. (Or may be intentionally configured to do.)
No one wants to have to explain to grandpa why all the faces in Dukes of Hazzard have been replaced by glans because he got a meme upscaler.

But then, as now, it won’t understand what it’s supposed to do, and will merely attempt to apply stolen code - ahem - training data in random permutations until it roughly matches what it interprets the end goal to be.

We’ve moved beyond a thousand monkeys with typewriters and a thousand years to write Shakespeare, and have moved into several million monkeys with copy and paste and only a few milliseconds to write “Hello, SEGFAULT”

Right? It’s a darn fine marketing effort.

Someone commented here yesterday that just as NAFTA allowed manufacturers to export jobs and find reasoning to squeeze blue collar workers, creating a general shift to white-collar work in the U.S., this move is designed to squeeze those higher paying white-collar jobs, so that even more money goes into corporate and investor coffers.
My own addition to that thought is that it seems the natural end product is that the only way to make money once that system has done it’s evil deeds is to have money and be a member of the investor class.

Or, in other words - they aim to do to all of the U.S. what Walmart did to small towns across the U.S.

Without a care in the world, obviously. I think the people wealthy enough to not be impacted by this will thrive on exploitation until the U.S. economy is sucked dry to the point of unsustainability for their grift (or revolution occurs), then, like the parasites they are, will take their grotesque wealth and move onto other economies they can exploit.

My girlfriend asked why I carry a gun around the house? 
I looked her dead in the eye and said, “the motherfucking decepticons”. She laughed, I laughed, the toaster laughed, I shot the toaster, it was a good time.

…. I don’t know. It’s just what came to mind when I thought of household appliances being hijacked.

I did a quick search, so I’m basically an expert now. imaginary hair flip

So, some flashlights have multiple brightness modes. I guess that’s controlled via a tiny, low power microprocessor.
And if it’s a computer, it can be hacked!

So the firmware does things, depending on the capabilities of the hardware in the flashlight, but you can set it to override defaults for brightness, change how many levels of brightness you have, add (or remove) a blinky SOS mode, sleep timers in case it’s accidentally left on, and even add a way to check the battery percentage via a button press pattern, that the flashlight responds to with a series of blinks.
No lie, kind of fascinating stuff. I like to hack other stuff, like smart appliances (replacing firmware so it doesn’t share my data, but I still get to use it as a smart device). I don’t think I would be into talking to my flashlight via Morse code, but I can see the appeal as both a hobby, and for folks who need flashlights as safety equipment.

Same. I went with them as a “good enough” option when I needed cameras because I have had a good experience with Anker products, but they’ve slowly enshitified to the point that I’d drop them in a heartbeat if the budget was there.

The focus on piracy is a smoke screen. It’s about capacity.

Build the capacity, and then just start growing that list of reasons things are blocked.

This is out of scope for this community, but the U.S. is amidst a coup.
I mean, literally, it’s being raided by a corporate stooge that is breaking all manner of laws to just reshape it in whatever image they see fit.
In a geopolitical sense, they’re trying to break relationships with close allies, and trying to isolate the country. We see that with the tariff threats, the withdrawal from WHO, the Paris Climate accords, and now with threats to withdraw/pull back from NATO. Domestically, it’s clear that businesses are bowing to Trump or facing government punishment. That much is evidenced by social media companies filtering search results, by media companies tepid criticism of Trump and by the lack of national coverage over anti-trump sentiment. We also see it in terms of the investigations that Trump and his cronies are trying to bring against NPR, of all things.

This is a play in the move to control information access in the U.S. After the media, and social media, which are now yolked, the open web is the next biggest threat to their coup.
And now this is the legislation they’re pushing.

Sure, some may say it’s absurd, but masturbation inspector is a good paying, high quality American job that cannot be exported overseas, and not a job I’d trust to AI.

That state senator is a visionary!

Oh, and as evidenced by the government losing control of the backdoors they implanted into telco companies, this data will be hacked. And having all of it in one place will make it a big target.

So it’s not just the U.S. government that will know about your business, but so will the U.S.’s foreign rivals.
Great fucking strategy. Let’s make sure all our health data is accessible, not improve the health system, and just hope that none of the people whose information you can freely and easily buy online due to lax privacy laws have expensive medical bills and a sensitive job.

Way improve national security. Dumbasses.

What an unexpectedly deep bit of research this threw me into.

In 2005 a company called Fortress Credit loaned the Trump Organization $130 million dollars for the construction of trump tower that it later ‘forgave.’ Fortress Credit is owned by Fortress Investment Group, which is owned by SoftBank. Additionally, SoftBank tried to engage with Trump in 2017 under a similar scheme, where they offered to invest in the U.S.’ IT infrastructure as part of some deal they were cooking up with Trump.
Incidentally, in 2019, New Fortress Energy, also part of the constellation of companies, was granted a peculiar permit to transport LNG over rail lines within populated areas - something that is generally not done due to the danger involved.
So that’s just, you know, the corruption cherry on top of this shit cake.

So now, we have SoftBank, OpenAI, and Oracle - companies whose CEO’s ‘bent the knee’ announcing a half a trillion dollar investment into an all knowing AI medical black box that the government (and its corporate sponsors) intend to use to track all your medical information.
Yes. Centralized government tracking of your periods, ladies. If this system ever works, the government will know if you’ve ever told a medical professional that you use illicit drugs, even drugs that may be legal at the state level, but illegal federally. The government will know if you’re on antidepressants - something that JFK Jr. wants to send people to re-education/labor camps for being on. They will know if you’ve ever told a doctor that you’re not CIS or straight.

And we know that SoftBank can’t afford to invest that much. They took out a $4 billion loan 2 years ago, and then asked for another 1.1 billion shortly after. Even Elon Musk is saying they don’t have the money.
So they’re going to invest some money in something, get very overpriced government contracts for the operation of it, and use a fraction of the overages from that to ‘invest’ further until their obligation is fulfilled or forgiven – in much the same way that telcos fleeced the government to build out broadband and never did.

It’s a bad deal for all of us, and the very best outcome for anyone is that it will never work.
Because if it does work, we will lose our medical privacy, and we lose control of any data we’ve ever shared with medical professionals - one of the few areas in U.S. citizen’s lives where there are privacy laws to keep them safe.

Ooh. Yeah. Possible exposure. Definitely grounds for testing.

If I’m honest, I think your dad’s logic is sound:
Whether or not your brother has COVID is immaterial to the fact that he has an illness that is likely contagious and is still planning to visit your compromised aunt.
If she’s ill enough that any illness could tip the scales for her, then it doesn’t matter which illness. The real question is why the hell is your brother considering visiting at all.

Not that you’re wrong for asking that, it’s just that your question is superseded by a question that it seems your dad forgot to think about while contradicting you.

Edit: Scratch that. I can’t do words good sometimes.
I re-read your comment. I misunderstood part of your comment. I thought you were saying your brother is visiting your aunt sick, who has cancer. But your aunt is sick with cancer. My whole comment is predicated on a scenario that isn’t happening.