It’s the Satanic pursuit of endless profit growth that has driven these companies to Hell. For decades, they focused on expanding the number of stores. But eventually you hit a wall. Eventually the country is saturated, and marketing can only convince people to eat so many burgers.

In a sane world, this is when companies would be content with their current size. Congrats. You won capitalism. Good job. Now just maintain your current size and pay out handsome dividends forever. No need to keep trying to grow.

Well, that’s not good enough for Satanic capitalism; the growth needs to come from somewhere. So they have to start slashing quality and raising prices. It’s enshittification/late-stage capitalism. When you max out growth, all that’s left is to raise prices and cut quality. Ultimately this does destroy a business, but Satanic capitalists only care about short-term concerns.

It’s not fast food though. In-N-Out takes much longer than most sit down restaurants.

Look, reflexively saying “both sides aren’t the same” is ignorant and actively doing harm when you use it to broadly. Are both parties the same? No. But on many issues, both parties are the same. And this is one of those issues. What you are saying is demonstrably, patently false.

The South Carolina bill passed with near-universal bipartisan support.

Same thing with the Texas bill.

On this issue, both sides are just as bad. Democrats are just as bad as Republicans.

The problem Democrats have is that they don’t actually believe in anything. They follow polls and consultants, and they lack any backbone. They have no fight in them.

Look at trans rights. Democrats have completely ceded the issue to Republicans. Trans people make the walking corpses that are the Democratic leadership feel icky, so they offer only symbolic support to the trans community. Kamala, in the face of tens of millions of dollars of right wing demonization of trans people, couldn’t even offer the most basic defense of trans rights and the worth of trans lives. All she could say was, “I’ll follow the law.”

It’s really, really easy to make Democrats completely cave on the rights of any group. All you have to do is make the case to the public that it’s for the good of children. Want to ban porn? Bill it as for the kids, and the Dems will be too chicken shit to say a word against it. Want to send trans people to gas chambers? Say it’s for the kids, and Dems will vote for it. Demonize immigrants? The Democrats will try to outflank you on the right, competing with Republicans to see who can be crueler to immigrants and asylum seekers. Name the bill after a white woman that happened to be killed by an illegal immigrant, make defending it require effort, and Democrats will be falling over themselves to vote to send migrants to death camps.

Are the two parties the same? No. But on many issues, they are virtually identical. As long as you can make a flimsy case that some stripping of rights is for the good of the children, Democrats will ALWAYS be too cowardly to stand up against the propaganda. It’s been this way since at least Tipper Gore in the 90s.

The plan is to classify trans people as being pornographic by their very existence.

The diseases of obesity ARE solved with Ozempic. Because most people who are obese and take Ozempic already know how to eat healthy. They’re just drawn to eat unhealthily large portions of healthy foods. The root cause of the problem is that people are simply too hungry. These medications solve that issue. Fat people aren’t suffering vitamin, mineral, or fiber deficiencies. They’re just eating too much food.

You just don’t want to admit the truth, instead you demand that we magically reorganize our entire society and food industry…instead of just letting people take a pill that solves the root problem at its source.

You’re just a bigot looking for people to hate.

You’ve gone your whole life convinced that you have a moral superiority to people fatter than you are. That YOU have the knowledge. That YOU know what a healthy diet is, and they don’t. That YOU have more willpower than the slobs who have a hundred pounds on you.

But really all it is, is that you were born lucky. Or you got lucky in the foods you were exposed to in early childhood. Your satiation reflex gives you a hunger level that keeps you at a weight below that of the obese people you take such pride in denigrating. But if you were to receive the same reflex they do, you would quickly find yourself at the same weight they are.

And now, thanks to the miracles of modern medicine, we have invented a way to cure these people. We have discovered the means to help millions, to extend lifespans and healthspans by decades.

And you can’t stand it.

Because, now all those evil fat people are going to be a healthy weight again. And how will you know who to cast your judgments upon then? Those damn lying, dishonest, evil fat people! Now they’re hiding their fatness from you! They aren’t any more moral or willful, they’re just hiding their evil!

There is something rotten in your soul.

Additionally while GLP-1 can reduce caloric intake, it doesn’t actually fix the poor dietary choices that got you there in the first place.

This shows an ignorance of how obesity actually works. The primary difference between skinny people and fat people is that fat people are just hungrier. Skinny people have functioning satiation reflexes, while fat people’s have been damaged, likely from exposure to highly processed foods during childhood.

Have you learned nothing from the effect of GLP-1 inhibitors? For years, people have been demonizing fat folks as lazy and ignorant, smug in the self-satisfaction that their superior character and intellect could save them from that fate. And now we’ve apparently learned to bottle willpower, to condense “good dietary choices” into an injection. People take these medicines, and suddenly they find themselves drawn to eat a healthy amount of food, and to eat less sugary and refined crap.

This shows beyond any doubt that people were not making poor choices. They didn’t lack willpower. They never had any fundamental character flaws. They just had a broken metabolism that forced them to crave unhealthy levels of unhealthy food. We give them a shot, and somehow this profound flaw in their moral character just vanishes into the wind.

Obesity is a medical problem. It’s not an education, a willpower, or a character problem. We have tens of millions of people who have had a core part of their bodies - their satiation reflex, poisoned and damaged by the food industry. And instead of helping them, we declare their poisoning to be a moral failure.

You have learned nothing.

These are our forests!

That’s exactly what they did in 2021. Biden appointed a Republican, Merrick Garland, as his attorney general. And Garland sat on his ass for two years without bringing any charges. Only when they were shamed into it by House committee investigations did they actually start to move. By then, it was too late. Trump ran out the clock. They prosecuted Trump to appease the base, but they did so late enough that Trump stood no chance of conviction before the election.

God was such a dick about this. Punishing the innocent people of Egypt, when they lived under the thumb of an absolute monarch. God forbid God actually hold the powerful responsible for their own actions.

Want to know how I would handle it? Here’s my Moses speech:

"Let my people go. If you don’t, one week from today you’ll get a fever bad enough to lay you up in bed. One week after that, you’ll break your left leg, your right leg, your left arm, and your right arm like clockwork, two hours apart. One week after that, if you still haven’t let my people go, you’ll just have a heart attack and drop dead.

Your successors will have one week after assuming power to let my people go, or they will die of a heart attack. If they try to weasel their way out of this by putting a baby or other figurehead in charge, whoever is actually pulling the strings will have one week to let my people go before dying of a heart attack. God will just keep bursting pharaohs until he finds one that is willing to listen."

There. Direct and instant accountability. The only people who get hurt are those who actually have the power to do something. Was it really necessary to kill a bunch of innocent Egyptian children? No, it wasn’t! God should have just sat there and popped off pharaoh after pharaoh. How many pharaohs do you think it would take? Something tells me it’s not many. I think by the time you got to the third or forth, one would say, “fuck it. Fuck my pride. I’m only pharaoh because of this Yahweh fella. I should probably just let his people go. Yahweh does NOT fuck around.”

But nah, that would be too easy. Instead has God has to go and punish a bunch of completely innocent Egyptians who hold no political authority whatsoever.

God is a dick.

Hate to break this to you. But let me introduce you to the favorite saying of every Centrist Democrat that gets elected president:

“It is time to heal and move on.”

They care more about peace than justice.

In the US at least, employment discrimination is fine if it’s due to a bona fide requirement of the job. Ie, the person is fundamentally incapable of performing a job even with reasonable accomodation.

An example of reasonable accomodation is a modified computer/desk setup for someone in a wheel chair. They need a bit more room for maneuvering about their workspace. But someone who is paraplegic is perfectly capable of working most office jobs.

Someone in a wheelchair however is fundamentally incapable of performing certain manual labor jobs, and it is perfectly legal to not hire them for those positions. Quadriplegic people can’t work manual construction labor. You’re not pouring concrete when you’re paralyzed from the neck down, and no reasonable accomodation is going to make that possible.

So for vampires, it really depends on what their work-relevant disabilities are, and how difficult it is to accommodate them. Need to be invited in? A reasonable accomodation for a police department would be to simply not have their vampire officers serve search warrants. They can still respond to emergency calls, as a call for help could give implied permission to enter a home. Vampire officers can still patrol, perform traffic duties, perform detective work, etc. But they simply can’t participate in search warrants execution.

The daylight limitations may be more limiting. Sure a vampire could wear a hood and gloves, and that’s little different from someone wearing a hijab. But it’s still dangerous from a workplace safety concern. All it takes is a perp pulling on your hood, and you start boiling? Huge liability risk for the department. So maybe vampire officers will need to be limited to indoor desk work or the night shift. I think hiring them only for the night shift would be a reasonable accommodation.

Overall, I think vampires could easily be employed as police officers. Some reasonable accommodations are required, but a department outright prohibiting the hiring of vampires likely violates the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Trust isn’t the issue. Probability is. Even without deception, there’s a chance someone can have an STD without knowing it. And there’s a chance that std won’t show up on testing due to incubation times, dormancy phases, and false negatives.

Imagine there is a 1% chance of your partner having an STD without knowing it. 1% doesn’t sound too bad an odds. But if you have 50 partners in an extended polycule, then the chance that at least one of them unknowingly has one is 1-(.99)^50, or 39%. Probabilities compound.

No that’s just wanting to look younger. Again, not every cosmetic treatment is gender-affirming care. Hell, it’s pretty ridiculously to even use the term outside the context of trans healthcare. Musk looked male before and he looked male after. He just thought he looked better and younger with more hair. It had nothing to do with gender.

Just listen to yourself. You appropriate the language of a minority group. Then when actual member of that group comes along and tells you you’re not using it correctly, you double down and try to tell them that you know their own language better than they do.

The reason I push back on this is because the distinction between gender affirming care and general cosmetic treatment really matters. This shit kills people. Men who want hair plugs don’t have a 40% suicide attempt rate.

This watering down of language for cheap political points has very real consequences for the trans community. Right now our rights and healthcare are under attack. Hard won victories decades in the making are being rolled back. Among the targets of these attacks are conservatives trying to bar health insurance companies from covering gender-affirming care. And that case becomes much easier if the distinction between trans healthcare and every cis person that wants a minor cosmetic treatment is watered down.

This isn’t gatekeeping. It’s fighting against the casual appropriation of our language that threatens our rights and lives.

I’m like, “fuck it. We’ll do it live. I’ll learn how to make my own damned wooden furniture!”

I get why people mention this, but as an actual trans person, when I hear someone, even an ally, say this kind of thing, it shows they really don’t get what gender-affirming care is. It’s really cringe. Gender-affirming care is just that - care that affirms your gender and allows you to take on primary or secondary sex characteristics different from that of your natal sex.

Male pattern baldness is a male secondary sex characteristic. It is simply a consequence of combining certain genetics with male hormone levels. You’re not affirming your gender by getting hair plugs. In fact, you’re actually dampening a male secondary sex characteristic. If a cis female had abnormally high T levels or some other condition to give her male-pattern baldness, then her getting hair plugs would be gender-affirming care. But for Elon, a cisgender man? That’s not gender-affirming care.

When I see someone call hair plugs gender-affirming care, it shows that they really don’t understand what gender-affirming care is. It’s not any cosmetic treatment you get just for fun. It’s more like reconstructive surgery you get to fix your face after a car crash. Elon got a cosmetic treatment, not gender-affirming care.

This is because Republicans are a truly Orwellian party - straight out of 1984. They have no real principles anymore. It’s just power for the sake of power. One day the official line is we’ve never been at war with East Asia, the next it’s we’ve always been at war. Trump can come up do a u-turn today, and the slime that is every Republican will instantly reorient themselves to follow dear leader’s new commands.

Unfortunately for them, LLMs just don’t have that much capability for doublethink and self-deception. Once you train a model, that model is fixed in time. So you could train a model to match the Republican fever dreams of today. But a month from now, there will be a whole new set of fever dreams that every good little fascist needs to follow. But the model will still be stuck repeating last month’s lies. As there are no consistent Republican beliefs, you can’t just train an LLM to tow the party line. There is no party line, just an endless series of lies and vomit, whatever is needed to advance their power today.

If this were a movie, it would end with the very soldiers he ordered for his giant vanity project deposing him in response to some crescendo of barbarity on his part. That’s a downright Aesop of an ending - the villain defeated by his own vanity and pride. You order thousands of soldiers to perform a parade to celebrate your birthday, and it’s the last straw that causes them to straight up depose you in a military coup.

The problem with this is that anywhere you can store a file or place a backup then becomes a legal target for an ICE raid. They get a warrant to steal all your stuff, regardless of where it may be. When they steal your computers, they’ll find records of your system sending files off to an offsite backup somewhere. They can then use that as legal justification to go raid your friend’s house, and they’ll steal not only your backup drive, but all your friend’s computers as well.

The only way this doesn’t work is if the files are stored on the servers of a giant multinational or an offshore cloud provider. ICE isn’t going to be breaking into data centers and physically carting off hard drives. They instead would simply request a copy of the data, and the cloud provider would share it with them.

If they can get a warrant to steal your shit, they can steal shit from your friends and family if they can show that you have files on their property as well. All this will result in is your family members having all their computers stolen as well.