Yes, he spent the equivalent of ~$105 if you make $100,000/year. If you make $100,000, spending $100 to buy the government? You’d be dumb not to.

It takes a truly bureaucratic mind—someone with a sensibility for relentless, daily tedium—to dismantle bureaucracy.

Democracy, by contrast, is far easier to unravel than state bureaucracy. Bureaucratic systems often outlast governments, as seen with the colonial administrations in Africa and South Asia. Bureaucracy is designed to be “portable” across different regimes and transfers of power.

Elon is likely facing a long and tiresome road ahead—one he’ll almost certainly abandon in some spectacularly embarrassing fashion within two months. Bureaucracy endures because it’s so deeply embedded in the everyday, utterly quotidian and entwined with, like, everything.

Agreed. A more granular map would be interesting to see. I mean, something like 65% of NY state’s population live in the NYC metro, which is a tiny part of a deceptively large state.

Re: Colorado, it’s just a relatively healthy state with a general ethos of living well. I think you’re seeing some of the urban effect through the Denver, Colorado Springs, etc. and the addition of rural areas of Colorado still having an outdoorsy culture, as well as (often) affluent rather than “rural poor.” Colorado has one of the lowest rural poverty rates in the United States.

And since Colorado would be in the 25-29.9 category now, it’s comparable to many states that also have comparable rural poverty rates. The fact that the states with the highest rural poverty also have the highest weights makes me assume obesity rates and poverty rates heavily overlap.

Edit: to the point, look at the county map for childhood obesity. You can literally point out almost every major city in the United States.

Is it possible they’re expressing admiration or paying you a compliment and not trying to invoke your smirking condescension?

Incidentally, according to the most recent CDC numbers, Colorado is no longer “green” on this map, just Hawaii and DC.

There’s only eight states under 30%. West Virgina tops the numbers at 41%.

~75% of the United States is classified as overweight or obese, which is staggering. It has to be pretty unevenly distributed even within states, because I live in a college town in a low-middle-weight state, and very few appear obese, and I’m regularly in a nearby major metro, and I don’t see a ton of obese people there either. Rural children are 10-15 times more likely to obese, so I’m guessing that is probably a major factor as well.

25-35% obesity rates covers like 80% of states, so the US is just fat and getting fatter.

This person posted this earlier today then deleted it when people started pointing out how gross it is. It’s all they’ve posted about.

Indulging this person’s fetish that they’re facilitating by using an LLM isn’t a great idea. You’re enabling someone who is probably in mental distress, and you’re spending way more time on it than they are. He’s just throwing responses into an LLM and copying the response over, and he’s indulging in the attention. This account is literally only this post and comments.

It’s creepy to think of some low-effort sweat slobbering over the attention from those willing to indulge his AI-constructed fanfic. Gross.

Just because things have been started and the money had already been allocated doesn’t mean if it somehow gets on Trump’s radar that the democrats initiated something that might actually be good for America that’s still going when he’s president that he won’t viciously ruin it.

Just a single dollar bill, and everyone gets it for one day and can only spend it on another influencer. Reminds me of those dudes in college that are convinced it is ok that they are failing, because eventually people are going to pay millions to watch a stream of them playing video games in their filthy rooms. 🤣

Or maybe Z knows something about inflation that everyone else doesn’t lol

That might be minimum wage in two decades who knows

Gen Z’s financial ambitions, and the dissonance between their dreams and reality, honestly highlight a troubling cultural shift that I’m sure, if we’re honest, we all recognize. This poll, while maybe not bulletproof in methodology, lines up with other findings from Credit Karma, other Morning Consult surveys, and academic sources like PLOS and Collabra: Psychology. The term “money dysphoria,” used by financial therapists, gets to the heart of the issue, which is a mismatch between the paychecks, fame, and wealth many envision and the actual economic terrain we’re navigating. The fact that more than half of Gen Z reportedly wants to be influencers points to a broader trend where social media distorts not only career goals but also broader ideas about value and success.

Researchers see Gen Z as unique—sometimes in ways worth celebrating, but more often in ways that are troubling. Every generation wrestles with the pressures of its time, but Gen Z is the only generation that spent critical childhood-development years under a spotlight powered by social algorithms, constantly fed by curated images and endless comparisons. It seems obvious this environment is going to shape approaches to work, wealth, and purpose, often in ways that are kind of adrift from reality. What stands out here isn’t just misplaced optimism; it’s the fallout of growing up in an ecosystem designed to blur the lines between aspiration and delusion.

This isn’t to pin dysfunction entirely on Z; after all, no one chooses the world they inherit. But the extent to which our formative years were shaped by this digital distortion makes the challenges uniquely sharp. Gen Z was effectively raised in a hall of mirrors. That’s going to have an effect. And honestly, when I’m talking with from Gen Z about it, we tend to either completely agree and are pretty worried about it, or some people absolutely deny it and get pretty angry about it.

I think if you’re honest with yourself and are in college, you can kind of look around your classrooms and see who is going to feel which way.

It’s theoretically possible but extremely unlikely for a number of reasons. There’s a difference between bending constitutional intent by flouting democratic norms on the one hand, and outright ignoring what most people consider to be an explicit and core constitutional principle on the other. And, again, I’m not someone that believes Trump is ultimately heading for a lich-king transformation, so basic biology makes it even more unlikely.

Oh zing!! What a sick burn! Do more!

This is like watching someone have an existential crisis in real time. It really is quite amusing. Do more!

🤣

I can’t argue with that lol

🙄

The Republicans are paradoxically incredibly strong and pitifully weak. 🤣

Hitler was literally like 30 years younger. You are so scared that you’ve somehow convinced yourself Trump is immortal.

Yes, I know fretful democrats have created in Trump such a fearsome boogeyman that they seem confident he’s either going to upload his consciousness into a computer mainframe or assume his final lich-form and rule a totalitarian America for the next thousand years, but here in the real world that’s not actually a possibility. It does make for good fear-mongering among the mopey left however.

His mental decline over the last two years is sufficient to assure that even in the incredibly unlikely case we remove presidential term limits, which requires an amendment to the constitution requiring 2/3rds majorities in both the house and senate and ratification by 3/4ths of state legislatures, he will be in no physical or mental condition to do so. I’m doubtful he’ll even be able to actually complete his full term.

It’s not a law, and it was created in 1963 and augmented in 2010. He gains presidential power regardless of if he signs them or not.

They have no effect on whether he assumes power.