Not exactly the same playbook. Hitler was much younger when he tried his coup. And I don't think Trump is writing any manifestos, unless he gets put in the same cell with his ghost writer.

If Trump goes to prison, he's old enough that he will likely die there, even with a shortish sentence. And there's a chance that a smarter buffoon takes over the party, but did you see the clown show last night? I doubt any of those has what it takes.

Trump is not the next Hitler, no matter how badly he wants to be. My fear is that the next Hitler is just around the corner, and uses the Trump playbook to come to power.

Well said! I would also like to add that we shape the community here (and in Social Media in general) through our interactions.

Whenever we post, we are making a conscious choice to interact with a human (or possibly a bot, beep boop). Even if we are disagreeing with that human, the act of replying is, in some ways, a vindication of their point of view. You felt, among all the posts on the Internet, everywhere, to reply to that one.

So if someone posts nonsense or gibberish that doesn't help the discussion at all, and spreads negativity about you or other people, you are under no obligation to respond! These people are negative because they seek conflict. The worst outcome in the world for them is if you simply ignore them, because it means that you didn't think enough of their opinion to respond.

Don't feed the trolls!

This might be the Genesis of a meme

You have to either be rich, or run enough grift on a regular basis to appear rich, by sticking other people with the bills.

I don’t see in these comments any compassion or empathy, in fact all I see are excuses for why we don’t need to have compassion or empathy

This basically sums up the entire article, right?

But as I understand it, all the discussion in the article is about Internet comments. People often resort to hyperbole and sensationalism on the Internet, because it's an easy way to get attention, and they can talk tough without actually having to witness the suffering that their views would lead to. The problem is, though, when they vote based on these views, they elect psychopaths who try to live up to what these incels are writing in their parents' basements, which is a stunted adolescents idea of what being "tough" is.

I was very ambivalent about WFH all through the pandemic. But I had a job which involved hardware development. When I was forced home due to the pandemic, I had to bring half my lab home. When we were contemplating going back and being hybrid, I told my boss that I had too much physical shit to interact with on a daily basis to be in two places. I either had to stay home, or move all my shit back to the office and stayed there. But I had an actual cubicle and a lab there. If I needed privacy to get stuff done, I could sort of get it.

Meanwhile, I got a fully remote job offer and took it. It is more of a systems role, and I can do much more of it remotely, so it works well. I still make several trips a year to the home office though, in an extremely HCOL area. Their office is one of the super-open-floorplan offices. Before the Pandemic, I was told it was packed and nobody liked it at all. But during the pandemic, people literally got days of their life back because they no longer had to spend 2+ hours a day commuting.

They've been trying to get folks back to the office at least once a week, but they're not forcing the issue. If anything, the managers end up there more often than the workers. When I go there, I have the advantage of being able to expense my travel, so I can stay close. And with the exception of that one day a week, the office itself is a ghost town. There might be a few dozen people in a place that can "hold" hundreds (like sardines). But on that one day, there are so many people talking that if I have a critical meeting, I just stay in my hotel instead. Plus, so many meetings are with offsite people anyway (the company has employees around the world) that even with so many people on site you're still doing the meeting over the Internet anyway.

Open floorplans are an absolute joke. They need to die.

The Governor even screams "woke" at the insurance companies, for raising rates, or leaving altogether. But insurance companies are about as far from woke as you get. They don't give a shit about the latent injustice in the system. They just look at their numbers, and tweak them until they maximize their revenue vs. risk. And all the bean counters have decided that Florida is too risky.

I don't think there is a conspiracy that involves the RAND corporation, or the reverse Vampires.

I do think that Elon Musk is an idiot who failed upwards his whole life, and mistakes that for business acumen. I think his tweet to buy Twitter was originally a joke, but then the SEC got involved and he was forced to buy at an inflated price. Recall he did everything he could to get out of the deal; Twitter literally sued to enforce it because it was a much better deal for shareholders than anything they could do organically. When you realize he never really wanted it in the first place, his actions make more sense.

I also think Steve Huffman is a fraud who can't see that Elon Musk is a miserable failure and looks to him as a mentor, so he is turning out to be just as petulant as Musk.

Isn't this just a linear scheme? To be a pyramid you need to be kind to two or more people....

“A fistfight could break out at any moment,” Tennessee Representative Tim Burchett told The Daily Beast.

He then creepily added that, as a fan of professional wrestling, “it’s entertaining to think that a fistfight could break out at any movement. I kind of dig that.

Republicans are creepy.

Its particularly interesting that Hunter got nabbed for evading taxes (technically failing to pay on time, but I suspect he wouldn't have paid at all if the IRS didn't enforce it.)

I bet all those Republicans who voted to gut the recent increase in funding for the IRS will never understand the irony.

Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar....