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.

State actors expend resources that have no effect all the time. Wanting to have an effect and actually having the desired effect are two different things, as I’m sure you know from your own life.

“Open the door to corruption”? 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Narrator: it didn’t.

I think it’s more like he felt like Republicans were more likely to punish his child for daring to be themselves and Grimes for daring to leave him. He’s got big divorced-guy vibes.

Lol that’s incredible. Never seen it before, thanks.

Sounds accurate. He thinks things work like 80s action movies. He probably literally got mad when they told him Rambo was a fictional character, so they had to force some guy to legally change his name to Rambo so Trump would be happy.

The idea that you can just “send” “special forces” “assassins” to kill cartel leaders in a foreign country is fairly challenging just as an accomplishsble mission, let alone factoring in the potential and very serious blowback from the cartels AND the Mexican government.

$20 says he recently watched Sicario or something.

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.

Yeah fair enough. I think I was responding in tone more to the OP and other desperate conspiracy theorists who are clinging to the hope, against all evidence, that the election was somehow stolen from the democrats. Given Republicans now will have majorities in the house, senate, state legislatures, supreme court, governorships, and will control the executive branch – not to mention the anticipated purge of federal agencies and loyalist-stuffing – I find it very important that democrats level with themselves instead of looking for excuses.

While it’s true Trump lost an absolute majority, the republican candidate still beat the democratic candidate by about 2.5 million votes, with about 98.9% votes counted. And, as you noted, recounts in some counties and states are occurring, and the FBI has been, and as far as I know still is, investigating questions and concerns about the election being hacked since at least August.

That said, I take your point, and I’m sorry for being so derisive in the tone of my response. I appreciate your level-headed reply.

That’s actually a minimum requirement in this coming administration.

That’s what they said about Harris’s weak numbers and every time someone brought up how Trump was gaining for an entire month before the election. I think the first step is acknowledging how much support he has. And then to face the fact that Republicans now control the presidency and have majorities in the supreme court, the house, the senate, total counties, state legislatures, and state governorships. I don’t think we can blame that on landlines.

👍

I’ve come to understand that you are open about grappling with a way of thinking that makes it hard to let go, take accountability, and engage with reality as it is. It seems that you’ve created a kind of mental framework—almost a dreamworld—where everyone and everything is aligned against you. This tendency to assign blame outwardly, to view others through the lens of imagined hostility or hidden agendas, mirrors the patterns we often see in conspiratorial thinking. I can only imagine how exhausting it must be to live with such constant anger and frustration, feeling perpetually under siege by the world around you. This way of thinking doesn’t just keep you trapped—it compounds your sense of helplessness, fostering isolation and perpetuating the very struggles you’re trying to escape.

What makes this even harder is how these feelings trap you in a vicious cycle. Anger and helplessness often lead to assigning blame or constructing theories that rationalize the world in negative ways. This mindset, in turn, fosters behaviors and patterns that reinforce those same feelings, perpetuating a feedback loop that’s hard to escape. The effects on your relationships must be profound. I can imagine how isolating and disheartening that must feel.

I hadn’t realized until now just how long this has been a part of your life, consuming so much of your energy. It’s clear that these challenges have been significant for you. With that said, I’m going to step back and block you. I imagine this won’t be the first time this has happened to you, and I’m not talking about Lemmy. However, I do genuinely wish you well, and I hope that one day you can confront and overcome the struggles that have held you back. Breaking free from this cycle will require immense effort and readiness, but I believe it’s possible for you to wrestle with those demons.

When you’re ready, I suspect you’ll find you have more support around you than you might realize.

This.

Right, you’re not a conspiracy theorist—you’re just “asking questions” and urging people to “do their own research.” Where have we heard that before? While you throw around baseless accusations about the Harris-Trump election, the reality is this: there’s no credible evidence to support claims of widespread fraud. Swing states have robust systems for verifying results, and the election process is overseen by bipartisan officials, including both Democrats and Republicans who vouched for its integrity. Demanding “just one investigation” isn’t about seeking the truth; it’s about refusing to accept the outcome.

I know you you’re unlikely to read let alone comprehend this post—just like you didn’t read the article you’re twisting—but for anyone else stumbling across your nonsense, this is the reality: your claims are bullshit. They’re not just wrong, they’re embarrassingly, demonstrably wrong based on the very data provided for you in the article to which you are responding. Let’s go through the numbers you’ve clearly ignored.

You say there were “5-12% bullet ballots” in swing states, but the data in no way supports that claim. Take North Carolina: out of 5,722,556 ballots cast, 5,592,243 included votes in the governor’s race. That means just 130,313 ballots didn’t—a mere 2.3%, not your laughable “5-12%.” Arizona? Of 3.4 million ballots cast, only 81,673 didn’t include votes for the Senate race—about 2.4%, again miles below your inflated, made-up conspiracy numbers. Nevada? The difference was 23,159 ballots out of nearly 1.5 million—a negligible 1.6%. Interesting. On average that’s… basically right where you said it should “normally” be.

Bullet ballots in battleground states are rare, but they’ve always existed, especially in contentious elections. And they’ve always been higher in battleground states. Swing-state voters tend to focus on the presidency when the stakes are high, which is common knowledge to anyone who understands voting behavior. Your numbers? They don’t exist.

As for your implication that it’s “improbable” for Trump to win the presidency while Democrats do better down-ballot, I hate to break it to you, but racism and sexism is a much simpler, proven explanation with data to support it. Polling had consistently shown that Harris faced deep resistance, even among Democrats, with much of it rooted in gender and racial bias. Voters who rejected Harris while supporting other Democrats weren’t casting “impossible” ballots—they were reflecting prejudices that have been documented for decades. You don’t need a vast conspiracy to explain why Kamala Harris lost; you need to look at exit polls and confront the ugly reality of American history and culture

The bomb threats on Election Day, which you seem desperate to weave into your narrative, were investigated by the FBI and found to largely be hoaxes originating from Russian email domains. These threats, while reprehensible, had no impact on the election’s integrity and were not linked to any domestic conspiracy. The idea that they were part of a grand scheme to disrupt the “chain of custody” or facilitate hacking is pure fantasy, unsupported by a shred of evidence. If anything, they reflect an attempt to intimidate voters and officials, not to alter outcomes. Clinging to this as proof of fraud is the hallmark of conspiracy theorists: taking unrelated incidents and spinning them into a baseless, implausible story when reality doesn’t fit their worldview.

And this is exactly where your conspiratorial thinking falls apart. Rather than accept straightforward, evidence-backed explanations—strategic voting in swing states, voter sexism, or even the simple fact that Trump remains popular among many, indeed a majority of, voters in this country—you leap to shadowy plots and grand conspiracies. This is textbook conspiracy logic: inflate normal patterns into anomalies, ignore the data that contradicts you, and demand investigations into “questions” you’ve invented yourself. It’s bad-faith reasoning at its worst.

Your entire argument isn’t skepticism; it’s denial. You’re not interested in the facts—if you were, you’d see how consistently they dismantle your claims. This isn’t about election fraud. It’s about your refusal to reckon with reality.

She lost. Get over it.

Wow, impressive! You managed to showcase at least five of the psychological traits we discussed in record time. I also love how you accuse me of not reading the article, while cozying up to someone who actually didn’t read it and is throwing out numbers that flat-out contradict the data in the very article you shared. But hey, they’re feeding your paranoid conspiracy, so I guess that’s all that matters, right? If only there were a term for this kind of behavior—oh wait, there is: “confirmation bias.”

Honestly, you really speedran those psychological traits. Bravo. 🤣

🙄