You are thinking of this:

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002

Awesome song about this that becomes increasingly more relevant every day:

King Gizzard and the Lizzard Wizard - Mars for the Rich

Yep, my first thought on seeing this was … ‘and who will be enforcing this?’

No one, the answer is no one.

While the information about Elon’s history of making false claims, hardware and software details are accurate… there is no official body that has ruled as the title of the article suggests.

A more accurate headline would be ‘should’ not ‘has to’.

There is basically zero chance that this guy’s desire would be effectuated in the US … as the US agency that regulates cars… was recently gutted by Musk’s DOGE idiots.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2025/04/car-safety-experts-at-nhtsa-which-regulates-tesla-axed-by-doge/

Maybe the EU or China or other governments could… legally agree with the author, and order a similar command…

But uh yeah, the Trump admin is currently blatantly telling the Supreme Court to go fuck themselves, the law will soon be whatever the hell Trump and his orbiters want it to be, has already told the entire world to go fuck themselves and also beg and grovel at the same time.

Elon would just… continue doing whatever the fuck he wants, even if another country mandated a recall/replacement.

Sorry, but uh yeah, we have a fascist government now, the rule of law is dead, the law is now whatever the fuck the Trump admin says it is.

… Delete… all… IP law?

So… just literally make all piracy legal, switch all gaming and tv show and movie production/consumption… to an optional donation model?

Fuck it, why not.

I am both an avid pirate and have a degree in econ, wrote papers as an undergrad on how to potentially reform the DMCA… and uh yeah, at this point yeah no one has any fucking idea how any thing works, everyone is an idiot, sure fuck it, blow it all up, why not.

Don’t forget they also spun up their own ‘production studio’, and… it mostly produced basically the anime equivalent of lolcows in terms of their general reception and percieved quality, always overbudget and/or massively missing deadlines, never renewed for another season.

And then that was shut down within 3 years.

Oh right, and the union busting, also very cool.

I agree with all of that.

Maybe … 5 to 10% of Dems, like Federal Congresspeople, State governors… are willing to meaningfully go against pro corporate policies… at least more than half of the time.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some kind of psyop used to induce or intensify infighting among younger leftists, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if … there really wasn’t something specifically aimed at doing exactly that.

I know Russia has been very successfully employing the uh, hyperreality tactic, just fund or assist or influence enough people who are bombastic enough in any political persuasion, publish and spread baseless nonsense all across the spectrum to just sow general chaos…

But I do also think a lot of it really is people just adopting a vocabulary generally shared by leftists and then using it to their own, individual ends.

The thing with the CIA’s Simple Sabotage model is that it describes basically every social circle or work environment I’ve ever been in, or hear about from a friend.

General incompetence and … wasting time over petty stupid bullshit … just sounds like the norm in America generally, for pretty much my whole life… but maybe I have just had particularly bad luck with that.

Fellow autist here, here’s my funniest Elon moment:

The cybertruck reveal, softball pitch into the window.

Musk audibly gasps and says ‘O-oh myfuckinggod.’

Comedy gold.

That moment, right there, that was the high water mark.

Then, the window cracks, and shortly afterward, his entire general public facade and reputation begin to crack and shattet as well.

I do appreciate a visual metaphor.

Yep.

It is mostly just revisiting older news from decades before that… as would be reasonable when a newcomer to politics now seems to stand a reasonable chance of becoming President, might want to do a more thorough journalistic background check on the guy.

Leftists critical of Trump, back then, before even his first term, were … you know, kind of worried about Trump having Hitler in his nightstand table, very, very obviously seeing him as a role model and source of inspiration…

And then they said things like … is Trump a Nazi? Is Trump a fascist? This stuff is … quite concerning, along with his bombastic rhetoric and extremely nebulous and fluid ‘policies’, that all seem to converge on a return to past greatness, hypermasculinity, racism, sexism… all very much in line with … a populist, which historically very often leads to fascism…

And then almost every one else in the country dismissed that as hyperbolic nonsense, and ‘everything/one you don’t like is fascist’ was born.

… And now here we are, evidently in the bizzaro clownworld timeline, where Trump is ‘the joker, baby’ all the Republicans are his brainwashed cult of goons, the Democrats almost all as well sane-washed the shit out of Trump untill way after it was too late… and, as is also predictable broadly by history, the leftists, with few exceptions, fought each other over idpol, purity tests and tone policing, effectively negating any coherent opposition.

Well, the ‘listening to their constituents’ thing certainly hasn’t been going well lately… what with all the screaming matches, arrests, barely contained open revolts and what not.

They just kinda said those were all fake news and then stopped doing them.

I get that.

What… would actually make much more sense would be to index the minimum wage to some other, per state metric.

A fraction of median income, some formula that actually does a good job of estimating a minimum standard of living…

But, that will never happen, because … well basically half of voters and half state legislatures fundamentally either do not understand how to, or believe in laying a foundational safety net layer for society.

The income and CoL disparities within the US are… basically as wild as the differences between EU member states, but our governance systems are… well, pretty much fundamentally broken at this point.

More than that would create private business deserts in poor areas, forcing the locals to exclusively patronize corporations. More of the population would need social program assistance to help pay for the increased cost of our domestic food supply.

… If we’re talking about Arkansas… all of that has already happened.

You know Walmart is… from, and based in Arkansas, right?

20 ish % of the population is already below the poverty line… and the poverty line is basically ‘lets assume you have no rent and are homeless and just want to be able to buy food’.

That means 20% of the state is already getting SSI, SNAP, TANF, etc.

…

The US Federal poverty line is about $35 dollars a day. about $13k a year.

If you converted that to a full time wage, thats about $6.75 an hour.

The US Federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour.

50 cents of difference.

Hasn’t changed since 2009.

From 2009 to 2025, if you go by CPI, a single 2009 dollar is worth about $1.50 2025 dollars, that is to say, prices have risen by 50% in 16 years.

…

Arkansas is literally an economic disaster zone.

41% of the state struggles with getting their basic needs met, multiple independent observers and international aid agencies have compared the level of poverty, lack of education, access to healthcare… to areas of the world recently devastated by wars.

You say the cost of living is 36-37k.

That must be for a single person.

As of Nov 24, the median individual income in Arkansas is $29,740.

That makes the median wage about $15.50 an hour.

The median individual income in Arkansas cannot afford the average cost of living for a single person.

Arkansas is already the state equivalent of a mentally unsound person being deemed incompitent to make their own decisions and be declared a ward of the state.

Bumping up the min wage would be more like doubling the care and support staff for the assisted living facility that is Arkansas, already massively dependent on Federal subsidies to the poor… and the laughably tiny tax rates on giant megacorps that allow said megacorps to dominate its economy.

…

If you want to see what unchecked hypercapitalism looks like, you’re looking at Arkansas.

Median one bed apartment rent, across the entire US, is $1550 as of Feb 2025.

Lets knock 20% of that off, to approximate a median studio apartment instead, give some leeway to poorer parts of the country.

(there are not as good or reliable general stats counted for studio apartments, but a studio being 20% less than a one bed is… hopefully a reasonable, napkin math aporoximation)

Ok, that’s $1240.

Alright, now we use the ‘rent should be 30% of your income’ rule.

Thats $4135 a month, rounded up very slightly to the nearest 5.

Ok, 40 hours a week, roughly 4 weeks a month = 160 hours.

4135 / 160 = $25.85, again rounded up to the closet 5 cents for simplicity, so thats your actual minimum ‘living wage’.

If you wanna say a studio should be 30% off a one bedroom?

Math works out to roughly $22.60

If you wanna say an actual one bedroom should be the standard, works out to about $32.60

Any way you look at this, $17 an hour is too low, that’s still… you can’t even afford a studio (as in, you cannot pass the rent to income threshold without a cosigner or double deposit or somethingnon your lease) you need roommates, you’re still living with your parents.

If I were to pronounce it outloud, I would say:

D. B. Zero.

Like D. B. Cooper, lol.

the… zer(o), 0 swap is… basically old school l33tsp34k… like uh… l00tb0x, pr0n, type of … dialect? syntax?

Huh.

Well, I appreciate the info and shrugging magic, but uh… hrm.

I dunno then.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Ok whew, we are truly almost back to the 1890’s, Trumpublicans apparently favored era of America.

19th Ammendment was passed back in… 1920.

Basically this undoes women’s suffrage, so married women either just can’t vote, or will face massive uneccesarry hurdles voting.

And of course transfolk as well, they’re now pretty much formerly formally (ducking autocorrect) disenfranchised.

I wonder, do we have bootleggers (smugglers) for abortifacients, birth control, horomone therapy drugs yet?

I guess that’ll be the ‘growth market’.

I mean, makes sense, Hitler is one of Trump’s favorite authors.

No, I am not being hyperbolic.

https://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trumps-ex-wife-once-said-he-kept-a-book-of-hitlers-speeches-by-his-bed-2015-8?op=1

Trump kept a collection of Hitler’s speechs from the 1930s in his nighstand table, and would read from it before going to bed in the 80s and 90s.

When asked about this,

" ‘Trump hesitated’ and then said, ‘Who told you that?’ "

i apparently cannot figure out ascii shrugs, nvm

I don’t know exactly how that post counter … actually, technically counts posts, but:

1:

Zip going down could have uncounted all posts anywhere made by zip accounts.

2:

There could have been some kind of… propogating post count negation effect, as various other instances reacted differently to zip users posts on their instances could not pull them anymore, on different time scales.

3:

If a zip user had a … top level comment, on another instance, its possible all lower level comments responding to that comment may also have poofed out of existence, in some respect.

…

I may be misusing some terminology here, and this is just spitballing, but yeah.

Almost all of my .zip account’s posts/comments… are not on zip itself, and its possible that that is fairly common amongst .zip users.

https://lemmy.zip/post/35999238

Here’s the post.

Evidently, Demigodrick has since fixed the problems and successfully upgraded to 0.19.11

https://lemmy.zip/post/36177918

EDIT: Alternate explanation: The fediverse tracker has fallen victim to Trump Tariffs as well rofl.

It may have been lemmy.zip

It did in fact go down for about 48 hours… prompting me to make this new account on dbzer0.

Basically, the admin attempted to update to a newer lemmy version… and it failed, multiple times, and they just rolled back, restored the old version, posted an explanation and apology, and they’ll be further looking into … exactly what went wrong.

It doesn’t come off as snarky at all, no worries!

Genuienly… Like, I myself am autistic, and I’m willing to bet a whole lot of other data scientist type technical data sets type careerists either are as well, or are close.

What I’m trying to say is: It is genuienly difficult to be both well versed enough in the math and data… and at the same time have the requisite communication skills to present a whole lot of complex data in a way that people with less expertise can understand easily… while also at the same time not over generalizing so much that you are actually giving a just flat out false description or misleading metaphor.

I appreciate your summary of what I wrote in the last post.