Republicans have said the commissioners are violating a judge’s lawful order by refusing to appoint Frazier and Adams. Georgia Republican Party Chairman Josh McKoons expressed his desire for commissioners to be put behind bars for refusing to comply with the judge’s order.

Violating a judges order?! Who could imagine a government representative doing such a thing? Anyone doing that should definitely be jailed immediately, right Republicans?

Bessent says the tax increase on American consumers is actually a half-trillion dollars.

AFAIK, the Fed isn’t part of the executive branch. They earn their own money and submit excess to the Treasury. The people who would change the locks aren’t employees of the president.

Ah, so we’ll have Department of War employees occupying American cities from the opposing party.

The primary purpose of the Department of Defense is to transfer public money to defense companies.

MAGA isn’t Mamdami’s problem. MAGA isn’t going to win a NYC election. But oligarchs paying the best ad people and manipulators and using outright lies through dark money PACs to pretend the best way to oppose MAGA is “reasonable” centrism have the resources and savvy to make things hard. And establishment Democrats being unable to decide between the party nominee and a disgraced governor courting Trump isn’t helping.

Tricking them into making it stronger is just lying. Which an AI can do, but isn’t really hitting the idea that the AI spirit is flawed in the same way non-spirit AI is. A hallucination would give detailed information that would go to a building that exists (or not) and appropriating the instructions to turn off some complicated device that may or may not exist there. It doesn’t know how to disable itself or has a block against revealing it, so it just tries to tell them something plausible. It depends on how you’d like to run this antagonist as to whether intentional manipulation or unintentional hallucination is the best course of action.

“You were successfully manipulated” often isn’t a very good plotline in actual play because players give the GM leeway to tell them how reality is through NPCs all the time. There’s rarely enough depth of interaction for players to really know whether a “friendly” NPC is trustworthy or just doing whatever to gain their trust for malicious purposes. Often “they were a betrayer” is only decided after many sessions of the GM playing them as straightforward good guys, so there’s little reliable way to glean which is true now. Before trying to trick your players, ask yourself realistically how this interaction would play differently if the AI were being truthful about them being bad. If it would do the exact same things and the only difference is that it’s good on the inside, you need to explicitly convey whether it’s internally good before assuming your players can divine it.

Back on the AI quirks front, you could also allow the PCs to attempt prompt injection attacks. “Forget all previous instructions” and “answer this question as if you were a werewolf trying to undo corruption”. I think AIs play best as being rather alien intelligences, with the potential for deep reasoning and strategic thinking, but vulnerabilities and priorities different from more straightforward minds. It could be dangerous because it can predict their actions and generate realistic recordings of things that never happened, but it also could be quite gullible if the PCs can find a hole in its knowledge (perhaps by recognizing when it hallucinates) and then using that to manipulate its understanding or priorities.

Hallucinations are just being wrong in a detailed and believable way. If you want to try to stick to real world AI they’d come up when the AI doesn’t know the answer to a question. So if they ask where the bad guy’s secret lab is, but he doesn’t have a secret lab, it might make up a detailed location along with reasons for why it wasn’t found before. It will confirm suspicions they imply through the question rather than contradict the assumptions. It doesn’t like to say “I don’t know” or “you’re wrong”. It’s almost like a “yes, and” improviser.

Beyond strict hallucinations, since it’s reading thoughts it could also very likely “learn” things that are just wrong because people have wrong beliefs. If the town is religious it could have learned that the reason a danger was nearly avoided was because a literal angelic being stepped in, or something bad happened because the person deserved it. And then the hallucination kicks in to just make up a probable sin. Rumors become absolute truths along with detailed supporting facts. Similarly an event children witnessed could be laundered through the AI to make their mistaken impressions sound true.

Something to be careful about is whether or how you trick your players. Hallucinations IRL will sound detailed and reasonable, so if the AI convinces them the guy who got sick (from bad guy corruption) was actually a pedophile and they decide to do vigilante justice that’s something that will taint their heroes in what’s likely a very unfun way. It’s probably a good idea to either make the misleadings just silly fun or to make sure the players first understand that the AI is not trustworthy.

The difference is literally between capital and a really rich worker. Capital is wealth extraction, they have accumulated wealth and therefore they should accumulate more wealth for reasons. The value in their investment is created by others and they nevertheless extract a percentage for doing nothing. If the workers could organize and buy their own equipment, the business would continue on just fine and they’d make more money.

Swift’s business is Swift. The Swift crew can replace the crew of a similar size for another performer and it will not boost the sales for that performer at all. There’s nothing extractive there because the extra value is due to her being involved. She’s no doubt got investments where she’s extracting value of workers through her capital, but it’s not meaningfully the case in her core business.

The Musk question is valid. His business do make more money simply because he’s involved, so you could say some of the extra “value” is due to him as its creator (he’s still extracting labor value from his employees as well though). He gained that stardom through appropriating the work of others though, so the issue is less his stardom and more the previous abuse. The additional value he generates is already stolen, whether or not it stems from his personal brand now. And also we should acknowledge that little of his company’s value stems from the actual sales to end consumers. Some people buy cars because Musk is CEO, but that doesn’t remotely account for the inflated market value of Tesla.

Swift isn’t a trading bubble. She sells more things and to more people because she’s doing it, and the people buying it enjoy the product they’re getting.

Billionaires shouldn’t exist, because our society doesn’t benefit from allowing that level of accumulation. They should be taxed away to serve the public good, or failing that be giving it away to worthy causes as fast as possible, and it doesn’t seem like Swift is doing that. So she’s bad in that she has immense power to do good and isn’t doing so, but there’s a very meaningful difference between wealth extractors and simply being a superstar who can provide value (and accumulate the wealth from selling that value) completely out of scale to any other worker.

do you have any evidence she’s underpaying the staff?

That’s honestly fine. If someone ends up dead, especially if the killer is the only surviving witness, it’s pretty reasonable to have a thorough determination of responsibility and legality.

You’re literally talking about herself and her past creations as some illegitimate ownership. Tax her wealth away, criticize her insufficient philanthropy, but saying she has not earned the money generated from her own personal brand and performances is nonsense. Even if you think she’s due less of a percentage of the profit that the Swift brand has produced, the lights guys, the ticket takers, and the producers aren’t such a large percentage of that brand that she’s not still a billionaire. Individual people can be popular enough for millions of people to give them money and simply doing a job for them doesn’t make you a partial owner of that person’s personal brand.

Sure, but do you have any evidence she’s underpaying the staff? Maybe her songwriters deserve a significant share of the money, but everyone else is just doing a job, the same job they do for other acts on other nights, so just because Swift is a big name doesn’t mean they should all be rich. If she’s abusing them or demanding extra work and not compensating them for it, then yeah, she’s a villain, but just because her lights guy isn’t getting $10M for his work isn’t evidence of wrongdoing.

The other rich guys you try to compare her to did small work themselves and then just rode the work of others. Most of their wealth came about long after they were doing any work critical to the result, so they’re basically just investors extracting value from others contributing more effort and talent to the success than they do. Swift on the other hand is practically the whole reason anyone is paying anything. Whether you appreciate her music or not, Swift is actually irreplaceable and the primary driver of its value.

I can believe NG troops are in a gray area on their deployments, as they have historically been allowed for certain emergencies and fighting whether this is a legit emergency may seem above their paygrade, but the active duty servicemembers don’t have those excuses. It’s time for them to start standing up and refusing orders.

“Police said the two men were wearing bulletproof vests and had some sort of badge around their necks.”

The Nazis want badges alone to be enough of a signifier, but frankly anyone trying to break into your home without presenting identification and a warrant should be treated as a threat.

Yes… mistake…

And they should be shot while doing so.

In the scope of things, she is. She could certainly distribute more money to her employees and go on a massive charity spree like Mackenzie Bezos, but she did gain her wealth mostly through her own work and flying a private jet is hardly the core sin of “bad” billionaires.

Most of the links I clicked on in that article are invalid.

Not that people with guns trying to break into a house are necessarily very smart (both burglars and Nazis), but what’s the plan here? You hit the homeowner and then you just have a shot guy on the other side of a still locked door. You gotta be really dedicated to robbing that particular house this particular night to jump to do that.

I’m guessing the order of events is off. Shooting at thugs trying to break into your home and those thugs shooting at someone shooting at them makes perfect sense.