u/Numerous_Fly_187

Almost done with the new season and I have to say the territory freeze must be adjusted. Maybe it’s because of who won it. Certain features in a game are way too powerful and advantageous.

What do you mean you can’t be challenged until everyone else plays? I’d recommend the territory freeze keeps you safe until the next episode. Make it similar to the category trade and time boost. The winner at the end of every episode gets to choose a territory freeze or the 20k.

It’s just an anticompetitive rule. I feel like game shows are meant to be just that. Game shows. You go on to play the game. Any advantage or rule change that keeps you from actually playing the game is silly. The whole point of a game show is to prove that you won. The money was originally secondary. That’s my rant sorry.

As someone who struggles with what the clippers punishment should be, this episode sets up a dichotomy that summarizes my conflict. Balmer and the clippers absolutely circumvented the cap to keep kawhi. Thats against the rules.

It’s just difficult to get fired up about dropping the hammer on Balmer for spending extra money while we are in this second apron era and the blazers have a new owner who is cheap and wants to move a storied franchise.

In a lot of ways the saga reminds me of an old school ncaa violation where a booster buys a players mom a house and car. Violating what is a silly rule

I think Abdul is a better candidate than Stevens even though Stevens is a more experienced candidate. However, I think that lack of experience shows up in his campaign where most of his talking points are about Stevens campaign financing rather than his own qualifications.

While I think Abdul won the debate, I don’t think Stevens completely bombed. The results will be a solid litmus test on whether dark money spending really matters that much to democrats.

But not every talent is gonna be in the main event picture and losing a match much less your title doesn’t mean you’re buried. Folks will try to convince you Sol losing the IC title was somehow bad when mid card titles are meant to be hot potatoes.

I see people talk about Bron, Lyra, Evans and other young talents booking when they are consistently on tv. The main roster has 5 or 6 hours of programming a week. Maybe it’s just me but I don’t think you can bury someone who is on tv every week or damn near every week.

A talking point that’s frequently brought up, and was brought up by yesterday’s guest, is how difficult it is for young people to vote. How true is that with now that we have early voting and mail in ballots? Voting seems like a very if you want to you would sort of deal.

Thats why I have a difficult time getting behind this dilution of elderly votes or reengineering the system to take away some of the elderly advantages such as reduced mortgages.

I think Krystal was right on the nose when she said division by age only helps the oligarchs. When you look at most of the local Trump or AI protests…it tends to be older people. Focus on class and we will win.

I hope they touch on this race during today’s show because I think it will have big implications in 2028. The DSA New York candidates and progressive, not sure if they are officially DSA, candidates in Colorado were huge. I can’t refute that. However, an argument can be made those are more blue leaning races where your moderate dem voter there probably has questions about Israel.

For all the talk of Kamala losing Michigan because she wouldn’t condemn the genocide … Michigan still seems like a centrist state by and large. The general seems kinda moot at this point. However, if AIPAC successfully pushes Steven’s over the line that could impact the 2028 races specifically the top of the ticket.

Whats even more fascinating is what seems to be swinging this race is AIPAC and also the idea of who would have a better chance in the general. Democrats have always leaned towards electability in a general election as a measuring stick in primaries whereas republicans under Trump use primaries to select the candidate that aligns closest with the top of the ticket.

So yeah I know we have the house races, Maine, North Carolina, Texas and Georgia but for democrats at least the 8/4 primary in Michigan seems like THE race

The housing bill was a great bipartisan effort. Much like the Epstein bill it was good to see both sides of the aisle come together on something the voters care about. That being said, I honestly think this is a builders bill more than anything.

Housing supply was definitely the issue during covid along with artificially low interest rates. The supply side is ticking back up but the larger issue, in my opinion, is now starter homes are roughly 400k. A person needs to make about six figures before accounting for student loans for a starter home.

I don’t see how this bill addresses the price of starter homes because builders aren’t going to begin lowering prices. In reality, this bill may incentivize builders to continue pushing low quality homes at the same if not higher prices.

This doesn’t even get into private equity likely creating shell companies to purchase inventory. Unless the federal government is committed to following the money and penalizing equity that circumvents the 350 home cap…that provision just creates more administrative work.

So bravo again to Congress for the effort but I’m curious to see how this actually gets more Americans, specifically young Americans, in homes

https://x.com/dropsitenews/status/2074897688139555147?s=46&t=DfgqSettXp6-wNBxzvahiw Ryan reported on the message that Platner interpreted as an invitation and mean it doesn’t change much

A woman saying she needs a glute massage, a back massage or needing anything for that matter is not an invitation over. Matter of fact anything besides an explicit come over or when’re you coming over is not an invitation over.

If you’re coherent enough to interpret a simple statement of needing a massage as an invitation then you’re coherent enough to understand the words no don’t come.

Is precisely what Rabb was talking about when it came to Platner. The dude has a Nazi tattoo (that Ryan still refuses to acknowledge), suspect Reddit posts (guilty myself but I’m not running for office), has stories about being physical with women but was still able to run.

The fact that this latest story seemed to derail his campaign immediately isn’t a quick rush to judgement. It’s the culmination of a series of signs pointing to this guy maybe being a bad dude.

There’s an element of woke 1.0 that comes out of Ryan whenever Platner is the topic. As though all the previous red flags were just excuses for people not liking his masculinity and appearance.

https://x.com/SimplySubstance/status/2064481955387978176/video/1?s=46

She tries to essentially walk Chris Rabb into saying Platner was being targeted for his politics instead of legit character concerns but Rabb wasn’t having it. Krystal and Ryan both carried a lot of water for this guy even when prominent progressives like an AOC seemed to think something was up with the guy.

Real shame. I thought her project 2025 stunt at the DNC was pretty cool. Looking back, the 2024 DNC might’ve been a funeral for the democratic establishment and we didn’t know it. A bunch of pop and pizazz some rap music to connect with the youth but no real substance. Oh we also had Pritzker own Trump by saying he’s a real billionaire.

But Mallory. Has anyone reinstated their campaign after “suspending” it? If it comes out that Abdul is a huge Ohio State fan does a campaign suspension imply Mallory can get right back in the game?

The Supreme Court ruled against Trump in the birthright citizenship case. Sort of feels like the Chris Rock bit about raising your kids but yay on the courts I guess.

I could assume if the courts acted like Trump’s third branch of government that the next step would be stripping people of citizenship then deporting them.

Beyond being cruel and depraved, that would be horrible for population maintenance. See a problem with capitalism is everything becomes a profit maximizer including child care, food, vacations, summer camps and housing…ya know things you need to raise a family. Thats why America relies heavily on immigration to maintain our population.

Has anyone heard a conservative plan to maintain or increase the country’s population without immigration or “giving people handouts” aka addressing affordability

This has to be the most fascinating thing going on in domestic politics. Even more than midterms. Vance appears to be breaking from Trump in a way most current vice presidents don’t.

Whether it’s appearing on The View, exposing the Iran reconstruction fund or voicing his concerns over Epstein. It’s clear that Vance views Trump as a political liability and is working to create some daylight.

The only problem is Trump is a vengeful character who still has power over the base. Creating distance might help you in a general but you likely won’t make it out of a primary. I think Trump’s sole mission after he leaves office will be to torpedo JD’s presidential ambitions.

Politically I’m more aligned with Krystal than Saagar but journalistically I prefer Saagar way more. When Breaking Points has a subject matter expert on I notice Saagar uses that time to push back when it’s an area he’s well read or informed on otherwise he’s really trying to learn from the guest. Krystal on the other hand is really trying to defend her world view.

Ed broke down what many people even in this sub have been saying about the LLM con that’s pretty obvious. It’s a business model built on hype that’s dependent on exponential growth.

I mean it was pretty tough to hear Krystal try to defend the profitability of AI companies by saying well couldn’t they be profitable if you remove a significant cost from them? Or AI is going to replicate the human consciousness because it can do really hard math problems and do “spreadsheet jockeying”.

It truly was refreshing having someone on to give the counter argument to the AI sci-fi story that’s been the show the last three years. Hopefully they do that again but I doubt it

I’m not really sure what to do with that. The whole thing seems like a grift. The system. The system is rigged and filled with grifters. Whether the media is for the current ruling party or against it their solution is always the same…go out there and participate in the system.

I’m sure breaking points will have a segment or two on Elon’s new wealth. Maybe even criticize the system but nobody is gonna call for a new system. Why? Because the system has been pretty good to breaking points.

We got the first trillionaire in human history and it’s been reported that insurance companies may be able to give patients loans to pay for medical care but hey…midterms will fix it all.

After reflecting on the last episode, the season and seeing peoples think pieces….I think I actually really enjoyed this season. It felt responsible.

The first two seasons a common and in a way legitimate criticism was how the show glorified vices. I think the show took the characters and purposefully didn’t have them grow…it just showed how they’d fit into the real world outside of their high school town.

We saw what Nate the adult manipulator looks like, Cassie the oversexualed now young woman, Maddy the alpha that can control every situation, Jules the young woman searching for a love she doesn’t understand, Lexi the judgmental high achiever and finally Rue.

I think this season was beautiful in the sense that it showed that yeah you can control what seems like the world in high school but there are some real sharks in the world that feed off weakness.

The last thing is how the show handled the fentanyl crisis. I don’t know if a major show or movie has touched on the evils of fentanyl like this season. Opioids yes but this season put fentanyl at the center in a powerful way. From questioning why a dealer would want to kill customers, showing how an innocent mistake like not cleaning a scale could cause death, it can be used for murder by monsters like Alamo, how it’s trafficked and lastly how it can take out even an experienced user.

As someone who’s lost plenty to accidental fentanyl overdoses, that was a powerful storyline throughout the season.

It wouldn’t be a Krystal and Saagar show without AI doom. So let me get this straight, AI has the capability to replace most white collar labor but it’s also a bubble that’s overvalued?

AI CEOs that tell their corporate customers that AI’s purpose is to replace employees are being honest but the AI CEOs who say AI can’t replace employees at a massive level when they realize they need public funding and consumers to turn profit are lying?

There was an irony in today’s doom and gloom where the first half of the segment was dedicated to how bad the economy is then the second half blames AI for the layoffs even though Sachs correctly said robotics has been here decades.

These AI companies are selling snake oil and corporations who are getting massive token bills are slowly starting to figure it out. Nobody is actually saving money by replacing humans with AI. I wish breaking points would cover that

The CEO’s of OpenAi and Anthropic both came out walking back their comments on AI taking over the job market even though breaking points for the better part of a year has been saying it’s inevitable.

Now it is possible that they’re lying and AI will displace hundreds of thousands of workers. However, I think the likeliest scenario is the one most people have predicted. That is that these chatbots for the purposes of business are simply a new Microsoft office tool.

They can draft some language and process a lot of data but the idea that these chat bots can replace humans at a large scale is silly.

What’s also apparent is as these AI companies go public, they need significant consumer base to turn profit. Computers were similar. The dot com boom happened when tech figured out how to create and sell personal computing.

So now that this 30% AI driven unemployment fantasy is over I wonder when the breaking points panic over pending economic doom will pick up

I think for a while now most audit shops have been able to stay “layoff proof” by simply implementing hiring freezes. I remember ten years ago we’d back fill roles before a person’s notice was up but now my shop hasn’t hired significantly in two years.

AI looks like it’s finally hitting the audit space in financial services at least but due to so many institutions being manual…it can’t simply execute testing yet. Anecdotally and looking through postings it seems like upper management is being hit hardest so far directors and senior managers so far while auditors in charge and staff are still in demand. Not high demand but there is still work out there.

Is that consistent with what everyone else is seeing? What areas are going to be hit by AI the hardest?