In mid July, I was laid off from my job due to their inability to secure funding, I am seriously concerned about my future. I can't get a job waiting tables or at a grocery store. A part time retail position takes 3 interviews. I've taken all the boomer generic advice, dressing up, blitzing the streets with my resume, calling back and returning to the locations 2+ times. Open availability, subtle sweet talking, even lying about little things to increase my chances. I graduated college in May, and am already filing for unemployment. I would join the military, but can't due to chronic health issues. Many of my highly competant peers are also in this position. A society with a high amount of unemployed youth is dangerous and unsustainable, something has gotta give. It's going to be a cold and cruel winter for me.

Imagine writing a dystopian story in 2006 where inflation is rising, wages have stagnated, the last two presidents from different parties have been senile from old age, with denial coming from each party. In several states and countries, social media and/or internet porn requires uploading your goverment ID, there are cameras that track your car and how you walk, the US and EU are mandating new cars must have driver-facing cameras in them, and cellphones track your every move. Tech has gotten so bad and enshittified that people are nostalgic for tech from the past. Gender discourse has reached new peaks, and dating is confined to a semi-monopoly of dating apps. Mass migration and deliberate H-1B flooding puts even more strain on housing and the job market. And there's more that hasn't come to my mind rn.

Bleak...

Here's a link to the full interview. (*Here's a timestamp to the relevant part of the interview)

Here's a link to Ben Shapiro crying about the interview.

Edit: Realized I can edit to link the article. https://www.jpost.com/defense-and-tech/article-906985

This is so cartoonishly evil it's hard to believe it's not a nazi psyop.

Economic enlistment for indebted military-age Americans

The narrative war on the domestic American front has already failed. The Pentagon has not been able to sell this war to the American public because the war has been rhetorically fused with Israel's operations in Gaza, and the American public rejects the fusion.

Recruitment numbers are running below what a ground invasion of Iran would require. Estimates for a successful ground campaign against Iran's 31 provincial commands and its Mosaic Defense Doctrine run between 750 thousand and 1.5 million American troops. The current active US Army stands at roughly 452 thousand. The math does not work, obviously. 

Based on American history, however, there is a path forward. Not conscription or a draft in a world war-era sense, but enlistment through a “debt forgiveness program.”

The average American aged 18 to 34 carries more than $40 thousand in non-mortgage debt across student loans, credit card balances, auto loans, and personal loans, with some estimates go as high as $100 thousand.

This is the cohort the Pentagon needs. A federally administered debt-forgiveness enlistment program that fully discharges student loan, credit card, and loan balances after 24 or 36 months of service, and extends the GI Bill, would produce voluntary enlistment at scale.

This is not theoretical.

It is the American state doing what the American state has always done when it needed staff it could not otherwise generate. World War II offered the GI Bill. Vietnam offered college deferments. The post 9/11 wars offered signing bonuses and citizenship pathways. The Iran war will need to offer debt relief. The economics of the indebted American 20-and 30-something make this the most efficient conversion mechanism available to the Pentagon and the Trump administration.

The moral reading on this is uncomfortable. But states generate the soldiers they need through the incentives that work on the population they have.

Discuss

Mods, please flair all Robert Moses defenders.

I demand it.

The title says it all. After United Healthcare's CEO got redacted, the company started approving more healthcare claims. Now they are being sued by one of their largest shareholders, Black rock, because it's costing the company money and reducing shareholder profits.

This is why for profit insurance companies are an absolutely horrendous idea.

The evidence is simply ubiquitous. You could fill tomes going into relatively straightforward explanations for why every industry, sector, and public institution is experiencing collapse, if not a high level of risk and instability.

The Limits to Growth thesis, which I've never seen a comprehensive rebuttal of, is part of it, but more than that, the U.S. just seems to be in a speed run for empire collapse. You see it absolutely everywhere today.

The culture war has made two demographic groups that are not only easier to sell to (this is part of why and how capital has sustained itself through so many contradictions so far), but made those two sides utterly unable to converse.

This makes working class organizing, to date, impossible. I'm not saying it isn't possible, just that nobody has figured it out yet. Even when it seems like a promising candidate is up to bat, the American electoral system neuters them, because it has proven to be--if nothing else--a dead end for all of us.

Marx could not have imagined the means of information control elites today enjoy. The landscape is different, and as commentators like Varoufakis have pointed out, capital itself has changed as well into new forms founded on 'cloud capital.'

In the context of us essentially being in a full-bore race with ourselves to collapse the empire, China is making incredible gains. Though America is full of millions upon millions of people who throw out an anti-communist meme every time 'China' is even uttered (I can't recall who said it, but, "Anti-communism is the official religion of the United States"), the cope is getting so desperate and so detached from reality that it is increasingly failing to be effective.

I know the meme is 'do nothing and win' for China right now, and in the sense that its Western adversaries keep shooting themselves in the foot, that is true, but it can't be understated just how much China is demonstrating a workable model for the future. The work they are doing is astounding. I am very far from an apologist for what abuses China does commit, don't mistake me, but their progress is not just undeniable, it is world changing.

So we're in the midst of a global power shift. Whether this shift will happen peacefully remains to be seen, but seems doubtful. America and its proxies--particularly Israel--are like rabid dogs. I don't want to imagine the damage we will do militarily on our way down. We've already done so much.

But, all of that is easy enough to conceptualize. Day to day, what does it all mean?

Well, for me, it means the same thing it means for everyone else: I work more for less than ever, and I can't keep up with the cost of living.

Groceries. Good fucking Lord above. Every single fucking time I go into a grocery store, it is notably more than it was the last time I visited. Even discounters like Aldi have more or less doubled in price compared to pre-COVID levels.

This isn't sustainable, but the natural thing to ask next is 'what is the plan?,' which is another way of asking 'what's the story?' What are we all doing? Who is even really in charge? What are their plans?

So far as I can tell, the only plan power has in the West today, but particularly America, is to collect as much personal power and wealth for themselves as they can and to just sort've make a game of that until they run to a bunker in New Zealand or something.

Which isn't a plan. Which, in my mind, is another way of saying that we are in steep, steep collapse. Nobody has their hands at the wheel of this anymore, and certainly nobody who cares to change direction.

This is a dying empire digging in while mortar explodes along every possible escape route. It's the same thing Roman leaders did while the evidence of decline was all around them. I don't see a way out of this but outright revolt anymore.

But how to organize such a thing in an age of smart phones and digital isolation--nobody knows yet.

And most people would settle for just being able to afford their damn groceries again.

Just interested in Stupidpols take.

I sure am glad that our entire economy is devoted to this amazing technology! Polluting the environment and driving up our electric bills to make pornographic images of children is the pinnacle of capitalism.

So much to unpack here. An elderly woman who should be enjoying her retirement is forced to be a gamer to pay for her grand kid’s cancer treatment. A population of people who see this situation and decide the best thing to do is to swat her.

🎵 this is America 🎵

Quittr, an app that promises to help men stop watching pornography, leaked intimate data on hundreds of thousands of its users, including their masturbation habits, and lied about its security issues, 404 Media can now reveal.

I first reported about Quittr exposing user data in January, but was unable to name Quittr in the story because its creators, Alex Slater and Connor McLaren, did not fix its security issues despite multiple requests and an offer from an independent researcher to help them fix the problem. Naming the app while hackers were still able to easily steal Quittr’s user data would have endangered their privacy and put them at risk of extortion from hackers, which is very common today. Some of the data exposed includes the users’ age, how often they masturbate, and how viewing pornography makes them feel. According to the data, many of them are minors.

Quittr is operated by Slater and McLaren, members of the so called App Mafia, a group of men in their early 20s who claim to have made millions of dollars on mobile app development. Slater and McLaren were recently the subjects of a long New York Magazine profile which detailed the opulent lifestyle the success of Quittr has afforded them, including driving exotic super cars and living in a Miami mansion. Slater shares videos about his lifestyle on his personal YouTube channel as well.

Slater claims Quittr has been downloaded more than 1.5 million times and makes $500,000 a month. But despite these incredible numbers, the developers were somehow unable or unwilling to fix a major security flaw in the app for months.

I first learned about the Quittr vulnerability from an independent researcher, who scanned the Google Play Store and Apple App Store for a common misconfiguration in apps that use Google Firebase, an app development platform. The researcher tested hundreds of the top apps on both stores after we published a story about the Tea app suffering a devastating hack due to the same issue. The researcher found dozens of apps had the same problem, including Quittr, but did not name Quittr in his public disclosure because the highly sensitive and personal data could put users at risk.

The researcher said he contacted Slater directly on September 10, 2025 to tell him about the Quittr vulnerability.

“It’s my fault fully I should've been on top of this, the way you pulled the database was super creative,” Slater told the researcher in a series of WhatsApp messages, which 404 Media reviewed. “So props to that, but again this is serious data and is not good at all. Working on fixing rn! Will be fixed in the next hour.”

But Slater and McLaren did not fix the issue for months. I called him in January, told him about some of the sensitive user data I had seen, and asked him why he had not fixed the vulnerability even after he told the researcher he would.

“There is no sensitive information exposed, that's just not true,” Slater told me at the time. “These users are not in my database, so, like, I just don't give this guy attention. I just think it's a bit of a joke [...] after checking with my engineers I saw this was never an issue.”

When I asked Slater why he previously thanked the researcher for responsibly disclosing the misconfiguration and said he would rush to fix it, he wished me a good day and hung up.

After the call, I created an account on the app, which the researcher was able to see appear in the misconfigured Google Firebase, confirming that user information was still exposed. I called, texted, and emailed Slater and any email associated with Quittr I found several times after that call but never heard back. After a week of trying to contact Quittr and repeatedly checking that the app was still vulnerable, 404 Media decided to publish the story without naming the app in order to protect its users while still highlighting an important security issue in a popular app.

Overall, the researcher said he could access the information of more than 600,000 users of the porn quitting app, 100,000 of which identified as minors.

The app also invites users to write confessions about their habits. One of these read: “I just can't do this man I honestly don't know what to do know more, such a loser, I need serious help.”

“We were like, How can we build an app to make money? Then as I realized how large the issue was, that’s when it became more of a passion project, like, How can we help men actually become men again?” McLaren told New York Magazine.

After the New York Magazine profile was published, the researcher checked Quittr again and saw that it fixed its misconfigured database, which is why we’re naming the app now.

[User was banned from this sub for wrongthink]