I mean he’s not the first to claim this:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/29/trump-russia-asset-claims-former-kgb-spy-new-book

It’s unlikely tho that the Kreml ever foresaw him becoming president. No-one did really.

Search engine optimization ruined the web. Change my mind!

¿Where is the hat coming from tho?

A lot of software is reliant on very precise timing. The world at large would notice immediately due to the many disconnects, glitches, bugs, desyncs, not to say anything of all the physical processes controlled by machines going wrong. As a simple example consider an industrial oven (or any process really) that is programmed to shut down at 4:39:20 but at 4:39:15 the 1 minute skip happens. An airplanes auto pilot that is suddenly missing the last minute of sensor data to. base its micro steering on. Any big internet service that has to deal with thousands to millions of clients trying to reconnect at once because their previous connection timed out. Bad stuff.

This would be immediate world wide chaos and likely panic as the cause for all the chaos would be unknown and forever would be. Economic crash likely.

Think of all the attention and effort the year 2k problem got, but this one is worse and there is no prep whatsoever.

Hmmm, it seems the modern way for autocracies to deal with elections is to control the information space. I don’t see election being called off, but major social media platforms boosting one side while attenuating the other goes a long way. We know Musk is all in on this and the other big players like Zuckerberg & Co seem all too happy to oblige. Tiktok is an open ended question at this point.

According to the study 37% of participants verify information before sharing it on social media.

There you have it folks.

Disinformation campaigns don’t need to be super convincing with the latest tech or elaborate fake outs, although it certainly helps. For the masses (ie election interference) it’s easy enough to to establish narratives, vibes by users simply sharing headlines to fake or manipulative reports. The people that bother to deep check and cross reference sources you typically couldn’t convince anyway. Sadly enough, most users never read beyond the head lines (75% this Facebook study estimates).

Think of your own feed: how many head lines // posts do you just scroll by w/out ever opening them? Even if you don’t share actively it still can influence the your perception of the world today and shape your mood.

Social media is eating away at the fundamentals of Democracy 🫠, change my mind!

As the saying goes: listen not to what politicians say, but watch what they do.

By his own previous public proclamation anyone cooperating with the extremist AfD is to be expelled from his party. If he had decency he would now self-expel.

Hmm this section sounds familiar:

The persecution drove hundreds of directors, managers and workers – including the author – into exile and/or imprisonment. In their place, the government appointed political operators, lacking knowledge and experience in the oil sector, who provided unconditional support to Maduro’s policies but damaged the company’s operational capacities, bypassing all control or accountability mechanisms.

That’s essentially what Trump admin wants to do. Fire civil servants en masse, replace with loyalists (proficiency for the job is optional).Then if something is goes wrong, and it will, just blame it on DEI, Biden, wokeness or something.

Honestly, there’s nothing wrong with career bureaucrats // civil servants per se. ¿Do you want to swap out every geologist, accountant, teacher, interpreter, ranger, manager, safety inspector, lawyer, technician, secretary every 4 years? These people literally run the country and by extension allow society to continue. And they are part of the idea that power and expertise are spread amongst many people.

Is it fair to criticize individuals, agencies, institutions. Yes. Is there corruption, mismanagement, incompetence? All the time, happens for any sufficiently large enough organization.

But no need to spin this into some bonkers conspiracy theory.

I’ve updated my initial comment.

This guy literally wrote a book about what he dubs “the executive branch deep state” including a list of high profile names he wants to target.

It’s all out in the open. Confirmation hearings are supposed to weed out people like him.

Edit: the way I previously worded my comment it might have been construed as me stating Patel was rightfully going after these people. Instead I meant to indicate that they rightfully resisted/investigated Trump.

It’s crazy to think that while we now live in a globalized, interconnected society with billions of peoples yet Dunbar’s hasn’t changed from when we formed tribes and harmlets thousands of years ago.

A lot of the structures and institutions of modern society essentially center around somehow overcoming or side stepping Dunbar’s number: to reliably interact with strangers, ease tensions and achieve greater things (from credit scores to spelling dictionaries to standard sized clothing to electing representatives to online wikis to opening hours, calendars and time zones; the list goes on an on).

p 698 of project 2025 document:

The federal income tax system heavily taxes capital and corporate income and discourages work, savings, and investment. The public finance literature is clear that a consumption tax would minimize government’s distortion of private economic decisions and thus be the least economically harmful way to raise federal tax revenues.

more riches to capital and corporations, consumers will pay for it. it’s all in there

I think in that scenario it’s more likely that they would “buy the dip” then that they would up and leave. Some of the billionaires also want to found their own techno-fashist fiefdoms. This could be a good catalyst for that.

Saw a policy expert say it’s a mixture of 3 things really:

1. Trump likes to blame outsiders for problems and this is well received by his loyal base and gives off strongman vibes
2. long term plan to switch from income tax (scales the more you earn) to consumption taxes (the poorer you are the more you pay for for consumption, relatively speaking) which benefits the rich at the expense of the poor. this wealth transfer is easier to sell when the populace is focused on outsiders
3. Trump doesn’t understand basic economics

source: https://youtu.be/2I1L1fXaYDs

There’s so many parts and pieces that all failed to get to where we are today. Each time you reflect a moment and realize that we shouldn’t be be here in the first place:

• The FBI // justice department shouldn’t be a tool of personal revenge.
• But wait Trump/Musk shouldn’t have become presidents to begin with.
• Voters should be educated and well informed enough to simply not vote for an autocrat.
• Merrick Garland should never have become attorney general and even so Biden should have pressured him hard to do his job.
• Trump should have been impeached multiple times already.
• But the democrats too should have had a better alternative candidate.
• The democrats should have had a real primary contest.
• Biden should have never announced to run for another term out of the blue.
• And his handlers shouldn’t have tried to hide his frailty for so long.
• If only Donald Trump should have been sentenced for his many crimes.
• And he shouldn’t have had the backing of the Republican party for this long.
• Arguably voters should have realized he’s inept the first time around.
• The media shouldn’t have sensationalized him as much when he first ran as a publicity stunt

The list is not exhaustive and goes on and on…

And in the background there’s all the systemic failures and problems that enabled this: terrible public education, ignoring a large chunk of the electorate for too long, citizens united, social media and outrage culture, rampant disinformation and propaganda disguised as news, the electoral college and de facto 2 party system, too few checks and balances being hard codified, obvious loop holes like presidential pardons, …

Petty sure historians will analyze this for generations. If we will still live in a world where historians are allowed to about their work freely.

Ah yes, there isn’t even an option to permanently disable this popup, only remind me later. When the operating system is the nag ware. `

Sure, for many things there’s a deluxe version (clothing, cars, food, housing) but they tend to be physical. Since media is largely digital these days and has fantastic marginal distribution costs the rich consume the same stuff when it comes to popular media. Ie there isn’t an alternate Hollywood studio just for the rich, itunes doesn’t have a separate server, the new york times website is the same for all, etc.

¿Does it comment on your life with latent cynicism, in prosaic tone and with a deep, haughty voice like Wayne June (narrator of Darkest Dungeon)? Damn, now I want one too.