I am so fucking tired of this government of not simply the most corrupt, but the most stupidly corrupt.

The kakistocrat.

There’s no need for anyone to tell anyone anything.

The rich shitweasels who own one media conglomerate have enough common interests with the rich shitweasels who own another media conglomerate that they tend to arrive at more or less the same decisions and same policies even if they do so wholly and completely separately.

That’s generally the case broadly too - not just in this instance, or even just regarding media conglomerates.

Best guess - is he so stupid he believes this or so dishonest he pretends?

Yes, he lies literally non-stop, so that’s always the safe bet, but with this tariff thing in particular, he seems to sincerely believe that they’re some kind of magic, and he fairly obviously has no idea how they actually work. So it seems at least possible that he genuinely believes this.

Which would take a special kind of stupid, but if there’s anyone capable of it, it’s Trump.

Where did I say that others do deserve to?

Yeah… somehow I can’t be arsed to care about the supposed threats to someone who oversees an army of masked thugs who black bag people and send them to concentration camps and foreign torture prisons.

Seems to me that if that’s the kind of world she wants, that’s the kind of world she, more than anyone else, should have to live in.

I just think it’s funny that “AI” (which is “artificial intelligence” not in the sense of “human-made” but in the sense of “fake”) is contemperaneous with Trump.

This is going to go down in history (if humanity survives long enough) as the Idiot and Lunatic Age.

From what I’ve gleaned of the ravings of the angry stupid right blogosphere, a lot of people actually do think that only tree huggers want green energy.

And I have little doubt that that’s an opinion that Trump shares, but that’s not his main motivation in all of this. His main motivation is big fat bribes from the fossil fuel industry.

And thanks to Trump, the US is perfectly placed to be entirely left behind.

The more I think about it, the more confident I am that at least the basic outline is actually the truth - that “Big Balls” - entitled, sheltered 4channer that he undoubtedly is - got his ass kicked for being a racist dickhead and/or creepy pervert.

Okay - as of right now, I think there’s much more to this story that we haven’t been told and this is all damage control.

Like it wasn’t actually a carjacking at all, and instead, for instance, “Big Balls” tried to buy sex with one or the other or both of them, then when she/he/they not coincidentally refused, he went on a drunken racist tirade, so they kicked his ass.

Yes.

I wouldn’t call them weak and ineffective. I’d call them corrupt and compromised.

They don’t roll over because they’re weak - they roll over because that’s what the donor class pays them to do.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ToastOfTardiness

I don’t know when or why it started - my thoughts’ll start drifting toward unfortunate memories and I suddenly find myself doing this thing sort of somewhere between humming and scat singing. And it’s always made up - I don’t hum real songs (presumably because that wouldn’t be enough to distract me).

It’s to the point that the two things are sort of reversed in my mind, so instead of recognizing an uncomfortable memory then catching myself humming, I catch myself humming so realize I just remembered something uncomfortable.

I catch myself humming improvised songs as a distraction.

Yes.

Data hoarders are going to really come into their own after the corporations start trying to paywall information - pretty much no matter what it is, there’s somebody out there who has it squirreled away on a drive.

On the first point, I’m not sure. I definitely agree that left to their own devices the AIbros would just keep expanding and battling each other and chasing ever more pie in the sky. But I don’t think they’ll be left to themselves. I think the MBAs will move in and take over, and it’ll shift to standard corporate tactics of buyouts and mergers and bankruptcies and liquidations, and inevitable consolidation.

On the second, I agree. I think the web is actually going to effectively split into a commercial system of monolithic corporations and subscriptions and fixed hardware and a much less formal true web of small servers and self hosting and ad hoc networks.

Amusingly enough, The Economist illustrates what I believe to be the new business model that’s already waiting in the wings for the internet.

With admittedly no direct evidence to support it, my theory at the moment is that the “AI” players plan to consolidate and to continue to expand their reach and continue to gain users who rely on the “AI” for information rather than following links to the originals, then, once the "AI"s have killed enough clicks to collapse the ad model and drive the websites out of business (and give them the opportunity to buy up the remains of the businesses, and more importantly, their databases), they’ll put all of the information of which they’re now in sole possession behind paywalls.

Broadly, the goal is to apply the most lucrative if least popular business model to information ,- to monopolize ownership of it in order to sit back and collect money as rent-seeking parasites.

Imagine that…

Of course, if the Dem establishment really wanted to analyze where they went wrong, all they’d have to do is talk to, and much more importantly listen to, voters.

But then they’d run the risk of having to face up to the fact that they’re the problem.