ReallyActuallyFrankenstein @ ReallyActuallyFrankenstein @lemmynsfw.com

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2 yr. ago

I mean, New York is a close analog, and the relatively minor gerrymander in Democrats' favor was struck down, which is a large part of why Republicans control the House.

So you're right that Democrats tried, but also Democratic (and democratic) judges nullified the gerrymander.

I guess it's classic that they gave up political victory to have the moral high ground. So might as well give them that much?

I think of this moment probably once a month and I don't know how to make it stop.

I had to read the headline and source twice to believe this wasn't the Onion.

What I’m saying is, while I feel for you as an individual human being who seem nice and reasonable, I lump you with the problem and I fully blame you for it as an American.

You don't seem to understand that you certainly do not feel for me as an "individual human being who seem[s] nice and reasonable" if you think you have the right or moral ground to blame me for Trump because the people around me joined his cult - it's the diametric opposite of acknowledging me as an individual.

You just seem to keep repeating "as a nation" as if that hand-waving abstraction somehow makes it sensible to blame every single person in America for Trump. Test your premise even a little. Are American children also responsible for Trump? What's the principle? Do they somehow gain the original sin of being an "American" and therefore culpable for Trump at 18? Is that midnight Eastern Time or Pacific Time? How about people who lost the right to vote? How about Americans who naturalized after the election? Is it getting complicated yet?

Because that's life, it's complicated, and applying the label of "American" to two drastically different people doesn't somehow waive your duty to engage in moral inquiry before you engage in moral condemnation.

Well, two ways this can go.

Option 1: Yes, well you are a [insert name of country you are from], and despite that [insert thing the worst person from that country is doing that neither of us likes], so we are also fed up with you.

Cool, by acting exactly as you, now we both hate each other because of things other people are doing, despite neither of us being directly responsible for the things we jointly oppose.

Option 2: You think a little more about this and maybe understand that not every American is part of the problem, and in fact we're even more horrified than you because [looks around] we're living in the hell that's spoiling your nice view. And maybe you also realize it's pretty counterproductive to abuse, threaten and isolate the very people who are in America now and who agree that Trump is a cancer on this world.

If you can take a moment to wean yourself off the high of righteous indignation, you'd see we who are trapped here with Trump are the ones most directly being abused by him.

So why exactly are you doing the same as Trump and abusing us too? Don't you think you should also worry about the ethical implications of your own actions?

Go home and sacrifice his hand to the demon lord Anthraxus in exchange for more power?

Trump, but more likely one/some of his sycophants, explained how hard-line immigration enforcement could help in removing political opposition with the help of a corrupt and stacked Supreme Court

It's definitely Stephen Miller. Zero doubt. He is the true believer in racist/white supremacy and the New York Times' recent story had multiple anecdotes about the DOJ and DHS/ICE being directly controlled by him, while Bondi and Noem are only interested in making TV appearances.

Right but... you know 90 out of 100 Americans on Lemmy didn't even vote for him and oppose him?

I kind of just read your message as: Hey, domestic abuse victim, you need to figure out your abusive spouse who you're forced to live with pronto! Their abuse spills over and it's making a mess everywhere.

The contest won't be over who can imitate Trump the best. It'll be who can use Trump as a martyr best. They all know Trump is the glue that holds their machine together.

You're confusing him. It's not a big deal, he's some guy and we're just two people on the Internet, but he's a left populist, not a "both-sides-er." He's fed up with institutional politics becoming ineffective, not with people being too "left."

I've been watching him since the beginning too, I wouldn't say that 10 years ago, but this is where he's at right now.

I assume it's going to come out of DHS or ICE-allotted funds.

So...I agree. Yes, it's our tax or debt burden, and yes, that's infuriating. But the money has already been stolen from us. Now the only question is, is that money going to be used to accelerate fascist policies like the end of due process or not?

So drain the bank, please. Every dollar for judgments or settlements is a dollar not spent on racist, unconstitutional immigration policy.

Hmmm, I have been skeptical of AI, but it looks like it's getting smarter.

They can't, and either way, with Bondi in control, she can decide what the DOJ says. I can't think of a reason not to expect she'd change what the report contains or concludes, forever distorting that history in favor of Trump.

Would expect nothing less from MiniTrue.

Have xAI's real employees considered hiding the password to alter Grok's system prompt, at least while Elon isn't allowed to play with his other favorite toy, the lives of millions of federal employees? Or just setting up a fake interface for him so he can alter a sandboxed Grok instance that's only accessible from his Twitter?

Thank you for submitting your final exam for AP American History. ChatGPT 5-TeacherEdition graded your Llama 6.3o answers to be 25% incorrect. This determination is only appealable by confirming an error in grading with a Gemini X-5-level grading-appeal service, with a Standard Reliability rating of 7.5 or higher. Our system notes from your records that this service is not available to your income tier.

Your future profession is selected as: Meat packer.

Have a nice day.

Flash forward eight years, to this past May, when Mr. Miller, still livid and now the White House deputy chief of staff, paid a visit to the Washington headquarters of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, where he berated officials for not deporting nearly enough immigrants. He told the officials that rather than develop target lists of gang members and violent criminals, they should just go to Home Depots, where day laborers gather to be hired, or to 7-Eleven convenience stores and arrest the undocumented immigrants they find there.

This time, the officials did what Mr. Miller said. ICE greatly stepped up its enforcement operations, raiding restaurants, farms and work sites across the country, with arrests sometimes climbing to more than 2,000 a day. In early June, after an ICE raid in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles triggered protests, Mr. Trump deployed several thousand National Guard troops and Marines to the city, over the objection of Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The crisis, from the immigration raids that sparked the protests to the militarized response that tried to put the protests down, was almost entirely of Mr. Miller’s making. And it served as a testament to the remarkable position he now occupies in Mr. Trump’s Washington. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, who reportedly accompanied Mr. Miller on his visit to ICE headquarters, seems to defer to him. “It’s really Stephen running D.H.S.,” a Trump adviser said. The attorney general, Pam Bondi, is so focused on preparing for and appearing on Fox News that she has essentially ceded control of the Department of Justice to Mr. Miller, making him, according to the conservative legal scholar Edward Whelan, “the de facto attorney general.” And in a White House where the chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is not well versed or terribly interested in policy — “She’s producing a reality TV show every day,” another Trump adviser said, “and it’s pretty amazing, right?” — Mr. Miller is typically the final word.

That last paragraph... Ooof.

I knew Miller was a nihilistic misanthrope who would take as much power as he could, but I expected Bondi, Noem and Wiles to be nearly as craven to demonstrate their value to Trump and carve out their own fiefdoms. I didn't expect them to cede it without so much as a shrug.

Yeah, this post started as a reassurance that Tailscale wouldn't enshittify. But it turned out to just be an argument about how to avoid enshittification that boiled down to two principles:

1. You shouldn't make your product worse because it'll eventually harm the company; and
2. Founders are magic and need to never turn over control of the company to others (be it new CEOs or VC) to resist enshittification.

Both are partially right and partially wrong.

For #1: Yes, making your product worse eventually harms the company. No, you can't expect CEOs to accept that as a reason to not make their product worse because even if it harms the company, short-term incentives that lead to enshittification are eventually going to become irresistible. His comment about reaching "zen" with leveled growth and profit will never stop VCs from calling in demands and favors.

For #2: Yes, founders typically "get it" more than their VC- or failure-initiated replacements. No, that doesn't mean founders are uniquely resistant to enshittification. This is your point too, and it's why I don't believe this person - they lose credibility here because they don't acknowledge they aren't special. Every tech bro out there thinks they've cracked the code to permanent tech hegemony. That exceptionalist thinking turns into enshittification, since the product-worsening or overcharging is easier to justify as temporary/necessary/not-a-big-deal (until it isn't).

And all of this doesn't explain why Tailscale specifically gets immunity if the principles are true.

So interesting post, and a lot more self-awareness than most founders which is still a little reassuring, but a lot of warning signs too.

Edit: clarity

“You’re either going to take a massive tax increase or you’re going to decrease taxes. So for conservatives like myself, that’s a no-brainer,” Chaffetz said.

Ah! "No-brainer" makes a lot of sense to me. That should really be the GOP's tagline.

But the bottom line is that Mike Lee and all the other Republicans aren't responding because this will be out of the news cycle in 3 days so they'll never have to answer for it if they can just avoid making further headlines.

That's some quality conspiracy thinking!

But there are too many people who could have been early adopters and have any number of random motives for this to be "likely."

Heck, I was watching Bitcoin when it was like $0.002 a coin and someone spent 10,000 (presumably home-CPU-mined) BTC to buy a pizza. There were a ton of people there at the beginning, the barrier to purchasing a ton was very low, and unlike me, a lot of them certainly had $20,000 to spare and believed in it enough to buy.