It feels longer than that to me (weren't people talking about America's influence when discussing our entry into the world wars?), but you're absolutely right: it took decades to accrue, and it'll all be frittered away in weeks.
Of course, Trump's no stranger to bankruptcy caused by mismanagement.
"Take over the world" might be a bit of hyperbole. I'm talking mostly about his desire to take over Greenland, to take back Panama, to annex Canada, to be put in charge of Palestine, etc. Of course, this too is Trump trying to enrich himself; how many Trump properties would end up being built in Greenland if the US ended up with it? How much would shipping companies pay him in kickbacks if he took the Panama Canal and offered them priority passage? How much money would he and his cadre make by decreasing regulation in Canada, or getting access to Canadian oil fields? And, of course, you've already heard of his plan for the "Palestinian Riviera."
He wants to "take over the world" in the sense that he wants to rule over more swaths of land and extract the value from them, and in the sense that he wants to tell Keir Starmer to jump and hear him say "how high, sir?"--but yeah, I agree, he doesn't seem to have the desire to actually do any ruling.
Definitely a Russian asset. I think that's more or less clear at this point. But the acts he's taking seem more...stupid than calculated right now. I don't think it's his goal to destroy America (though it's certainly possible that his handlers want that); I think it's his goal to enrich himself, and he's just not too bothered by the prospect of destroying America in the process.
Trump wants to take over the world. All he's succeeding in doing is remaking the world into one that doesn't need the US. And indeed has no use for us at all.
I have one that was proven false, and then later re-proven true: the existence of the brontosaurus.
When I was in elementary school, we were taught that they existed, they were big, etc. Then, at some point while I was in college, I discovered that actually what we thought was a brontosaur was a brachiosaur or an apatosaur. And then, when my kids went to school and learned about the brontosaur, I discovered that actually, they did exist!
Products are really the only thing that can be marketed. Even oneself is a product when marketed; you're saying "please buy my services" or "please listen to me" or whatever. Once you've begun to market it, it's become a product.
And in this scenario are you the creator of the product (in which case, why)? Or some rando on the street?
If the former: you could say something really, really terrible; or release the product in a broken or laughable state; or collude with a foreign power to put an unqualified idiot into political power. There have been plenty of case studies in recent American history.
If you're just an average joe, probably nothing. Products are created and positioned in the market in such a specific, intentional, and anodyne way these days that you probably can't really find a way to make its marketing fail; short of discovering one of the things mentioned in the above paragraph and making it public.
"Oh, dude, you gotta stop using TJ's Action Rune of Changed Files. That runebook has a backdoor to one of the hells now. Didn't you see the patch notes?"
Yeah, I've been targeted by enough romance spam that I just assume any photo of a woman I don't know was probably stolen from some random Tumblr or Instagram.
We found success in keeping the cat out by putting a layer of aluminum foil on the crib mattress one day, about a month before the due date. The cat jumped in once, hated it, and couldn't get out quickly enough. She never tried jumping in again.
So you're just reimplementing the current model but with the extra layer of a browser in between.
No, I'm removing the layer of the native code that launches whatever flavor of Electron they're running under the hood in favor of the browser and webview that's already installed on your device (or whatever other one you're interested in switching to).
Installing a PWA is the same as installing a native app, except instead of running it directly you also have to have a browser installed to run it.
...which literally every single mobile device already has. Seriously, you can't uninstall webview if you wanted to.
Plus, you only have to install one browser for the entire system, Come on. You can't honestly believe that the dozens of reproduced copies of the same codebases that live on your phone right now are a good use of your phone's storage or memory.
It's adding a significant amount of complexity [...]
I don't know what complexity you think it's adding. It's removing a bunch of native code, and replacing it with web-standard code that (in the case of most apps) was already written for the native app anyway, or at least was written for the web app.
[...] for no good reason.
Ever wanted to mod an app? If it was a web app running in a browser, you could. Would you like to use ad blockers on the YouTube app? Or use a userscript to hide stories about a particular person? Or automate the function of one of your apps? With native code you can't. With web apps you can. Web apps are more accessible, they adhere to published standards, they're not as heavy on your operating system, they're more resistant to privacy-siphoning attacks and surveillance, they're more easily able to share code...and, to be honest, they're also easier to develop. The only reason for corpos not to do this is because it gives the user power that they would rather be able to sell to the user instead.
Browsers are huge attack targets.
Security is not improved by forcing users to switch to native apps. For one thing, most companies' apps already are web apps; if they're not already hardened, wrapping them in native code and putting them in the Play Store or App Store won't magically make them more secure, because decompiling native apps and sniffing API endpoints is still a thing. Also, it could be argued that browsers are more resistant to security issues, since you can patch them once and mitigate certain vulnerabilities in every app without waiting for developers to ship a fix.
Anyone who's watched Trump for any length of time shouldn't be at all surprised by this. Just ask the five Black men who wrongfully spent years in jail for the 1989 assault of a jogger in Central Park, before being exonerated in 2002 due to DNA evidence and a confession by the man who actually did it; because a full fourteen years after their release from prison, Trump maintained that they were guilty (and probably still does).
The man is biologically incapable of apologizing or taking responsibility for his actions.
Oh no? We've had browser storage and cached web apps for twenty years now. The technology exists and could be improved, if we stopped forcing everything to be a native app.
I mean, honestly, most "native" apps are webviews displaying cached content. Clearly we can make it happen, it just needs to be more discoverable and have smoother integration.
So now we see whether Trump gives in or makes up bigger and bigger numbers. "900%! 1,776%! A BILLION PERCENT!"