alexgieg

Voters' minds are made deliberately feeble. Check the kind of thing taught in private religious schools paid for by public money in the US in strongly red areas, and you'll see a significant chunk of what that is. Creationism and millenarist biblical literalism are thoroughly enforced at all curricular levels and across all disciplines.

From the perspective of the architects of his policies, The Heritage Foundation, things are roughly going as they want, and these losses are a price worth to pay to ensure what they want to happen, happens.

Their perspective is relatively simple. Unhinged, but simple.

They believe the US is strictly incapable of remaining as the sole global superpower, and that due to cultural this and that, risks falling into a middle power or worse. Hence, they want to resuscitate the pre-WW1 notion of imperial Spheres of Influence, in which the world is carved between Great Powers that dominate their surroundings, and to make sure the US stays as one for decades to centuries. The US Sphere would be the Americas plus a small piece of Europe.

For this to work, a few things are needed:

a) The middle powers, and the weak countries, must all learn their place, that they have no real agency, that they must submit to the Great Power that dominates the sphere they're inserted into, and that if they revolt they're going to experience all manners of pain, from economic warfare to actual hot war in their territories.

b) The other strong countries must agree with this project, so although they're enemies on the long run, they must unite in the process of carving the world into those Spheres, and not to interfere too much with the other powers doing their own carving. Any current potential interference (Taiwan, Ukraine, Iran etc.) is a piece in the table to be used in negotiating the future frontiers between their Spheres.

c) And, internally, a shared culture, where the majority becomes supportive of this via the indoctrination appropriate to each case for the long run.

That's the gist of it. Everything else, including the public face of the implementation, are details that can be replaced as long as the overall strategy keeps advancing.

Thanks!

Replying here so it's close to the top (sorry):

What do people recommend as truly good alternatives? Particularly non-American ones due to Snowden's revelations etc. etc.

I don't disagree with you. I'd say this fits what I alluded to in my second paragraph.

If there are massive protests, it's clear the reconciliation hasn't reconciled things properly, and a better reconciliation must be done, preferably one that doesn't result in more massive protests from either the same or other huge groups.

In fact, remarkable long-term lack of massive protests would be a very good metric for determining whether ongoing reconciliatory efforts are moving in the right direction. If such protests start happening, correct course sooner rather than later, and measure success by a newfound lack of further massive protests.

Presumably, because the people who want to change things do have in-system ways to do so: joining into a new Party, preaching their views, getting elected, growing, until they convince enough people to give them the power they need to change things.

In practice there may be many roadblocks in that, so this isn't absolute. But if that's the case, it's still on the people who notice the roadblocks to convince most everyone these are real. Without that any protest will lack widespread support and be suppressed regardless.

IM cannot be stopped. When a government broadcasts they will censor them, the very next step is for protesters to install something like Bitchat, which does Bluetooth-based, mesh/P2P IM-ing, and is specifically designed to resist even full-on Internet shutdowns.

The best way for governments to deal with protests is to have policies in place that fulfill what We The People want. Everything else is a band-aid atop an ulcer: it hides the problem for a little while, but the problem itself keeps growing regardless.

In principle crypto solves the first problem, but suffers from networking effects: creators won't list crypto for payment because most people don't use it; most people don't use it because there's nowhere it can be used.

As for a universal social media platform, that used to exist. It was called "webrings". Every website would link to other websites they vouched for, so you could browse around them, and sign up for those you liked by clicking a single button on your browser of choice, adding it to your RSS feeds, after which you'd be notified whenever a creator you subscribed to posted something new.

Most of that died when Google decided to oppose RSS as a public-facing feature, and pressured Firefox in doing the same. So nowadays it suffers from the same networking effects problem crypto does.

The whole thing is deliberately engineered to centralize decision-making in the hands of as few people as possible, aka elites, and, through that, to steer most of the masses in whatever direction most benefits those elites.

Well, you find it right because you like the fact that your vote is worth n times more than the vote of those you oppose. Were the situation reversed, you'd find that a pretty bad arrangement.

Do you know the traditional method of cutting a cake in two perfectly balanced parts? Person A gets to cut it in two however they want. Person B chooses which slice goes to whom. Is it any wonder Person A dislikes it, and would pretty much prefer to both cut it and select which slice goes to whom?

So far the last several Presidents of the USA have decided they don't want that.

If you equate what the Presidents of the USA want to what the USA itself wants, then the USA have decided they don't want that.

If not, then you'd need to organize a referendum and let the population itself decide on a one person, one vote basis.

And that prevents them from calling the company and ordering them to increase prices so that they can then use the extra income to pay those capital taxes... how?

There's still the problem of how, precisely, we're going to force the rich to pay those taxes out of their own wealth, rather than them simply offloading them in the form of increased prices for the products and services their companies provide, which increased prices are then paid for by the weakest chain in the link: private end consumers, aka the middle class.

There may be a way, but it isn't self evident what that way may be.

Long term the tendency is even lower salaries.

Right now AI still isn't autonomous enough to do all of the work itself, so it needs developers to carefully manage it to do what it must.

If things remained like this, then sure, there'd be a point when "AI-management for area X" would become a profession on its own, similar to how similar processes happened multiple times in the past, and that would result in a new balance.

But AI won't remain like that. The end-goal is that a high level executive coils type on, Claude v25 something like:

"Update all my legacy codebase to the most recent everything. Make sure it works perfectly and doesn't break compatibility with anything. Also, while you're at it, these DOCX our customers sent list new features they'd like, so implement it all while you're at it."

And come back in the morning with it all executed perfectly. Which definitely isn't a recipe for human developers to start earning any better.

Human earning ceiling will be how much it'll cost for AI to do it at the same quality and efficiency level. If you charge less than that you'll have work, but not otherwise.

Was it a Russian-style suicide? Did he shoot himself on the back five times, then jump from a window?

Or was it a more Western-style suicide, hanging himself at the exact same time all the cameras around him coincidently turned themselves off?

I guess it's time people start keeping a public people with powerful enemies start keeping some kind of "not, I'm not planning on suiciding today" canary of some kind.