“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.
Is it just me, or is this graph (first graph in the article) completely unintelligible?
The X-axis being time is self-explanatory, but the Y-axis is somehow exponential time but then also mapping random milestones of performance, meaning those milestones are hard-linked to that time-based Y-axis? What?
Even if any of them believe they are praying, their “faith” is a sham in support of their real religion: power. To Republicans, “politics” is the religion founded on increasing personal power through performative speech and conduct.
They are hollow, nihilistic simulacrums of human-like virtue, expressing themselves only to drain the actual human value and agency from the public.
Yeah, Match.com isn’t satisfied until everyone is miserable.
It’s weird to think about how dominantly successful any app that took a principled position and resisted enshittification starting in 2010 would be now.
I think civilization is probably just ending after these last few generations, frankly.
Probably for the best…
We’ve seen the exact same playbook with universities. Pull federal funding for racist political priorities, and other funding if they don’t start toeing the line.
Don’t forget to bathe in raw sewage.
I think a general strike would be effective, but dangerous when people are kept so close to poverty.
Remember the pandemic, we “all” stopped going into work? Except the grocery store workers, and the food processor workers, and those that distribute the food, and water treatment plant staff, and the power plant, and hospital staff, and taxis, and drug store workers, and so on and on. Do those people stop working? How many people can’t obtain the things they need beyond their next paycheck? What if in addition, the store shelves are empty?
I agree, it’s the most feasible way to fight back, so don’t get me wrong. But just like union dues and preparation enable a local strike, accounting for food, water, amenities…a general strike would need to do that or else we would be fighting a war of attrition not just against billionaires with multi-year bunkers but also against ourselves.
Well, Jan. 6th was that too. Every boundary push is a practice run to push further.
The things that happened earlier - arresting US citizens before grudgingly releasing them, deporting them and legal residents - was a trial run for today. Today - planning denaturalization based only on Trump’s mood at the time - is a trial run for tomorrow. And we can guess what that is.
Yes, I opt out. The point of the scan is to (1) build a thorough database (although DOGE probably already did that, we just haven’t found out yet), and (2) to accustom you to your identity not belonging to you.
The second point is the real point of opting out - as soon as nearly nobody opts out, and they’ve made headway on a database, it will no longer be optional. Opting out in that sense is the only vote you’re going to get to cast against it.
They’ll ride in, but it won’t be to save us. It’ll be only exactly to the extent they can buy up the bankrupt economy. It’s the post-Soviet Russian collapse wealth privatisation scenario.
Probably the idea was that people aren’t familiar with it and wouldn’t have approved a general election ballot measure when RCV was voted on, so they did the “lower stakes” elections to get everyone comfortable with it first.
My understanding is ranked choice only applies to NYC primary and special elections. General elections are not ranked choice, which I believe the final mayoral to be.
So choosing the “I didn’t get control of the city so I’m going to be a spoiler candidate” option, I see. Real leader material.
It goes to show even Republicans don’t understand how Trump came to have so much power.
To recap: He appeared and said things that were universally condemned since the beginning. The point of that wasn’t to win over voters, it was to increase name recognition to the point that everyone knew and was talking about Trump in national media. After that, Trump had a direct line to voters and could exploit that relationship directly without the national media.
Right now, they are giving Mamdani national name recognition. This is fantastic. If they keep this up, he’ll have a direct line to voters just the same.
And maybe, just maybe, once they know who he is, some sizable part of the population will actually vote for [checks notes] health care, increased pay, increased protections, taxing the rich.
Don’t worry, I’m sure the FTC will investigate this obvious and pernicious false labeling bait-and-switch scheme!
I switched to Rust Desk after I got repeatedly flagged for commercial use of Team Viewer and access disabled. I was doing nothing of the sort, but it happened after I accessed my personal computer on my personal phone while at work. They must have IP address checks that are extremely aggressive.
I followed their process to “verify” I was non-commercial, which was invasive and insulting, and then was flagged again.
Rust Desk works great, no problems, never using Team Viewer again.
I mean, I fully expect them to settle and that’s depressing, but so far they haven’t. The article is paywalled, but it looks like this is what a mediator has proposed, that’s all.
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:
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