This got me interested. What exactly is he saying there? Does it mean what I think it means - that they immediately shift that money around, possibly through some mixers, to muddle the origin? And, of course, make it better suited to pay their proxies now that Qatar isn't sending suitcases of cash to them anymore?

Thank you for writing that. I was starting to think I'm going crazy and I can't possibly be the only one who sees through that.

And if you realize that Trump is just the clown at the helm. There's literally an entire bureaucracy underneath him doing most of the planning, deciding and executing.

Douglas Adams was right. The role of the president is not to excert power, but to distract from it. President of the Galaxy, president of the USA, no difference.

This.

You don't need billions to be care-free. Even double-digit millions in some nice safe assets already give you enough fuck-you-money to be good. And while everyone looks at the super-super-rich and they're in various public lists and tracked by not just the tax authorities, barely anyone knows the multi-millionaires. I know three or so that I'm sure nobody on here has ever heard anything about. They stay quiet, comfortable, private.

Don't you think you have the absolute best reason to not be revealed right there?

Can you imagine what criminals the world over would do for a few percent of that money?

Don: Why shouldn't we? We're the winner. We won.

He's giving himself prizes now.

nuf sed

It might be a hallucination, or it might be a real problem. And there are other possibilities. (E.g. earlier it was suggested that MS noticed a bad bug *somehow* and the government didn't want the bug to be fixed.)

If you want to be fair, it's been headed that way ever since the 1860's. And prior to that the individual states were headed that way.

People in power like to make their jobs easier.

"Security by obscurity" doesn't work by itself. It's a necessary component of every security policy, however. You can't just pick one. (It's called "defense in depth", but that's not really a good metaphor.)

general inequality because it factors in all the levels, not just specific boundaries.

Re: "because they needed to free funds for building data centers."

Yes, for some co's that's certainly the case. But it's not because "bots took jobs", but rather "bots need funds".

Correction: "laid off"

But you've got to do both. Doubting oneself is "critical thinking". Doubting other sources of authority is "independent thinking".

The thing is, nobody has enough expertise to be an independent thinker in every area. So you essentially MUST delegate your ideas in some areas (variable between people) to external authorities. At which point what you "believe" depends on which authorities you choose.

A related question is "how firm is that belief?". This also tends to vary wildly with little apparent (to me) reason behind it. This is one feature that *can* be related to IQ, but isn't always.

It's not just widespread, it's universal. What varies from person to person is the domain that they apply thinking to, and how they validate the authority they choose to trust.

Nobody is an "independent thinker" on every topic. Wherever one is an expert, one tends to be an "independent thinker" in that domain. Where you don't feel knowledgeable, you tend to accept an authoritative source...possibly after doing some amount of checking to see whether others think it reliable.