"Were his posts always like this?"

It appears to me that this is a serious question, so I'm going to give a serious answer: yes.

This is how he's always written (and spoken), although arguably it's gotten worse in the past few years as his dementia progresses. The press -- right, left, and center -- has unfortunately whitewashed much of this by often not quoting him unredacted or by paraphrasing what he's written/said in order to make it intelligible. If you actually listen to him, word for word, and read him, word for word, it's obvious in minutes that he's not only an incredibly stupid and uneducated man, but that what's left of his mind is deteriorating rapidly.

Keep in mind that Trump was born into an organized crime family, was raised to be a mobster, and built his entire "career" on fraud. At every point it was always about him and only about him: he doesn't care about anyone or anything else. He was able to conceal that -- to a certain extent -- for a long time, but now that he's losing his mind, the mask is off. He's been reduced to a toddler, who only wants ME ME ME. Except in this case, he's willing to destroy the US in order to get it, and US adversaries have quite adeptly leveraged that. Both the Iranians and North Koreans have made him their dancing puppet, for example.

So to circle back to your question and answer it another way: he writes like a scammer because he is a scammer.

"What is wrong with the Republican party?"

There is no Republican party. Not any more. It's been replaced with a death cult. (If you think that's an exaggeration, then I invite to pull up every piece of GOP-initiated legislation in Congress for the last quarter century and consider its goal(s). You will find that -- with precious few exceptions -- all of it is intended to kill as many people as possible. Whether it's cutting funding for anti-hunger programs, or for medical care, or for housing, or gutting environmental regulations so that industry can destroyer the planet faster, almost every piece of legislation is explicitly designed as an instrument of mass murder.)

Barry Goldwater - who I sharply disagreed with but have to admit was usually rational - saw this coming over half a century ago: "Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them."

These people are of course completely insane: but they're insane people who wield enormous power. They believe that they're bringing about the "End Times" and that doing so justifies anything/everything they do, no matter how vicious and inhumane. And so they're doing everything possible to bring about not merely the end of the US, but the end of humanity -- including their own children.

There's no reasoning with these people. They're impervious to it. There's no appealing to conscience or ethics or morality; they're convinced that they're doing the will of god and that doing so justifies anything. The only thing left is stopping them by any means necessary, and the only question left is how long and how far we're going to allow things to go before we finally do the things we need to do.

What I mean by the Subject is that this has made headlines, and of course it should, because the consequences that fortunately didn't happen would have been horrendous.

But meanwhile, quietly and largely unnoticed, AI/LLM/big date/whatever is being used to kill people in far less attention-grabbing ways. Medical insurance claims are being denied; housing loans are being declined; and so on. Things that affect folks' lives are being increasingly delegated to systems that are badly flawed because doing so increases profits and/or suits someone's political/social/economic agenda. The resulting body count isn't a bug; it's a feature. But because it all happens without much fuss, it doesn't make headlines.

The AI-becomes-superintelligent-and-kills-us-all doomsaying is a distraction from this, because this is already happening every day all around us. But because it happens quietly and privately, it isn't front-page news. It isn't news at all. It just...is. And that is why it's truly dangerous: it's not a highly visible large threat, it's just background noise.

Until it's you.

First, because it's an extraordinary book: well-researched, beautifully written, cohesive, and enlightening.

Second, because it's applicable here. Briefly: neuroplasticity is a thing: our brains can and do actively change themselves in order to handle the cognitive tasks we ask them to perform. They do this surprising rapidly, and they do so in adults, not just children. So -- for example -- while we no longer ask students to memorize very long poems, that doesn't mean they don't have the capacity to do so. (After all, our brains evolved over a very long time. They're not going to un-evolve in just a few hundred years.) The same is true of mathematical reasoning, rhetorical analysis, spatial reasoning, and everything else. Children today are just as capable of doing these things as children 20 or 50 or 200 years ago.

However, the learning, social, cultural, and economic environment around those children has changed. The lives of many of them are incredibly stressful, and it's not reasonable to ask anyone, let alone a child, to be good at learning under such adverse conditions. To put it another way: if you want better educational outcomes, then ensure that every kid has a stable home, medical care, good food, all the essentials required to provide the environment in which it's possible for them to learn. If you do that, then their brains will adapt to the tasks in front of them. But of course in many countries, including the US, national policy is do the exact opposite of this -- the product of decades of Republican work to undercut education at all levels, because literate, educated people are their enemies.

It's happening right now, as you're reading this: kids need clean air, so EPA regulations have been gutted. Kids need vaccinations, to anti-vax lunatics are being pushed. Kids need libraries, so their funding is being cut. Kids need hope for the future, so the economy's being wrecked. Kids need a safe environment, so global warming is being accelerated at every opportunity. Kids need safety, so pro-gun advocates want mass shootings every day, preferably in schools. Kids need available parents, so they're being forced to work two or three jobs. Kids need stability, so national leaders are whipsawing policy around on almost an hourly basis. Kids need peace, so pointless wars are being started. Kids need hope, and it's being systematically taken away from them.

Instead they're being offered lives of misery, working forever as the vassals of the feudal lords of tech. So of course they're not learning: how could they? Why should they? And it's not their fault: it's ours.

Good analysis. I'll add the price of crude continues to increase because the cost of shipping continues to rise quite rapidly. Insurance fees have gone through the roof, fuel costs are up, some ships are being rerouted all the around Africa with commensurate costs. The Saudis' east-west pipeline is out of commission for an indeterminate period. And now that the Houthi control the southern entrance to the Red Sea, all it will take is a couple of potshots at passing ships to exacerbate all of this further. All because Trump couldn't stand the idea that a black President had negotiated a working (imperfectly, but working) deal with Iran that kept everything manageable and because he's surrounded himself with sycophants who are just as ignorant of asymmetric warfare as he is.

1. It's not ethical anywhere that two-party consent is required, because Meta will make a recording of it and retain it.

2. Deaf people have gotten along and will get along just fine without Zuck's pervert glasses. Lip-reading and sign language almost always suffice, and on the few occasions where they don't, a scribbled note works.

3. If there was the slightest intention of creating these in order to help out the Deaf community, then (a) the Deaf community would have been consulted up-front (b) and asked "do you actually want/need something like this?" (c) the design and implementation would be very different (d) a consent mechanism would have been built-in and mandatory (e) there would be no recordings. This is an after-the-fact attempt to justify a device that was conceived by a misogynist who absolutely hates women with every fiber of his being -- something we've known since he was in college -- so that he can abuse and victimize them vicariously, and then blame the users of these devices, the very people he purposefully enabled.

We need to find out the names, addresses, vehicles, etc. of every Flock employee and set up 24x7 surveillance not only of them, but of their entire family. The resulting videos/photos should be posted online along with corresponding metadata including geolocation. This data/metadata should be heavily replicated so that it can't be taken down and it should be correlated against whatever databases are available in order to build dossiers that are complete as possible.

This is what Flock's doing to us; we should do it back to them. And we should show the same responsibility and restraint that they've shown: NONE WHATSOEVER.

It's the only way. Regulation and legislation won't help us here, they're much too little, much too late, and Flock will simply ignore them anyway. We need to put them in same panopticon that they've put us in and keep them there until they yield.

"But yeah like you said, never gonna happen. In most of the world there's a Caste system. And the Untouchables are at the top."

Boy howdy, have I got news for you!

Latest estimate I could find is that in San Francisco alone, Lyft gives something like 170,000 rides. Every day.

People forget that California is a huge market. There's a reason why when California changes its emission standards for vehicles, large automakers don't just go "well, fuck you, I'm not going to sell cars in California." It's a market that is extremely painful to walk away from, and virtually no major company has done that (two exceptions, before someone "well actually"s me: Firearms companies and insurance companies. But those market segments are meaningfully different -- insurance companies were simply seeing a bad market given fires and earthquakes, and California wants firearm companies to not do business in the state).

I'll acknowledge that Uber and Lyft did threaten to leave the state right before Proposition 22 was passed, giving them legal cover to continue to treat their employees unfairly. I suspect they'll threaten to do that again. They will not. I ain't losing sleep over that.

" an angry person following and harassing someone" - Didn't happen, it was a calm and rational news reporter. You Crossburning Treasonfucking IncestShit GOP KlanBitchtards just lie all day huh?

Do us all a favor DMB, end your life since you're a subhuman Incest-Produced Crossburning GOP Trashfuck.

A Klan Member in the neighborhood is dangerous. DMB should be removed from society since he's a Trashfucking America-hating Bitchboy KLAN TERRORIST SHITBAG.

Yeah, that's true. And as a Lyft customer, that's a huge concern of mine. I live in the San Francisco area, so deep in California, and I worry that at some point Lyft will respond to this by moving all the cars and drivers they use to give people like me rides to Nevada.

The wait time for a driver to come from Nevada is going to suck

The Technician is a Bitchboy for a fascist company. Fuck that.

He was harassed and SWATted and the Flock KlanBitchboy made a FALSE POLICE REPORT with ABUSE OF THE 911 SYSTEM both of which are actual crimes.

DMB is a Klanfucking Incest Produced Treason Ass RETARD who hates America and has never read the Constitution. Deport yourself or Cobain yourself, DMB, you Wortless Subhuman America Hating Klan Bitch Treason Cunt.