They have basically gutted the SEC and virtually all regulation enforcement.

Remember it doesn't matter if something is a crime if there's nobody enforcing the law.

Instead of going after a scam artists JD Vance and Donald Trump are now openly attacking left wing organizations full force of the Department of justice. Their words not mine.

Under those circumstances scam artists know they can get away with all sorts of crap.

If you have elderly relatives get ready to have them moving in with you after they have their retirement stolen from them.

Now idiots who don't know any better can lose money even faster!

Venture capitalists can afford to lose lots and lots of money and make it all back on one big hit. Small retail investors can't do that.

Furthermore small retail investors generally aren't sophisticated enough to tell the difference between scam artists and actual businesses. Hell we just had a run of Chinese scam artists covered by the greatest rap channel on YouTube. One of them managed to pump their value up 60,000% before cashing out with everybody's money.

Once again this is a chesterton's fence moment. Don't take down the fence if you don't know why it was put up.

But with the current administration Jesus fucking Christ it's open season. If you're a scam artist it's like shooting fish in a barrel. As long as you keep a few million around for a pardon and make sure you do your crimes in a red state so there's a governor to bribe on the top of the president you are probably okay.

Edward Snowden accomplished Jack and shit.

He didn't tell us anything anyone didn't already know. He just found some documents that confirmed things and we all just ignored them anyway.

Meanwhile the Democrats had been slowly chipping away at the government powers seized during the wake of 9/11 when guys like you were shitting bricks demanding protection from the big bad scary terrorists.

In the wake of 9/11 the Democrats could do basically fuck and all to prevent people panicking so much they handed away their liberties. A couple of them tried and immediately lost their seats and their political careers.

As things calmed down the Democrats began to run committee hearings and work towards eliminating all that surveillance crap.

And every time they started to get somewhere with it you start to freak out and they started to lose elections and they had the back off.

It's the difference between people representing you and people ruling you. The Democrats represent you. And that's for good and for bad. If you want them to do something balls to the walls incredibly stupid then they're going to let you do it. They will tell you the back off is best they can they will try to limit the damage you're going to do is best they can but they will still let you do it.

Basically when you as an American have a hold my beer moment the Democrats hold your beer instead of telling you to shut the fuck up and stop acting like an idiot Cletus.

They have tried in the past doing that and you still do to dumb shit you just do even more dumb shit because there's that Republican who not only will hold your beer but will tell you to do something even stupider and more dangerous and you'll do it.

The affordable Care act comes to mind but there is a whole slew of other less well-known laws.

They're also a ton of Labor protection laws the Democrats pushed through.

And without the free and open Internet created by section 230 of the CDA which the Democrats have consistently defended I wouldn't have the job that let me pay for my kids to go to college.

And of course there's the whole thing with the Republicans keep trying to crash the economy and would have made me and several of my friends homeless in the wake of the 2008 market crash if they could have.

And this is before we talk about all the clean Air stuff. Or the food safety stuff. Or the vaccine stuff. Or the fact that the Democrats are the ones who got money for working Americans during covid which kept our economy functional albeit barely. Or the fact that Joe Biden got us a soft landing instead of an economic depression. Or...

You really are just ignorant. I don't mean that as an insult I mean that is a statement of fact. You have been protected by people that you endlessly hate your entire life.

And threw it all despite your scorn they still work hard to protect you and your family. And no matter how much you hate them they won't stop.

Because of laws the Democrats passed that the Republicans fought tooth and nail against. So you can go fuck yourself when it comes to saying the Democrats did nothing.

You don't know anything about America or American history. I would accuse you of being a foreigner but I know fellow Americans don't have a fucking clue so who knows...

Go look up the contract with america. That was newt gingrich's name for the systematic process of derailing anything that would help you as an American and then using their control of media to blame the Democrat party for the Republicans did to you.

Over and over and over again the Republicans have fucked Americans in the ass and we bend over and take it. The way they keep getting this through the Democrats is by threatening to destroy the entire American economy by shutting down the government during budget negotiations.

Every single American is a hostage of the Republican party. And about 47% of us have Stockholm syndrome. A little bit of voter suppression and the Republicans can consistently win elections.

I mean for fuck sakes Missouri is 40% black but a deep red state. You don't need to have a PhD in political science to figure out what the fuck is going on there. And they still gerrymandered the districts to give the Republicans one more vote in the house because everyone knows they're about to get their asses kicked if they don't do something.

Trump literally said last year was the last election you were ever going to vote in and you still voted for trump. With all due respect and I do mean all due respect what the hell is wrong with you?

Trump wants to seize power and put himself in as a dictator so he's hoping for a nice scary violent event like an assassination against a republican US senator or something like it that would let him declare martial law and suspend elections. He is probably not going to get it but that's what he's after.

Economically the Republican party has nothing to offer voters and that has become exceedingly clear. The Republican party today favors high taxes on anyone who has less than 100 million cash in the bank and high prices to pay for all that using a national sales tax.

When your economic policies are that dumb and that destructive you need to keep everyone in a perpetual state of fear.

It's why Russia is doomed. Their birthright keeps going down because they treat people like shit but they can't get immigrants because they need intense xenophobia and racism in order to keep people willing to accept those terrible living conditions.

At this point I think the majority of Republican voters know all this but the closer they get to election and the more of the right wing propaganda they consume they just can't help themselves anymore. Their eyes glaze over their brains turn off and they vote Republican.

Hitler proved propaganda works.

Yeah if you go back into the early to mid-90s you will find Democrats doing this kind of tough on crime bullshit.

Similarly there's some of it right after 9/11 that the democrats got on board with.

In both cases the public was in the throes of a major moral panic and demanded it.

If the Democrats have a flaw it's that when the public wants something stupid they will give it to 'em.

But when the public calms the fuck down they will gradually start undoing the stupid shit the public demanded they do during the, always Republican stoked, panic.

The difference is the Republicans will do this kind of shit when the public doesn't want them to because Republicans don't give a rat's ass what you think or what you want.

Trump said it himself. You'll never have to vote again.

Jesus fucking Christ I still cannot believe we voted this guy back into office. I get how many people were confused and desperate because high food prices and I get that people do not make good decisions under pressure, there's a reason we do so much police and military training.

But I mean for fuck sakes people. What did you think was going to happen?

I would pay good money for a magic Ray that forced Trump voters to explain the actual reason they voted for him.

You voted for this. The Democrats have long since started curtailing these abuses because they are extremely unpopular with their base of minority, specifically black and latino, voters. For obvious reasons since over policeing is basically wrecking their communities.

This kind of tough on crime bullshit would evaporate overnight if Trump voters would focus on their pocketbooks instead of whatever crazy ass moral panic they're supposed to be afraid of today.

Again the Democrats are objectively better for the economy and for your pocketbook. That is not a point anyone can argue in good faith.

The thing is if you want to sell your house and all your possessions and give that money to Trump go ahead. But for fuck sakes stop trying to make me do it. Stop dragging me into your fucking cult.

It also unfairly biases towards the large investors. They are more likely to get insider information and also more likely to be able to absorb temporary losses.

With USB c peripherals. Drives are kind of flaky and disconnect at random. Buddy mine is a guitarist and he bought a music interface that doesn't work right under usb-c but works perfectly with a USB a connector

Not sure what the problem is but there is definitely a pattern.

Although there is a parallel line of technology that improves productivity through better understanding of science.

Good examples include vaccines keeping people and animals alive and our understanding of agriculture so that we can increase crop yields even with the same labor inputs.

That said as far as automation goes the problem is staying ahead of it.

As automation destroys jobs we need new technology that generates more jobs and we need new social structures for that too.

When the pace of technology exceeds our ability to generate new jobs and/or our society's ability to adapt to the lack of work for certain people you're going to get social strife from the technological unemployment.

And if that's left on checked you're going to get wars or at best a terrifying dystopia.

Basically what's called techno feudalism where you have a handful of super kings, a handful of people serving them and then everyone else probably 98% of the population maybe even 99% live in squalor.

Remember that the key with world war II was the combination of rapid technological advancement, the total destruction of Europe and large parts of Asia necessitatingly building it all, and a ton of new technology coming out of the war creating entirely new categories of jobs.

That's all fine and good for the people who came after had that exact moment in time when there was plenty of work, plenty of food and relatively few wars.

But based on everything we know about history you and me are about to go into what people call interesting times.

And I absolutely do not have a solution for it. People are not going to accept tens of millions of people who are completely without work getting food and shelter and medicine.

At the same time those tens of millions of people aren't just going to slowly starve to death in the streets without doing anything.

Somebody, a populist dictator, is going to come along and organize those millions of unemployable people into armies and point them at the people who still have jobs.

Is that as stack overflow collapses what's going to happen to those LLMs.

There is still GitHub although I do wonder how long until it's filled with AI slop code. There will still be plenty of hobbyists though.

Not sure it's enough to just point the llms at run of the mill open source code that isn't extensively commented. What makes stack overflow work so well is that it isn't just code it's code with detailed explanations on how to use that code.

At least we now fully understand why Microsoft bought GitHub. It was a massive data set for their machine learning.

Your boss is not looking top to bottom in the entire organization for anything and everything they can automate.

And even if your job isn't one of those somebody else's is and they're not going to go home after they get laid off by automation and eat a bullet they're going to start gunning for your job.

Maybe they'll get it or maybe they won't put your boss knows they're out there and they know cut your pay now

Without skill accessing wealth. Remember that.

Our current automation trends will reduce the GDP because there will be less overall economic activity. Fewer people with fewer jobs will buy fewer things and use fewer services reducing the GDP.

The way it stands AI, specifically llms, is a fundamentally antisocial technology. It doesn't have to be but context is everything.

You can't have a society where if you don't work you don't eat and then start automating the fuck out of everything.

You can't ingrain at the deepest cultural level the idea that if everyone isn't working a minimum of 40 a week then we need to go after those people because they're stealing from us all and continue automating away jobs.

Something has to give. Either the deeply ingrained notion that people have to work for a living, which is the say if they don't work they die, goes away and we accept that some people are just going to be useless but we're still going to let them have food and shelter and medicine...

Or we have to get okay with those people dying. Either of starvation, the elements or lack of medical Care.

We could also stop the automation Amish style but I don't see us doing that.

I also don't see us handing out food and shelter for free. Nothing pisses off people more than going to work for 40 hours a week and watching somebody sit at home playing Xbox.

I suspect we will take option three which is massive amounts of internal strife leading up to a third world war.