Hm. So folks who were small kids when the US ramped up a massive security panic, kids during a period of economic upheaval, Teens during our global experiment with raising children by cell phone, and are now trying to learn how to adult in another brewing economic mess, with creeping fascism and "AI" weirdness distorting everything.

All while being forced to go to schools bitter shitbag losers like to shoot up.

When you're powerless in an environment that is constantly changing and frequently hostile, it does things to you.

Not sure where you live.

Trump either does not understand that or thinks that USA citizens are too stupid to understand.

He understands it quite well.

It does two things:

- serves as a regressive national sales tax, shifting the tax burden to poorer people.

- Gives him a big stick to fuck around with for extortion, punishing people he wants to hurt, and generally making him feel powerful.p. It is an Americanized version of VAT plus DMA. Instead of health care and social guard rails, you get to share your ID before buying porn and pay for the health care of your masters.

My Newsblur install is my morning newspaper.

It is also a great filing cabinet - since most of my sources of new info flow through it, I use it all the time to find that thing I vaguely remember but can't place.

Your reaction is what's stupid.

You misunderstand the law, funnel the resulting frustration through an Ayn Rand filter, and then ignore the very real fascist takeover currently in progress to whine about nonexistent restrictions on your use of your robot friend.

This is why we can't have nice things.

They are still flailing for a distraction from Donnie's pedophile bestie.

If this weren't going to end in martial law, it would be a lot funnier.

Yeah, this is all fairly basic stuff. I don't do Wordpress, and I won't do CloudFlare.

I have a fairly custom stack, which is a liability a lot of the time, but can be useful in cases like this. Being different than the herd means they're spending most of their time on attacking their mitigations instead of whatever weird shit I'm up to.

even throttled crawlers are easily identifiable

Please share the secret. Currently about 70% of the traffic to some sites I run is from badly behaving robots puppeting residential IPs.

About the only trick that works fairly well is hidden poison links (effectively, "click here to ban your IP"). Some robot farms coordinate the search space, so you have to leave them all over, and they're using huge amounts of IPs, so you'll still get beat to shit.

What is your magic sauce?

Your (2) is spot on, and a significant side business for them.

(1) is close, but not quite right.

Those reports are their bread and butter. They are nicely packaged industry collusion, freshly laundered and dressed up with a pretty salutation. Senior management gets to know how far off-median they are, can spot if anyone else comes up with anything clever, and shave a few headcount somewhere knowing that's what the rest of the herd is doing, too.

Important life hack: when you see others valuing something much more than you, it is wise to reflect on why. Usually it is a Beanie Baby. Occasionally it is a tool you don't know how to use.

I'd take 6 months severance and a dismissal by txt over an HR drone reading from a script 150 times in a row and a week per year or whatever most companies do.

There are certainly more or less callous ways to lay people off, but in the end, layoffs can't really not be miserable. I'd argue that a nice cushion while you find your next gig is worth a lot more than a tearful goodbye.

Jimmy Lee Swaggart is dead, there's an opening in the grifter world there.

Your claim that the bottom of the economic ladder uniformly supports Stumpy is false.

Your assumption that because I'm well-off I'm clueless about the lives and opinions of less well off people is stupid and false.

You're incredibly presumptuous and appear willing to just bullshit without regards to facts. So I'm done wasting time on you.

He did cut my taxes - I'm well compensated.

But total tax load, counting tariffs, on the bottom 40% is up. And if you factor in benefit losses, like you should if you're looking at impact on real humans rather than gaming a spreadsheet, it is way up.

The point is that Trump is using tariffs as a cudgel

That's one of the reasons. The other is worse.

This is his "answer" to tax cuts for the rich. Tariffs as a regressive national sales tax, similar to how Southern states farm their poor while not charging income tax.

MRAs invent reasons why their precious bodily fluids are being horribly abused like a debtor talking to a loanshark.

They would still complain even if we reverted to chattel slavery. After all, that places burdens on them, too.