Even without the context we all know who I'm talking about.

I bring it up because dear God this administration is corrupt and in light of the subject of this comment what the hell was anyone expecting?

I think the real problem is about 25% of the population of any given country or dyed in the wool assholes.

From there all you have to do is push people to enough desperation that their brain stop working right. People under enormous amounts of pressure don't suddenly get better or smarter. They make bad decisions and they make more of them.

Like believing a famous pedophile who bankrupts everything he touches is somehow going to reduce the cost of groceries. Somebody who can think straight knows better than that.

It could also just be money laundering. I've seen several of these absolutely enormous thefts and they're so large that it's basically impossible to get away with it. You can't move hundreds of millions let alone billions of dollars like this and not have it be readily traceable.

If they catch the guys who did this then yeah we will know but if they haven't caught these guys in a few months then it's either North Korea or one of the other nation states or it's just money laundering. Honestly the money laundering could easily involve nation states like Russia or Iran or North Korea.

The internet didn't flourish until after 1995. And how? Because hosting companies made it possible for anyone to put up a website. Because DNS providers offered their service. Because ISPs sprang up to connect people to it. Because businesses put up their own websites and gave people a reason to go on the internet other than looking at some personal geocities page.

Like almost everything else you have, it exists because someone saw an opportunity to profit by creating it.

"Late-stage Capitalism" is a Marxist myth based on a cherrypicked view of history and the arrogance of claiming to be able to predict the future. Marx looked at a sliver of a business cycle and mistook cyclicality for linearity. His predictions were proven wrong over a century ago.

No, I don't want to go back to geocities and webrings.

When do you think it wasn't money-driven? Servers cost money. The people who run them cost money. DNS costs money. Internet service costs money. The people who started these sites did it to make money. Anything that uses any resources costs money.

Calling people NPCs will convince exactly zero of them.

Oh, I've just got to pick those nits!

Ignorance and nievete are a lack of knowledge, not a lack of understanding. Optimism only looks like a lack of understanding if you're a pessimist who makes the mistake of thinking they're "just being realistic".

You could have saved some time and typing by just saying, "I suffer from untreated depression", leaving the same semantic footprint.

Are you absolutely certain you aren't mistaking, "don't think like me" for, "don't think"? "Don't think about the things I think about", is another one that often gets mistaken for "don't think".

I've thought about it. It would be useful for me if something would watch my accounts and automatically pay off anything I put on my credit card, under some limit. I haven't done it because I am A, lazy and B, because I'm worried it might go wrong. So, I get why someone would do it. And while I expect it to be safe before long, I'm not confident in it yet.

I guess it's to be expected. Just like the early days of the internet when they didn't yet know how to deal with security.

If I see an email claiming to be from my bank, and it uses the word "kindly", I know it's fake.

I was thinking that myself. Is it just that things that small look generated?

You go to the right schools and you meet the right people and you get to pretty much do whatever you want. And you get into the schools because your parents get you there and their parents got them there.

If the working class had half the solidarity of the Epstein class we would live in a Utopia

It's not a product it's capital. It's not something you sell the people it's something you use to make things.

It's a labor saving device. Automation. In other words a job killer.

There are studies that clearly indicate that factory automation is responsible for approximately 70% of the Lost middle class jobs since the 1980s.

We have been automating away high paying jobs as fast as we can for decades and AI is just another extension of that.

The Epstein class doesn't want to sell you products. They don't want to have you as an employee. They look back at the Kings and emperors of old and say, that should be me. I shouldn't be dependent on consumers and employees.

They are planning a new world and you're not part of it.

And because nobody gets it unless I say it this way, like George Carlin said it's a big club and you ain't in it.

For some reason one Carlin says that everybody understands but when I explain it it's right out the window.