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Comment Re:It's not the government (Score 1) 95

The billionaire oligarchs don't need much government to function, at least not in the sense most folks think of government. If the federal and state governments disappeared tomorrow, there would still be a demand for security services currently supplied (regardless of opinions of quality) by government law enforcement. The private entities that step in to fulfill that demand would still in turn have demand for these surveillance packages. The primary difference is in their relationship with citizens' constitutional rights and whether the remaining government would have the resources to enforce that new relationship. And that's just looking at the security angle; private corporations under our current status quo have shown a tremendous appetite for surveilling all of us as much as possible for their own purposes. Adtech doesn't disappear with a 99% reduction in government. Subsidies and regulatory capture disappear, but the natural monopolization factors only increase with that governmental reduction.

When you boil capitalism or any other economic system down, it's about which economic factors are allowed or enabled to convert to political power. Removing explicit political capital while ignoring the barely-indirect political capital available to (under our system) the grotesquely wealthy only reduces the number of people splitting that pie. It's all well and good to say that remaining 1% will be charged with keeping the economic elites in check, but that comes via regulation and enforcement, both of which require enough political power to both remain independent of the economically powerful and overpower it when necessary. It's no accident the loudest voices in the shrink-the-government movement place regulatory agencies and independent ombudsmen at the top of their hit lists.

Comment Re:Bullying the AI (Score 1) 68

There are definitely a few projects in that vein, including webserver Miasma which infinitely returns poisoned training data with self-referential links to serve as a tarpit, and Nerpenthes and Iocaine which focus on the tarpit "labyrinth of links" using robots.txt prohibitions as bait for scrapers that ignore that guidance.

Comment Re:I guess I stop using Ubuntu (Score 2) 135

Were you going for irony in that last sentence or are you truly that self-unaware? The quote states that Linux follows that philosophy, and that the user likes that fact about Linux. It does not say the user follows that philosophy, much less to whatever degree of strictness you're insisting they must.

Comment Re:Was that when you immigrated to Russia (Score 1) 84

Several states have a pattern of cutting polling places and resources in areas that are statistically overpopulated by the minority party's voters, yes. You'll also see more creative forms of this, like Texas (my home state) limiting each county to one drop box (https://www.texastribune.org/2020/10/27/texas-voting-elections-mail-in-drop-off), with the background context that big (majority Dem) cities annex neighboring towns into their home counties when they annex the towns themselves. See also Texas coming down hard to limit drive-through polling locations because those same big cities implemented the concept as a COVID mitigation and saw a massive increase in voter accessibility. Texas was under a Democratic trifecta until the mid '90s, and is still much more purple than one would expect. We just also have bottom-5 voter turnout rates, partially due to the state legislature pulling shenanigans like I described for the past 25 years.

Comment Re:Democrats (Score 1) 84

None of those quotes show disdain at all. The closest it gets is mild judgment about frequency of changing political support. Contrast that with the sheer disgust you've flung in this thread--right down to incoherently insulting the extremely common metaphor of party support (or any other group affiliation) as ships. The only "wild" thing in this thread is the unprompted hostility you brought into a pretty basic discussion about a famous personality.

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