> which never accounts for the very bulk of what US really exports: IT and financial services

Given the growing demand to move away from US services and towards European alternatives, I wonder what the US will look like in 10 years if this move gains significant momentum.

For those who decried Hillary's E-Mail server but fail to apply the same standards to the current administration, it was never a real issue to begin with. Just performative nonsense.

Given the history of his family, one would expect them to avoid risqué associations and activities. I think it deserves some scrutiny.

That is a probable outcome however it would at least cap or limit the ability of bot farms to produce industrial sludge content.

> human using AI to 'improve' the quality of their comment

I want to hear people in their own voice, their own ideas, with their own words. I have no interest in reading AI generated comments with the same prose, vocabulary, and grammar.

I don't care if your writing is bad.

Additionally, I am sceptical that using AI to write comments on your behalf creates opportunities for self-improvement. I suspect this is all leading to a death of diversity in writing where comments increasingly have an aura of sameness.

No system is flawless. Every democratic system has its own issues. What is increasingly clear is that the current crop of tech billionaires do not belong anywhere near a position of power. God help us. The quality of individual is disappointing.

People aught to be questioning more the future vision of those in positions to shape it. Someone who struggles with such simple questions around humanity while simultaneously building the tools of a surveillance state probably should not be one of the individuals driving our future.

It's quite clear that my vision of the future is nothing like theirs.

It's a lot more comforting to believe that the people who have influence over us are there by some right of some kind.

Wether it be because they're "smarter than us and have completed capitalism" (that's how Gates, Ellison and ironically Trump/Musk are thought of)

or by "divine right" as it used to be with Kings.

It's horribly sobering to realise that, actually, they're just people. Like, pretty ordinary unremarkable people who have access to different information than we do and have been exposed to different things. Rarely are they more than a single standard deviation from the norm in intelligence.

They're people, flawed, egotistical, easily manipulated, easily dragged into thinking weird things, persuadable and unless they're really self-aware: will be surrounded by sycophants that just repeat what they want to hear (because, that feels pretty good) until they have a warped "echo of an echo" understanding of the world.

I wouldn't wish this on anyone, it's terrifying to believe that you would be insulated from all direct criticism while being told that everything you do is the right thing no matter what it is. You can't trust your own fucking reflection in that situation.

But we do that to people, people who have enormous influence over us, and they get confused when we don't like them, and we get confused about how they can be so out of touch and unlikable.

But they're just people.

Some might even agree with their dystopic vision of the future.

One outcome of the Epstein files release is getting direct evidence, very clearly, how goddamned stupid and crass and uninteresting these assholes are.

They talk like the dumbest 1850s british aristocrats. They talk as if they are discussing how lazy the Irish are and how that is definitely why they are starving. They have objectively stupid opinions. They believe themselves especially smart as they fire off one or two sentences about high school level philosophy topics, and they somehow find a way to generate wrong answers to questions that really shouldn't even have wrong answers. All the while, they misspell everything because apparently they are outright illiterate too.

Like, they say such utterly stupid things as "Women are too emotional to make good decisions". As if they don't do the things they do for extremely petty reasons.

And yet, still some morons all over the US think they must be geniuses because they fell ass backwards into a literal bubble and came out rich. You can publicly be an absolute moron and the Wealth propaganda in the US is so bad people will still insist you must be magically genius and only pretending to be stupid.

Did they even encrypt their "I'd like to purchase a rape of a little girl please" emails?

Perhaps stolen accounts? I doubt every user is practising good security hygiene with a unique password per each account. Password leaks from other sites might well allow a motivated individual to hijack some here.

I could speculate that someone in the past had the business mindset to create thousands of accounts over multiple sites and offers the ability to loan them out for a period of time.

> There are tariffs everywhere, all the time.

This neglects the scale, cost, and unpredictability. His tariffs are far from being the usual seen elsewhere. Of course, you should already understand this.