The old skeuomorphic Apple icons were so easily distinguishable and yet still identifiable as Apple, a tough act to balance today amid competing design languages in oceans of competing apps. I thought they were great.
That pen and ink icon had a classic feel to it. It made me think about the time and effort demanded by handwriting that I was bypassing by opening that app. That kind of visual poetry is lost in these flat designs, where communicating membership in a brand's ecosystem seems to beat out other priorities.
The fuss about AI is interesting to me in music. The most popular and commercially successful artists are already basically using "AI" by having teams of people produce their ideas for them, if they're not outright buying a hit from someone like Max Martin. If you watch Timbaland's Masterclass, he is essentially squeaking noises into a mic which his underlings toil away with and produce into beats.
If you don't like the AI workflow, humans are already offering that workflow to the richest and most successful among us. The new tech is kind of leveling the playing field in that sense. When you think about how AI is applied in other fields, it's basically on the way to giving everyone CEO powers, allowing them to delegate vague directives into action. Whether there's room for 8 billion CEOs on earth remains to be seen.
I personally think barriers to entry in certain industries are features, so we aren't drowned in a sea of careless whims and can more easily find products made with love, dedication, and well articulated intent.
The music is produced by a large team and the headlining artist reduced to a brand in that case, but ultimately it is still a team of people. The use of AI in their place forecloses the possibility of their artistic drive overcoming and subverting the conformist demands of the music industry.
If it's coming down from the C suite, that just makes it worse. That's cheap marketing tricks winning priority over lasting intent. It's not just the design folks trying to justify their job at that point, it's the executives surrendering to the "stock must go up during my quarters at all costs" mentality.
If Company X didn’t reinvigorate their product line then consumers might switch to Company Ys products because they look shiny and new. Which is literally why people switched from BlackBerry et al to iPhones in the previous decade.
Consumers are fickle and want that dopamine hit when they spend money. I know this and even I find myself chasing shiny things. So there’s no way we can change that kind of consumer behaviour.
To be clear, I’m not saying it’s right that companies do this, but I do think they’d go out of business if they didn’t because consumer trends will continue like this regardless of how ethical companies tried to be.
So the problem here isnt that Apple tried to refresh its operating system look. It’s that they completely jumped the shark and created something that was too focused on aesthetics while failing in literally every other metric.
People switched from BlackBerry to iPhone for far more than just iPhones being "shiny and new." Visual voicemail, Safari, touchscreen, etc. The recent UI redesign effort is not remotely comparable to the investment and strategy that went into distinguishing the iPhone from the rest of the cell phone market.
We're discussing this on one of the most bare and plain sites on the popular internet. Folks who are attracted to value don't care if stuff isn't redesigned if it works well. It's a bad sign if executives at Apple feel the need to invest in cheap dopamine hacks for the sake of novelty farming.
A company that stagnates or even shrinks to a healthy size can be more valuable to society, and the stock market in the long term, than one that mutilates itself in chase of unnecessary growth.
Yep. Also an issue: the high profit industries are abused by pump and dump scammers like Vivek Ramaswamy who had his doctor mother run a phase 2 clinical trial on a struggling Alzheimer's drug he bought from GlaxoSmithKline before he cashed out and it inevitably failed phase 3 trials.
We're moving in the opposite direction of ensuring that capital is allocated productively in said industries by destroying regulations and agencies like the CFPB, FTC, SEC, and by giving platforms and political power to the cheaters and fraudsters who have infested the Republican party.
You've convinced me, I'm going to stop complaining about corporate slop and the connection between big tech / VCs and the awful political situation in the most advanced country in the world. I will try to glaze Liquid Glass from here on out, say some nice things about the richest man on earth who kept quiet about the fact that he pays people to grind video games for him, and make sure to give David Sacks and Jason Calacanis the benefit of the doubt next time they are whining like babies online for a Silicon Valley Bank bailout.
I don't think I misinterpreted the condescension you dished out by blanket labeling a trend of mostly valid critique as psychological compulsion and performative misanthropy.
Mainly I wanted to suggest that the folks you're diagnosing might have valid reason to complain. I could have done it more tactfully, but that's what came out.
Your post reads to me as a complaint that people who complain too much have a problem.
Larry Ellison is using his bags to purchase lies and silence.
No economy can be in true equilibrium when the consumers send profits to be spent in unforeseen and unrelated ways like this. Every purchase carries potentially immense future costs that are almost completely opaque.
Free market maximalists need to confront this fact before praying at the altar of complete deregulation, and every consumer should pay more attention to who they are buying from.
-- Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776
More significantly, one of the first discussions within the text of precisely what wealth is (on which Smith has several, and occasionally inconsistent, answers, and which he seems to think of as more a flow than a stock.)
One of Smith's principle complaints in his text was what we now call "market failures" and "regulatory capture".
What's free market about total state regulatory capture, calling the President when your bids get rejected, or setting up wars and domestic police actions to enrich yourself with contracts using taxpayer funds?
There are legitimate criticisms of a pure free market, but this is "state capitalism" not a free market.
The Trump administration is absolutely not pro free market. They're putting fingers on the scale all over the place, taking Federal positions in private companies, taking literal bribes for regulatory favors, influencing the selection of executives and board members, and using the power of the state to attack privately owned companies for platforming speech they don't like (like this 60 Minutes segment, made by a private company). Trump/MAGA looks a lot more like the CCP than anything else.
Of course if you pay attention to the discourse, MAGA and national conservatism are an explicit repudiation of Reagan/Clinton "neoliberalism" and "libertarian conservatism." They explicitly support a large administrative state that centrally plans the economy and culture, just one they run and use to push right wing and nationalist agendas.
I remember saying back during the Bush years: if the right is forced to choose between liberty and cultural conservatism, they will throw out liberty. The right only supports the freedom to do what they think people should be doing. (Yes, there are similar attitudes in some parts of the left too. There are not many principled defenders of individual liberty.)
Edit: I'm really just arguing that we should call things what they are. Calling MAGA's CCP-like state capitalism a free market is like calling Bernie Sanders or Mamdani communism (they're socialists, not communists, these are not the same) or calling old school conservative republicans fascists. Words mean things.
The tariffs are at least partially about crony capitalism if you look how they have repeatedly played out. Announce big, broad, sweeping industry & country level tariffs. Talk to Big Tech execs, quietly delay/rescind specific sub-components or even companies from said tariffs. Rinse & repeat.
The companies left fully paying tariffs are the ones that aren't big enough to have the orange mans ear / "donate" to the ballroom construction.
Tariffs, as with taxes, may serve positive, market-favourable functions, particularly in addressing market failures, uneven regulation (e.g., higher pension, safety, environmental, and/or medical-care burdens in the importing country), as well as anti-dumping or anti-interference actions. British-Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang writes of this, particularly in Kicking Away the Ladder:
And it would quickly be destroyed by competing governments that don’t believe in free markets and actively subsidize their industries to capture market share.
I forgot to put in my comment "until recently". And the US auto industry does such so using that as your argument in favor of tariffs doesn't really work.
You and your downvote brigade can continue to hit my posts but it won’t change the fact the US has been subsidizing our agriculture sectors and oil and gas to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars for a LONG time.
Anyone claiming the US is a completely free market is either uninformed or a delusional nationalist.
Can you give an example of a zero tariff country being destroyed by a super high tariff country? I can give you examples of the opposite. For example Argentina tried to build up domestic industries with high tariffs.
Trump forced the UAE to buy $2 billion of his stable coin in order to avoid tariffs. He is making $80 million a year farming yields off that. The tariff nonsense was 100% just a backdoor for corruption.
Edit: and I forgot he pardoned the binance guy for facilitating this corruption too. Trumps pardons are the most corrupt in american history but MAGA is still yelling about the hunter biden pardon even though Joe was absolutely right that trump would maliciously prosecute him
It’s actually a lot of small to midsize manufacturers importing subcomponents that are getting hurt in the heartland. They can’t lobby for exemptions & don’t have the supplier negotiating power of the megacaps.
The recent defense bill is evidence of this. Who has access to these contracts and massive spending increases? Is it any random startup that is building a good product? Nope. It’s the incumbent companies that are big donors and the various defense tech companies from the Peter Thiel and Joe Lonsdale ecosystem, who are ideologically aligned to the administration and support them vocally. Same with the new ICE and border agency funding. They’re tripling these agencies budgets. Who’s getting contracts to hire thousands of new agents or to build software profiling the millions they want to deport in 2026? Their friends like Palantir probably.
> There are legitimate criticisms of a pure free market, but this is "state capitalism" not a free market.
Yeah, that's what OP said. I hate these sort of comments where the poster acts like they vehemently disagree with what was said, but then just restate what was said in a slightly different way.
No, OP lectured us about the evils of free markets and how they need to be regulated... presumably by the same corrupt, captured government he's complaining about. The one who's giving Ellison his orders to pass along to Weiss. Because that's who'll do the regulating, in the world OP is implicitly asking for.
The problem isn't the money or the market. The problem is the power.
Trump's and the Republican party's whole shtick is deregulation. The financial tumors in the economy love it when the white blood cells look the other way. That's why folks like Ellison and Elon bought this election. These are the types of orders they are happy to comply with for favorable treatment.
If you don't regulate, you're just opening the door for the free market to birth a tyrant or cabal that makes up their own power structures.
If you don't regulate, you're just opening the door for the free market to birth a tyrant or cabal that makes up their own power structures.
Perhaps, but right now the only tyrants and cabals I see around me were elected democratically. I don't have to use Facebook or Amazon, but I have to pay taxes to Trump's treasury department.
The fact that stupid people can be easily herded into voting against almost everyone's best interests, including their own, is not an indictment of the free market. If anything, it speaks to the apparently-unresolvable incompatibility of social media and democracy. I'm pretty sure we'll have to give up one or the other before long.
Democracy is not the problem, it's a deliberately misinformed populace shaped by undeserved money that's the core issue. Folks who pollute the information in the market or the political field steer the market away from a symmetrical information equilibrium -- they are huge drains on human potential. Trump did both and evaded trial for sedition because of how much he cheated in business and engaged the law in bad faith, and due to favors he promised to others like Elon and Ellison who had more money. Before he was a "democratically elected tyrant" he was a regular free market one.
Money is power. High concentrations of money controlled by few people serve the whims of those people, who use that power to influence politics, in 2024 through one of the most dishonest campaign trails and propaganda operations in my living memory of American politics. I'm surprised you don't see the connection.
Money is power the way religion is power. Traditionally, religion is what the American right wing has used to herd its supporters, but it wasn't enough by itself to capture the entire electorate. More recently they've found that leveraging social media such as Facebook and friendly "news" outlets such as Fox gives them enough influence to take over national politics completely. If such immense power wasn't up for grabs, the money wouldn't matter.
If I said the problem was religion, I'd rightfully be taken to task. But if I were to call out the effects of evangelical subversion and abuse of protestant Christianity in America, you'd probably find room to agree. It's exactly the same with money.
We aren't going to get rid of either money or religion, but we can say that the Federal government -- and yes, the billionaires behind it -- shouldn't have anything close to this level of power.
In a free and unregulated market, you will see cronyism by the wealthiest players who have captured it. The payoff of capture is enormous and therefore investors have incentive to offer up capital to accelerate the capture. Tyrants emerge from anarchy. A corrupt MAGA administration bought by private money is the product of a poorly regulated market.
I think you're missing the implied cause and effect here. Lighthanded regulations allow for ridiculous amounts of wealth to be acquired in the U.S. Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, etc. are so unfathomably rich (and therefore powerful), they can now trivially bend government to their will.
Peel it back even more: how does any State not fall victim to monied interests? This is usually handwaved away by socalists in the sense that everything is handled by "independent commissions" that can totally not be corrupted.
The solution is really to keep the scope of government small so that any corruption isn't detrimental to the populace, and they can handle it in the next election.
> Peel it back even more: how does any State not fall victim to monied interests?
Go with either the FDR route (94% tax rate), or the CCP route (clip the wings of the Icaruses who fly too high).
Edit: if the above are too extreme, another approach would be firm and consistent application
of anti-competitive laws, resurrecting the fairness doctrine, and stop pretending that artificial constructs have human rights.
> or the CCP route (clip the wings of the Icaruses who fly too high).
This seems like a great way for the monied interests from WITHIN the party to just take full control.
> Go with either the FDR route (94% tax rate)
The reason why this worked is because FDR oversaw the US during a period of incredible change and after the Great Depression. It's not like the tax rate was responsible for his successes.
> > or the CCP route (clip the wings of the Icaruses who fly too high).
> This seems like a great way for the monied interests from WITHIN the party to just take full control.
They already do in the US, so this is a non-response.
> > Go with either the FDR route (94% tax rate)
> The reason why this worked is because FDR oversaw the US during a period of incredible change and after the Great Depression. It's not like the tax rate was responsible for his successes.
Once again, this is a vacuous response. If the claim was “high taxes caused the change during FDR’s time,” “There was change” is not an alternative explanation to that claim. If we took the counter-factual claim, do you think the period would have been as transformative if the tax rates weren’t high?
> This seems like a great way for the monied interests from WITHIN the party to just take full control.
Politicians already have political power in every country and political system. The blatantly corrupt ones get the death sentence if their provincial or central committee patron can't save them, and those get culled every decade or so, so you can't go overboard.
That's not a solution, that just removes an opponent of monied interests from the table entirely, it's exactly what they want. The only thing these people want more than a government they can capture is a government so small they can replace it entirely.
But theres a balance to be struck there — keep the government too small and weak and it is susceptible to corruptive forces from domestic and foreign enemies alike.
So imho it isn’t enough to simply keep government ‘small’ —it is also important to keep it the size proportionate to other potential threats.
It’s also important to keep in mind that size is but one dimension and is only being used as a proxy for power which is the ultimate factor that matters — a government of one person with control of WMDs can be much more of a threat than a large government without WMDs.
Small government goes against the original and deepest Capitalist thinkers, who all pushed that strong government oversight was a REQUIRED part of Capitalism to keep it healthy and in balance.
That's a solution. Another would be to enshrine in law independent watchdog agencies whose goal is to win trophies for rooting out corruption, reducing waste, preventing or breaking up harmful monopolies, etc.
How valuable are those trophies compared to bribes, or the tacit bribes of cushy "consultancy" roles? How do you stop lobbyists from gutting those regulators - what use is a fiercely independent regulator that has no resources?
Getting money out of politics is the hardest part.
I am not sure how the US will find the political will short of getting burned badly enough for partisans to align on reform. How bad does it have to get?
That's no solution, since once someone has corrupted said small government, the obvious next step is to use the influence to increase its size and power.
Capitalism by it's design, and as outlined by it's original and deepest thought leaders requires strong and decisive government oversight to keep it in check and keep it healthy. Being against strong government oversight is to be against a working, Capitalist system and against traditional Capitalist thought.
Strong and decisive don't mean huge expenditures and picking winners. Our government does so much more than governing. Capitalism needs a government that sets and enforces rules in the face of market failures. It doesn't mean a government that redistributes trillions of dollars.
There's more than one type of government that can resist corruption, since much that drives corruption is extra-governmental (populace education level, media environment, trust in institutions, wealth equality, etc).
So it's unsurprising there are different optimal anti-corruption government types for different combinations of those qualities.
Yes. But, I don’t think a single one of those “least corrupt” top contenders could be described as:
> The solution is really to keep the scope of government small so that any corruption isn't detrimental to the populace, and they can handle it in the next election.
Which was kind of my point. In reality, the least corruptible types of governments tend to be ones libertarian-skewing Americans would crassly describe as socialist.
Singapore is strange place - aside from being a city-state. You'll get sent to the gulags for being in possession of a joint, but prostitution is legal. I know a guy who once got in a bar fight there, and he immediately packed up and went to the airport.
I wouldn't exactly call it lightweight government.
The graph here can get a bit wonky. And Switzerland is definitely the closest example of “limited government” working, I’d agree. But both of those countries, e.g., have universal healthcare. Switzerland through a more strict version of something like the ACA. Singapore, state-funded. Switzerland has compulsory military service, higher taxes, more gun regulations, etc. than the U.S. I think the U.S. beats these two on having a more conventionally “limited government” design.
I don't entirely disagree, but also note that the extreme wealth of both these guys is at least partly a result of state spending not pure private market forces.
Oracle has always had a huge presence in government. Large companies too, but Federal use has really helped keep them afloat as open source and competing products that are far cheaper have eaten their lunch.
For Musk the case is even more extreme. Tesla's early growth was bankrolled by EV credits and carbon offsets, which were state programs, and SpaceX is a result of both Federal funding and direct R&D transfer from NASA to SpaceX. The latter was mostly uncompensated. NASA just handed over decades of publicly funded R&D.
These two would probably be rich without the state, but would they be this rich?
The same was true back in the original Gilded Age. The "robber barons" were built by railroad and other infrastructure subsidies.
However I do agree that private wealth beyond a certain point begins to pose a risk to democracy and the rule of law. It's a major weakness in libertarian schemes that call for a "separation of economy and state." That's a much, much harder wall to maintain than separation of church and state. Enough money can buy politicians and elections.
As much as I don’t like Musk and think Tesla is overvalued meme stock and the cars suck compared to other EVs (I have driven a lot of EVs during the year that we went without a car on purpose - long story), SpaceX did something that the government couldn’t do - have a lot of failures before it had a success. Politics wouldn’t let it happen.
Let’s remember: Musk bought Tesla. He was already ridiculously wealthy in order to get himself into this position of basically robbing the U.S. government.
Of course. That was also my point, as I think it is yours. There is an event horizon after which an individual can corrupt government and really accelerate their wealth accumulation even faster.
Isn’t the cause that people just happened to elect someone who doesn’t care and is corrupt? Are you implying money decided the election? How do you reconcile this with the fact that trump was outspent?
Sorry what regulation in particular are you thinking about here? There’s no logical anti-trust angle I can think of.
I mean of course I think the outcome here is bad, but I’m struggling to think of a kind of regulation that could have prevented it that isn’t completely insane.
Edit: Listen everyone, it sucks, but there's no "one weird trick" where you can have a congress, judiciary, and executive branch dominated by Republicans, that then governs like Democrats. This isn't a "regulation" problem. It's a "roughly half the country wanted this" problem. Adding more regulations is not going to suddenly make the FTC act right; we have thousands of regulations already on the books and if they wanted to do something, they could.
Your prior seems to be that the Trump administration is operating in good faith and that they would naturally be predisposed to allow the merger, being free market republicans and all.
That's not the accusation at hand. The contention is that the Trump administration is threatening to block the merger (corruptly, in opposition to their republican proclivities) unless the news arm of the merged company is operated in a partisan way.
And the evidence for that is that Ellison walked in, threw out CBS News's pre-existing leadership, and brought in a reasonably-well-known-but-still-not-celebrity-enough-to-be-independent partisan republican voice to run it. And now that she's there, she's clearly operating the news room in a partisan way.
In July 2025, the Ellisons bought CBS (Paramount) through Skydance. This was approved by Trump's FTC.
The FTC is responsible for enforcing regulations that would prevent mergers that negatively impact the quality of services and innovation. They aren't doing their job.
Agreed. Let's also not forget that a large part of the reason that the Skydance/Paramount merger likely went through in the first place was because Paramount paid off Trump to the tune of 16 million USD by settling a lawsuit in which he alleged deliberate deception during his Kamala Harris interview on 60 Minutes.
The FTC has not done its job since after the Microsoft consent decree and economists have claimed that up is down and somehow preventing market monopolies is bad for the economy.
What existing regulation are you accusing the FTC of not enforcing? Is it illegal for a rich person to buy a company? It's not like he's cornering TV news or something. He's a minority player by any measurement (revenue, viewers, etc..).
Not a fan of Trump, Ellison, or obviously this expose being buried, but I am just trying to understand what the FTC did wrong.
> The FTC is responsible for enforcing regulations that would prevent mergers that negatively impact the quality of services and innovation.
I don't think this is the best summary of either the FTC's mandate from congress nor the antitrust laws in the US.
But whatever, it just seems like what you want is not more regulation (Trump is adding lots of regulation on solar and wind, that's good right?), but different regulators.
It sucks, but there's no "one weird trick" where you can have a congress, judiciary, and executive branch dominated by Republicans, that then makes them governs like Democrats. This isn't a "regulation" problem. It's a "roughly half the country wanted this" problem.
> I don't think this is the best summary of either the FTC's mandate from congress nor the antitrust laws in the US.
Okay well I basically copy/pasted from ftc.gov:
The FTC’s Bureau of Competition enforces the nation's antitrust laws, which form the foundation of our free market economy. The antitrust laws promote the interests of consumers; they support unfettered markets and result in lower prices and more choices.
The Bureau of Competition is committed to preventing mergers and acquisitions that are likely to reduce competition and lead to higher prices, lower quality goods or services, or less innovation
Were you saying the same thing in 2014 and 2015 too?
According to data from Thomson Reuters, 2015 is set to be the biggest year ever (once the planned deals close) in worldwide dealmaking, with $4.7 trillion in announced mergers and acquisitions—up 42 percent from 2014, and beating the previous record of $4.4 trillion in 2007.
The year stands out, not just for the total value of the deals but for the number of so-called mega-deals, which refers to any deal that exceeds $5 billion. Just in the last three months, notable mega-deals include AB Inbev’s acquisition of SABMiller, creating a $104 billion beverage company; Pfizer and Allergan’s announced a $160 billion merger; and the chemical companies DuPont and Dow Chemical Company’s plans to unite as a $130 billion company. Thomson Reuters counted 137 mega-deals last year, which accounted for 52 percent of the year’s overall M&A value.
The greatest challenge facing humanity is building a culture where we are liberated to cooperate toward the greatest goals without fear of another selfish individual or group taking advantage to our detriment.
Yes, the mathematicians will tell you it's "inevitable" that people will cheat and "enshittify". But if you take statistical samplings of the universe from an outsider's perspective, you would think it would be impossible for life to exist. Our whole existence is built on disregard for the inevitable.
Reducing humanity to a bunch of game-theory optimizing automatons will be a sure-fire way to fail The Great Filter, as nobody can possibly understand and mathematically articulate the larger games at stake that we haven't even discovered.
The folks who succeed most in business are the type who have an intuition for what's best. They're not some automaton reading too far into and amplifying the imperfect and shallow signals of "demand" in a marketplace.
That was not the clear purpose of DOGE. The Trump campaign deliberately distanced itself from Project 2025. If they had been honest about their intent to enact Project 2025 to voters, they would have lost.
Agreed. Anyone with a modicum of common sense knew this was the plan all along. It's not like it was hard to find people saying this before the election.
I'm not excusing elected officials. I would go further and blame Vivek Ramaswamy for playing a huge part in pitching the failed DOGE. I'm just pointing out that the Trump admin deliberately lied about its connection to Project 2025, which made DOGE's connection unclear to people who consume Fox News etc.
People are downing my comment for suggesting that many people who don't take the internet straight into their veins every day might have had a hard time connecting the dots between DOGE and Project 2025.
I think at some point people need to take some accountability for their own information ecosystem.
It really is a Catch-22 though, since the imperative and ability to do that is itself derivative of the information ecosystem.
Which is why I blame, more than anyone else, the actual smart people (largely cynical, craven, and greedy) who didn’t through their weight against this stuff when it could’ve mattered.
All they had to do was skim any decent daily, weekly, or monthly newspaper or news magazine in 2024. Folks whose only news sources are Facebook shares and Fox News are simply stupid. The reason they don’t know WTF is going on may be due to their news sources, but they chose those. That’s a really stupid thing to do.
Well, sure. There’s most of a century of science behind the finding that votes aren’t really made or motivated by the things a democratic idealist might hope they are, nor do most voters have half a clue what’s going on or how anything works.
All modern campaigns assume large segments of the electorate are very dumb. Because they in-fact are. You’ll get your ass handed to you by a less-idealistic campaign every time if you pretend things are otherwise.
The trouble now is the huge private media empire capitalizing on that fact was deliberately built over a period of 40+ years and is now entrenched. Countering that is gonna be hard and take generations. Everyone alive now is going to have to suffer for decades before it maybe gets better.
> would go further and blame Vivek Ramaswamy for playing a huge part in pitching the failed DOGE
Ramaswamy is a useless idiot. He wasn’t useful in getting DOGE to exist. (He rallied voters in states Trump couldn’t or otherwise would have won. It’s why he was easily cast aside–he didn’t bring anything to the table.)
I know people who didn’t know the government had shut down until more than two weeks into it (and on discovering it were like “oh shit this might affect us!” because their whole lifestyle depends on money from the government).
The same people didn’t know the east wing had been torn down until a couple weeks after it happened.
In both cases they only found out when my wife told them.
They pay attention to lots of “news” but it’s AI videos of mass crimes and viral “look how bad democrats are” garbage.
That people are dense motherfuckers (can we stop sugar coating how stupid these people are if they’re surprised about any of these things? I mean dumb as a bag of hammers kinds of dumb, dimmest bulb in a box of broken bulbs, that level of dumb) doesn’t mean this wasn’t clear.
It is 100% these morons’ own fault they’re surprised.
I think you're being too harsh. "Dense motherfuckers"?
My own sense is that these people are willfully ignorant. That is, they seek to find confirmation of what they already believe. Kind of human nature, really. It's sad that there is a complete infrastructure that spouts what these people want to hear, make lots of money doing so.
I’m done with treating willful morons nicely. The last year has turned me from a Vonnegut to a Twain, if you will. A good chunk of My Fellow Americans are just awful, and after 25ish years of serious political awareness & attention and watching what’s happened over that time my benefit-of-the-doubt tanks are dry, having been siphoned at high rates continuously that entire time. Probably I was myself stupid ever to have thought better of these dangerous dipshits. It’s not like I wasn’t pretty familiar with history, but somehow, it took watching people be extremely dumb and never learn over a long period to break through what I suppose was some kind of savior-complex ego thing that made me want to be the kind of person who believed people were mostly pretty good. How embarrassing.
They’re dense motherfuckers, and that’s the generous take. They’re a black hole of stupid. That’s the level of density we’re dealing with. And that’s just the America I’ll be living with until I die. One that’s been trashed so thoroughly by the idiot brigade that hope for actual improvement is gone for, best case, several more decades, which will amount to the rest of my life.
They’ve wrecked shit out beyond the horizon of my plausible lifespan, in all likelihood. They’ve been continuously working toward doing this my whole life. No, I’m absolutely not being too harsh.
Maybe cutting some slack would be more appropriate if the voting public didn't make decisions that end up killing a large number of people and turning the U.S. into a fascist state.
>No, it wasn't clear. I know several Trump voters who either didn't know Project 2025 existed or believed the lies that it was a liberal hoax.
>To anyone paying an ounce of attention, yeah it might have been clear.
Many, many folks were out there long before the election saying (both as promises -- from the Trumpers and warnings -- from pretty much everyone else) that Project 2025 would be the blueprint for a new Trump administration.
That some folks either ignored or disbelieved it doesn't make it "unclear." Rather, it means that a lot of people believed the lies. Which says more about those who believed such lies than it does about everyone else.
And to put a fine point on it, what more could others have done to disabuse those folks of the lies told them by the Trump campaign? Seriously.
Shame. Only the wealthiest scammers should be able to manipulate these numbers via businesses that generate GDP like phone farms or buying the entire social media platform.
That pen and ink icon had a classic feel to it. It made me think about the time and effort demanded by handwriting that I was bypassing by opening that app. That kind of visual poetry is lost in these flat designs, where communicating membership in a brand's ecosystem seems to beat out other priorities.
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