PolarPerspective
AI could lead to the single greatest transference of wealth and power from the people to the elite. It could also lead to SkyNET.
It's an incredibly powerful and dangerous technology. A handful of poor decisions is all it takes to turn the world into something out of a dystopian/post-apocalyptic novel.
The best we can hope for is that AI makes hundreds of millions of jobs obsolete, and we then have to fight the elite to make sure that wealth is appropriately distributed. I think it will be a lot worse than that.
All I see is someone who finally wants to shut down the war machine. I have waited since the Bush administration for someone to do that. Obama ran on bringing our troops home, and actually expanded foreign military involvement.
If Trump is the only one who has the balls to put an end to the American World Police, then so be it.
I don't know how or why democrats decided to be pro-war, but they'll have to fight the rest of us to keep it up. That money and those soldiers would be much better utilized locally, and with a much lower chance of dying for someone else's cause.
I saw a lot of progressives turning into free market libertarians as soon as social media started censoring right wing opinions. Suddenly all I could see was "They're a private company, they can do what they want!"
It reaffirmed my belief that a healthy portion of either side doesn't actually have any principles. They just care that their side is winning and the other is losing.
I'm a moderate that a lot of people confuse for a conservative, and I say nail big business to a wall. I think the Microsoft-Activision deal should be declined just on the nature of the size of each business, not because it meets some arbitrary standard of anti-competitive behavior. Businesses as big as Microsoft do not need even bigger market coverage through owning more production houses. The whole point of the anticompetitive corrections is to avoid these giant conglomerates that have their hands in everything.
Microsoft already owns video game production houses. They produce one of the most popular home consoles in the world. They own a lot of the ecosystem that most people use on a daily basis on their pcs, namely Windows OS, Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and more.
Why does one company need to have a bigger market share than this?
Well, keep in mind how much footage there was of the capitol police letting "rioters" in and escorting them throughout the building as if they were on tour. I remember reading that there were opportunities to shore up the area out of concern there would be riots, since it was fairly obvious that there was going to be discontent, but the democrats declined.
I will make the standard disavowal that the riots shouldn't have happened, and those involved should be charged and prosecuted accordingly. But Trump very specifically said to protest peacefully during his speech that day.
My take on all of this has always been that the establishment hates Trump, sees him as a legitimate threat to their way of doing business, and have always exaggerated and highlighted anything they could to make him look like the most evil and incompetent person possible. I don't think you could neutrally look at all the evidence and think otherwise. I was a Democrat supporter before Trump came along. When I saw how united and unfair the portrayal of the man was by democrats and mass media, I realized the extent of corruption in the system, and more was slowly revealed over the next decade.
They want you to hate anyone who would upset the status quo. It's the same thing they did to Tulsi Gabbard. Anyone who is anti-war, pro-America, and is for populism and against globalism. Just watch for yourself. These people get fat off of selling Americans out to foreign interests and by feeding the war machine. They can't do that if we stop playing world police and start focusing on initiatives that improve the value of local labor. It requires us to rip up free trade deals and to stop funding military and PMCs, where a lot of elites make big money. That's why populists get shut out.
Jan 6 was a handful of people doing something stupid. They've turned it into a giant cross to lay on the entire moderate and conservative voter base. If you think that's reasonable, you're being tribal, not rational.
That's kind of the point. We live in a system that is supposed to be "innocent until proven guilty". Not because people who commit crimes should get away with them, but because the opposite system would be completely untenable. How exactly is he supposed to prove that he is innocent? I don't care how sure anyone is that he did it. Prove it, or by our legal standard, he must be considered innocent.
If you want to live in a society where accusation is tantamount to fact, you're going to regret it as soon as anyone says anything about you.