The future of the US depends on these people being held accountable by the next administration, and structural reforms to make their abuses harder to do again in the future.
This won't happen. Mostly because the next administration that is a counter to this current administration won't happen. The electoral process in the US is effectively cooked.
That's the big worry now. We've got to wait to find out if we still have a democracy or not. They're trying to stop us from being able to vote them out of power. Even if they're unsuccessful it just means we have a chance to put things right, but the democrats are the party of the status quo and I haven't really seen them stepping up and promising accountability.
There's no demand for it. Half of the US still likes what's happening, half the ones that don't are only concerned because gas prices are a little high.
Trump's approval rating is in the mid to high 30 percentile even according to Fox News polling. He's lost most of the independents and minority coalition vote who naively thought the economy go back to what it was in his first term pre Covid-inflation. Never mind his love for tariffs and fossil fuels.
I don't really understand what the 35%+ still sees in Trump. Massive fraud, abuse of power, covering up Epstein files, more war in the ME, the president is ranting at 3am on his social media. He's falling asleep in meetings and looking more frail all the time. And worst of all, he's still trying to undermine elections.
Guess I have to accept the fact that 1/3 of the American public wants an authoritarian figure to rule over us without any real checks or balances. They don't want anyone in Congress or the courts to oppose his excesses.
> I don't really understand what the 35%+ still sees in Trump. Massive fraud, abuse of power, covering up Epstein files, more war in the ME, the president is ranting at 3am on his social media. He's falling asleep in meetings and looking more frail all the time. And worst of all, he's still trying to undermine elections.
None of this is particularly different from what he said he'd do. This is a felon who tried to overthrow the 2020 election. But the US decided he was the person they wanted to preside of their country for 4 years.
And that 35% was about nearer 50% before their gas prices went up. Its nothing to do with Epstein, 3am rants, sleeping, shitting himself, pulling broadcast licenses, stealing billions from the tax payer and from pension funds, or about war, its solely because a few people are having to spend a little more to full up their monster trucks
If trump decided to give a $3 a gallon subsidy on gas prices his ratings would shoot back up.
As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people
The future of the US depends on political candidates attempting to win the public over on the merits of their argument and the quality of their character instead of being conmen on billionaire payrolls or billionaires themselves.
Instead, we're ruled by these two dumb, evil political parties that radical centrists treat like elemental forces of nature. It's a play being put on for your benefit. Your vote changes nothing. The Heel W. Bush administration had presided over the most consciously evil things done in both foreign and domestic policy, with the full knowledge that it was illegal, and then Golden Boy Obama came and indemnified everyone. The person who illegally destroyed the CIA torture videotapes became the head of the CIA.
The country is a joke and quickly turning into a failed state, and upper middle-class people are being distracted by sock puppets because as the top 20%, they aren't suffering in the least.
edit: advocating for the prosecution of the last administration by the next is simply advocacy for dictatorship. There is no reason for anyone to leave the presidency if civic intellectual thought has degenerated so much that they think that this is a wise or democratic thing to do. If you vote in a criminal, there's no clawback after you get robbed. The reason this is a failed state is because we're exclusively putting criminals on the ballot, from President to dog catcher. Turns out that non-criminals can't raise millions of dollars to get a job.
I hope this comment isn't flagged or downvoted into oblivion. This is exactly what happened and the consequences of George W Bush are where we are today. Everyone looks at him and thinks "Oh what a cute old man, he's joking around with Michelle Obama!" and no one remembers he is directly responsible for 1 million Iraqi deaths, and then enriching the shareholders of Cheney's company. And then he broke the Middle East, created ISIS, etc.
And then Obama came in with promises and almost immediately brought everything back to default George Bush timelines. To those of you that don't live in SF, most SF progressives HATED Obama because all he did was legitimize Bush's policies instead of acting on his promises of "Hope" and "Change". Anyone remember how he talked about abortion rights, and then immediately after his presidency said that it wasn't a priority for him? If abortion rights were passed as a federal law, we wouldn't be where we are today post Dobbs.
> The future of the US depends on these people being held accountable by the next administration ...
OK but who was signing in place of the totally senile Biden? The autopen is a thing. That puppet wasn't functional anymore. Yet "he" was signing things.
Who's being held accountable for the deep state that was guiding Biden's hand?
Nobody. Just as this administration isn't holding anyone accountable for any of the misdeeds done under Biden, nothing is going to happen next.
Being held accountable in the next administration is pretty much the opposite of what a democratic society needs. It's a never ending cycle. Let the court system handle this.
Not GP, but in this context I would interpret the next administration[^1] holding the current administration to account as a willingness to use the court system to prosecute actual crimes committed while in office[^2].
That is by no means a given.
[^1]: Assuming there is one.
[^2]: That is, not petulantly prosecuting those deemed to have slighted you.
SCOTUS has already given POTUS immunity in any form other than impeachment followed by a conviction. The problem with that is that just removes POTUS from office. It does nothing to punish for those crimes that were deemed worthy enough of being impeached/convicted. SCOTUS said that POTUS cannot be held accountable for things done as official acts of office. So Congress cannot hold POTUS criminally accountable, but removed from office to stop the criminal acts. Once POTUS becomes a citizen they are free. At this point, I can only see where the newly sworn POTUS would use their new pardon power to end the question as well.
However, all of this is very far away from the legality of quantum computing
> SCOTUS has already given POTUS immunity in any form other than impeachment followed by a conviction.
That's not exactly accurate and that nuanced difference may be the key to holding the executive branch accountable, now that we're in this disastrous state of the world.
Specifically, POTUS has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions that are within their constitutional authority, presumptive immunity from all official acts (but not absolute), and no immunity from unofficial, private acts committed by the president.
Congress could also pass legislature or constitutional amendments to revert the effect of that tragic decision, though of course those also come with their own sets of challenges.
Let's not forget the complacency of this Congress. POTUS could not get away with this nonsense if Congress would do its job. The right has been working their way to this perfect scenario for decades with gerrymandering at the state level, Congress refusing to accept a SCOTUS nominee from POTUS holding out that the next POTUS would be their guy, and all of the other nonsense that has happened to get us to this spot.
The courts are either ignoring the problem, supporting the problem, or just being ignored. They courts themselves have no power to enforce their rulings. The ones that would enforce the courts decisions are doing what the Trump tells them to.
The problem is, the current admin has shown how pliable the courts are. And, this weakens them, in that, there is less of a belief of impartiality.
Conjoin that with AI able to generate billions of videos, saying anything anyone wants, and you have a real issue. 99.99% of the population can't tell or even realises much of what they watch on youtube is AI, and... it will get less distinguishable, to the point that no one, at all, will be able to tell.
Not you, I, or anyone at all.
There are already endless AI personalities on youtube, each building followers. If I wanted to upset the apple cart, I'd spawn 1000 or more "people", each with a different appearance and manner of speaking. All would dance to my tune, and all would be the most honest, trustworthy source possible.
Until, of course, I wanted to upset the apple cart. Then I'd ensure that all these personalities, insisted that all the court decisions post-office, are lies, mistruths, and designed to punish and harm and "take out the right's power".
Imagine if you have someone you've watched for 2 years. On hundreds of points, they've been blisteringly honest, never lying, always truthful. Then?
On this one thing, they manipulate you.
Who do you trust? The most honest person you've ever seen, or the impartiality of the courts?
This is the sort of long game you can play with fake personalities. No disloyalty. No breaking ranks. No bad days, or mistakes.
I've fought for a free internet. I've fought for the right to anonymous posting. To be a voice, without an identity. But? That time is over, or we won't have a democracy. I've pivoted 180, I cannot see a democratic society with this level of manipulation continuing.
> I've fought for a free internet. I've fought for the right to anonymous posting. To be a voice, without an identity. But? That time is over, or we won't have a democracy.
The con is claiming that this has anything to do with anonymity. There are 8 billion people. Someone with money can get a hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand of them to lend their names to bots. The cost of a random human name is less than the cost of the years worth of tokens they'd be putting under it. Sacrificing anonymity over that is a fraud.
On top of that, we shouldn't pretend this is a new issue. In 1975 the local magnate owned the local newspaper and radio station and had relatively unbiased coverage of issues until it came to the ones that affect their own business dealings or the political ambitions of their associates.
And your disaster scenario doesn't even work when people are getting information from multiple sources. If the sources are >50% lies and exaggerations then you can spot check a small sample of the stories and notice that. (Sadly all too many current outlets fail this test.) But if, as you posit, they offered unbiased coverage almost all of the time then their coverage would be similar to every other source offering mostly unbiased coverage, until they try to mislead you, and then your "reliable sources" would be saying different things from one another because less than 100% of them are controlled by the one trying to manipulate you, which is a major red flag that somebody is lying to you.
The actual problem is that people don't bother to do the spot checks when the source is telling them the pretty lies they want to hear. Which is nothing new and has very little to do with AI.
> The American people (myself included) are done working half the year to earn money to pay taxes to make the world function and get none of the benefits, while the rest of the world puts their taxes towards benefits for their own society (social safety nets, paying for unlimited migration, etc).
You are utterly delusional if you think Trump and the Republicans are interested in scaling down military spending in favor of social safety nets.
Nothing; so it raises the question, when the BBC news reports "insider trading suspicions looming over Trump's presidency", are they deliberately ignoring insider trading suspicions looming over a bunch of other high-ranking US politicians?
Pelosi got a free Presidential jet and scooped the inside trades on Iran?
Trump set a stratosphereic high bar for examples par excellence, I doubt all of Pelosi's husband trades add up to a signifigant fraction of Trump's crypto gains alone.
They sure have - see Chris Joseph's comments, the developer of the Pelosi stock tracker app, about having numerous examples from both sides of the aisles of numerous congress members who have traded more and had better returns.
Irrelevant to the matter of scale - Trump's corruption easily exceeds that of Pelosi.
More to the point, this is simple what-about-ism to avoid facing up to corruption in the US government and the poressing need (for many decades now) to take effective action.
As it stands, the emoluments clause and the impeachment wrist slapping make the US a standing joke for poor definition of problem and inability to punish.
Yet it has produced the most fruitful country the world has ever seen. The genius of the document is that it assumes the corruption of a centralized power and provides the proper counter measures to return the power to the people.
And you won’t believe it but the US didn’t make J D Power Best Places To Work either. In fact, I’m told that the Barclays Certified Happy Places To Live Brought To You By Standard Chartered doesn’t list a single American city.
I'm with you. It's fine if your opinion is "software = tool" and you personally want it to be utilitarian and basic, but plenty of us desire our software interfaces to have personality and customization. The answer is that we should have the option to choose.
Incredible. LittleSnitch is must-have for macOS and trying to get equivalent functionality on Linux was painful. So very happy to see this, and very happy to give the developers at Objective Development my money.
In linux, I trust most distro apps to run with network access without any sort of firewall. And for apps from internet, just put them in bubblewrap or run with flatpak without access to homedir, network, audio, video etc. depending on program.
I think it's worth giving people a tiny bit of grace on this. I've surprised people by explaining that the "Department of War" is just fascist fanfic and that the legal name has not changed.
It's a testament to the broken information ecosystem we're in that many people genuinely don't know this. Most will correct themselves when told. I agree with you that those who don't are not worth engaging.
reply