Musk’s various ponzi schemes, up to the Artemis-killing SpaceX fiasco, were coming due. Trump provided the opportunity for him to pivot into government, by replacing it with his AI, gps with starlink, air traffic control with whatever he comes up with, etc etc etc, making himself even more too big to fail. The US government the latest offering on the ponzi|pyramid. Trump’s ideology aligning with Musk’s own true beliefs is a bonus.

It will severely weaken the US in direct measurable short and long-term ways, to the point it is a real disaster for the US. Those to blame are all those that never called him out throughout his rise. Not to mention those governments (Republican and Democrat) who fed him public money throughout the entire period.

Edit - Bezos’s The Washington Post is apparently supporting him now. No surprise, they want an oligarchy. The Democrats are moving rightward, they are more or less happy with it too.

I guess it is some version of the land of the free home of the brave, but maybe it is the freedom to do what you want if you’re rich, and have been brave enough to brazenly take everything and exploit everyone.

This is what Canadian and European rivals of the US should have been doing for some time, and should be doing now.

Exactly. I responded to somebody who said twitter was bought not to make money but as a propaganda tool.

Then a sequence of morons ‘attacked’ me. (I put attacked in quotation marks as it hardly counts as any kind of ‘attack’.)

lol

OK, I have read some evidence that shows how when a level of impoverishment is reached, people are too preoccupied with day to day and week to week survival to bother with voting or much of any other civil engagement.

I won’t waste more time on this, I’m not interested in arguing over the definition of ‘disengaged’.

The fact that they voted means they are not disengaged.

Yours might have just been an offhand comment, but as it might be a genuine question I provided a brief answer.

Dunno, I think Musk was forced to buy it, then he suggested it was going to be all sorts of things while massively cutting costs, before pivoting to giving Trump a quarter of a billion in order to get access to government.

I don’t think there was any intention to buy twitter for propaganda, and I haven’t seen any evidence that shows to what degree (if at all) it helped Trump get elected.

And what is an ai trained on reddit going to help with? Misinforming people on specialised topics, or misinforming people on current affairs?

Edit - I suppose you might be able to train an ai not to reply as per replies on reddit, dunno.

I doubt it will be noticeable overnight, but at least some of his supporters will be pushed into a degree of impoverishment that inhibits political engagement.

Reddit is pretty useless for getting any kind of advanced information on any topic. The impression I had of the US election based on it was completely out of line with reality, so in that case it couldn’t be trusted as an accurate source of information on current affairs.

People are addicted to it, but you’d have to be pretty sad to pay for it.

Blocking ads on it is a trivial matter. It never made any money.

The question is why did anyone think it would ever be worth much at all.

Yeah it is other countries fault, lol.

Do you really want to carry your lifetime supply of honey around with you every time you move apartment?

What other foodstuffs are you going to buy your lifetime supply of? Dried goods? Tins? You could get yourself a winnebago and fill it with all your lifetime’s worth of food or something, which would make lugging it all around with you forever easier. Just hope nobody nicks it.

His name is Trump. Russia completed sidelined America’s military.

MAGA by bringing back US manufacturing, which means creating developing world conditions, thus enabling it to become a sweatshop.

And I guess these four supreme justices think the world should continue to buy US debt lol. You reap what you sow.

pretty on track

lol. SpaceX are destroying Artemis as we type - and America’s prestige as a space-faring nation - and are not going to Mars on any timeline, as Musk well knows. Musk doesn’t care at all, it is helping him get to trillionaire status.

The Taliban humiliated him. He has one entirely exploitable strategy: try and be a bully and back down when he gets called out.

The result is widespread boycott of American manufacturing, Europe pulling away from a reliance on the US including manufacturing their own arms, a pivot towards BRICS and China, and a hastened end to the dollar as global reserve currency followed by an America that has to pay its debts.

What a fool. America’s second vote for Trump has shown the world it is an unreliable partner.

Yeah I said in another post that the Americans I have known irl have been great. I love America’s contribution to stuff like music and literature, and the arts generally. And I take your point it is a minority.

But this oligarchy has taken a while to build but it wasn’t stopped. And I do think this is a watershed moment for the US and Europe, BRICS and the dollar. I think we are entering a global economy that reflects the multi-polar world we actually have.

As a Brit, whose economy is 50 - 100 years past being the global reserve currency, I think the people most likely to suffer over the long term are Americans, after everyone suffers the coming short-term instability.

This total breakdown in cooperation happening just as we roll straight past climate change’s last chance saloon (to butcher a couple of metaphors) is an even bigger disaster. Some of us ‘doomers’ are being proven right. I’d rather not be.

I know that eminent computer scientists wrote to I think Harris a couple of years back voicing their concerns over the security of voting machines.

I think the Democrats are as done as a credible political force as the Republicans are.

America you have switched sides. Expect a European pivot towards China, provided China maintains some degree of pragmatic neutrality.