The ikea chair still actually works as a chair, usually quite well, and is functionality indistinguishable from a 19th century hand crafted masterpiece.

That people got rich off of it does not make it money, i it just means you can make money off it.

Yeah, but how much of that was really the mainstream media being (less) trustworthy, and more clever marketing by new media outlets? Social media sources seem to spend a LOT of time building personal feeling connections with the viewer than using that trust to scare them off the competition. As I see social media get worse and worse, I am seriously starting to wonder how much of the loss of trust is just people being easy to manipulate.

Sadly what this really shows is that building something that caters to people just wanting to socialize isn't considered a success because the metrics pundits and advertisers really care about is 'engagement', which mostly means angry or miserable people arguing. Metrics are why we can not have nice things, since they don't define _our_ nice things as worthwhile to buisnesses.

I will never get over leadship of established companies looking at small nible ones and going 'why can't we do that?', skipping over the point that yeah, these small companies can set up these new systems...once.

Though we are starting to see the next stage : acceptance of climate change, but leaning into the 'well, it too late now and we are addicted to the things that cause it, so time to protect ourselves from other countries'.

Incredible perhaps, but on borrowed time. We are already seeing democracy wind down, and capitalism is slowly reverting to feudalism. Are whole system is pegged on 'you want freedom, then keep up the exponential growth', and that can not go on forever.

That has been a major conservative boogie man for quite a while, but the older issue is, well, stopping americans from making money has always been a sore spot. the right has always gotten pissy about things like americans being charged with financial (or other lucrative) crimes

the even bigger hypocrisy is that the right gets fist pumping thrilled when the US sends in special forces to 'extract' people in other countries for prosecution in the US.

Which makes sense. People tend to forget that at the time, it was a tossup which side the US would join, with the nazi party being VERY popular in the US. It was mostly the north east power block with its financial and cultural ties to england that decided which way to go, but a lot of the country (mostly regions that are red states today) would have prefered germany and were more than willing to let their fellows back into the fold.

They consider anyone who makes them feel bad a 'terrorist'. There is nothing more important than their feelings, and they love genocide so making them feel guilty about it is worse than killing (other) people.

Financial crimes. It sets up the framework for telling other countries that if something isn't illegal (or selectively enforced) in the US, then they can not apply it to US citizens, even outside US boarders.

Hate speak laws might be the cultural coverage, but the real target is probably countries with anti fraud laws. Scams, fraud, and cryptocrimes are all protected american speech and since they are profitable, stopping them is stopping america.

I am always floored at how much of a 'we give up' feel modern ML based AI is. In the past, training AI meant building simulations or having agents interact with each other, while feeing them data you generated. Today they have really taken on a 'if we throw enough public data and processing power at it, we don't have to do any work or understand anything!' tactic.

This is one of the reasons the right (esp the christian-capitalist community) rail against media and education so much. They see it has intellectuals and hollywood (i.e. the jews and communists) warping the children. In their worldview, we are supposed to have a ruling class. Everyone in their place, a well defined hierarchy, as god and his economists intended.