America hasn’t really stood for Freedom (in the pure sense and deserving of a capital F) from when it’s “Democracy” ‘for male landowners only’ was formed, followed by a couple of centuries of taking all the land of the territory it claimed away from the Commons (and the various Indian Tribes who were its main users) and making all of it have owners (i.e. with its use by others controlled by said owners rather than Free).

In its territory, America has had somewhat better periods in that regard, but even the end of Slavery didn’t really end it, just restricted it to be only for prisioners, whilst outside its territory America always acted to make other people’s lives and possessions serve the best interests of a powerful subsection of the American society rather than be free (hence how most of those interventions involved replacing one dictator by a different pro-America dictator, or setting up semi-Democratic regimes whose hands were tied by a web of obligations to America and some of it’s allies, such as how the US and UK basically gave themselves oil exploitation contracts for most of Iraq’s oil wealth and “security” contracts at the end of the 2nd Iraq War and then set up a “Democratic” government there).

However unlike with regimes were the web of laws and property that curtails most people’s freedom is much thinner and more direct, and hence more obvious, American Propaganda on “Freedom” has always been top-notch.

I was going to say I partly disagree and that the “those people” element depends on the Society (i.e. different in different countries) but after thinking about it, I actually agree that wanting to be “comparativelly better” rather than better in absolute is a pretty general thing for rightwingers everywhere, and what changes in the countries I lived in is mainly they way they go about doing it (i.e. in England that overwhelmingly materialises in people spending a lot of time and effort in keeping those below them in the “prosperity ladder” from climbing up, whilst in The Netherlands there’s a lot less of that).

So, yeah, thanks for pointing that out.

I’m sure the people who made this decision will be alright. The rest (including those who voter for them), not so much…

People should just start referring to Tariffs as “import taxes” (which exactly what Tariffs are) , as in " Trump raise the import taxes on Canadian goods".

Then just let people reach the natural conclusion from the pain on their wallets.

Now you went and made it a British meme, complete with a weird accent.

It’s basically indentured servitude - in that poverty is what now turns people into de facto slaves rather than race - in pretty much the same way as the English “ended slavery” but not really back in the 18th century.

The thing is, unlike in the US the Brits got rid of indentured servitude more than a century ago, plus in the US poverty and race are tightly couple for afro-Americans because the ultra-Capitalist system in American transformed ex-slavery and the subsequent tail of racist discrimination into poverty and made poverty a dynastic characteristic (in that even after active Racism was weakened, being born poor means a huge probability of being foverver poor so the victimization of Historical Racism was propagated down the generations) so present day indentured servitude in American disproportionately hits the descendants of the slaves whilst indentured servitude in Britain mainly hit the majority ethnic groups in those isles (though I do believe that for example the Irish were much more likely to be victims of it than the English).

Well, in essence and at its purest level the difference in thinking between Leftwing and Rightwing is the difference between “I want people to have a better life” and “I want to have a better life”.

All the political complexity above that comes from the different possible ways to achieve either end and from how one end partly overlaps with the other (i.e. for many a general improvement of people’s lifes gets translated into a personal improvement).

So yeah, conservatives are just “What’s in it for me” types who believe in a different method to maximize their personal upside than the Fascists. In fact many American-style Liberals (the political version of “Liberal” in the US, not to be confused with those who believe in the actual Liberal Ideology) are also rightwingers who believe in yet another method for personal upside improvement.

Remember that Cambridge Analitica got their money from rich Americans.

Even though I’m sure he’s part of the problem, this exclusive blaming of Putin is just a (sadly, oft and mindlessly repeated) propaganda slogan that protects very wealthy people with far more blame in the matter.

If magically Putin was removed from the equation tomorrow, it would have pretty much zero impact on the trend to ever more Fascism, at least in the UK and US.

The Dunning-Krugger Effect has been fully weaponized.

It’s my impression that the epidemic of parasites in American is mainly of the full sized human kind.

I believe it’s called Regulatory Arbitrage - using the time gap between a new technology appearing that allows new ways of doing something which have yet to be Regulated and Lawmakers getting around to regulating it, to run an unregulated (yet legal) business - and indeed as you pointed out it has been the most common business model of the largest startups since at least the 2010s.

I think your most demanding use of databases was in tiny environments with tiny datasets and relaxed performance metrics compared to my own experience in designing systems that include databases.

MySQL and Oracle DB are totally different beasts for totally different needs, even if they’re both relational databases.

Further, the Oracle DB predates MySQL.

MySQL was created exactly because at the time there were either these massive Enterprise Class behemoth expensive databases such as Oracle DB and IBM’s Db2 or stuff like Access and hacked Excel sheets being used as “databases”, so there really wasn’t a proper database for things like inventory systems for small and mid-sized companies - they either used Access which was a joke (didn’t even had Transactions, so prone to get corrupted) or they paid a lot for licenses for the big databases which also required expensive machines to run them on.

One could say that MySQL made a lot of the modern Internet possible because it was Open Source and ran on Linux so you could for free make a dynamic website (say, a small online store) on top of a stack with it at the bottom (and Apache at the top and some custom middle layer in something things like PHP - remember that these were the 90s and Python only became popular later) on a pretty basic Linux server somewhere and that was enough until you got really big. You could do it with Oracle DB at the bottom also, but it was expensive and not really worth it unless you were serving tens or hundred of thousands or requests per minute.

That said, I agree that Oracle DB wasn’t revolutionary, it just worked well with all kinds of loads, even extreme ones, as long as you knew what you were doing.

The point I was making was that the Oracle DB was the only decent product Oracle ever created, not that it was revolutionary.

Historically, the only thing Oracle ever made which was good was their database, and even that is only worth it beyond a certain size of dataset and number of simultaneous requests being served.

In the Racist mind the criticism of how their judgement standards and choices of supporting or not a person or State are different depending on the target person’s race, always ends up interpreted as “an attack on a Race” because Racists cannot even begin to conceive the idea that “All humans and their actions should be judged independently of their Race”.

When a Racist voices criticism of an instance of double-standards depending on Race being used, they are motivated by a desire to attack the Race which benefits from such double standards, so in their minds that must be the reason why other would attack such Race-related double standards and in their Racist minds it’s inconceivable that the criticism could be against any such double standards no matter who benefits and against the entire mental architecture of seeing and judging people as Race-members rather than as human beings,

In the minds of Racists everything everybody says or does about other people is determined by Race, so criticism of Racism itself is invariably seen as an “attack on a Race” in the mind of the Racist.

(Aside from this poster’s response to my post, other examples of what I mean can easily be found in how Trump supporters respond to criticism of their Racist actions - their responses often follow exactly the same pattern as the poster above)

Obviously thanks to their circular logic that “any criticism of Race-based double standards can only be explained as Racism against the Race which benefits from it”, Racists feel no shame about their own Racism, since it justifies itself as a reaction to what they interpret (following said circular logic) as the Racism of critics.

I weep for Germany and all the Germans who are Humanists rather than Racists: it must be hard living surrounded by so many people whose views on their fellow human beings fit the very same architecture of thinking of people as “first and foremost members of Races”, as the Nazi ideology.

Kinda makes me think when I, as an immigrant over there, was a member of the Green Party in Britain before the Leave Referendum: great forward thinking people who were genuinelly good persons who wanted a better world for everybody, all the while the rest of British Society turned out to be mainly composed of dumb racists.

Still today I use the lessons I learned in British politics, since IMHO they were maybe a decade ahead of the rest of Europe in the shift to the Far Right (their version is just posher).

I think that the reaction of most mainstream German politicians to the Israeli-Genocide has made it painfully obvious that they’re deeply Racist, since they justified unwavering support for a regime commiting a Genocide along ethnic lines - were amongst, other things they murdered tens of thousands of children because of their ethnicity - by saying that they “unwaveringly” support the ethnicity that said genocidal regime claims to represent: it doesn’t get much more Racist than justifying sending weapons to guys mass murdering children along ethnic lines because the ethnicity of the murderers is one specific ethnicity rather than a different ethnicity.

Not only is the moral distance from “We support Genocidal mass murderers because of their race” to supporting the quasi-Nazi AfD miniscule compared to what it would be if the starting point had instead been “No kind of oppression can be justified by the race of the oppressors”, but even the AfD ideology itself of “The German people should be able to do whatever they want to other ethnicities and nationalities” is morally not that distant from the “This specific race should be able to do whatever they want to other ethnicities and nationalities”.

In summary, the actions that the SPD and CDU/CSU (and even the Greens, for their eternal shame) have been unwaveringly supporting “for the Jewish People” are even more violent than those the AfD have been supporting “for the German people”.

Clearly the German Political class never strayed far from the way of thinking that underpinned NAZISM (they mostly moved a specific ethnicity from the “untermenschen” to the “ubermenschen” column) and hence the distance to get back to the “old” “principles” was always much shorter than their performative anti-Nazism led most people to believe.

I’m also not from the US.

I would say that the full picture is somewhere in the middle - generally most actions of a President are not irrevocable but many do have consequences which are irrevocable (for example, Bush’s decision to invade Iraq after 9/11 has as a consequence destroyed many lives and created ISIS and that will never be undone, especially the deaths, even if the president after him had immediatelly pulled the troops out from Iraq).

As you say, Trump might very well turn what was mainly (IMHO) not a Trolley Problem, into much more of one by (in “more likelly” to “less likely” order):

• Take a lot more decisions which are hard to revoke.
• Take a lot more decisions with irrevocable effects or with more of such effects.
• Stop the cyclical nature of the “game” (i.e. change the rules so that nobody but a Republican can ever become President).

The time for Punishing the Democrats to try and influence the approportioning of the “cake” they put forward in the next round of the “game” was before in elections before this one, but that was not done hence the “quality” of the candidate offered by the Democrats. The wisdom of Punishing it in this election was, with hindsight, not so great, but it’s still understandable that some people chose to Punish the Democrats by refraining from voting, even if one thinks their estimation of the associated risks of doing so was very wrong.

I suppose I agree with your original idea that in this cycle the US elections have turned into a Trolley Problem (though I see it as a high probability rather than absolute certainty), though I disegree with the wider portrayal (maybe not by you, but many others) of people who chose to not vote Democrat as responsible for what Trump is doing - I strongly suspect they merelly erred by underestimating the risk they were taking, which is understandable since in the Propaganda Heavy US environment the extreme warnings about Trump coming from Democrats were self-serving and very much a repeat of their propaganda techniques in previous elections, so many simply did not believe they were true or at least that they were not purposeful exagerations (i.e. a “boy who cried wolf” situation).

I just love the “totally not orchestrated” sudden rise of China-is-bad meme posts against the LLM company that just crushed the US-based behemoths by making a way better product.

That shit is not at all the kind of stuff that US-based-Tech-Bros-employed propaganda sockpuppets (or useful idiot nationalist fanboys) would put out to try and hamper a competitor from abroad with a better product.

I suggest the counter is to stop respecting Intellectual Property for anything registered in the US, not just US Copyright but also Patents and Trademarks.

The US doesn’t actually make much and is hugely dependent on Intellectual Property to extract wealth from other people making stuff.

I think I used a wrong methaphor (sorry!) because the whole death thing carries a lot more implications than what I meant to convey.

In a Trolley Problem the A/B choice is fixed, is a once-only choice and its effects cannot be undone. My point is that, unlike a Trolley Problem, even in the US deeply flawed voting system the choice is (so far) not an irrevocable one time only choice - there is a new choice every 4 years, most effects from the previous choice can be undone (the chosen one of the next cycle always has the option to undo most of what the chosen one of the previous cycle did) and the actual choices available at voting time are not fixed and can be influenced before the actual vote (Parties can be convinced to field different candidates).

My theory is that in part Presidential Elections in the US system are a Cyclical Ultimatum Game, in that for each Party a candidate is fielded whose political offerings are a certain approportioning of the “cake” amongst different societal interests and the voters who care about such societal interests can chose to Accept or Reject, and given the cyclical nature of the choice, one can use Reject to Punish a party for fielding a candidate who is offering a specific approportioning of the “cake”, the difference between a mere Reject and Punish being that the latter is done with the intention of affecting the choice of “cake” approportioning of the other side of the game (i.e. the Party whose candidate is being rejected) that they offer on the next cycle.

Or in common language, in the US system it’s a logical strategy to, on one election, reject the candidate of one’s “natural” Party who is offering an unacceptable approportioning of the “cake”, to incentivise that Party to offer a better candidate in the next electoral cycle - the decision tree in the system is a lot deeper than merelly the single unrevocable choice of a Trolley Problem.

Had most Democrat voters actually been following this logic for the last couple of decades, rather than treating each vote as an independent event from all other votes, the situation in the US would be totally different, IMHO, not least because somebody like Trump would be facing Democrat candidates who actually would be trying much harder to appeal to the common people (as they otherwise would be rejected and hence never win).

Further, the mob here claiming that “natural” Democrat voters who refrained from voting Democrat in this election are losing everytime Trump does one of his extreme measures are totally missing the picture - those people did not reject Democrat to get Trump, they Rejected Democrat to get a better Democrat next time around and a Trump presidency was the risk they were taking for it. That choice will only be a “loss” if the Democrats do not field a better candidate next time around (or if Trump somehow manages to make it so that there is no “next time around”).