The Republicans have been the party of inflation since the Nixon Shock. If the money in your pocket is dissolving, then you’re encouraged to invest in businesses to save for retirement. Then once you’re dependent on those investments, you’ll defend them.

They want every American drowning in debt. They want us living paycheck to paycheck. They want us to fail and then call us lazy, irresponsible, and financially illiterate. The purpose of a system is what it does.

Delusion can survive a lot of things, but losing everything can help.

Between midterms and 1/20, all of the Etsy witches will be working overtime.

This isn’t a force choke. He’s more machine than man.

This was my central argument when they tried to take away my Firefox at work.

All authorities are just some guy with good programming skills. The giants on whose shoulders we stand were mostly rich guys who had the privilege of screwing around. I prefer the original definition of genius - not a quality that a person possesses, but an external spirit that comes and visits you.

I’ve got good news for you!

Elect me as president. I’ll start pardoning whistleblowers and antifa. They’ll abolish it within a week.

You got me to learn something new today!

Sure, that’s obvious to you and me, as seasoned internet users. But we can’t expect lawyers and career politicians to understand such things. They must be ignoring it by accident.

American children are >20x more likely to be killed by firearms than European children. Saying it can’t be brought to literally zero is a distinction without a difference.

The Taft-Hartley Act, and other laws like it, have dramatically weakened American unions far below what’s necessary to overthrow anything. If your strike is too successful, then the government will declare a compromise on your behalf and end it.

Joining a union is a good idea, and there’s no reason why we can’t come up with a clever program to avoid restrictions on unions too. I’m just explaining why Americans have not simply organized.

Unfortunately I don’t think they’re coming to save us.

Edit: actually it looks like you might be suggesting something else. Just so I don’t accidentally make a strawman, could you elaborate on what you expect individuals in oppressive countries to do?

If there’s so little depth that they’re not getting a significant reward, then that’s where we are right now. Looking around you and I see the same thing - a bunch of Lemmings with big words and no action. We have no mechanism of coordination because centralized organizations get censored, like with the Taft-Hartley Act or the CIA abroad.

There would need to be sufficient market depth to pay someone to act. So we couldn’t just publish $0.01 bets on everything and watch the town burn. “Coasian” solutions like this are limited by transaction costs.

In practice, the owner of the datacenter would need to either eliminate the externality or watch it burn. If the datacenter is worth more than its external cost, then they can reimburse their victims or pay for cleanup. If the revenue from the datacenter is less than its external costs, then it’s a net loss for society and ought to be shut down.

Let’s say you don’t want a fire, like it’s your data center. You’ll want to get paid if the fire does happen. So you bet on fire, like you’re buying insurance against it.

Two interesting differences from existing fire insurance.

• If you’re not an asshole, then now you’re just getting insurance at a better rate because there’s more competing insurers.
• If you are an asshole, then you’ll find yourself now paying the external cost of owning the data center, as higher insurance rates.

That’s the real point of this software. It would allow crowdfunded defense against people who are destroying the world and own the legal system. Most participants would just be minimizing costs or gambling, not ideologically motivated.

You’d bet against the fires if you wanted a payoff when the fire doesn’t happen. You pay when the fire does happen. So anybody who benefits from the fire world have an incentive to bet against it.

A peer-to-peer prediction market where instead of betting on forest fires, we bet on datacenter fires and mansion fires.