He probably got to avoid having sex tapes released. Epstein was probably working with multiple intelligence agencies. The Russians probably just paid the most for those videos.

If they live in swing states they are.

Ideally third party candidates could get concessions from either Republicans or democrats in exchange for an endorsement. Kennedy got some completely insane concessions from trump for example.

But Stein hasn’t been reported to have asked the dems for anything. Which means the green party is trying to get trump elected. My guess is that Stein got concessions from trump to stay in the race.

Lots of people probably aren’t aware that Trump’s crew has published a manifesto saying they will eliminate the FDA.

That is a very interesting observation. The anthropologists Davids Graeber and Wengrow studied how human groups had been controlled by charismatic leadership going back into prehistory. These groups could become authoritarian dictatorships which wage wars against their neighbors, engage in slavery, and human sacrifice. Alternatively when they were egalitarian and controlled by democratic institutions they were the opposite. More peaceful and equal.

For men you have a white power gang in almost every federal and state lockup. But because gangs like the Aryan Brotherhood are patriarchal institutions, women are not permitted to be full members. As such, when a female white supremacist ends up in jail, she is far less likely to find a group which shares the same political views.

You are completely right. There’s an entire ecosystem of right wing propaganda channels out there but most people get their news from their friends. It’s the key phenomenon behind influencer culture. And that’s how most of the damage is done.

If someone has one friend who is considered knowledgeable on current affairs and that one friend watches Fox, chances are that none of his associates will have an accurate understanding of any given topic. And that’s by design. The kind of tripe spread on fox news is inflammatory and salacious. The sort of noxious trash you’d share with friends in private conversation.

I realize this is what TikTok and facebook maximize: The friend effect. People learn from their friends. The kind of lies spread by right wing networks is magnified by social media and Russian bot farms.

When narcissists become triggered they have a fight or flight response. Trump is having that same response every day of his life. He was having it during the coup, he was having it when he was raping, he was having it when he got convicted. The observation that Trump is mentally crumbling is true. But it’s something that he does daily.

Just think how contorted someone’s thinking must be I’m order to derive their self worth from a poll.

I think you’re right and that I’ve horribly misunderstood how this data is collected and used. According to their yearly report, mozilla’s advertising revenue is explicitly not drawn from user data and is only related to tiles and default search engine sponsorships. The fact that they are not selling this information is heartening and it inspires confidence that they have not flipped on the ad money spigot.

I appreciate your informed response but no system other than advertising-abstinence is fool proof.

Im saying this as a supporter. My browser of choice is firefox and I send them money regularly. And I understand their need to generate more revenue. But there has never been a company who has sold customer data discretely. My understanding is that every piece of data that’s sold can be de anonymized when combined with other data sets. And the data is horsetraded until it gets into some very marginal actors’ hands.

Mozilla’s need for money is largely driven by massive mismanagement. It should have been fully funded in perpetuity through establishing a foundation that operates off interest payments but they decided to try and build a headquarters in Mountainview. They also operate offices in some of the most expensive cities in the world. They have made expensive software aquisitions. These are not necessary and have only whetted mozilla’s thirst for other revenue sources. It’s guaranteed that they will look for more customer data to sell because that’s the path of least resistance.

I wish them luck but I also wish they’d not chase advertising money.

Even if Mozilla takes precautions to avoid de-anonymizing our data, any private data sold to data brokers becomes a part of the puzzle for learning our identities

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_re-identification

Even knowing something a trivial as two movie ratings led to a 68% success rate in learning an identity.

Everything you wrote lined up with the article on wikipedia so if you got something wrong I didn’t see it.

I’m referring to the book “This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly” the title of which mocks the oft repeated defense of bubble investors:

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w13882/w13882.pdf

But their point is that every single asset bubble ended up popping, despite the protections instituted by banks and governments. They also point out that the bubbles have been getting bigger and bigger

I’m not sure what you mean, but no, I don’t think that and I didn’t write that but i can understand the confusion because it’s not well known how QE works. Some forms of QE prevent crashes. The Fed can achieve this by taking the bank’s failing debt instrument off the books, and swapping it for a t bill.

Sorry I appreciate your comment. So I read (erroneously?) that central bankers had done away with the reserve ratio in the fractional reserve banking article. And that just seems like a reckless thing to do given how prone to bubbles our economy is.

One of the main points in “this time is different” is that despite the math, we are experiencing greater and greater asset bubbles and at no point in world history were things actually different.

Thanks for the reply. I hope you don’t let my spelling or use of ex nihilo (this is the exact language used by the fed and economists, I didn’t just make it up) turn you off, because at a policy level they are pursuing policies that keep real estate prices high.

This seems like an already failed banking model which places lenders at the front of the pack and will lead to only larger asset bubbles. Japan’s Kiretsu system of banking led to banks taking out loans to cover up their own investment losses as they had put their money into an asset bubble which collapsed. Banks then committed wholesale fraud by disguising such losses on their books. The Japanese government then used quantitative easing. They create money ex nihilo, swap the money for a t bill, then they bought the toxic assets by giving t bills to the bank. The bank doesn’t sell the t bill, they merely collect interest on it.

The main effect is a system in which bubbles are never popped and consumers suffer a declining standard of living in order to keep asset prices high.