>Our presence on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok is not an endorsement [...] We stay because the people on those platforms deserve access to information, too. We stay because some of our most-read posts are the ones criticizing the very platform we're posting on. We stay because the fewer steps between you and the resources you need to protect yourself, the better.
The story behind the numbers they present clearly demonstrates that X is censoring/shadowbanning them. Going from 600MM to 13MM impressions/yr -- losing 98% of their impressions! -- is no accident but clearly Musk's thumb on the scale.
Imagine what this means if you are trying to gauge impact of a post. Remember, X is giving them zero information about who they're preventing from seeing it. Impressions is the main datapoint so if you can't figure out why you've lost 98% of your impact, how on earth are you going to evaluate it vs other platforms?
And yes, each platform has a cost. There's a LOT more to social strategy than just "copy and paste this announce to every platform".
The only thing Elmo managed to do was block legitimate and fun bots posting silly stuff.
The actual pretending-to-be-humans bots / professional trolls that argue for any viewpoint they get paid to endorse are still there in full force. They even pay the fee for the checkmark.
They still get more engagement on X than on Bluesky.
Also, cross positing the same content on multiple platforms isn’t time consuming.
This is clearly EFF violating their stated commitment to political neutrality, and providing only a superficial and easily discredited rationale for cover.
The problem is they can't really say it, because if their stance is that Musk's management deserves such rejection, then they are cutting their nose to spite their face, and if the abhorrent ones are X users in general, they show themselves to be only on one side of the aisle, removing any legitimacy to their principles.
>They still get more engagement on X than on Bluesky.
Is this the right metric? Or would having 98% of their impressions lopped off by the platform factor in? What if they were 100% suppressed? Would it still be "political" for them to leave? If not, then what's the threshhold?
And, if the platform is suppressing them, then isn't it the platform that's playing politics? How are they absolved, and why should EFF stick around to give them its imprimatur of legitimacy / neutrality?
It's not necessarily shadowbanning (although it could well be), given that it's been turned into a cesspit where huge numbers of users left and the ones still there are probably not the demographic that would engage with the EFF, it could just be a natural consequence of Musk's wrecking it.
That may be the case, but the EFF’s Twitter alone is enough to explain their poor performance.
Their last post did quite well, and it is characteristically different from their other posts.
I don’t think Elon Musk personally needs to put his thumb on the scale in this case. I don’t even understand why he’d be involved here and not say anything. Like wouldn’t he say “EFF sucks” or something? I dunno, I don’t really keep up with that kind of thing.
It’s fine if the EFF wants to leave because they aren’t reaching people.
On a decent social platform, it shouldn't even matter if their posting sucks or is lazy. If I followed them, I want to see their stuff. If I'm not seeing the posts of the accounts I follow, the site is not worth me using - same if ppl who explicitly followed me aren't seeing my posts.
Maybe, I haven’t been keeping up since the cracker machine stuff. I thought EFF was a GNU-adjacent thing any generic tech person supported. I guess I was wrong.
The GNU-adjacent thing would be FSF, and I'd say many EFF supporters are antagonistic towards the FSF (and/or RMS) because of their "extremist" stances. I'd characterize EFF as "corporate Open Source" vs. FSF/GNU "Free Software."
The thing is, unless their posts have only gotten bad recently, it's reasonable to assume that the drop in traffic is unrelated to post quality. Algorithms, changing audiences, etc. become better explanations.
Leaving out key parts of a quote is a disingenuous way to attempt to make a counter-argument, especially when the full quote clearly contradicts your second sentence.
The problem they're not talking about is that for all the X users they could potentially help, their messages will be actively suppressed by the platform owner.
Perhaps they still do, particularly because that’s exactly what they stand for. The overall shift in perspective and narrative to the right makes them appear left.
If the narrative of a platform is intentionally divisive and making them appear left, leaving is the only way to both be center and present as center.
A warped perspective is hard to spot if you’ve been staring at it too long.
The only congressman who would actually support the EFF in digital rights is Massie, a republican.
Reading their post they throw out every progressive buzz word for the omnicause, they are clearly aligning themselves with the progressive wing of the Democrats. The wing which is ironically some of the most anti-free speech in all of American politics.
> In Joe Biden’s presidency, two great forces pushed the information state to the limits of its power. The first came from the administration’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The second came from its decision to use the arsenal of counterinsurgency against American citizens accused of domestic extremism. Both relied on the vast public-private apparatus of censorship and surveillance, originally built to combat foreign disinformation, to wage political battles at home.
[…]
> Back in 2017, two academics affiliated with Harvard had created a novel category to describe speech that was factually true, but undermined official interests. They called it malinformation and defined it as speech “based on reality, used to inflict harm on a person, organization or country”. Could constitutionally protected criticism of the US government be classified as malinformation? Only the information regulators could say for sure since all power rested in the authority to define the terms. The government seized the opportunity. In the very first month of the Biden administration, CISA rewrote its mission from focusing on foreign disinformation “to focus on general MDM”, an acronym for misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation — a three-part classification developed by the 2017 Harvard paper that coined “malinformation”. The machinery of the information state had completed its inward turn. Rather than defensively protecting critical infrastructure from outside attack, the agency would now “be responsive to current events” inside the US.
(a) The Biden/Harris administration was not one that I would consider Progressive, and I really have no interest in defending them broadly speaking
(b) I am quite aware of the actions and events described in the article you link, and do not approve of them. Even so, I think there is a legitimate question as to whether or not these actions constituted violations of the first amendment, at least legally if not in spirit. This is quite unlike the current administration's blatant violations which include:
(c) Jailing and attempting to deport people for political speech, attempting to revoke funding from universities that allow certain protests (freedom of assembly), defunding PBS and NPR on the basis of political viewpoints expressed, suing many other news outlets for unflattering coverage and threatening to revoke licenses via FCC. The list goes on. Also, Twitter is now owned by an honorary member of the Trump cabinet, and if you don't think he's putting his finger on the scale, boy do I have a bridge to sell you.
Nothing said here is of substance and instead mere projection of speculation.
If they came out openly as gay as an organization but kept their current stated goal of digital freedom, they still would be a digital rights organization I do not see what driveling about supposed progressive politics makes fighting for digital rights bad.
An organization aligning itself with progressives means they will only support a certain set of digital rights that align with progressive politics and not others.
I guess you can still call yourself a digital rights organization if you want by you won’t be seen as legitimate by both sides of the aisle.
MAGA is the one who decided ideas like freedom of expression, an expectation of privacy, and holding governments accountable were woke liberal concepts.
Maybe a good start if you're a specific flavor of person, but it would be pretty amazing to claim it's an objective observer of "freedom" when the Freedom Index is a John Birch Society project, which is an ultraconservative advocacy group.
Just because it's called the freedom index, doesn't mean it's concerned with the freedom of all man, look to the civil rights movement for easy examples of how JBS' "freedom" is only for certain people.
Hell, click over to the JBS website and you'll see Alex Jones and Steve Bannon front and center on their home page. It's crazy to refer to one of their projects as some neutral arbiter.
> We have assigned pluses to the yeas because Congress has every duty to forbid grossly illicit acts of sexual perversion in the armed forces.
It is full of things that are not what I would consider freedoms. Freedoms of companies to exploit oil reserves is one. Voting no to taxpayer funded healthcare is a good thing,apparently.
Edit: and I didnt look further than 3 clicks away. They are not hiding their political bias very well.
Looking very quickly at some of the votes being tracked, I don't see any vote that remotely qualifies as supporting or opposing free speech. Instead, they're focusing on things like "do you oppose the Federal Reserve making interest payments?" "do you oppose cryptocurrency regulations?" "do you oppose energy efficiency regulations for appliances?"
You cannot be serious. Looking at the 'Freedom Index', I can see them approving of things like restricting abortion, giving the executive even more power and more.
The point of these videos is that no platform that values freedom of expression and diverse points of view would have auto-ban systems for the kinds of things that he said. X is massively more liberal in what it allows and what it tolerates before it will ban someone than Blue Sky. So the EFF's claims are totally disingenuous and I don't think people should stand for it no matter where they stand politically.
I don't think they shifted their stance, I think the stances of the left and right shifted around them. For example I remember during Trumps first term they announced a rather sensible stance on the internet/net neutrality via an official blog post, and shortly after (maybe even the next day) it turned out that intern who wrote the piece was fired and it was removed. It's not that the stance was particularly anti-right etc, but that the positions of the right solidified more towards pro-big business rather than anti-regulation as they had previously been trying to be.
I worked at EFF during that time, and this is a weird story that I’ve not heard before. EFF doesn’t let interns write blog posts (at least not with a lot of supervision) and certainly wouldn’t sack someone for getting something wrong — partly because that’s a terrible lesson to teach someone just starting out in law or activism, but also and more pragmatically it risks being a PR nightmare.
I concede it might be a mangled version of some other incident — EFF’s network neutrality policy during that time was /extremely/ subtle and we often struggled to express it without annoying some colleague organization or another. Do you remember any other details, or link to coverage of it?
yes it was this, not the EFF but the Trump admin, it was a surprisingly normal and level headed policy take, and I was pleasantly surprised, but then it turned out it wasn't their official stance, it was removed and replaced with a statement and stance that was nearly the opposite. But for the life of me I can't find it again, but I swear I didn't imagine it.
EFF is more like classical liberal. They generally oppose regulation of speech/tech and oppressive laws like DMCA 1201 (anti-circumvention) but promote things in the nature of antitrust like right-to-repair. Everything is required to be crammed into a box now so that often gets called "left" because the tech companies (also called "left") have found it more effective to pay off the incumbents in GOP-controlled states when they don't like right-to-repair laws, although Hollywood ("left" again) are traditionally the ones pressuring Democrats to sustain the horrible anti-circumvention rule when they're in power.
It turns out trying to fit everything into one of two boxes is pretty unscientific.
I enjoyed the article. And it gave me a different perspective about how sometimes you have to go to where the people are to get your message out to people that they should leave.
It's funny that the (seemingly) right leaning people in this thread are criticizing the EFF for leaving Twitter while also simultaneously saying they will leave HN for the exact same reason, just "on the opposite side of the political spectrum".
Not in this instance. People don't stop being people when they join an organization. If we can recognize that getting ignored, suppressed, or met with hostility "discourages people from posting", why can't we recognize that it can also discourage organizations from posting?
You don’t think people have different goals than organizations?
Do you think the goal of EFF posting on HN is the same as some random user posting on HN?
Of course not. So it’s not surprising they have different actions under similar circumstances. Nor is having different actions indicative of differing morals.
You clearly didn't read the article closely enough. The first header is "The Numbers Aren’t Working Out." If it was about the audience, they would have switched stopped earlier.
I agree with you. It's clear that they're leaving X because "X bad", but they don't want to say it that way. I don't know if X is or isn't bad, but it seems pretty mainstream and a good representation of a lot of society, both US and international, so for an org that apparently cares for the online rights of people, it feels silly to leave a platform where there are - people. (and this is coming from someone who doesn't use X or social media in general)
It is a poor representation of society internationally. Twitter has never been a big platform outside the US (and Japan I believe). It's irrelevant most other places.
>Another culture clash, this time between Discovery’s unscripted empire and Warner’s premium sensibilities, a wannabe mogul overpaying so he could cosplay as Robert Evans (ask Claude), and a 5x debt-to-EBITDA ratio. The good news? The sequel had a short runtime. CEO David Zaslav slashed costs, engineered a good bank / bad bank structure to spin WBD’s declining linear assets, and ultimately orchestrated a bidding war that restored shareholder value. As an operator, Zaz is Ed Wood (see: the worst branding decision in history, deprecating HBO), but as an investment banker, he’s Steven Spielberg.
WTF is this slop? I've never seen a an article so riddled with analogies and pop culture references that actively degrade the ability to understand whatever argument might be lurking behind the obscurantism.
What body of work has Scott Galloway produced that should cause me or any other reader to suffer this kind of self-indulgence normally found in a 8th grade creative writing class, in the hopes of learning something meaningful about these topics?
It depends on whether or not you like that style of writing. It has always been consistent with Galloway; I like it, but I prefer listening to it over reading it.
Whereas I definitely prefer reading PG’s writing over listening to it, interestingly enough.
Just personal preference. Scott’s a good storyteller; if you let him finish the story. :)
To me it feels like you're reading his insecurity. He can't be direct. He needs to fluff it up so you know how smart he is. I'm guilty of the same bullshit.
Korea, Vietnam, Iraq (I and II), Afghanistan, etc. were not technically wars in the sense that there was any form of formal declaration by congress. The U.S. constitution allocates the authority to declare war to congress but, in practice, it's been under the sole authority of the POTUS since long before Trump.
This reallocation of authority hasn't been a huge problem until now. Now you have a POTUS whose motives for starting a war are entirely suspect. It's true that negotiations between Iran and the U.S. would have had significant trust hurdles to overcome. The U.S. and Iran had a deal that granted Iran relief from economic sanctions in exchange for a halt to Iran's nuclear program. It was working, but Trump is the president who unilaterally broke that agreement in his previous term[1]. Trump has also repeatedly broken his own agreements in his current term. Even his own signature is now completely worthless. What would it have taken to assure Iran the U.S. could be trusted to honour its word with Trump in power?
Moreover, the timing of this war makes it hard to view as anything other than the bloodiest case of "Wag the Dog" of the modern era. Americans need to put this "president of peace" behind bars or he'll just keep starting wars. Once that's done, serious consideration should be given to restoring many of the powers the constitution allocates to congress, including the authority to declare war.
> Korea, Vietnam, Iraq (I and II), Afghanistan, etc. were not technically wars in the sense that there was any form of formal declaration by congress.
(1) A declaration of war is not necessary for a war to legally exist, except in the context of specific US laws that might rely on a declared state of war,
(2) Congress constitutional power to declare war is not dependent on the use of special words; every (conditional or unconditional) “authorization for the use of military force” (including the broad but time limited authorization in the War Powers Act) and similar is an application of the Constitutional power to declare war.
I just wish we'd apply this rule slightly more widely and didn't let countries get away with say - just as example - killing 20k children in Gaza. I guess you did say "generally".
Neither the US nor Europe would have cared about Hitler's mass murder as long as he kept it in Germany and didn't disrupt business, his antisemitism was not unusual, and he was generally popular in the US. Stalin got away with it. Mao Zedong got away with it, and his authoritarian regime is a nascent superpower. Pol Pot more or less got away with it. He was deposed by his own people and died in his sleep. Israel has killed tens of thousands Palestinians and the world did nothing to stop it, America funded it. Idi Amin murdered hundreds of thousands of people and died in luxury. How many Russians and Ukrainians has Putin and his invasion of Ukraine sent to the slaughterhouse? Do you think anything is going to happen to him? How many North Koreans have the Kims starved to death or executed? Repercussions for the Armenian genocide? None. History is replete leaders whom the "civilized world" let "get away with it."
Israel does not need a declaration of war to kill heads of state. Their targeted killing policy has been upheld by their own Supreme Court. Whether international law agrees is another matter.
The US has also done this since 1945 (at least) although executive orders have, at times, placed some restraint on the practice.
There’s a reason every POTUS has a Secret Service detail. So yeah, it’s been imagined. Presidents have been shot and killed before, and Trump himself was shot during the lead up to the most recent election.
Again, the Secret Service is there to protect against all threats and the US Military there for every single other threat above the Secret Service’s pay grade and scale.
It’s the most dangerous and most protected job in America no matter what the POTUS is actively doing at any and every single moment.
I think y’all are so quick to try and criticize everything around the President that you’re kinda missing my point:
Of course there are people that would love to target the POTUS. The Secret Service detail exists for a reason. That reason being that yeah, it’s an unsafe job, and having them there is how we prevent a foreign adversary from just walking right into the White House and doing what we did to Maduro.
All of these problems are downstream of the Congress having thoroughly abdicated its powers to the executive.
The military should be reigned in at the legislative level, by constraining what it can and cannot do under law. Popular action is the only way to make that happen. Energy directed anywhere else is a waste.
Private corporations should never be allowed to dictate how the military acts. Such a thought would be unbearable if it weren't laughably impossible. The technology can just be requisitioned, there is nothing a corporation or a private individual can do about that. Or the models could be developed internally, after having requisitioned the data centers.
To watch CEOs of private corporations being mythologized for something that a) they should never be able to do and b) are incapable of doing is a testament to how distorted our picture of reality has become.
The private corporation is not dictating to the military, it’s setting the terms of the contract. The military is free to go sign a contract with a different company with different terms, but they didn’t, and now they want to change the terms after the contact was already signed. No mytholgization needed, just contract law.
The country is sovereign. It can just make a law democratically that changes things. The sovereign must act on whatever is in its best interest. The method of action is democratic in this case.
During a war with national mobilization, that would make sense. Or in a country like China. This kind of coercion is not an expected part of democratic rule.
It has always been a part of democratic rule, in peacetime and war. All telco's share virtually all of their technology with the government. Governments in europe and elsewhere routinely requisition services from many of their large corporations. I think it's absurd to think llm's can meaningfully participate in realworld cmd+ctrl systems and the government already has access to ml-enhanced targeting capabilities. I really have no idea what dod normies think of ai, other than that it's infinitely smarter than them, but that's not saying much.
Not the same thing. The parent comment was talking about government “requisiting” services as in forceful compliance, takeovers, not collaboration or regulatory compliance.
If you're referring to telcos sharing their tech with government there are a few examples of Ericsson working with the Swedish military:
> Brigadier-General Mattias Hanson, CIO, Swedish Armed Forces, says: “Strengthening Sweden’s militarily and acting as part of a collective defense requires us to increase our defensive capabilities. We need to utilize the latest technology and all the innovative power of the Swedish private sector. Sweden has unique skills and capabilities in both telecoms and defense technology..." [0]
The question of whether or not the government should be able to use AI for targeting without the involvement of humans is a wartime question, since that is the only time the military should be killing people.
Under such a scenario, requisition applies, and so all of this talk is moot.
The fact that the military is killing people without a declaration of war is the problem, and that's where energy and effort should be directed.
Edit:
There's a yet larger question on whether any legal constraints on the military's use of technology even makes sense at all, since any safeguards will be quickly yielded if a real enemy presents itself. As a course of natural law, no society will willingly handicap its means of defense against an external threat.
It follows then that the only time these ethical concerns apply is when we are the aggressor, which we almost always are. It's the aggression that we should be limiting, not the technology.
You could view various non-proliferation agreements as a legislative constraint on military technology.
Same for chemical and biologicals. Those do prove your point that the law will be ignored if expedient. But it doesn't invalidate the notion of a society putting constraints on itself.
It's also downstream of voters who voted in a president who promised to be dictatorial after failing at an attempted insurrection. We need to deprogram like 70M very confused people.
That seems relatively straightforward, so likely incomplete: the left is a collective of various interests that often don't align internally and the right has very consistent and largely aligned interests. One of those is easier to steer. Another facet could also be education levels. As they say, a lie can get across town before the truth has its pants on. Being educated takes time and effort, and the educated lean left.
They are also absolutely shameless about lying and feel no obligation to stick to facts or data, but rather appeal to and cultivate ignorance, binary thinking, fear, us-versus-them thinking, and scapegoating. In short, their propaganda is more effective because they lean into it being propaganda.
I really encourage you to avoid the language of "they" and "we." It's a discussion, and it doesn't need to be an attack of which you are putting yourself on a side, or as you put it, binary thinking. As written I can't know if you are talking about either the right or left.
I think you want to read my comment a certain way and it's not allowing you to, so you posted both:
> it doesn't need to be an attack of which you are putting yourself on a side
and also
> I can't know if you are talking about either the right or left
Which are contradictory, if you think about it. I am not sure what you want me to write if I can't use "they" to refer to other people. Also, I didn't use "we", something you somehow also seem to want me to say, and didn't.
"They" is exclusive. "We" is inclusive. One goes with the other. The point I was getting at was that when you use that language in a discussion it comes off as if you are directly involved, rather than commenting from the outside, or having an opinion.
I didn't want you to use "we" either :) Here's your comment, rewritten twice, that fits in better with HN rules and avoids emotion:
> The left are also absolutely shameless about lying and feel no obligation to stick to facts or data, but rather appeal to and cultivate ignorance, binary thinking, fear, us-versus-them thinking, and scapegoating. In short, the left's propaganda is more effective because they lean into it being propaganda.
> The right are also absolutely shameless about lying and feel no obligation to stick to facts or data, but rather appeal to and cultivate ignorance, binary thinking, fear, us-versus-them thinking, and scapegoating. In short, the right's propaganda is more effective because they lean into it being propaganda.
As you can see, I couldn't tell which side you were talking about. I hope the above example helps. A lot of political discussion denigrates to us-vs-them. It is not helpful.
Because it's easy when you don't let facts block you. Spread lie number 1 on Monday morning, lie number 2 in the afternoon, lie number 3 the next day, and do that for years and decades.
Whenever someone spends the time, and it takes a long time, to correct you, laugh, mock them, spew a few more lies.
And it's easy to do when the rich, the owner class side with you, because they buy newspapers, websites, ads, which you can't do if you lean left because acquiring money at all cost is not a priority of left wing people.
I'm curious for your understanding of why Trump won in 2024. If I'm understanding right, you think it was because American voters were rejecting Maoism ("it was called re-education"), to which you think the previous commenter likely subscribes, and which voters associated with Harris/Walz? But I suspect I'm not getting it quite right, and it would be helpful if you would spell out what you mean, rather than just relying on allusion.
(I myself don't have a clear answer to why Trump won, but I don't think it speaks well to the decision-making of the median voter on their own terms, whatever those were, that Trump's now so unpopular despite governing in pretty much the way he said he would.)
> Biden, and then Harris/Waltz, are the kind of the ultimate expression of this left-wing, elitist decadence. Biden appointed a man who wears stilettos and dresses to work in charge of nuclear waste as the Department of Energy... Tolerance of mass border crossings was probably a more directly fatal error...
This is just totally disconnected from policy reality. Biden did not tolerate mass border crossings. (I _wish_ he'd dismantled ICE, but he very clearly did not.) A relatively minor DoE appointment going to a member of an unpopular minority both has nothing to do with policy and is the kind of thing that must necessarily be acceptable if minorities are actually going to be "treated equally under the law". This is a ludicrous basis to infer "the subservience of the political class" to transgender people.
On the other hand, Trump is a billionaire with Epstein connections and entirely unabashed about making money for his businesses and family using his government position. If this isn't "decadence", or "elitism", what meaning could the words possibly have?
"Deprogramming" might be an unfriendly word but it's hard for me to imagine how you have a functional democracy when a plurality of voters are making decisions on the basis of straightforward falsehoods, or even inversions of reality, just because "at least that is the perception". This isn't a sustainable situation, and it will end with either re-connecting these people to reality or disenfranchising them (really, them disenfranchising themselves along with the rest of us, e.g. by re-empowering someone who tried to steal an election). The former seems vastly preferable.
Speaking of unfriendly words - I also broadly have very little sympathy for a demand that people on the left speak respectfully of Trump voters given the total lack of any reciprocation. Even if it is the right way to do politics, the asymmetry between the way Democratic politicians talk about rural areas and the way Republican politicians talk about cities is another thing that's totally unsustainable.
This is a great example of a well put together, level-headed analysis, that I still think misses some key facts about how right wing propaganda works.
> Tolerance of mass border crossings was probably a more directly fatal error, representing a final decoupling of the democratic party from their ideological roots in the labor movement which was always militantly against illegal immigration
Both Biden and Obama turned away more immigrants than Trump did in his first term. And Clinton is the kind of denying asylum. The idea that we just had completely open borders and nothing was being done about is a fabrication.
> Something like 0.6% of people identify as transgender in the United States(1). They are vastly over-represented in the media, in left wing political programs, and in the general zeitgeist at large relative to their population size
If you actually pay attention to who is talking about Trans people, it is the right. Liberal media may be occasionally baited into arguing about it, but to say it was a major platform is a perception the right crafted. Fox was talking about it 24/7 leading up to the election [1]. Musk and Trump were tweeting about it constantly. They ran political ads saying they wanted to convert your kids to trans ideology. It's gotten so bad that our current president just harasses women that look kinda manly, saying they are trans.
If the Democrat leadership weren't going all-in on this ideology despite the demonstrable harms it's causing, the Republicans would have almost nothing to say about it.
As an example, replacing sex with "gender identity" in prisons policy has inflicted considerable harm on women prisoners, who have been sexually assaulted, raped and impregnated by male prisoners who were transferred to the female prison estate on the basis of their supposed "female gender identity".
Feminist groups like WoLF spoke up on the horrors of this first, and the Republicans followed when they realized they could capitalize on this politically. But really it shouldn't have happened at all.
>You should be asking why 70 million people voted the way they did in spite of the events you describe.
Propaganda, 1 in 6 Boomers being exposed to amounts of lead in childhood that lead to measurable cognitive declines, average age of the US population being on the rise with lower birth rates means most eligible votes are in the age groups most likely to suffer low grade dementia, and the weaponization of social media by foreign adversaries and wealthy elites.
There's maybe 4-5M true believers, the rest are gullible lead-addled old fools who got brainwashed by Fox News. That's the unvarnished truth of it.
There was no landslide. Trump got 49.9% of the vote. And it was after his attempted insurrection to overturn a valid election in which he was soundly rejected. He's never received 50% of the vote despite his relentless lies about voter fraud.
I'm not upset at people for having a differing opinion or being upset at some economic conditions attributable to Democrats, but rather their persistent belief in provably false information like the relative danger of immigrants, the causes of climate change, vaccine safety, election security or whether or not a particular ethnic group is eating their pets. This isn't a matter of opinion or it's a matter of observable reality and fundamental human morality.
It's on you to argue it was, e.g. by comparing it to other clear landslide victories like Reagan in 1984. Truth is that 2024 the final popular vote gap was 1.5%, compared to 4.5% for 2020, -2.0% for 2016 (yeah, really), 3.9% in 2012, 7.28% in 2008, and so on.
Does the term landslide have a widely accepted definition? One definition could be winning every single swing state, which Trump did.
I think you also have to factor in the degree of political polarization today, and in particular Trump's polarizing nature, which means that there is smaller pool of "effectively independent" voters to fight over. So 1% today is worth more than %1 in 1984. These, are of course, not particularly quantifiable measures.
The point is taken tough, "comprehensive victory" would have been the more appropriate description.
> The technology can just be requisitioned, there is nothing a corporation or a private individual can do about that.
I strongly doubt this is true. I think if you gave the US government total control over Anthropic's assets right now, they would utterly fail to reach AGI or develop improved models. I doubt they would be capable even of operating the current gen models at the scale Anthropic does.
> Or the models could be developed internally, after having requisitioned the data centers.
I would bet my life savings the US government never produces a frontier model. Remember when they couldn't even build a proper website for Obamacare?
> Remember when they couldn't even build a proper website for Obamacare?
With a massive budget, too. Hundreds of millions iirc.
It felt like a website that the small web-dev shop I worked for could build without much problem in a couple months.
We didn't have 200 layers of beauracracy, though.
That said I don't doubt the military could take their current tech and keep it running. It's far different from the typical grift of government contractors.
Maybe they could keep it running. With the way models are improving though, I don't think that'd be useful for long. In 6 months or a year when the frontier is again pushed out, I don't think the military is going to want to be running Opus 4.6
And contrary to what the model-makers would like you to believe, I don't think we're anywhere close to the system being self-improving enough that you could just let it run without intervention and it spits out a new frontier model
This is just a weird Trump talking point. This situation is unprecedented on many levels. The pentagon already had a signed contract with these stipulations and wanted to unilaterally renegotiate with Anthropic under threat of deeming them a foreign adversary and destroying their business if they didn't accept the DoD demands. It's totally absurd to turn this around on Anthropic and paint them as trying to determine US Military policy.
I think any such examination of a military that doesn't actually fight wars is meaningless. The question can only be really asked of a handful of countries.
I'm sorry I read this a lot and this is kind of an insane thing to say? Classified OLC memos giving legal cover to any military action has been a fixture for the last over twenty years! Congress never abdicated power, it just, by the nature of the constitution, practically has SO much less power than the president! The president is a single person that people elect, they expect the person to be a leader, and congress will always, always play a following role so long as the president has unilateral power over the military, is directly elected, and just in general has expansive interpreting authority over laws.
You know who doesn't have as much power? The swiss head of state, so weak you can't even reliably name them! THATS what it looks like to defeat personalization, not some hand wringing hoping a system does something that it wasn't designed to do.
It SHOULD be called the Department of War, as it was originally, since it makes its function clear. We are a society that has euphemized everything and so we no longer understand anything.
It's a funny thing that the most war-loving people and the most peace-loving people both love calling it "Department of War" - just for different reasons.
But the reason for "Department of Defense" name was bureaucratic. It's also not true that DOD is hard to understand.
The Department of War was responsible for naval affairs until The Department of the Navy was spun off from it in 1798, and aerial forces until the creation of the The Department of the Air Force in 1947, whereafter it was left with just the army and renamed the Department of the Army. All three branches were then subordinated to the new Department of Defense in 1949, which became functionally equivalent to the original entity.
The Department of War is what it was called when it was first created in 1789 by the Congress (establishing the department and the position of Secretary of War), the predecessor entity being called the The Board of War and Ordnance during the revolution.
The Department of "Defense" has never fought on home soil. Ever.
> The Department of War was responsible for naval affairs until The Department of the Navy was spun off from it in 1798.
After the Continental Navy was disbanded, there wasn't much of an American Navy to have a department around until... mid to late 1797, when the first three of the Original Six frigates was commissioned into active service.
If you look at the U.S. Constitution you'll find that the 'land' and 'naval' forces were separated quite early on in Art. I Sect. 8. Even the appropriations permitted were treated distinctly.
Obviously new domains of warfare will require new schemes of organization, but the "Department of War" that people think about that conducted military operations against America's enemies up through WWII was the Army's department. The operational Navy was always under the Department of the Navy.
> The Department of "Defense" has never fought on home soil. Ever.
What does this have to do with anything? Who argued otherwise?
Naming is important because it intuits what we expect to do with a thing. The Department of Defense invading Greenland is more invocative to inquiry than the Department of War invading Greenland because that's what a department of war would do.
It's one of the reasons why people get annoyed at jargon or are pissed off about pronouns, because it highlights that they should be putting mental effort into understanding why they're current mental model doesn't fit. It's much easier to ignore and be comfortable if there's not glaring sirens saying you've got some learning to do.
Most of us can't (or won't) be aware of everything that should be important to us, having glaring context clues that we should take notice of something incongruous is important. It's also why the Trump media approach works so well it's basically a case of alarm fatigue as republicans who would normally side against any particular one of his actions don't listen because they agreed with some of the actions that democrats previously raised alarms about.
Also while there is an abundance of reasons of varying legitimacy they're both good examples because people often run in to them and are annoyed by the use of the words out of proportion to running into the actual legitimate reasons to be annoyed by the concept.
The number of people annoyed, by words like rizz or are angry that doctor can refer to a female, far out weigh the people legitimately trying to figure out if rizz is something they need to protect their kids from or getting delayed medical care because they needed to wait because they only feel comfortable with their own sex.
Does this not apply to X users?