If the first thing Donald Trump did in office was arrest every Cheney and toss them into Gitmo, I would feel significantly less bad about him winning the election.

He won’t. And that’s one more reason why he fucking sucks. This is all just theater, before the Cheneys are back to cutting the GOP checks for special O&G industry favors.

Mainly because the governments already have access to everything and I mean EVERYTHING.

There’s limits, largely around the speed and accuracy by which data can be ingested and processed. You can look for everyone somewhere sometimes and someone everywhere sometimes and someone somewhere at any time, but it takes a ton of digital resources to monitor everyone everywhere all the time. For the data to be meaningful it has to be interpreted.

Manned checkpoints allow local state actors to make decisions in near-real time relative to immediately present information. The classic example is someone with a stale warrant or notice on their record. The sheer volume of delinquents makes pursuing every individual troublesome, but as soon as a known offender steps across a checkpoint the police can pounce on the individual offender in that instance. If you’ve got a five year old traffic ticket, a police officer can be in your face about it as soon as they run your ID.

I doubt a hotel receptionist would make use of a pubkey cryptography.

If you’re just flashing an ID like a badge, maybe not. But as soon as the hotel tries to use the information to do anything (even as trivial as adding it to their local systems) there’s a good chance it’ll get bounced or hung up. A fake digital id is worse than none at all. Its a big red flag saying “Look harder at this person, they’re suspicious!”

There’s already a containerized Personal / Work split in the OS. You’d think the partitions could be made smaller.

But then Google is as deep into the NatSec industry as any other tech company. Even if you have containerization, there’s little reason to believe Five Eyes doesn’t have a back door.

That means if I used the digital version, they would had unlimited access to all my digital life. Photos, emails, chats, from decades ago.

Bare minimum, it would take a substantial amount of time and resources to harvest data from every phone of every driver passing through a particular checkpoint. Not that I’d ever recommend handing over my phone to a cop, but this kind of data transfer isn’t trivial. And its not clear what a street cop is going to do with 10 GB of accumulated vacation photos.

On the flip side, if you have an Automatic Backup feature on your phone, its going to a cloud computer somewhere. And that cloud computer is almost certainly compromised by the state digital security agency (and probably a number of foreign security agencies). At that point, it doesn’t matter if you’ve got a physical id or a digital one, just knowing who you are is enough to tie you back to that digital archive.

But… again, what is it that front-line state agents are planning to do with all this data? That’s never been made particularly clear.

the chinese government is an absolute hypocrite here once again

Going tit-for-tat with the US on investigations of rival tech companies isn’t hypocritical, its retaliatory. This is a strategic response to an escalating tech sector trade war.

Nvidia is probably the defacto monopoly corporation that deserves an anti trust probe the least because competition isn’t even trying

NVIDIA has acquired 23 different companies in the last 5 years. Six in 2024 alone. Back in 2020, they straight up bought out ARM for $40B, eliminating an enormous chunk of their domestic competition. This was a strategic prelude to cornering the manufacturing of AI-centric hardware.

These mergers never should have been allowed to take place. They’ve squashed anything resembling competitive pricing and created a choke point in distribution that the bigger tech companies have exploited to crowd out competitors in the nascent AI industrial space. In a sane world, an anti-trust claim would be open-and-shut. NVIDIA is caught red-handed in the act. They’re straight up bragging about it to their investors. Its the singular reason for their skyrocketing stock price.

The only incentive rivals have, at this point, is to get large enough for a company like NVIDIA to buy you out. There is no competition because the market has already been cornered.

Doubling our police budget to assist in the protection of health insurance management supply lines.

It’s not a crime if the President does it. Or so prior presidents have told me.

None of those count unless Jordan Peterson says they count

instead

We’re not doing either, because both the animal agriculture and private airline industry exist to benefit our liege lords

You’ll be eating the bugs (and liking it) soon enough. Just have to find the profit motive

It’s far more nutrient rich than any of the overly processed vegan garbage

Nothing more nutritious than slop. Keep stuffing your face with hamburger

John Wick was an awesome series of movies.

They’d burned through the premise badly inside the first two films. And that’s before you read it as Equilibrium with the serial numbers filled off.

Which is a shame. All that money on effects and direction and talent. Nobody thought to hire a screenwriter worth a shit to make any of the theatrics meaningful.

Free to campaign. Free to fundraise. Free to conspire within the party and continue to build support.

And then the opposition ran a prosecutor mostly known for her reluctance to indict white collar criminals.

No shit he won.

Four years ago, really. He should have exited 1600 Pennsylvania directly into the back of a squad car.

Instead, he was free to continue doing crimes while rebuilding his base of support for another bite at the apple. Not a huge surprise, given the US’s long and ugly history of turning a blind eye to corporate goonery, financial malfeasance, and organized crime. But depressing, given how much of this was a predictable consequence.

Guy was convicted on 34 counts but never even got to sentencing. Pathetic.

random people living on the streets

That’s where I’m at as well. 100% guarantee all the money is going to a person in need.

Joker moment

It would be nice if organisations were run by people who were so dedicated to the job that they’d do it for free or at least on a survival wage

A fully flashed out public service sector could encourage this. If health care and housing and utilities and education were human rights rather than luxuries, you’d have more people who didn’t consider a six figure salary at a for-profit venture a prerequisite for survival.

It’s not like a private company where the owner/CEO can just grab the money

When the board is stacked with friends and family and the job itself is just cronyism, they absolutely can.

So if you want to actually contribute to that non-profit, you might want to save your few dollars and instead give them some of your time to help them in the right direction.

The advanced state of finance capitalism and the deplorable state of mass transit and paid leave make financial gifts far more practical than donated labor.

It’s a classic moral hazard of private non-profits. You generate income from press and marketing, so you have an incentive to invest more in those parts of your business. The Zoo Wildlife Alliance doesn’t get any money from the wildlife.

But now you’ve got a marketing team that wants to grow, in order to generate more revenue. So they need more revenue themselves. But it’s “justified” because they can claim credit for every dollar brought in. The bigger the marketing staff gets, the more sway they have within the organization as a whole. So it prioritizes growth for the sake of growth, rather than asking where the money is going.

And all along, the fundraising leadership is justifying higher and higher compensation as a percentage of groups revenue.

Eventually, you’re just a millionaire pan handler, asking money so you can ask for money. That’s a totally organic consequence of unregulated industry.

Can’t help noticing the DOGE wants to defund the FBI

Why not just make him the ambassador at this point?