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The phrase made me chuckle, but I'm curious what exactly "rear ending the singularity" means.

To clarify, Elon himself opposed OBBBA because of the deficit. My point is that anyone cheering on DOGE for cuts but staying silent on the administration's generally bad record on spending, has an ideological bias that is not purely about fiscal responsibility.

This is a reason why the US is trillions in debt.

Trump's OBBBA will be another reason, expected to add several trillion in the next few years. So yeah, real cuts are probably needed, but the DOGE people aren't achieving that in net.

I heard "belt and suspenders" at least 20 years ago (meaning multiple solutions to a problem with backup in case one fails), and maybe would be longer if I were older. You could blame Claude for overusing it or importing it to other cultures maybe, but it's not in the category of invented phrases or ones that only barely mean something in the specific context Claude used them.

the annual water consumption of all US datacenters

How many hamburgers will it be if all the proposed/pending datacenters are completed and running?

Perhaps we could try to destroy those power structures without having a giant war

The power structure is what is putting out the satellites and datacenters that you hope will bring the Star Trek utopia. Not sure you can both destroy it and reap its fruit, or that the fruit is not poisoned by the immorality and antisociality of the current power structure anyway.

Also, in Starlink's case, if utopic United Earth becomes real, it will probably be cheaper to lay fiber and cell towers, so it's maybe just a bootstrap and not a final end state.

The data center hosting this website is already built, unlike the ones people are fighting against.

I'll grant the general public may not understand enough that they already rely on "datacenters", but there are reasonable arguments against gigawatt buildouts for AI, while still using technologies that run in datacenters in general.

The lockin is that you buy a new computer, and when you turn it on Windows is there. Like 1% of people have any concept that they could change that or how they would go about it. It doesn't suck enough yet for them to try changing it.

If you want to talk about why not macOS or Chrome, there are different reasons, but of the people buying PCs, that's why they're on Windows.

Modern 64-bit Windows doesn't execute .com files, unless the user installs an emulator or something.

Are the future benefits locked in by law or bureaucracy? Or some other reason the agency don't just decrease them?

Lead was the basis for an awful lot of useful gasoline. Doesn't mean it was the only solution or the best one.

Why is he lenient to her at all? It's either guilt or corruption, or at the very least out of character, given his many tirades against rapists.

Trump reportedly called the police in 2006, after their investigation became public, saying "everyone has known he's been doing this." Why didn't he call sooner then? And if he was working with the police, why did he say in 2019 he had no idea of the crimes? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/10/trump-epstei... That article also quotes the DOJ: "We are not aware of any corroborating evidence that the president contacted law enforcement 20 years ago." So the claim is just something in the files, right alongside the worst imaginable allegations against Trump. Do you believe those too?

I believe Biden had legal and procedural reasons not to release them (ongoing cases and keeping DOJ independent), but even without those, the argument cuts both ways: Trump could have released them in 2017. He could have released them before 99.8% of Congress voted to force it. If Biden or Obama were covering for Dems or something, why wasn't Trump glad to release the files as soon as possible? Even if you say "both sides are bad" on this issue, that would be a reason people are disenchanted and want to leave the country.

I'll admit after googling Rosie, it's murkier than I thought. I don't really care to sift gossip rags and try to predict what she'll do, though I'd lean toward you're wrong if you mean she will never set foot in Ireland again nor live there for any significant time. But what is your argument really? Famous liberals who say they are leaving don't actually leave for long, because USA is actually great because of conservative policies? Maybe for most of them, but I feel like them leaving for any significant fraction of the year kind of undercuts your "nobody sneaked into East Berlin" idea though. I don't think many people would performatively leave if there was literally nothing better about their destination. They leave because the value has diminished, and maybe they come back because it's not zero.

Epstein died in jail.

He was awaiting trial, so death by his choice wasn't necessarily the justice he deserved.

His co-conspirator is in a cushy prison as a favor from the administration. Trump promised to release files but has been avoiding it in every possible legal way. It appears there are still things missing. What do you call that other than protection? I might buy that there is not great evidence for any more prosecutions, but they are at least reputationally protected as much as possible.

Rosie O'Donnell didn't stay in Ireland very long.

She has only visited the US, which is congruent with this thread saying it's a less desirable place to live.

It's like Joey Allegra was just announced as the magazine sales winner. https://moxie.org/stories/money-machine/

Right up there with finding out Grimes was with Elon.

Maybe we should open our minds a bit, and also remember that a parasocial relationship (speaking for myself) isn't really knowing someone.

The nuclear problem was never fixed

https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2025/06/irans-nuclear-fa... It's kind of a cheap shot at this point, but my point is why should we trust them today if 1 year ago they said the program was set back by years?

Wikipedia: The majority of the documents were created between 1999 and 2003, after which the AMAD Project was halted and Iran's nuclear weapons research program was cancelled

the documents contained no revelations about recent nuclear activity

Granted, additional background on the past affects trust levels in the present, but to be clear, AFAICT it was not showing violations of JCPOA. Maybe there is something worse that's classified.

Everything foretold? Iran is the most dominant in the region, they kicked US out, they possess nukes (or conventional) that can reach the US, and the cost of US stopping them is prohibitive? Wow, Trump had better surrender today then.

I don't think it's fair to say he predicted all of its consequences when he also hoped the next president/congress would cancel it, and they did. Did he foresee that it would only last 3 out of the 10-15 years it was supposed to run, but that would be enough to doom us? Or would it have worked out better if it lasted?

Maybe you are right that the sanctions lift built them into a threat, but it still feels stupid there was an agreement in effect, Trump destroyed it, and 10 years later the best we can hope for is they agree again to give up their biggest lever and with sanctions this time. I don't think that will go well.

Arguably it's a weakness of the US system, or the particular laws in this case, that, whichever of JCPOA or sanctions was best, either can be undone at the next election. Rubio implied that's a strength though.

It is prescient that he predicted a lunatic would possess nuclear weapons and act according to apocalyptic religious beliefs, he just didn't say he would be working for the lunatic.

Weird response that does some dodging of its own. Anyone defending JCPOA is obviously in favor of controlling nukes, so why don't you explain more than restating what we already agree with?

You're going to have to specifically address why ending the program with no replacement was better than letting it continue. Your other comments about cost, lack of conventional weapon limits, and perverse incentives for other countries doesn't do much for me. (For one thing, other countries aren't very relevant to this discussion, unless the cost of paying them off were to actually become prohibitive.) It was something, it had some positive effect on the "Iran can't have nukes" you keep harping on, and it was replaced with nothing but sanctions. Why wouldn't they resume development?

I don't think it's that simple. If it was, why hasn't the administration managed to focus on that? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationale_for_the_2026_Iran_wa... And your own comments say they also have a large arsenal of conventional weapons, so presumably they would be a threat without nukes. And the US already claimed to have fixed the nuclear problem last year.

And they torched JCPOA – even with your arguments it was weak, it appears to have been more effective than doing nothing for years and then spending billions to stop them when they, completely foreseeably, stop following an agreement that the US broke first. https://armscontrolcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Ira...

I'm rambling and don't know all that much, so to the point of your question: the conflict started because Trump and his people wanted to, and it feels sort of pointlessly speculative and hopeful to ascribe your own interpretations beyond that.

I guess we'll see, if it really ends, and what the new regime, sanctions, nuclear enforcement, etc look like. If there are any career bureaucrats left, maybe they'll pull off something good.

I don't think iOS has it from the app switcher, but pretty easy to take a screenshot and immediately select from it. (Or selecting from older screenshots or photos you open.)

The Loureiro case doesn't explain things much better than a conspiracy theory does. At least, after a few minutes of research, I'm still wondering if someone could have manipulated the suspect into finally acting on a decades-long beef that does not appear to have been escalating steadily. Perhaps the hard part is why he shot the other people, but an angry suicidal person could do that, whether they were acting alone or triggered by someone else.

You can probably do it with a keyboard paired to a server/RPi that emits the keystrokes to the Roku ECP API, if having that second device is acceptable.

The original point was only that a Silicon Valley "golden age" can coexist with immigration. Admittedly it could be a better argument if it holistically made a recommendation, but at least as a starting point it tries to refute that idea.

I don't have a particular love for any of them, but the point was they generated billions in value for the valley in what some consider a golden age.

Google at least, I think people would say there was a period of near-universally believing it was a good thing, and an immigrant was a co-founder.

It definitely shaped our society. And if you think it's for the worse, might that suggest college-educated Anglo-adapting immigrants are more dangerous to us than the ones right-wingers are telling us to focus on?

For the record, Sergey Brin, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Patrick and John Collison, and Jerry Yang are foreign-born. Probably more would not have been here if their parents had not been allowed to immigrate. Now that you mention it, I would trade a few of them away, but I doubt the market would like to erase their work.

What about before AI all the machine translated projects that people used for years without a single complaint?

If by machine translation you mean something like transpiling, that's a technology that has been proven over decades, and the translators were written by hand with some attempt at formal correctness and guarantees. Translating with LLM is much newer and subject to the errors LLMs can create, such as hallucination. And I think a lot of people would still be nervous about translating an entire project of that many lines, even with the best pre-AI translators.

The description reminds me of the Renée Good shooting. Both highly videotaped, intentional blocking of a departing vehicle, an official inexplicably releasing what many say is self-damning video, but people tend to see only what they already believed in the videos.

Like saying, "There have never been more opportunities for commoners to become kings!" Okay, most of the people who say kings shouldn't exist will still feel that way, even if they could become king.

You are closer to a billionaire in your capabilities and agency in this society than a peasant was under an actual King.

How much of that is because I live in a democratic republic, and not because billionaires exist? I guess you might say they're the same thing, but I believe there are free-enough societies with less wealth/power inequality than the US. I think I care more about the gap between top and bottom than about my own personal level of power, but of course it's hard to be objective.

It is harder to draw the line with money than with literal kingship, but I don't accept that we should change nothing and let unbounded power disparities exist.

Edit: More to the point of the original article, maybe I can accept their existence if we plugged all the holes they use to pay a very low percentage, as discussed in other comments. They may remain billionaires, but the tax law would treat them more like the rest of us than like kings.

the idea that nobody benefits from the creations of billionaires has to be questioned

Who said that? Not in the post that prompted your reply, nor in the parent post.

Illegal and legal immigrants are being completely supported by Uber right now in NYC.

Can you prove that taxis wouldn't have been able to do that, if Uber didn't exist? That wealth taxes wouldn't have been able to support them?

The gate that previously blocked your ability to disseminate your ideas to a wide audience and create a living off of it has been completely torn down by the billionaires that create platforms

Musk is also erecting new gates, to promote himself and his ideas. I have to admit, I'm surprised what he lets stay up there, but I still don't believe it's an actual free platform.

I wish there was a plugin for it so I can erase it from my consumption.

Vibecode it; the billionaires tore down the gates that previously blocked your ability to have any software you want -- as long as the billionaires accede to your use of their AI and running your own software against their platforms, of course.

You complain about open platforms filled with people giving you their ideas for free, and you just don't like what they're saying, but you just cited exactly that openness as one of the valuable things that billionaires deserve to have billions for.

The premise that billionaires are less efficient than the government at deploying capital to serve society is incongruent with reality

Nobody said that, explicitly. Maybe the people arguing against billionaires don't believe capital efficiency is paramount, so you'd have to persuade them of that first, otherwise you're just saying "But capitalism is the right way, of course!"

If they were saying that kings shouldn't have the unchecked right to execute people, this response would be akin to "Oh, you just wish you could kill anyone. Your argument is invalid."

NOTHING to do with our national security

You think a dangerous man at the helm with skeletons in his closet has no effect on national security?

I don't think these concerns are separable. If it weren't for Trump, we probably would not be at war right now. Russia might be more contained by diplomacy and sanctions. If it weren't for Trump's first term, Iran might have been less threatening right now.

And, in some sense, this doesn't matter, because like you say it's the real world and it's happening regardless of why or whose fault it is. I guess I don't want to sign on, even rhetorically on the internet, to destroying this axis that is effectively being created by vile and stupid men because Trump wanted to end the Epstein news cycle.