The parasites are killing their hosts.

I’m not an anarchist by accident.

Trump might as well have been created from scratch by China for the sole purpose of guaranteeing that they will become the world leader in science and technology, and thus the dominant superpower, while the US fades into obscurity.

He couldn’t have done a better job of it.

Very simple dynamic at work here - behavior that you want repeated is rewarded.

It’s only punished if you don’t want it repeated.

Mm… yes. You might well be right. I can see a number of otherwise inexplicable things that point that way.

That said, while they’ll undoubtedly capture a significant amount of the market, I don’t see any way they can monopolize it - computing technology is simply too common and even mundane.

Still though…

I think it’s pretty obvious at this point that a lot of the backdrop for the AI arms race is a competition to see who can succeed in paywalling the internet as a whole.

Machine learning is more in the nature of a side business. The primary goal of scraping the entire internet is to then strangle the original sites by denying them traffic, so that the data the corporations have stored away in their centers is all that’s left, and anyone who wants to access it will have to pay them.

It’s essentially rent-seeking on the largest and thus most brazenly evil, scale the world has seen yet.

And made just that much more evil by the fact that it’s all based on content that they’ve stolen from us in the first place.

This is the sort of thing you get when you elect an insane moron with the emotional maturity and attention span of a toddler.

This should be his “Let them eat cake” - the quote that goes down in history to neatly illustrate what a loathsome piece of self-absorbed shit he really is.

The national equivalent of starting smoking.

And here we are, 50 years later, and the US is on its deathbed, riddled with cancer.

And as it lays dying, its most greedy and loathsome children are ransacking the house, stealing everything they can get their grubby little paws on.

It’s cynically amusingly ironically pretty much exactly the old cliche about the advent of the automobile putting buggy whip manufacturers out of business.

We’re exactly at that point, and official US policy, under Trump, is to discourage automobiles and subsidize buggy whips. And even a moderately bright child can see how that’s going to work out.

But children have the advantage of not being blinkered by a lifetime of compromises, betrayals, excuses and lies in pursuit of wealth and power.

You say that as if one precludes the other.

Just your daily reminder that the President of the United States is a deranged lunatic.

So what is it the men are supposed to understand? That they should only discuss disenfranchising women out of your earshot?

This is another of those moments when we really need a politician with a spine to stand up and clearly tell Trump to go fuck himself.

Preferably in those exact words.

I can’t even imagine what it must be like to be that frightened and insecure.

The Toddler-in-chief hoping that daddy Putin will pat him on the head and tell him what a good boy he is.