Americans are such unserious people.

Yet they take themselves so seriously…

Nearly 70% of eligible Americans didn't think that Trump was a enough of a problem to vote against him in 2024.

This betrays a complete lack of civic seriousness, and a childlike belief of invulnerability to consequences.

Oh so Trump just came out of nowhere I guess

Of course not. But Trump has never been overwhelmingly popular, either. If Trump == Americans, that means more than half of US citizens aren't Americans.

That's a good point, but tech oligarch money is one of the most important ways Trump overcomes the fact he's not overwhelmingly popular. That's also one of the reasons why tech is no longer seen as optimistic and a force for progress.

Elon is setting aside a stash for the next election. Because money is speech, right?

But it is currently a strong mitigating factor. The law is full of oopsie defenses.

The US military seems like an organization where there is very little accountability given all the people they kill in training accidents, the number of procurement mishaps they have, or their continuous inability to pass an audit.

So I imagine that if the military is the guidance for how we handle this in the future, there will be paperwork, shrugs, and perhaps some performative rage when an agent commits a crime.

Responsible and accountable can be very different things. For example, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_assignment_matr...

It is well past the point where writing off bad behaviour as probably a joke is a reasonable thing to do with Trump as he as consistently not been joking about many things people have claimed he is joking about.

AI makes certain types of people, like those who need to be trained, obsolete.

I would counter this by saying we might all be better off if consumer protection laws were stronger and actively enforced against this.

I don't really have a problem with offering discounts to members of X program, or if insurance is pre-selected.

But the advertised price should be inclusive of everything (taxes, fees, charges, etc) and the price available to the general product before membership-exclusive pricing.

So if you advertise a product for $100 then any normal person can pay $100 and get it for that.

Want to sell it from cheaper to members of your reward program? Go ahead. But it can't be the most prominent price advertised for it.

You want to sell insurance pre-selected? No problem but again the default advertised price needs to include it. Even if they can opt out for a cheaper price.

There are sure to be edge cases. But the point being is that the price you advertise most prominently needs to be the all-inclusive price any member of the public can get without having to fight to select the correct option.

We don't accept misleading and deceptive practices in other areas, why do we let airlines, hotels and hire car places do it?

"We don't accept misleading and deceptive practices in other areas"

Religion and politics.

I just want to see a price and book a flight, not engage in an online escape room with financial consequences.

Better off by being exhausted on never trusting any purchasing process? No, thank you, I don't need nor want to be curious when I just want to purchase a flight ticket.

Totally disagree. The cost of every single customer doing this for many different purchases is immense, and a completely unproductive use of time. It would be much better if pricing was as clear as possible so people can make make good purchasing decisions and move onto thinking about things that are actually interesting or useful.

Why, you think you're German and Ryanair is Lufthansa?

Yes, let's pit ordinary people against gigantic companies with teams of highly paid experts who spend all day figuring out how to deceive them.

That’s the value of tailwind. You can just skip learning CSS and still get a good result. The benefit to learning it is marginal.

> You can just skip learning CSS

It works until doesn't, and you'll have to figure out what's going on with your code.

BigTech is far more competent than a Telco though.

having worked and consulted at both... debatable.

level competency is higher at BigTech but laziness, vanity, selfishness, ego, and learned-helplessness happens plenty too.

e.g. for all of the BigTech brilliance plenty of them fall for mildly complex phishing efforts or bribes, etc.

Most breaches are not in the interests of management, but they happen anyway as management wants to save money or doesn't understand how it could happen.

> And obviously, a simple email to the data governance and privacy office would be taken extremely seriously.

What is this based on? I used to work for a data governance and privacy vendor that supplied data for audits. Tons and tons of customers asked us to fudge their data.

This is after the Delve scandal, where the hottest tech compliance company was completely fraudulent and numerous other hot tech companies also had completely fraudulent audits.

This is not a reasonable assumption.