You're missing that the difference is incentives, specifically perverse incentives being scaled up. If we were talking about an individual hacker who programmed their car for automated driving and it made the above wrong decision, people would straightforwardly attribute fault to the individual. The problem here is that large corpos, who will eagerly tout their perogative to do whatever they want as long as it's within the law, going beyond even that and breaking the law with impunity.

We can easily imagine a crash from such a thing being declared "no fault" (or even the fault of the turning driver!) based on corpo-sympathetic police, judiciary, and regulators who have succumbed to the inevitable "computer can't be wrong". That perceived lack of justice is the problem - when another individual does something wrong (either accidentally or willful) and gets away with it, we can brush it off as their bad behavior will eventually catch up to them. Whereas with corpos it has been thoroughly demonstrated that this will not happen.

It's amazing how some people can read Tolkien's works and come away with an idea that it would be a good thing to create new powerful artifacts that will inevitably fall under the control of evil. Perhaps because their minds have already been corrupted by the One Ring.

I suppose it's just the Don't make the Torment Nexus effect with a different motif.

You're really bashing a straw man of "the sensibles rightfully in charge of the plebs" to argue in support of a system that will be overtly in charge of the plebs without even nominal democratic accountability? Talk about mental gymnastics.

Where else is there to go?

It's not like bonds/currencies, metals/commodities, or real estate have intrinsic value that make them productive assets in an economic depression.

And big picture, if you look at Trumpism as a gloves-off corpo attack on the Constitutional US government, then equities look like a safe haven regardless of their diminished growth prospects - especially as Trump is itching to get his grubby hands onto the controls of the money printing press (the next big step of neutering the power of USG over corpos).

It feels like we're facing a pan-asset "inflation" type effect as an outcome of the everything bubble, where every non-financial thing is about to get a lot more expensive and the goal is hedging to preserve the paper "wealth" you have accumulated.

(having written that last part out, it would follow that labor is about to get more bargaining power in comparison. which is so decidedly against the apparent trend that I'm back to scratching my head)

I'd guess to make sure we know his reasoning - as it all makes sense in his own head, from his perspective the problem must just be that the People don't understand.

The same effect as why a certain type of criminal will readily confess everything, thinking the police will empathize with them and accept their need to have done it.

I agree with that explanation much of the time, but here it would seem to require a level of self-awareness that just isn't there. And it's not like his handlers would expect much market movement from having him dementedly ramble on TV.

Banks will readily send you a completely separate computer just to perform payment transactions with. It's very thin, and you can even get a phone case that holds it as well. There's really little reason to bundle all that functionality up into one device, especially if a consequence is that doing so requires you to run surveillance industry malware.

Someone can be forgiven for thinking that "unlocked" means "not locked" rather than "locked but with only one lock".

I only buy used devices from online marketplaces/vendors with free returns, as it keeps the incentives aligned such that sellers don't want to hide defects (as it just increases their return rate).

> It's possible that they unconsciously believe war is something they bring to others, never something others bring to them

Spot on. As an American who is quite critical of the imperialist dynamic, I still catch myself thinking this way. Like "what if Iran actually attacks something around me?" But it's war, shouldn't one expect that an enemy might attack at any point?! Except, we just don't think of war as something that might have direct repercussions for us personally, which is why most of us vote for chucklefuck leaders who start them so readily.

This is interesting. Even though its many years ago most of Europe have a big open wound from WWII. That might be a missing ingredient for the american people to be less trigger happy when it comes to bombing other countries. The act of bombing a school full of children would have turned everything on its head in my country.

Your "big open wound" is my country's stepping into what was still mostly an elective war, saving the day, coming out as the head of a global economic empire, and being lauded for all of it - including well after the war itself for being the alternative to the more direct-subjugation-based empire of the USSR.

I'm not saying this to brag or something, but to drive home how radically different the perspectives are. Even our stories that are fundamentally tragedies (eg Saving Private Ryan) are still tales of distant heroic sacrifice, rather than the nihilistic smothering of helpless humans that war actually is. And to that above-it-all entitlement, we've mixed a cocktail of religious fundamentalism to help with the rationalization.

Vietnam was seemingly the only time since that there has been serious society-wide anti-war sentiment, and that's because people were being forcibly conscripted against their individual will. They fixed that by (effectively) removing the draft, while the economic treadmill was turned up such that more people "volunteered".

> The big mistake was underestimating the appetite for rebellion

I'd frame it as the biggest mistake was underestimating the work required to facilitate a successful rebellion - you have to be ready to go to support the people rebelling. Form support networks ahead of time, airdrop supplies, supplement with small but crucial boots on the ground, etc - all things the domain experts of the "deep state" would classically do [0] before it got smashed under the banner of doggie, anti-woke, juche, or whatever the rallying cry is this month. These chuds thought success and praise would just automatically occur by virtue of them having some innate special quality, like every one of their "plans".

[0] note that I'm having to suppress a bit of a gag here writing sympathetically about the military-industrial complex that foments regime change in other countries. but if we're being honest about what it took to pull off the American-exceptionalist thing we've become accustomed to, this is what it took.