In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.

-Herman Melville

Regrettably this is sold as "The government steals your money to buy immigrants puppies" vs "Your freedom to choose which self-regulating corporation's food you buy--free market in action!"

And more regrettably people believe it against all evidence.

Directly so

America didn't get this way without help.

Rupert Murdoch is Australian.

Elon Musk is South African.

Sundar Pichai is from India.

Donald trump is a Russian asset.

AIPAC shovels millions to politicians throughout the country.

Anyone can come to America and become an American. This has been the case for decades and it's more true than for any other country. A bunch of sociopaths who got rich came here from all over. They've been poisoning the wells of public discourse in ways that are not unique to America.

Brexit happened. Marine LePen nearly won in France. The AfD is still a rising power in Germany. Alberta's secessionist movement has ties outside of Canada, but the people in the movement are home grown Canadians. Erdogan in Turkey, Modi in India, Abelardo Esperilla in Colombia... The list goes on.

There is a surge of cancerous right wing ideologies infecting our whole world with no exceptions. Technology has brought us together and exposed us all to the worst people any of our societies can create.

If we can't save each other, we can't save ourselves.

Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.

"From each according to their means to each according to their greed."

-Marx Twain probably

"LOL, what are you going to do, fine me?"

-Tech CEO who got fined four seconds of profit

I see this as a good move by Meta. None of the other tech companies are competing in the meat grinding sector. Though all of them have other ways of harming children, nobody has been bold enough to build grinders. I'm sure we'll see X basically copy this in no time.

They probably have more cash money than a lot of banks who haven't fully marked the value of their assets to market value since about 2008. I don't actually have a list of who's who, but creative accounting has been an open secret for some time and will likely become fashionable again either this year or next. Unless someone wants a banking crash or (more likely) is just too stupid to hire anyone that can stop one.

The years have seemed short but the days go slowly by Two loose kites falling from the sky Drawn to the ground and an end to flight

-The Shins - "Pink Bullets"

They're an attack on US domestic legal order too since the president doesn't have the power to create taxes and the current supreme court already ruled against tariffs imposed previously by this president. The current US Congress is among the most useless in the country's history at a time when the president is also the worst.

I had an opportunity to converse with one of the people whose work resulted in those body scanners they use in the airport. He brought this up casually as a kind of boast, like he genuinely believed the product of his work was amazing and essential. He thought I was being an asshole for being unimpressed and that being unimpressed was a personal slight. He had no concept of the down sides of such technology, or the actualized potential for abuse, or the reality that the amount of abuse vastly outnumbers the successful intended uses.

Maybe that kind of work takes a certain mindset, like how it's easier to get rich as a sociopath?

Ignoring the horror of this one case for a moment...

They also spied on every other presumably innocent person in Texas to track down this one person.

Then the officers and their IT service vendors had access to all the data. Can we confidently assert nobody abused that access as has been done in the past?

No crime justifies this much surveillance, especially not when the people responsible for watching everyone are some of the worst criminals.

As awful as Rimworld can be, there's also some amazing tech that would be great to have. Sure 99% of the planet is some combination of nuclear wasteland, cannibals, Eldritch terrors, ravenous marauding insect swarms and capricious machine god puppets, but my colony is a paradise bastion where each colonist is perfected, given only the taks that fulfill them most, and catered to every need and desire in utmost luxury. Except body purists, but fuck those guys some people simply refuse to be happy.

My favorite book Gone Away World by Nick Harkaway features a fresh take on apocalypse/post apocalypse, with ninjas. His other works are worthwhile too.

Sounds like body purist propaganda. Of course all those inferior flesh bits will get removed and replaced with superior bionics. Kidnappers? Tax collectors? If you meet a stranger on the road, they're probably just going to eat you and you should shoot first just in case.

In my colony, it would never come to that. The medical trainee on duty would amputate and fix you up with a badass bionic spine, kidney and arm the minute the paper cut occurred and probably implant you with some custom genetics while you're under. But if it did get that far, possibly due to a surgical mishap, we always keep the medicine cabinet stocked with resurrection nanites just in case. As for the Labradors, what's left of them after the minefield and auto guns, every citizen over the age of 13 is armed at all times with their preferred weapon type and a suit of power armor, so you and your neighbors and the security robots and your faithful alpha thrumbo will certainly be able to handle it.

They should make the extradition of trump and his family a condition to resume negotiations. USA will have to cave eventually.