One thing that made Microsoft successful was a strategy called embrace, extend and extinguish ("EEE"). This is what they tried to do to Java back when it was believed that Java was a threat to Microsoft's platform monopoly since the Java mantra was "write once, run anywhere". Microsoft added all these proprietary extensions after licensing Java.

Well, Microsoft basically did the same thing to knock Netscape off its throne. It was the whole basis for the antitrust suit. This was aimed at Java too because Java introduced applets. MS added ActiveX controls. MS did succeed at killing Netscape but the antitrust suit (and probably the victory over Java and Netscape) led us to more than a decade of hell with IE6 compatibility as MS basically abandoned their browser.

Google did something in the mid-2000s that nobody thought was possible: they created a browser and got mass adoption without having a platform. People willingly downloaded it. And when it was first released, it was magical. They pioneered one process per tab. At the time, Netscape had faded into Fireforx and it was pretty bad. Your entire browser could hang since it was one thread per tab and it absolutely did hang.

At this time and really through the mid-2010s, Google was a good actor with Chrome (IMHO). Chrome was secure, stable and a pretty open platform. Unfortunately for Google, this became a problem as use of ad blockers became more widespread. Where Chrome once became a posterchild for standards support, other parts of Google weren't so... open. Youtube at this time started playing games when people were using non-Chrome browsers.

Anyone who uses Chrome knows that the anti-ad blocking really stepped up. Changes to what extensions are allowed to do killed uBlock Origin. Google has risked regulatory wrath by special-casing their own user-tracking and ad cookies while blocking other third-party cookies. They also tried to phase out third-party cookies in favor of what sounded like a first-party only tracking (FLoC? I think it was called?).

Another issue is that Google always wanted people to be logged in with search and for the longest time they weren't. Well, people basically opted in to this by using Chrome and using a Google account. I used to really like the Google account syncing with Chrome. A lot of that for me has been replaced by using a password manager.

My point is I once was a huge Chrome fan and now I really want there to be an alternative. I trust Apple with Safari/iOS more than Google with Chrome/Android at this point. YMMV. I find myself using Firefox a lot (again).

Anyway, this whole messing with user tracking and ads I think could be Chrome's downfall and might invite regulatory scrutiny.

So there are three things that are scary about Trump's corruption:

1. It's so brazen and on a scale rarely seen. Apparently he's made $2 billion since coming back into office and he does so openly. Pardons are for sale. Truth Social has a feature to pay to get early access to posts to trade on, basically. There are crypto rug pulls. The list goes on;

2. A third of the population simply doesn't care and will defend it no matter what; and

3. He'll never be held accountable by any future administration. This is the worst part. If this happened in China, he'd go to prison and his assets would be seized. This would extend to his family and their assets. Just look at Hui Ya Kan [1].

The US just does not punish the wealthy. Look at the Sacklers and Purdue. There's clear evidence they hid the fact that Oxycontin was addictive despite their public claims and they have a large amount of responsibility for the opioid crisis. In a just world, they would all die penniless in 6x8 foot grey prison cells. And who went to prison for the 2008 subprime crisis? Oh, that's right. Nobody.

This also extends to the powerful. George W. Bush had an illegal torture program. Who went to prison for it? Only 1 guy: the whistleblower John Kiriakou for talking about it.

The Supreme Court is utterly corrupt. Anthony Kennedy allegedly traded his retirement for a job for his son. John Roberts's wife makes tens of millions in headhunting fees for finding lawyers to argue before teh Supreme Court. Clarence Thomas is just one bribe after another.

The entire government is captured by people who want to get rich by betraying their country to the ultra-wealthy.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-evergrande-founder...

1. Lawmakers literally do not care what you think (study from Princeton) [1];

2. Private utilities are more expensive than public utilities [2]; and

3. Nobody goes to war over a solar panel [3].

All of this is relevant here.

The privatization of utilities has shown to be a massive mistake, in part based on debunked economics (ie the tragedy of the commons). Demand is very inelastic so they have to be highly regulated. The electricity price is set by lawmakers so how do they make profits? By building more infrastructure because that cost can be passed on to consumers.

So if a hyperscalar needs 6GW of power, you need to build massive transmission lines and power plants. That's great for private utility profits. And that's what we're all paying for. The DCs are usually getting subsidized electricity as well as not paying for the extra infrastructure.

So many things would be better if we'd had mass adoption of renewable power but that's bad for the wealthy. You install a solar panel and it just generates electricity every year. It can be built incrementally and quickly. It also tends to utilize land that is of little value otherwise, such as in the Southwest US. But fossil fuels make people wealthy. An oil or natural gas well declines in production over time. That means you have to keep building them. That's more profit.

This whole saga is revealing to a lot of people just how little lawmakers care about the voters. They'll ignore protests and vote anyway. They'll do it in secret. If they get voted out, who cares? They'll magically find their way into jobs for these companies.

[1]: https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba

[2]: https://energyandpolicy.org/utility-profit-report/

[3]: https://www.theenergymix.com/no-one-goes-to-war-over-a-solar...

By all accounts, this was in the wake of the Red Scare and she was reporting on Communist activities by European student groups. At the same time she supported unionization efforts and fair pay for women. This is what I mean by complicated.

But more problematic was this statement [2]:

> While popularly pilloried because of her paymaster, Steinem defended the CIA relationship, saying: “In my experience The Agency was completely different from its image; it was liberal, nonviolent and honorable.”

Anyone who knows the history of the CIA knows it was completely off the rails in the 1950s and directly involved in if not responsible for many coups. Regime change by the US is so common there's a whole Wikipedia page about it [3].

Likewise, Steinem was anti-sex work, calling it "commercial rape" [4]. That's not really surprising for the time and you can't necessarily use the same norms from 2026 in the 1950s to 1980s.

You can appreciate her contributions to, for example, equal pay and advancement of feminism and what became known as women's liberation while acknowledging her complexities. I don't understand this need people have to rewrite history to be black and white and either deify or villify people when they die.

[1]: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP88-01315R0003003...

[2]: https://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/blog/feminist-was-spy

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

[4]: https://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/prosti...

There are an awful lot of people who don't hate opression. They simply hate being oppressed. And those are two very different things.

This claim probably upsets a bunch of people who don't want to think of themselves as right wing. They'll point to rainbow flags in their bios at the same time they're the most NIMBY people in the Bay Area and they basically want homeless people to just die.

This is probably the one valid thing they did. He's truly vile [1]. He's also illustrative of how most undocumented people aren't "sneaking across the border" as the media claims but are simply visa overstayers. Still, Laura Loomer shouldn't have the power to advance his deportation. The story goes that he was in removal proceedings and he didn't show up for his hearing before an immigration judge so was ordered deported in absentia and then ICE picked him up.

Milo Yiannopoulos is just not a hill I'm ever willing to die on.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/30/milo-yiannop...

We know what works in education. It's phonics and direct insturction, basically. But nobody gets rich that way so you end up buying into a worse system through two steps:

1. Education PhDs need to justify their existence. They do by reineventing what works. This is basically how we came up with sight words to replace phonics, which is largely responsible for destroying literacy. Whoever comes up with these schemes gets to get academic cachet for being a thought leader. They get invited to all the cool conferences and parties; and

2. Rent-seeking edtech companies end up creating solutions for things that aren't really problems. This long predated AI. It suffers from all the normal issues of corruption in government procurement. Politicians and superintendents are enticed ("bribed") to buy solutions that teachers are then mandated to use, forcing students onto devices to work a program with dubious results.

You see this pattern play out in a ton of government R&D. For example, SMR reactors in nuclear power. There's no world that SMR makes sense. Nuclear plants benefit from scale. But behind all this you'll find a bunch of physics academics who pushed this idea to get status, some of whom then get hired by SMR startups and others get involved in government procurement. Everybody is grfiting.

So while I welcome schools not using AI early on, that's barelly scratching the surface. And that begins with teaching literacy and holding students back until they can read sufficiently for their grade level.

There is an insatiable appetite for increasing profits. Eventually that means raising prices and/or cutting costs and the most significant cost is labor.

Game studios can only sruvive and keep excelling as long as they can maintain their culture and key talent and avoid getting finance people and accountants in charge. This is one reason why acquisitions usually mark the beginning of the end.

We're coming up on the much-ancitipcated release of GTA6. People might say that Rockstar has thus far avoided this rot but I kinda disagree. What made GTA magic for me was the social commentary and satire. I personally thought GTA5 lost its soul. Every previous GTA game I'd replay just to have fun, even if it's to do dumb stuff like causing mass pileups and explosions on the freeway in GTA:SA. I can honestly say that I never once played GTA5 again after finishing the main story and I also almost quit before I did. I have zero interest in the online crap but it's a huge cash cow for Rockstar.

So I imagine GTA6 is going to be visually stunning and I'm sure many will enjoy the new era of online gameply but I am fearful it will be even more soulless.

So, back to your point, I think the real problem is that the game devs need to own the studio. That's the only sustainable model. One could even call that the workers owning the means of production.

1. Running an agent like OpenClaude. The $599 Mac Mini was an insanely good deal for this. I happened to buy a M5 Pro Mac Mini for $999 last year for other reasons. The equivalent is now almost $2000; and

2. Hardware for running inference on local models. This to me is the far more interesting market because Apple has a real opportunity to disrupt NVidia's stranglehold on the market.

With current architecture, the largest model you can reasonbly run is the amount of memory on the GPU and is a function of the quantization (eg int4, int8, fp8, fp16, etc) available and the number of parameters. NVidia aggressively segments the market. The most VRAM on a "consumer" card is 32GB on the 5090, which allows you to run ~31B parameter models.

In comparison, the RTX 6000 Pro has only slightly more CUDA units than a 5090 but has 80GB of VRAM. A few months ago they were $10-11k. Now they're ~$16k.

Macs use a shared memory architecture. Apple has previously sold Mac Studios with up to 512GB of RAM. Almost all of that memory can be used to hold much larger models without taking a penalty for interconnections between different GPUs or machines. Plus Apple interconnects between computers are actually relatively good by chaining TB5. It's still slow but it's about the best non-enterprise option available.

But the previous Mac Studios just didn't have the raw FLOPS and memory bandwidth. The M5 Ultras are up to 1.2TB/s of memory bandwidth. M3 Ultra had ~900GB/s. RTX 5090s and RTX 6000 Pros are 1.8TB/s. The current best HBM3 NVidia DC GPUs are at 3.2TB/s IIRC. But the M5 Ultra has a claimed ~4.5x the FLOPS of the M3 Ultra.

We don't have our hands on these yet but it probably means they are going to be much closer to a 5090. I expect ~50% of a 5090's inference speed. That may sound bad but it's actually really good because a 256/512GB Mac Studio can probably locally run the best Flash models. With NVidia hardware you'll need to spend many tens of thousands for that.

We'll see what the inference speed is but I expect it to be usable. DeepSeek v4 Flash, for example, will be entirely runnable. We're not at DeepSeek v4 Pro local yet.

Fisheries is another of those and we have several data points to show the EU policies have generally been corrupt and a disaster for fisheries management.

1. The UK. As many know, the EU didn't start at the EU. It went through several predecessor organizations post-WW2 including the Common Market, the EEC and the EC. Those really began in the 1950s and the UK at that time declined to join and thus wasn't a founding member. At that point, fisheries weren't a common resource.

The UK began accession talks in 1970 (along with Denmark, Ireland and Norway). Hours before that the EEC changed its rules to make fisheries have common access to member states.

The UK has not always been the best custodian of the fisheries. They were historically overfished. But what's also clear is that the EU has been just as bad. There's a complex system on top of all of this about allowed fishing fleet sizes (by tonnage) and catch quotas. Over the years there have been many stories about how these quotas were increased through opaque (some would say backroom or even corrupt) deals. It hasn't worked;

2. Norway. Fisheries have always been a real sticking point for Norway and they're not open access. Norway didn't join the EU (or the EEC at the time) but instead they carved out an intermediate organization. The EEA I think? Here's a Venn diagram [1];

3. The UK (again). Continued access to fisheries by EU member states was a real sticking point and a major issue in the withdrawal agreement. It was also probably a factor in the Leave vote in fishing towns in the UK affected by all this. I believe the EU negotiated 6+ years of continued access.

That was meant to end this year but a 12 year extension was negotiated taking that to 2038. Think about that: why does this relatively tiny industry command such importance in the EU?

Iceland seemingly has been a relatively good steward for their fisheries. Were they to negotiate joining the EU, I think, much like Norway, it'll become a dealbreaker for both sides. And unlike the 1970s, I don't see the EU expanding the EEA or EFTA ro accomodate Iceland. It's a different time and Iceland just doesn't have Norway's negotiating position. Plus the political climate is different. Norway was NATO's bulwark against the USSR in the Cold War.

If I were an Icelander, I'd oppose any common access to fisheries, even if it meant being unable to join the EU.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1qbq43v/european_in...

Anyone setting up infrastructure has to consider, in the very least, how this will be used for CSAM in particular but sure, I guess terrorism too. Years ago we had The Office make a joke about this where the company website for selling paper was overtaken by child predators.

This is one reason why we have centralized infrastructure and not federated infrastructure. All the platforms we have have the capability to report content, automatically scan pictures, images and text and to respond to law enforcement. You need all of those processes.

The most important thing to note is this for immigrant visas ie green cards. As yet, nonimmigrant visas such as visitor, student and employment visas are unaffected. That may change. It's also unclear if K1 (fiance) visas are affected because they're technically nonimmigrant but they'll probably be treated as immigrant visas.

This has the most effect on family-based green cards. The most common type is a marriage-based green card but there are also green cards for parents, children and even siblings of primarily US citizens but also lawful permanent residents ("LPRs").

When a US citizen or LPR marries a non-resident and they wish to live in the US, you broadly have three routes to make this happen:

1. If they're within the US, you can do an adjustment of status ("AoS"). This is where you file an I130 and an I485. Generally you do this concurrently. If you're an LPR and not a citzen then you might not because you may need to wait for a visa to become available. There can be other reasons depending on the foreign spouse's immigration history, whether they're in removal proceedings and what other immigration benefits they've applied for;

The I130 is filed by the sponsor (ie the citizen or LPR) and it basically shows that you both are free to marry and the marriage is legal. If neither of you have been married before, this is relatively straightforward. It can be difficult otherwise but an I130 is generally considered routine;

The I485 is filed by the immigrant to adjust status. It can be based on an approved I130 or filed concurrently (within the US only). This is where USCIS will determine if they believe the marriage is bona fide, meaning there's no fraud taking place. This includes the submission of marriage evidence (eg joint bank accounts, bills in both of your names, a lease or deed in both of your names, photos, proof of the relationship and so on). USCIS makes a holistic determination based on the totality of your case and prior immigration history. For various reasons, you may have a bar on adjusting and may need a waiver;

2. If the foreign spouse is outside the US, you will generally need to do what's called consular processing. You file the I130 as per normal and once it's approved you apply with the consulate. Depending on the country it may take over a year to get an appointment and the embassy and/or USCIS may end up sitting on the case. This whole process can take years. If granted, you are granted a visa to enter the US. Upon entry, you get a green card; or

3. The so-called fiance visa (K1). In this case you are unamrried and the foreign fiance is outside the US. It's similar to consular processing. If granted, you get a visa stamp and can enter the US. You need to marry within 90 days of entry and then you apply for adjustment of status within the US.

So, what has this administration done to block legal immigration? A ton, actually:

1. They've placed various bans on the issuance of visas to citizens of certain countries. There are 3 such bans in place now and they're called the 19, 39 and 75 country bans. I honestly forget which is which. What happens in consular processing and fiance visa cases is that you go through all the above steps including a consular interview and then... nothing. The consulate is forbidden from issuing you a visa by executive order.

Although it's never been estated, the administration tends to take a broad view of citizenship. For example, if you were born in Afghanistan and your family moved to Canada when you were 1 month old and you've never been there in your life, this administration treats you as an Afghan for the purposes of the bar.

2. The administration implemented a rule whereby you have to consular process in the country of your birth regardless of where you live. There's really no reason for this rule other than to make it harder for people from "shithole" countries to get visas because certain countries have incredibly long wait times for consulate interviews. And if your country of birth has no consulate, they'll assign you to another one and that may not be convenient or even possible (ie you may not be able to enter that country);

3. The administration released a policy memo that stated that adjustment within the US was an "extraordinary" rememdy and that most cases should consular process. They like consular processing because AoS can be challenged in federal court whereas the Supreme Court has ruled that the president has broad powers to limit immigration so consular decisions generally can be reviewed by any court. So the various bans will likely stop issuance of visas to citizens of those countries outside of the US until, at a minimum, Trump leaves office;

4. They're introducing a new rule that's typically called "public charge". This is a new standard whereby USCIS should reject visa applications from people who have been or they consider will be a "public charge", meaning rely on public benefits. You can guess the skew in what countries this does and doesn't apply to;

5. When you adjust within the US, you can optionally apply for an employment authorization document ("EAD") ie a work card. In earlier times, this would arrive within 2-3 months and allow a person to work legally while their I485 case is being processed. It seems like since January 21, 2025, USCIS has basically stopped issuing EADs to make life difficult for immigrants in most cases;

6. To adjust within the US, you need to be inspected at the border. People without this (eg they sneak across the border) are called entering without inspection ("EWI"). This administration has decided some previous programs under Biden specifically (eg CBP One and TPS) in most cases won't be treated as valid entries. This generally means you need a difficult to get waiver to adjust and if you leave to consular process, you're facing a 3-10 year bar and possibly a permanent bar depending on circumstances;

7. In certain circumstances to adjust within the US you have to maintain valid status the entire time or be in status at the time you apply. This administration is trying to take the view that TPS is not valid status for this purpose. This can be mean you're retroactively out of status and can be placed in rmeoval and/or face a bar if you leave and try and return;

8. Various humanitarian programs to parole in place ("PIP") have been ended, forcing people to leave the country to adjust and then face bans from certain countries, bars for unlawful status and/or inadmissibility;

9. There have been pilot programs, particularly in San Diego, to coordinate removals by ICE when people go an appointment at USCIS for an interview or check-in;

10. Judges in immigration court are not Article III judges like federal judges are. They can be fired by the executive for any rason. This president basically fires judges that approve too many cases;

11. Previously, people in removal proceedings depending on their circumstances could get out on bond. For a lot of people, this has been eliminated;

12. ICE will generally try and get someone out of the jurisdiction after picking them up to avoid getting blocked by a habeas petition in federal court. Often they're moved to jurisdictions with far friendlier judges (eg Louisiana). They can also be moved randomly to make it hard to family or even their attodrneys to find and talk to them;

13. There is a ton of evidennce that USCIS is sitting on cases to delay for really no good reason. For example, they'll approve the I130 and just not make a ruling on an I485. This can force people to pay even more money to go into federal court and get a writ of mandamus;

14. Naturatlization has a requirement for "good moral character". Up until thi sadministration, that's been treated as the lack of bad moral character, such as a conviction for certain aggravated offences. This administration takes the view that an applicant has to instead prove good moral character, which can be letters of support from citizens;

15. Denaturalization has historically been a very rare occurrence. It requires the government to go into federal court and make a case that you committed fraud to become a citizen. Historically this has been a few dozen casea a year at most. Now it's in the hundreds. That's still not a lot but people expect this to ramp up. They're also taking a broader view of grounds for denaturalization. For example, if you committed a disqualifying offence before you naturalized but weren't charged and convicted until after, they isometimes now go after that where they didn't previously;

16. They've implemented so-called third-country deportation. That is, you can be deported to some other country entirely if your home country won't take you or if it's deemed unsafe for you to return to that country. So, you can flee civil war in South Sudan and be deported to El Salvador now. Historically, we didn't do this;

17. This week they announced they were going to revoke the B1/B2 visas for asylum seekers issued in the last 10 years. For anyone who doesn't know, visitor visas typically allow you to enter the US for up to 6 months. It's up the officer at the port of entry and they just make it up, basically.

People who seek asylum are generally forgiven for however they get into the country as long as they entered with inspection. There is a huge backlog in immigration cases from the mid 2010s that are still pending.

Now those visas have long expired so what's the point? I have a theory. When you apply for a temporary visa, you're asked what it's for. So for a visit visa, it might be to go to the World Cup. At any point later on if they find you didn't do what you said you were going to do, they can view that as misrepresentation (ie immigration fraud). This is particularly the case for people who get a visit visa, come to the US and get married within a short window of time.

A finding a misrepresetation can make you permanently inadmissible and that makes you ineligible to adjust.

So what's the point of expiring old visas? I believe they're going to say certain asylum seekers committed immigration fraud to get into the country and they'll find them inadmissible and use that as an excuse to deport them, something we never previously did;

Or, that evocation will potentially break your chain of maintaining status retroactively, making you ineligible to adjust in other circumstances; and

18. The latest: immigrant visas are being paused in consular processing cases, ostensibly for "retraining" in public charge scenarios.

This is specifically a pause on immigrant visas. That is, green cards. So this is for family-based green cards and investor green cards through consular processing (ie when out of the country).

As yet, work visas and other nonimmigrant visas are unaffected.

The way any large company works, and this includes all the big tech companies, is that they end up in a state of constant churn. Every 6 months or so there's a reorganization. There'san old joke that you get an email that your manager's manager's manager's manager now reports to a new manager and you've never heard of any of these people.

The point of that churn is to make sure nobody is ever held responsible for something not working. It's never given enough time. That's by design. Middle (and even senior) management is about empire-building.

Another quote that springs to mind is that the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy. That's how I feel about management bloat.

Anyone who has paid attention to Intel's downfall in the last decade will have heard stories about how the company descended into fiefdoms and it became impossible to get anything done. That's what happens.

Most people in these organizations aren't particularly talented at anything other than forming social relationships. the leadership of these companies always end up having an adversarial relationship with their workers and try to suppress their wages to increase profits so they can get their stock options and bonuses and the CEOs all sit on each other's boards of directors setting each other's compensation packages. It's a lootocracy.

The point of all this is that the leadership will never decide that they are the problem. Take Meta's Metaverse. It was a $70 billion flop. A lot of people got laid off from that. Were any of those worker bees responsible? Nope. They didn't choose the strategy or probably even what they worked on. It takes a lot for heads to roll within senior leadership and with the vote-stacked share structures of many major tech companies, ousting a CEO is essentially impossible.

1. Certain government contracts are what are called "cost plus" contracts. These have the same flaw. If the contractor earns 20% above "costs", they're incentivized for a cost blowout. Same with insurance premiums. If you have $100B in premiums, then $20B doesn't have to be spent on healthcare. But if premiums were $1T, then that same ratio is $200B. It incentivizes insurers to raise premiums; and

2. Health insurers cheat on the ratio by moving profits elsewhere. For example, UHC has a pharamaceutical benefits manager ("PBM"). Sounds inocuous but it's evil. PBMs bulk negotiate with drug suppliers but can basically keep the volume discount as an extra profit. PBMs do much more such as constantly force what medications are covered to force people to ssee providers even and get a prescription for whatever the new medication is even if they're stable on current medications. The whole point is to make people give up (or die).

But health insurance companies also own providers like hospitals and medical providers, either directly or through thinlyhh veiled subsidiaries meant to hide profits and that corporations are making healthcare decisions (something certain states have laws against).

The whole thing is a ridiculous system and needs to be scrapped.

[1]: https://www.cms.gov/marketplace/private-health-insurance/med...

Nothing will change the fact that this war has been a complete strategic defeat for the US and its allies. This is the beginning of the end of dismantling the world order created by the US for the benefit of the US after 1945. That's how this will be written about in history books.

As best as I can tell ~40% of Canada's exports to the US are energy, making it the most dominant export sector by far. One estimate I see is ~$160 annual value [1].

By comparison, lumber accounts for ~$6B. That's a rounding error.

Energy is the most significant Canadian export and it's deeply tied to the US (unfortunately).

[1]: https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/ma...

Also, I explicitly said "energy". That includes electricity (you can't export that anywhere else really) and natural gas (almost all of which is used domestically or exported to the US).

The US has done more to destroy the system it designed and benefits from in the last 1.5 years than at any time since 1945.

What this entire fiasco is about is China. China is the new superpower. It threatens the American global hegemony because it can't be bullied. Why is China the new Big Bad? To sell weapons. Pretty much the entire of American foreign policy is about selling weapons.

So Liberation Day was a ham-fisted way to try and isolate and bring to heel China. It has failed spectacularly because the dumbest sychophants imaginable are in charge of this administration. Because while doing all this, we're witnessing a lootocracy on the largest scale ever seen. When Trump took office in 2017, the national debt was ~$16T and it had taken ~200 years to get there. It just got over $40T. That's like $2T in interest payments every year just to service the debt.

Long ter bond yields keep going higher. That's going to be a really big problem, particularly because there's a political desire to lower interest rates. That's ismply not going to happen and record-high inflation is going to continue, if not get worse, all while real wages stagnate or decline.

So the US can't economically compete with China. Well, it can't militarily compete either. The US has been deceisively been totally defeated by Iran, an absolutely pointless war of choice. And they think they can bully China? Get the hell out of there. Part of the problem is the (now) $1t+ in annual military budget is just more looting from government coffers.

Empires don't die slowly or quietly. That's really what's happening here. The seeds of destruction for the Gulf security architecture have been sown. While Europe is still an American vassal state, realization is growing that the status quo cannot continue. Unfortunately I suspect a fascist takeover will happen long before Europe divests itself from the US protection racket.

I believe that the late 2020s will be written about in history books as the beginning of the end of American empire.