Yeah. I used to work with some guys from eastern Europe who would practically punch you if you heard their accent and referred to them or guessed that they were “Russian.”

Hope you’ll gonna get out of this looming autocracy soon. The world still needs you! 😁

Yeah, me too. Me too. I am reading this which is supposed to be a pretty solid guidebook, and I may try to change my job so I can be aligned a little bit more with resisting and then recovering to something good. I fucking hope this all goes okay man, so far it is not for anybody.

Jesus. That is a hell of a lot. That would be equivalent to spending $300 billion on American election interference, or about 10 Manhattan projects in modern dollar terms.

I am also disgusted with my country that these much smaller “not professional” countries are resisting Russian propaganda somewhat-effectively, where the US faced with proportionally a much smaller amount of it is not just slurping it up but rolling around in it blowing bubbles begging “give me more daddy pls.”

Putin really changed the whole massive arc of the fuckin’ world and its history with what he’s been doing to the US in the last 10 years or so.

Also, that was after Moldova made two pro-Russian parties illegal.

I do kind of get why they did it, and I claim absolutely no qualification to say whether it was a good thing or bad thing, but one of the most poisonous aspect of Russia’s way of doing election interference is that it’s not limited to election outcomes: It actually changes the for-real will of the electorate. Elections are only one piece of the public making their voice heard. If a big chunk of your public is getting hoodwinked by Russia on a regular basis, that’s going to fuck you up all to hell, regardless of what happens or doesn’t happen in the election.

Haha yep. The whole family was involved. I don’t even think it’s necessarily a bad thing, it’s definitely not comfortable but as long as you don’t have bad intent, it’s probably better that everyone has some kind of tabs on what’s going on, and you have to face up to justifying to them why and how you’re hanging out with their daughter.

The zeitgeist is changing a lot. Trump took a lot of things that were under the surface being done by people more clever and deceptive, and made them out in the open in an undeniable fashion that’s leading previously comfortable people to realize how fucked up they are and think maybe they’re really not on board with it.

There are motherfuckers out there now with NO idea what it was like potentially having to talk with a girl’s parents first, any time you wanted to call her

True that. They’re not fully mutually exclusive though. I’m just saying that I think he’s doing it more for the attention than because he’s decided this is the best way to promote Naziism. The Naziism he decides to openly promote is usually more disguised than this, I think most of even his audience would be more likely to be turned off by this (if they took it seriously) than taken in by it.

“Sir, the problem with your air conditioner is liberals.”

“Liberals?”

“See they put this coolant in that will make your daughter gay, we used to have good coolant in this country but I just don’t understand how people in this country don’t GIVE A FUCK and I said Charlie Kirk stood up and said what was right, and what happened to him? WHAT HAPPENED TO HIM? Where’s your daughter, I need to talk with her.”

Particularly where security and due diligence are concerned in un-sexy parts of the operation. Crichton actually described very accurately how the structure of the bullshit-and-real-tech combination works in a startup environment, and how it can lead to truly spectacular problems when the two intersect.

Seriously.

“So you’re threatening to throw us and our allies into prison, taking over the media and financial systems of the country in an unprecedented bloodless coup, and you have the nation’s law enforcement roaming the land turned against the residents and in some cases the citizens, throwing them into several varieties of extra-judicial hellholes without even a pretense of due process, and now you’re convening the nation’s military leaders for God knows what reason but the most obvious would be loyalty oaths and discussions about turning the federal military against the people of the country.”

“I tell you boy, that is IT! I will not help you fund this endeavor anymore unless you write down for me what the deal is. No more Mr. Nice Guy.”

I guarantee you Alex Jones did not go to Epstein island. That was for presidents and billionaires. They would have laughed at him and told him to get back to his trailer park and get some craigslist hookers or something.

Office furniture and vacuum repair

He’s just trolling, he needs to sustain attention which translates to income, now that it’s waning and he looks like a loser. What else is he supposed to do – get an HVAC license? Work at an Apple store? His options are limited.

Shoutout to when John Oliver jumped the gun on Mickey’s copyright expiring, by doing a horrendously illegal and offensive unauthorized Mickey Mouse and then daring Disney to sue them.

“Because fuck him, that’s why”

This might actually be something we can effect from grassroots. If we can build our local community, start group chats with our neighbors, host Block meetings, etc., we can spontaneously choose representatives to go to our city council meetings and voice our concerns.

I think this is pretty much the answer regardless. If the people are educated and organized and they fight, then over time it’ll come better and better. If the people are not organized, then the best “system” in the world isn’t going to do a damn thing to prevent the end.

Makes sense. Yeah, a lot of things sound great until you put them into practice and then there are 50 different problems with it that were not present in the original purely in the mind genius version.

That’s why I used the specific phrasing “had it downloaded to their computer” instead of claiming that they were the ones to do it. You’ll notice that those users in your footprint also fall into a category of people which this won’t do a damn thing to influence.

Ding ding ding

Maybe so. But Chrome got there some way, their computer didn’t come with it. 100% of the computers in that sample came with Edge configured as the browser and nothing else installed, and 81.95% of them are currently accessing the internet using something else. That to me indicates some kind of decisive action to use something else, on somebody’s part, and also that Microsoft’s years-long endeavor to correct the “problem” by just continuing to ask like a drunk man at the bar in the hopes that the answer will change is not a winner for most people who use computers at this point.

Probably it’s only as low as 81.95% because they do stuff like this. Obviously those people do still exist in a big contingent. My feeling is though that it’s no longer 1998 and there’s no longer this supermajority of AOL users out there who are confused by the very concept of a browser. Those people are in old folks’ homes now, their kids who grew up programming are the middle-aged people of today who aren’t hip to apps and TikTok, but they do understand about browsers. That’s just my feeling and a narrative I produced out of my ass, sure, but it does seem to match the data.

Citation: It is known

How many of them? How do you know?

“Many. It is known.”

I also like how you put “users” in quotes for some reason. Anyway, good talk.