Over-estimating is just as dangerous. People – and our governments – keep getting surprised by this pattern of behaviour because we pig-headedly refuse to admit the truth.

In order for our countries to plan economic matters, and defense and intelligence and more – we need to expect the same patterns of stupidity and irrationality as we’ve seen demonstrated time and time again. This doesn’t mean all the actions will be stupid – folks like Putin other intelligent evildoers are in the mix of those who are manipulating the president. But they have shown a lack of ability to fully control the irrational behaviour from surfacing in policy whims.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me thousands of times… c’mon at some point we have to learn.

We’ve all been conditioned to not accuse our political opponents of being stupid.

For one, it can cause you to underestimate your opponents — you don’t want to be caught unawares of some secret plan.

Second, there’s an aspect of pettiness to just labeling your opponents dumb. Most often people attribute “stupid” to “I don’t understand this”. For example, the idea of it being stupid for poor people in Kentucky or whatever to vote against their interests and aid billionaires and oppose their own healthcare — when it’s not stupid, it’s a misunderstanding of how important identity politics are to these groups.

Third, there’s a pushback to the “Jon Stewart effect”, where we sit back and laugh about how our opponents are dumb and we smugly know we are smarter. This is an excuse to do nothing, and it’s an ugly impulse and we must fight it.

But all this conditioning — and more — has led us to a point where we can’t actually recognize stupid when it’s staring us in the face.

The video doesn’t show evidence of this being a planned out endeavour.

For it to be grift, those people would have had to benefitted from the dip in some way. But that’s not what this shows, it’s just billionaires having their shares go down in value because of trumps idiocy and then back up from the whiplash when he erratically reversed course.

Spraytan is trying to ingratiate himself to these rich assholes by taking credit for their gains by wilfully ignoring their losses were inflicted by him.

This is not to say that no one in the administration is using this for their own gains. It’s entirely likely that some are.

I’m just super sick of this narrative that Trump secretly has some master plan when we have 40+ years of well documented evidence about how stupid this man is.

Oh my gourd please stop

He is a failed nepo baby whose only successes in life were being a hired hand on a reality tv show and accidentally stumbling into politics via undisguised racism.

He

Is

A

Fucking

Moron

It’s important to the world to drop the “quietly” bit.

The US administration is behaving erratically and irrationally. This isn’t a punchline to some smug joke, it has important repercussions for world trade and defence needs.

Let’s cut the conspiracy theories about how they are doing this for graft, and the unfounded “4d chess” approaches. Some people in the administration may be trying to steer the government in these ways, but the captain of the ship is an unleashed chaos monkey surrounded by sycophantic yes-men.

The tariffs could double tomorrow or be gone tomorrow. The US could invade Greenland with a military force tomorrow or drop it completely move onto some shiny new idiocy.

We in the rest of the world need to move with urgency in order to be prepared for the worst. This is a tall task, so the longer we keep these admissions quiet the longer we are vulnerable

I researched this phone a bit and found a few hands-on reviews including this one

https://youtu.be/BIQdthHMrK4

Seems quite promising!

“Born on third, thinks he got a triple”

Everyone makes jokes like it’s funny but it bears repeating in a serious tone.

Trump either is a Russian asset, or has been successfully manipulated by Russian assets for many years. Whichever one it is doesn’t even matter that much because their level of control is so significant.

No, he’s not just “Trump being Trump“ or some coincidence, it’s a specific pattern with a plethora of supporting evidence. This news is an extra grain of sand stacked on mountain. All by itself, the unexplainable appointment of Russian agent Tulsi Gabbard to head of US intelligence should be proof enough.

The rest of the world needs to take this seriously even if the American voters don’t. The evidence demands that countries should stop intelligence cooperation, and should move with haste to remove American equipment from areas of critical infrastructure and national security. Amongst other things.

That’s a big problem and nontrivial to accomplish but we can’t deal with it by laughing and being smug about how dumb Americans are.

Thank you for sharing that

I looked at this previously but had some concerns with most of the devices being rather old (most recent options are 2021) and even so the camera support seems to be quite rough.

Does this match your experience as an early adopter or am I reading too much into it?

This looks extremely promising, thanks for sharing it.

It’s the first I’ve heard of it but it already goes in the bucket of top options for me to consider.

If possible yes, or if not possible I’m interested in seeing what is closest to providing an experience like that.

I’ve been daily driving desktop Linux for the last 5y and off and on for 25y plus a lot of professional sysadmin experience so I’m pretty familiar with fiddling and such.

So I don’t need a turnkey experience but I do want a pleasant and reliable experience once it’s all setup.

“Schadenfreude” would be a great name for a roller coaster

An obscenely rich asshole — one who is currently dismantling the democratic institutions of a country where many my friends and family live — is asking who derives joy from his company collapsing around him.

The answer to his question is… us. We do. The punchline is that the people taking joy in his self-inflicted failure are the entirety of his former customer base and beyond.

When I posted this in bsky last night it found some extremely modest virality so I thought some folks here might enjoy as well.

Because of federation the lock-in is much lower and we could move to a new instance due to a rogue admin.

This was news to me, thanks for sharing this OP.

Stardew valley lied to me!