> The conservative base is unfriendly to foreigners and foreign cultures, and claims to prefer American-made goods and services, but will immediately guillotine any internal party member who causes consumer prices to raise substantially--which they would have to do in order to support American workers creating products rather than our offshored counterparts.
Currently, the head of the party is raising and lowering tariffs at will, so I don't quite think this holds anymore.
Agree. It is harder to manufacture in America when the party leader breaks critical parts of your supply chain with rapid and unpredictable tariff changes. It is impossible to lower consumer prices on a good by raising taxes on it.
This is not even mentioning the astounding corruption of a president and his family personally and directly benefiting from these tariffs threats.
Does the party not understand the realities of this? Do they understand and are just lying about it because they're afraid of the leader? Afraid of admitting that they're wrong? I believe people are usually rational but I do not understand a rationalization where choosing to harm American manufacturers and consumers on the whims of a visibly corrupt leader is good, actually.
I think there are a lot of people who recognize these changes as not very durable and don't see an immediate political benefit to opposing them right now.
They're assuming normalcy will return after the senile tenant-from-hell is either evicted from his taxpayer-provided housing or just keels over, ignoring that the senile guy writes angry screeds about how he's not going anywhere and was put and is kept there by a whole conspiracy of enablers.
We're a product of a very, very strange time and place in history where the average person had at least some recourse against tyrants. From prehistory to about the mid-point of the 20th century, if you were alive on planet Earth, there's a near guarantee that you lived life basically as a possession of some person or family who controlled where you lived, where you could go, what clothes you wore, what work you could do, whether or not you would be educated, who you would marry, if you would have children, which god (if any) you could worship, what you could say, and even whether you lived or died.
That was your existence.
This whole thing where you have some control over your destiny? That's the fragile set of changes. Someone behaving like Trump is historically insanely durable.
It's been over a decade. He's been impeached twice, lost an election once - and it sounds like the lesson he took from that is "get rid of elections" - been convicted on thirty-four felony counts, charged with even more, mismanaged a pandemic, "shot at", wiped his ass with a number of strategic alliances, sent thugs out on America's streets to harass people for being Latino, and been linked to a cabal of child-trafficking sex offenders.
A few hundred bucks a year ain't gonna move the needle at this point.
> It's also ironic for a self described "classic liberal" building a company which grows the power of the government instead of limiting it.
I think that he really does see himself as classic liberal in that he really does see government as "limiting" to people like him with things like regulation. Say what you will about the current administration, they're absolutely not going to regulate people who create wealth.
There's a divine right of kings element mixed in here. Thiel, Karp, Trump and the rest really do think that the order of the universe, or the will of a higher power, is putting them in a place to operate without limits. They see any sort of regulation of their behavior as an affront to the order of nature. That's why they consider themselves classically liberal. Ultimately, the little people - that's us - are being illiberal by electing governments that can do things like say "hey, maybe we don't put everyone under constant surveillance" that would both challenge their power and their profitability.
It makes perfect sense as a company. Low-tier software consultancy that has ties to the most powerful government in the world and can acquire lucrative contracts is an absolutely valid business model.
> And it’s the job of the CEO to convince them with real information not insults.
Why? What happens if the CEO doesn't take the high road? Is Trump going to say "your lack of decorum and decency has lost you the US government as a customer"? Hell no. He's the guy who kicked this sort of schtick off.
The job of the CEO is to create value for shareholders in any way possible. That's where it starts and stops. Right now there's a lot of money in creating a panopticon to be exploited by various governments and well-heeled elites. Karp does this. Therefore he is doing his job.
Is this the logical conclusion of everything people have been saying about reducing government regulation of business since the 1970s? Yeah, but the money was right, so we ignored them.
Just do this for like, the next six months. Go in, clear out tech debt, get stuff fixed.
Tell the creative and features guys that they look like hell and need to take a vacation. Unless it's the guy who says you can't make colorful MBP finishes. Just fire that guy.
Do that and you'll have my money for another MBP sooner rather than later.
At this point, it's fair to assume that if the US government wanted to surveil you to a nefarious end, they absolutely could, easily, using things you bought to make your life more convenient.
The keys then become:
1) Implementing policies discouraging them from doing so at the societal level
and
2) Implementing force behind those policies at the personal and societal level
DHS isn't getting paid right now because Kristi "Dog Shooter" Noem managed to screw up so badly that even Congressional Republicans under Trump don't want to own her agency's behavior and carved DHS out of the normal funding bill. There's still a chance for #1 to be achieved. #2 remains to be seen at the societal level, but you can start working on that yourself for the personal level.
Sadly ICE and CBP is still getting paid because it was already funded by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. [1]
So while some parts of DHS aren't funded, and it does give Democrats bargaining power, it could still end up in a situation like the October 2025 shutdown where they don't get meaningful change.
TSA employees won't get paid which could impact air travel. Probably not as bad as when FAA employees weren't getting paid but if it's bad enough the pressure for Democrats to cave again will be high.
I laugh at myself sometimes for things like this: I refuse to provide my phone number to the cashier who promises me loyalty points, then I hand over the same credit card number I use for all my purchases. Boy, I really showed them how much I value my privacy!
But the other holes in the bucket doesn't mean you have to help. From a real opsec point of view a single tiny hole is the same as no wall at all. But from a day to day view less is less. It does at least reduce the spam.
And there is also, say you plug hole A and you can't do anything about hole B.
Some day something may develop that changes hole B (maybe a new law, maybe it's a service that you can stop using, maybe one org stops cooperating with another, whatever).
If hole A has already been wide open for years then closing hole B may not change much. But if hole A has been closed for years when the opportunity to close hole B comes along, then maybe closing hole B actually does something.
I choose to see it as something is better than nothing and it's worth it to apply pressure and be sand in the gears.
It's got to be better for everyone that there is at least some sand in the gears than if there were no sand in the gears.
I think anything short of fully obscuring your face (a-la ICE-agent/stormtrooper) will be merely a mitigation and not 100% successful. I recall articles talking about face recognition being used "successfully" on people wearing surgical masks in China. In the US they ask you to remove face masks in places where face recognition is used (at the border, TSA checkpoints), but would be unsurprised if that isn't strictly needed in most cases (but asking people to remove it preemptively ends up being faster for throughput).
99.9% of people walk around with an electronic device that identifies them. If a particular person doesn’t, it should be trivial to filter out all the people that it couldn’t have been, leaving only a small list of possible people.
Alright, I'll rephrase - "ICE agents have shown a bias towards escalation than de-escalation in conflict situations, be it pepper spray, assault, detention, or worse. I think that trying to get into a shouting match with them about HIPAA violations on removing your face mask are not likely to result in "okay, carry on, as you were"."
Your gait I think is more useful than your face is anyways and my understanding is it's my difficult to disguise. So you'll need a wheel chair/scooter and a mask in public.
All they have to do is make a better UX than Google and Microsoft. As it turns out, that particular bar is at the bottom of the Challenger Deep, so they treat it as such. Money spent on making sure your UX passes basic muster is money not given to a series of retirement and pension funds that make up the bulk of shareholders for companies like Apple.
What do you want more: decent UX, or the Smiths to be able to sell their house and swing on - and off - the course at some golf-based retirement village in Florida?
> Why AI is so bad at vanilla JS and HTML, when there's no React/Vue in a project?
Because we're still paying for Brendan Eich's mistakes 30 years later (though Brendan isn't, apparently), and even an LLM trained on an unfathomably-large corpus of code by experts at hundreds of millions of dollars of expense can't unscrew it. What, like, even is a language's standard library, man?
> The moment you point it at a real, existing codebase - even a small one - everything falls apart
That's not been my experience with running Claude to create production code. Plan mode is absolutely your friend, as is tuning your memory files and prompts. You'll need to do code reviews as before, and when it makes changes that you don't like (like patching in unit tests), you need to correct it.
Also, we use hexagonal architecture, so there are clean patterns for it to gather context from. FWIW, I work in Python, not JS, so when Claude was trained on it, there weren't twenty wildly different flavor-of-the-week-fifteen-years-ago frameworks and libraries to confuse it.
If JS sucks to write as a human, it will suck even more to write as a LLM.
jQuery simply turned the tables and executed a `$( ".Claude_Code" ).remove();`. Now Anthropic's services are down across several regions and emergency meetings are being held with stakeholders.
Currently, the head of the party is raising and lowering tariffs at will, so I don't quite think this holds anymore.
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