And this is so obnoxious because actual-politics is kind of a fucking layup right now.

Your opponents are running a historically corrupt government.

Be anti-corruption. Run on fixing the shit they broke, holding assholes accountable, and improving people’s lives.

Duh.

it's not as simple as "hardware has gotten better, software has gotten worse" because a lot of companies making physical devices are lost in the wilderness from a design perspective, but a rule of thumb that anything that charges you monthly gets worse over time works pretty well

He's going to be really, really bad at it. Like, a war with Venezuela will end up with us losing Alaska.

Your blender is my JavaScript

Before I left, I had to work with a DOGE bro on a project, and the one PR of his I looked at was full of AI-hallucinated code. He very obviously just pointed AI at it, and shipped it without checking any of it. They‘re not sending their best.

They're not esoteric. Any of the conspiracy theories that shaped DOGE's mission can be found easily by browsing Twitter or Facebook for a few minutes. Apparently billionaire brains get cooked by social media in exactly the same way poor people brains do.

OMG

Should have put the sarcasm tag on it

He's right, though. Translating the requests of human beings and all their underlying assumptions is the exact same rote thing that converting code into assembly is. And you can figure out what every user needs for their specific business process by guessing based on the internet average.

The point is a bit more general than cops. We're a society of 350 million people. Authority over certain things has to be delegated to specialists. The existence of corruption is inevitable, but it doesn't have to dominate.

I have never left with less than a $200 bill

No doubt

Try this at Costco. I dare you.

... makers. Gotta make sure there are more good ones than bad ones.

... take a bullet for a total stranger. The other was the bully that wanted to swagger around with a badge and a gun and punch somebody in hand cuffs. The kind of police department you have depends on which of those two is winning."

There are always going to be cops, elites, decision-...

... of the occupants.

One of my son's baseball coaches, a pretty solidly red-leaning person, after, I think, Michael Brown's death and protests said about cops:

"I knew two kinds of people from high school that went on to be cops. One kind was the best kind of person you'd ever know. Would ...

... in the institutions rather than the institutions themselves. The distinction between today's Harvard and a generic "elite institution" is as important today as the distinction between Ketanji Brown-Jackson and Samuel Alito. The institution exists and life hinges on the quality...

If you're talking in the generic "American elites are generally comfortable with authoritarianism", I do not dispute. The fact that Harvard is behaving differently than Columbia may be a stroke of luck.

But if Trump 2 teaches anything it's that what holds democracy together is the people...