The punishment should be slow enough to fit the perpetrator, swift enough to satisfy justice, and deep enough to heal his victims:

Slowly drain his fortune to zero (make him watch, real-time).
Swiftly raze his properties.
Deeply insert that sharpie so it signs the back of his teeth with every lie.

At this point a lit match will likely outlast the United States.

Furthermore, the match serves useful purpose and outshines anything Bezos can offer.

No class. No integrity. No honor.

Groundhog Day... (again)

I read that as:

"A review of 47's victims..."

Yes, that's the broadly-accepted translation. I was being a bit cute with the character limit 😉.

Tha mi a’ fuireach ann an Dùn Èideann. Uaireannan is ann ainneamh a chluinneas tu blas Albannach, gun luaidh air ar seann chànan.

"I live in Edinburgh. Sometimes it's rare to hear a Scottish accent, let alone our ancient language."

Mony a mickle maks a muckle.

"Small things make something larger"

Years ago, when we were kids, we were offered the promise that at some future point along with flying cars and cities on the moon, the trash would be able take itself out.

At least one part of that future has arrived.

Ministry of Peace: responsible for conducting perpetual war.

Ministry of Love: enforces loyalty through fear and torture.

Ministry of Truth: handles propaganda and alters historical records.

Ministry of Plenty: manages scarcity and rationing while promoting the illusion of abundance.

1984: 2026

Cool calculating heads required. Divestment from the Dollar needs careful measurement. A rapid dump may be great for headlines but the crash doesn't help the world outside news and social media.

Weening from the Dollar teat builds global resilience to the default Trump has already set in motion.

It speaks volumes that it will only require a lone British agent to cause the whole Goldmember scheme to blow up, whereas 300M+ Americans are rendered impotent.

I'll place a call to 'M' and see if either Bond or Powers might be free between shag-fests.

Brits to the rescue, again... yeah, baby!

The difference: this isn't the 1940s; and America has failed to heed history's lesson.

Thus, either through ignorance, indifference, or impotence it's clear to the rest of the world that Americans seem incapable of addressing the problem presented to the world.

Americans: you must take action.

For a moment I wondered, why two rather than one?

Then I realized that sometimes even the faithful prefer a slither of choice between cruelty and corruption.

Start here: european-alternatives.eu

It's been growing steadily. A few beta services not yet listed, and I'm aware of a number that don't fully satisfy the sovereignty requirement. The new EU-AWS might open up a few more admissions (personally, I won't touch anything connected to US tech anymore).

The US was already abusing its dominant position, particularly in technology-related sectors, but the allegiance was mutually convenient enough for the US advantage to remain largely unchallenged.

The Trump effect reverses that into an adversarial position. US dependency is now a categorical risk.

LLMs are exactly what you say they are because they nothing more than non-deterministic hyper-parameterized token guessing engines; presumption of meaning is based on statistics rather than semantics and axioms.

Their right-brain "creativity" can be harnessed under a neuro-symbolic architecture.

As much as I admire Jackson for his many accomplishments, this would be vulgar travesty — it would be like Banksy spay-painting over the Mona Lisa.

Looking up at the monolith, "Man, that's one big MF Royale with cheese..." just doesn't cut it.

Pass the mayo.

We're long past Twitter. X is something else, deeply twisted, and causing real harm. I vote for banning as a matter of principle.

A basic understanding of Requisite Variety would be a start. Foundational cybernetics as a primer for a course on software and knowledge architectures would raise the game.

And applying neuro-symbolic semantics would begin to address the pathetic shortfalls of LLMs et al.

Some of us do understand.