Yes.

Data hoarders are going to really come into their own after the corporations start trying to paywall information - pretty much no matter what it is, there’s somebody out there who has it squirreled away on a drive.

On the first point, I’m not sure. I definitely agree that left to their own devices the AIbros would just keep expanding and battling each other and chasing ever more pie in the sky. But I don’t think they’ll be left to themselves. I think the MBAs will move in and take over, and it’ll shift to standard corporate tactics of buyouts and mergers and bankruptcies and liquidations, and inevitable consolidation.

On the second, I agree. I think the web is actually going to effectively split into a commercial system of monolithic corporations and subscriptions and fixed hardware and a much less formal true web of small servers and self hosting and ad hoc networks.

Amusingly enough, The Economist illustrates what I believe to be the new business model that’s already waiting in the wings for the internet.

With admittedly no direct evidence to support it, my theory at the moment is that the “AI” players plan to consolidate and to continue to expand their reach and continue to gain users who rely on the “AI” for information rather than following links to the originals, then, once the "AI"s have killed enough clicks to collapse the ad model and drive the websites out of business (and give them the opportunity to buy up the remains of the businesses, and more importantly, their databases), they’ll put all of the information of which they’re now in sole possession behind paywalls.

Broadly, the goal is to apply the most lucrative if least popular business model to information ,- to monopolize ownership of it in order to sit back and collect money as rent-seeking parasites.

Imagine that…

Of course, if the Dem establishment really wanted to analyze where they went wrong, all they’d have to do is talk to, and much more importantly listen to, voters.

But then they’d run the risk of having to face up to the fact that they’re the problem.

My favorite ex-girlfriend is one. She’s genuinely interested in what anyone and everyone has to say, and radiates that enthusiasm.

The oddest thing about it is that even she thinks it’s sort of weird and she actually wants to pull back a bit, but she can’t. She says it’s like a magnet - someone starts talking and she’s just irresistably drawn in.

She actually went to see a psychologist about it, and she said that during the session it slowly shifted so that he was doing most of the talking, then at the end, he told her there was nothing wrong with her and that he couldn’t see her as a patient any more, then asked her out.

Sort of like Erik Prince and Betsy DeVos.

Or classically, the Borgias.

I always wonder about people like her. What is it like inside her brain? How does she see the world and her place in it?

Broadly, she’s obviously mentally ill - no sane and rational person could make the decisions she makes. But how specifically? Is she delusional? Does she just not live in consensual reality? If not that, then what is it? Is she amoral - entirely unable to even grasp the concept of morality? Or is she so pathologically self-absorbed that she has no principles or ethics? Or is she just so greedy and/or power-hungry that she ignores everything else? Or does she have some speck of principles or morals or empathy thatvshe silences with alcohol or drugs?

I really have no idea, but I can’t help but wonder. It’s just so bizarre to me that any human being could be that utterly loathsome. What goes through their heads in those unguarded moments when they’re standing in the shower or sitting on the toilet or laying in bed? How can they not have at least some awareness of how foul they are?

You appear to have read a different post than the one I wrote.

The surest sign yet that the political winds are blowing against Trump on this one, since Johnson is not only a weather vane, but a coward.

"intimate” information that isn’t of “legitimate concern to the public.”

You know - things like charges, payment methods, offshore bank accounts, preferred vacation destinations, scheduling private jet flights…

Yet another reminder that the President of the United States is profoundly mentally ill and undeniably unfit for office.

Alligator Auschwitz.

immigration raids = pogroms

Bullshit.

The thing that five day workweeks won’t fund is obscene pay packages for executives.

The problem is that the corporations have no incentive to not pay the extortion money.

If Paramount had, as anyone with any integrity at all would have, told Trump to go fuck himself, the Toddler-in-chief would thrown everything he could get his tiny little hands on at them, and they would’ve ended up paying far more than $16 million trying to fend it off. So instead, they just cut President Shitbag a check, and now he’ll (supposedly) rubber stamp the merger they want.

The responsibility for bringing that loathsome bag of pus to justice falls on someone else - the other two branches of the government. And they’re cowardly, complicit and corrupt.

The Supreme Court doesn’t even bother pretending to be upholding the law or the Constitution any more. The conservative majority is wholly owned by the same autocratic scumbags who are backing Trump, and they self-evidently see themselves as having one and only one mission - to give that reeking piece of shit whatever he wants no matter what sort of illogic and lies they have to use.

And in Congress, the Republicans are lining up to suck the rapist’s deformed dick in the hope of getting to play a role in the oligarchy to come, and the Democrats are entirely focused on destroying the leftists in their midst so that they can continue gorging themselves on conservative soft money in exchange for doing nothing.

So the profoundly mentally ill and brazenly criminal piece of shit who’s stinking up the Oval Office is free to do whatever the hell he wants because every single person who might be able to do something about it is one or another sort of piece of shit themselves, with the only minor distinction being whether they’re corporate pieces of shit or judicial pieces of shit or congressionsl pieces of shit.

Right - a guy who’s known to have visited Epstein’s island is denying the conspiracy theories about his oh-so-convenient death.

That has all the credibility of a four-year-old with chocolate on his fingers and crumbs on his face saying “Cookies? What cookies?”

Government of the people, by the idiots, for the psychopaths.

And this is why DOGE gutted the Office for Vehicle Automation Safety at the NHTSA.

And I guarantee that billionaire Larry Ellison blithely believes that he’ll be exempt - that all of this surveillance will just be used against the little people. And he’s almost certainly right.