I like to call this "capitalist feudalism", and it appears to be the overt agenda of big business and their allies/agents in governments around the world, notably but not exclusively in the USA.
Other than the unauthorized category (see e.g. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/21/key-findi... for estimates), it's pretty hard to get established legally in the USA too, and the criteria are similar to what you cite for Switzerland. By the numbers (https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R42866#_Toc181884259), the majority of legal immigrants are family of people who are already citizens. The other big group is employment-related. Immigration for other reasons (specific diversity groups & asylees/refugees) is comparatively small.
American citizens generally do not think that they can just walk into another country and settle there, because you can't do that in the USA. A big part of what got Trump elected was that people just about everywhere, except the left wing of the political spectrum, were concerned about the scale of unauthorized immigration during the Biden administration. That does include a huge amount of asylum seekers under various programs, but even just CBP parolees at the southwest border totaled over 1.1 million July 2023 - July 2024 and that is a shitton of people (https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2025/08/21/u-...).
Also the USA has a literally 250 year tradition of people moving here (and an equally long tradition of fretting over how the "wrong" people are moving here). The entire history of the country is: people moved here and never stopped moving here, and along the way most of the native population were killed or exterminated by disease. You make it sound like some ill-founded 20th century liberalism run amok.
If anything, modern Europeans are too accustomed to people not migrating around. But it's worth remembering just how much migration (within and from without) had to happen before the modern European socio-ethnic layout emerged.
As much as I agree the longshoremen situation is "unappealing" from a policy perspective, it's not really a valid equivalence to compare a trade union trying to protect itself from being automated out of existence with a multinational corporation asking an historically corrupt government to let them use the $1bn that they were given for something other than its intended purpose.
Everyone always has a story to tell for why they deserve the Rolex and the other guy doesn’t. And nothing is equivalent except perhaps fundamental particles in each class. That’s the nature of reality.
I’m not this guy or that guy. I’m just a victim of both of them. And both of them are happy to conspire against me. So until they’re willing to give the rest of us Rolexes for sitting at home I don’t see much of a difference.
> The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I'm not saying that the longshoremen deserve Rolexes. I'm saying that if you had to choose between a handful of longshoremen with Rolexes and a Captain Planet villain with a Rolex and private jet and a bunch of new fossil fuel projects, I think the latter is clearly a worse outcome overall. False equivalence is a propaganda tool to confuse priorities and deflect.
I'd like see a system like this take more inspiration from the ES literature, similar to AlphaEvolve. Let's see an archive of solutions, novelty scoring and some crossover rather than purely mutating the same file in a linear fashion.
That was my impression. Including evolutionary programming which normally would happen at the AST level, with the LLM it can happen at the source level.
Git leaks a lot of implementation details into its UX. Rebasing is meant to be equivalent to checking out the "base" branch and cherry picking commits onto it. Therefore "ours" during a rebase is the base branch.
The meaning of "ours" and "theirs" is always the same, but the "base" of the operation is reversed compared to what you might be used to during merge.
Rebasing can be confusing and hard and messy, but once I learned that rule and took the time to internalize it, I at least never got confused on this particular detail again.
> fake history
That's the thing, it's not actually fake history. Git really is doing the things it looks like it's doing during a rebase. That's why you can do all kinds of weird tricks like stopping in the middle to reset back a commit in order to make a new intervening commit. The reason you can abort at any time with (almost) no risk is because the old history is still hanging around in the database and won't be removed until GC runs, usually long after the rebase is settled.
Learning git properly is pretty much "read Git book at least 3 times".
All of it makes sense and is decently intuitive once you know how internals work.
People keep imagining git as a series of diffs while in reality it's series of the filesystem tree snapshots + a bunch of tools to manage that and reconcile changes in face of merge. And most of that can be replaced if the builtins are not up to task. And the experience is getting slowly better but it's balance between power users and newbies, and also trying to not break stuff when going forward.
Now of course that sucks if programming is not someone's day job but there is plenty of tools that present simpler workflows built on top of that.
Also git store (almost?) all its operations in the reflog. They have identifier like commits so you can reset to them and restore the original state of the working directory (mostly after an automatic rebase gone wrong).
That's the thing, they're not "like commits", they are the actual original commits. It's a history of where the HEAD ref used to be. Eventually those commits will be pruned out of the tree if/when the reflog expires because there is nothing left pointing to them. But otherwise they are normal commits.
It's interesting that once even C programmers, like Linus, become really experienced, they embrace the wisdom that functional programmers are forced to swallow anyway.
I am very impressed. Kagi manages to maintain Google-par quality or better most of the time, whereas DDG became an unusable slop pit a few years ago. I'm a very happy customer and happy to keep paying for both Kagi and Orion, in part on principle and in part because the product actually works very well for me.
I don't even use the AI assistant much, only when there are a lot of disjointed search results and I want a quick summary.
Yes, it's the classic "both sides" myth. It is promulgated in order to manufacture consent for doing the thing that "both sides" are supposedly already doing.
> It is promulgated in order to manufacture consent for doing the thing that "both sides" are supposedly already doing
Manufacturing consent is horseshit because it gets the direction of causation wrong. Nobody is master planning any of this. Storytellers sell stories. And then politicians sense the vacuum of attention.
Fox News and Shadowstats don’t whip their flock up so DOGE could cut budgets. They did it to sell ads. DOGE then cut, mostly randomly. And there was no fury about these cuts so they stuck.
> Right-wing media strategy has been a lot more heavily-planned and intentional than you’re suggesting
It’s opinionated. That isn’t the same as planned. A lot more of society is motivated by what sells ads right now than anyone is comfortable admitting outside those firms.
The whole point of the manufacturing consent propaganda model is that you don't need some vast conspiracy, you just need industry consolidation and the leaders of those consolidated industries to either be willingly part of the conspiracy, or under pressure/threat. And just look how consolidated the media is in the USA right now, and look at who makes decisions for those companies.
> Fox News and Shadowstats don’t whip their flock up so DOGE could cut budgets. They did it to sell ads.
There are a million things that could've done to sell ads. Funny how they chose the one thing that just so happens to align with the particular political agenda of the president, who just so happens to be the current figurehead of the entire political movement with which Fox just coincidentally happens to have been tightly aligned for my entire adult life. Must be a coincidence.
> And there was no fury about these cuts so they stuck.
There was plenty of it, you just didn't see anything about it in the news except as page 10 human interest stories in the liberal-aligned media like NPR and the Boston Globe. Must be another editorial coincidence.
There is no way you can earnestly believe that the right-wing media doesn't favorably report on right-wing politicians and their causes. The Manufacturing Consent model is extremely successful among social science models in that it implies clear and testable predictions that have been corroborated again and again and again around the world, pretty much since the dawn of news media. If you don't agree with that assessment, then in my opinion you are ignoring reality or at best ignorant of it.
> you just need industry consolidation and the leaders of those consolidated industries to either be willingly part of the conspiracy, or under pressure/threat
And I’m saying that’s nonsense. The media operates on independent incentives. The political calculus then responds to it. Attention-driven society doesn’t need a maestro, and rarely has one. Pretending it does is comforting but wrong.
You claim it's nonsense, I claim it's been the reality in the United States for decades, and only becoming more true every year. You can choose to confront the evidence before you, or continue to live in willful ignorance, but the world you describe simply does not correspond to the one that we inhabit.
You’re arguing against the evidence that is mounting that there are coordinated campaigns to influence public opinion to be more sympathetic to reactionary ideology. It’s been a century since Bernays wrote the seminary work on this topic, why the credulity? The connections are not tenuous, these people are operating in the daylight, even giving public talks and publishing treatises about their strategies.
Personally, I view Trump as a useful idiot for them, as a charismatic figurehead. He knew how to tap into the heartbeat of the populace scorned by globalism. He’s of course sympathetic to their beliefs: his campaign against the New York 5 stands as testament enough. But now he surrounds himself with them and is clearly becoming increasingly convinced that they represent public opinion, emboldened enough to claim just recently that those of Arab descent have inherently inferior genetics.
You do realize we live in a country where Megachurch Pastors are billionaires, the Mormon church has one of the largest private investment funds, Scientology has a death grip on its members, etc etc. These are not innocent business ventures, they manipulate their victims into providing them exorbitant amounts of money and labor.
Capturing American minds is a solved problem for those who have enough money, and has been for awhile. Maybe not every single manipulative actor is working together in coordination, but they’re certainly manipulating.
> the evidence that is mounting that there are coordinated campaigns to influence public opinion to be more sympathetic to reactionary ideology
And there are numerous counter narratives that find fertile bases, e.g. Chomsky on Reddit. Most of these speakers are doing so not with one arm in policy and the other in media, but to compete in the attention economy.
> Megachurch Pastors are billionaires, the Mormon church has one of the largest private investment funds, Scientology has a death grip on its members, etc etc.
And billions of dollars in influencers, interest groups and activists. Elon Musk is singularly as wealthy as the Mormon Church. Art and music narratives.
It’s comforting to assume a lizard man is in charge behind it all. The facts don’t sustain that false comfort. There are cohesive opinion blocks. One of them is the one convinced to the point of faith in Chomsky’s hypothesis. But they compete and fracture and ally and fall. Missing that dynamic significantly handicaps any operational political theory.
> And billions of dollars in influencers, interest groups and activists. Elon Musk is singularly as wealthy as the Mormon Church. Art and music narratives.
You're arguing against yourself. Musk has a clear political allegiance. Same with Ellison and Bezos and the Koch brothers and the Sinclair Media group. It's a clear example of the Manufacturing Consent model operating in practice. And that's just the "mainstream" media. Connecting political influencers and content creators to funding and information sources is a big deal, e.g. https://nypost.com/2025/08/28/business/dark-money-group-payi...
(Relevant to the topic: note the well-known political alignment of the NY Post and how it might affect reporting on a topic like this. I think I had a homework assignment like this in 10th grade.)
Under the current administration we have the president and FCC openly threatening and pressuring media companies, but that's just them being more bold and arrogant than in the past.
There are many ambiguous and uncertain things in this world, but there is very, very clearly a directional flow of messaging and alignment from powerful people and organizations with particular political alignments to the media organizatinos that they control and/or fund.
> Strict limits on governmental regulation wherein any restrictions must be demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored to a compelling public safety or health interest.
> Mandatory safety protocols for AI-controlled critical infrastructure, including a shutdown mechanism and compulsory annual risk management reviews.
Read: industry can do whatever we want, but the government also has to put up barriers to entry that favor large incumbents.
This has nothing to do with rights or even computing, it's just regulatory capture.
Annual risk management reviews definitely favor large incumbents. Large incumbents have the ability to hire and maintain compliance teams. That burden is definitely a barrier to entry to new competitors (though not an insurmountable one).
But it only applies to AI controlling critical infrastructure, you think this is an issue in practice?
I would think if a power plant deploys some AI model to optimize something or other, it would be on the plant operator to perform the reviews, regardless of who they get the AI from.
In practice, there will only be one or two "safe" AI vendors approved for such infrastructure. On one hand, that's probably a good thing. On the other hand, it's deeply anti-competitive and it's pretty much a recipe for indefinitely renewable contracts at arbitrary high prices that get passed on to taxpayers.
The shutdown mechanism would have existed anyway and a "risk management review" sounds exactly like the sort of toothless policy that's supposed to make people feel better without actually putting any limits or enforcement on the industry
You know if we're gonna pass laws to make it illegal for the government to interfere with the Torment Nexus, the least they could do is not gaslight us with the fucking name of the law. Just tell us the billionaires get to fuck the planet in the eye and the rest of us have to deal with it, at least it's honest that way.
Practically every law, and lobbying organization, is named for exactly the opposite of what it does. If I see the Puppies and Orphans Protection Act of 2028, I assume its purpose is to use puppies to strangle orphans. Proponents will point to the limitation on how many puppies you can use per orphan.
Similarly, if I see the People For X organization, I assume they are against X. The Committee for Green Spaces and Clean Air is guaranteed to be an oil company.
Once you develop that reflex, everything calms down. Though admittedly, I passed a sign for Fidos for Freedom. I'm not quite sure what Fidos Against Freedom does. I think they give dogs to disabled people, and they bark at you if you try to leave the house.
There is something that this tactic misses: when people try to do good things, the name of their organization or policy is usually pretty honest. In an environment like ours, though, that still means that your strategy of assuming the opposite meaning has something like a 95% expected success rate.
The second term for the "drain the swamp" president implies otherwise (it did take another cycle, but that arguably had more to do with covid than corruption).
I find it hard to imagine any evidence-based viewpoint in 2024 that would have led to a conclusion that Trump would be better for Gaza. The two party system doesn't give any room for choices on some issues, but that's hardly an argument that the two choices are equivalent overall.
Evidence? No. But 2024 wasn't an election (IMO) lost on failing to appeal to the centrists and R's. It was one lost by failing to energize the D's. I still assert that a lot of D's simply stayed home as opposed to "changed to R", and that's the most effective form of vote suppression: telling them that "both sides are the same, nothing matters so why bother?"
I've seen this claimed, but I'm not convinced narratives that emerge before another presidential election cycle hold up to scrutiny in the long run. The common narrative post 2012 was that Republicans needed to move to the left on immigration to stay viable, but that didn't happen and Trump won in 2016. The narrative post 2016 was that the Democrats needed to move right on social issues, and that didn't happen (at least not to the extent that people claimed they needed to) but Biden won in 2020. My perception post 2020 is that a lot of people felt that Biden won only because of people being unhappy with Trump's handling of covid, and but Biden wasn't able to last through the next cycle to another election to be able to potentially get more data on that theory.
You're not wrong that Gaza probably affected things, but the larger issue is that there was no primary at all. Nobody challenged Biden's viability until too late, and at that point the party coalesced around a single candidate almost immediately. I'd argue that even if people were happy with her on that one issue, there would still likely be plenty of others that they were not happy with, especially when she was essentially starting from behind due to the baggage left behind from the baggage of being the VP of the president who couldn't even retain the confidence of the party through the election (not to mention how much she was sidelines for the first 3.5 years of the administration).
>My perception post 2020 is that a lot of people felt that Biden won only because of people being unhappy with Trump's handling of covid,
I agree with that. COVID was the breaking point of breaking points and Trump fumbled it especially badly. I certainly agree Trump would have won 2020 had it not been for his handling of COVID.
>You're not wrong that Gaza probably affected things, but the larger issue is that there was no primary at all.
That was a factor too. I see Gaza and the lack of primaries as the same factor: maintaining an unpopular establishment that didn't energize the party. For better or worse (much much much worse), Trump does energize his install base.
The core issue these past 10 years is that "what analysts say" have diverged much further away from what the people actually want. So getting a pulse on the ground is much more important these days than traditional means of surveying and reporting opinions.
It's not just "small business". If the barriers to entry are high enough, you can keep out pretty much any company that isn't already part of your oligopoly, pretty much indefinitely. That could be anything from a well funded subsidiary of another technology company to a foreign competitor.
Well, there probably are some in there. Data centre designers, comms experts, architects, electricians, etc. Lot of smaller organisations benefiting from the work.
It’s a good thing that businesses can make investment plans with legible rules to follow. Too many communities are blocking data centers for no good reason, and this preempts NIMBYs and unreasonable local opposition.
“What about my water?”- not an issue in this area.
“What about my electric bill?”- we’re signing long term contracts with local power companies or building out our own capacity; we eat the marginal costs and don’t increase your bill.
“What about noise?”- we’re far enough away from the nearest person that they cannot hear us; fans are x decibels at y distance; not a problem.
“I saw on Facebook that data centers poison the water and spy on me”- seek help, you cannot block us from building out and giving you oodles of tax money for this nonsense reason.
I don’t think it counts as NIMBYism if you don’t want it in yours or anybody’s backyard, ever. I would describe that as principled opposition.
Also, what happens when we don’t need such enormous data centers anymore? How many communities in the U.S. are saddled with enormous dead malls while the developers walk away with zero liability?
There is an incredibly good reason not to have datacenters in montana - a whole lot of the additional load will be from colstrip - one of the dirtiest coal mines left in the United States.
This research presentation from Benn Jordan will hopefully change your mind on the noise issue and its consequences. I highly recommend it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo
Long term contracts are routinely broken in bankruptcy without some sort of surety bond if things go sideways. This leaves localities footing the bill on maintenance if things do not turn out.
Out of curiosity how do you authenticate yourself with government services and finance companies and such? The reason the SSN is considered private is because it's used for authentication. Usually an SSN + one or two pieces of trivially obtainable information is enough to sign up for just about anything in somebody else's name, unless physical documents are required as in the case of a passport.
In Sweden the most useful and supported way means that you need this.
1. An identification approved by the EU. You get this from the national Police. (A government agency)
2. An SSN which is your birthday and four extea digits. E.g. 1212121212 is a valid "PNR", you get this from the Tax agency
3. A bank account (you need 1 and 2)
4. A patched Android or iPhone.
5. The BankID a app from a company owner by the banks in Sweden.
6. A Certificate downloaded from your bank to you BankID App
7. A PIN to Protect the key in you BankID App.
8. Normal internet connection.
9. A camera on your phone to read QR code on Service Provider webpage for session initionation
When you sign something the app will send lots of metadata to "the Identity Provider" (BankId), e.g. how much root you have on your phone, if you run known malware, your current ip, and your phone HW info. This is used to calculate a score that you as a "service provider" (i.e. banks, government, companies) can choose to ignore (they usually do)
When you as a Customer either sign in or sign you will see a document that you sign maybe "I give you 100SEK", and who you sign that to. You enter you pin or use biometric to aprove.
With cryptographic keys, normally stored on a smartphone. BankID[0] is the most common solution, but there are others. I personally use biometric 2fa to log in, and PIN to sign contracts or pay.
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