agggggggggggggggg

He must have died while typing …

Bread and circuses

Note that it being only part of a key is a technology choice that does not require the reality map to it. It may seem like overkill, but someone may not trust the political process to preserve that promise and so they add the birthdate, just in case something goes sideway in the future. Lots of technical choices are made anticipating likely changes and problems and designing things to be extra robust in the face of those

Frankly the whole exchange sounds like Hollywood tech jargon.vaguely relevant words used in a not quite sensible way…

I will say that it’s super easy to say “someone else (not me) should assassinate these guys”. I think that’s the biggest gripe, that people are all too willing to volunteer other people to take the risks while themselves shying away. Either you personally are willing to take the advocated action or if you think “well for me, personally, the risk isn’t worth it”, well then maybe if it isn’t worth the risk to you, you should not be advocating that it is worth the risk to others.

Note that it says article (and headline) were updated. At the time the article just had the State department document about 400m in armored Tesla. Then after initial backlash the document was amended to say armored electric vehicles. Then eventually the Trump administration declared this was not a thing and to the extent it was a thing, it was Biden.

Now it could be as they say, but it is also the Trump administration, that isn’t too big on the truth. So hard to say if this was a mishap about a misleading document, or something that was fired off without the broader approval of the PJ2025 folk and it getting killed after coming to light and needing a cover story as to why things didn’t get close to as blatantly corrupt as it sounded.

Oh look: https://www.npr.org/2025/02/13/g-s1-48571/trump-administration-order-400-million-worth-of-armored-teslas

Leopard eating leopard face… Extra fun

I’m largely inclined to agree, but his point stands that the Democrats are completely impotent in the current situation (at least legally). Whatever slim chance there is rests with Republican infighting.

I suppose if I try hard I can cling to a hope. He indirectly threatened their lives whole going out the door. A lot of the stakeholders likely genuinely thought he was going to go away without them having to alienate the Trump fanatics. So opting out of second impeachment they perceived as their best shot at retaining power.

Now Trump is quite directly doing everything to render the legislature powerless. Threaten their lives, that’s one thing, but to deny them the power they won, well maybe that’s a different thing…

Interesting move, to surrender all your power to the executive branch in hopes of keeping your power…

They don’t have to take it away, they can just set up the backend to blackhole those requests. So presence of the report issue facility does not imply they actually will ever even see the issue.

Sadly every major power tends to be the baddies to some extent, it’s how they get to be and stay major powers. We just get to grade on a curve. Nazi Germany really set the curve and the US got to be the pretty unambiguous good guys, at least up to the firebombing campaign in Japan, the nuclear bombs, and being complicit after the fact in Japanese atrocities by shielding them from consequences.

While we have an “ambient” level of baddie-ness most of the time, we at least have balanced it out by sometimes defending against unjust violence and providing humanitarian aid.

Now Trump seeks to turn that baddie scale up to the max while simultaneously cutting out all aid efforts.

Don’t forget the revelation that USAID was looking into Starlink in a critical way…

I think that really underestimates how corruption would work. Tesla might make a show of a “government edition” software loadout, whether because they had to or even as theater to pretend they catered to government requirements when in actuality it’s largely the same but maybe with some branding.

In terms of pricing, I’m sure that any actually “bulletproof” vehicles cost plenty. Which is why even departments like the DHS have largely unarmored fleets. Tesla wouldn’t meet those standards, but the marketing might be sufficient to serve as a bullet point over the current non-armored vehicles they use.

The MAGA crowd mostly needs to give their truck gender-affirming care by giving them truck nuts.

Wow, old comment.

1099 is income, not a deduction.

Elon musk is a white immigrant, and they are cool with white refugees, per the executive order to prioritize getting white South Africans in.

Multiple of these people have had their wives insulted by the movement, but at the end of the day even if they are their wives, they are “just women” so no big deal for them.

Orange Republic?

Of those actually in power, as a rule they don’t idolize Trump and I would say are manipulating Trump more than Trump is manipulating them.

Trump’s straightforward enough, he’s a megalomaniac. Make him rich and/or stroke his ego and you are golden. Trump doesn’t really have a lot of ideology outside of self-worship.

Much of his executive administration is the brainchild of the Project 2025 folks. Those folks are basically being like Dick Cheney, all agenda zero interest in “taking credit”. Trump is useful, they just have to say “Trump is great” and feed him a mountain of executive orders to sign and he’ll happily do it, while asking for a one liner vaguely describing the order, marveling about it and signing it and moving on.

Musk is different because while the PJ2025 people are all too happy to yield the spotlight, Musk is very loud as he is also a megalomaniac. He’s fine with buying and placating Trump’s ego, but he also must be front and center screaming “look at me”.

To the extent these folks are working together it’s because their interests don’t conflict. RFK Jr. wants to play with a health system that no other stakeholder in this game cares about, but otherwise doesn’t care. The PJ2025 people might not have gone this viciously after USAID as Musk’s vendetta is taking him, but they certainly don’t mind.

So what happens when interests collide? Well see when Trump declared the US was going to go in, take over Gaza, and spend shit tons of US resources on rebuilding that for resort development while doing an ethnic cleanse. That’s a lot of evil to try to hide, more than I think they like trying to pull off this soon, but more importantly to them that’s an expensive thing they don’t want to pay for. So they just pretended that Trump never said the things he said and invented a new narrative retroactively and acting like the media was stupid for failing to understand. The manipulation continues, and Trump is fine because they played it so that he was always right, even as they retroactively changed what he said about US troops and investment. Netanyahu’s manipulation worked, but then his administration manipulated a different way.

Now if PJ2025 and Musk reach a conflict, don’t know how that will go.

I would rather have 50,000,000,000bps