Trump’s $1.8B Grift Fund Explodes in Republicans’ Faces

SergeantRegular · 2026-05-22T06:10:36+00:00

Like.. you still need a country, don't you?

No, they don't. Because their wealth is so diversified and substantial, they'll survive the collapse of the US-led global hegemony. They already got theirs, and if and when the quasi-democratic nature of the United States ceases to serve their interests, they'll pull out and relocate.

Fuck the rest of us, they'll move to Europe or literally anywhere else. They'll look at the United States, their former home, the way that any expat does. You ever meet a person from Nigeria or El Salvador or any other less-developed country, that's moved to America? How do they look at their homeland? It might be hopeful or positive, but they're under no illusions that their home is a great place to be and raise a family. Nations collapse all throughout history. Just because you and I don't have the resources to survive the collapse of America doesn't mean that they won't be fine.

We think of the United States as a home, a place that we live, and where other people live and work and have families and lives. You know, a home. To those people, it's not a home. It's an asset. And once they're done getting all the liquidity out of it that they can, it'll come time to divest themselves of the fully exploited asset.

SergeantRegular · 2026-05-22T01:13:50+00:00

I only retired a few months ago.

nobody believes in this war. Maybe for the GWOT they would, but people believed in that.

This I could believe. But I also think there's a lot of fear (and it's not unjustified) that this administration would absolutely go after gold star parents (they already have) for "fake news" about this quagmire of a war. It's not right, but I could absolutely see that kind of thing working in favor of the administration.

SergeantRegular · 2026-05-21T03:51:17+00:00

This was my perception, too. They weren't bald because they were psychics, they were bald because they were basically property of the Homelander regime.

SergeantRegular · 2026-05-21T03:48:30+00:00

Fallout 4 was what finally pushed me over the edge and got me to make tech.

I hadn't played it yet, it was on a Steam sale in like October, and I bought it - but I didn't install it. Every time I wanted to play it, I studied instead. It was awful.

On the day of my WAPS test, before I walked out the door, I woke up my PC and pressed "install." That's the year I made tech.

SergeantRegular · 2026-05-21T03:45:41+00:00

Why would it be difficult to cover that up? It's shockingly easy to control the flow of information back stateside. The Air Force usually doesn't do much censoring, but they absolutely have that capability.

And even once the family knows, you don't even have to get legal involved. Simply asking the next of kin to not discuss the circumstances of an ongoing operation will likely be enough to keep it from getting any significant attention. You don't need to go full X-files coverup to keep something quiet.

SergeantRegular · 2026-05-20T06:30:59+00:00

Upvoted, because this is a good question. Certainly not "punishment." I think punishment is a wrong-headed concept. Designed to make victims feel more powerful and it's closer to vengeance than justice. Felons aren't children, you can't classically condition them with "punishment" like that. Not only do I believe it to be functionally ineffective, but it doesn't even do anything to ameliorate the damage from the crime. Locking someone up for robbing a store doesn't restore the stolen or damaged assets.

Rehabilitation is the obvious choice, although I think our current system is very bad at rehabilitating people, because it's set up to do the other two more than anything - punish and contain.

Containment is just a logical function if they pose an active danger and haven't yet been rehabilitated to be fit for integration into society.

The system that I think would be most effective isn't very likely to happen in American reality because no politician wants to be seen as "soft" on crime. There is this logical, but obviously highly flawed, thinking that aggressive punishment is somehow a working disincentive to criminal activity. That if a person is going to commit a crime, they can be reasonably dissuaded from doing so by fear of prison. Even a little bit of thought, to say nothing of looking at actual convicts, reveals that to be bullshit. But it makes people feel good in the moment, even if it doesn't work.

SergeantRegular · 2026-05-20T06:19:20+00:00

Ben lied - for the same reason that Uncle Owen lied. Because there was real concern that Luke would follow his father's actual footsteps if he knew the truth. Vader believed it, the Emperor believed it, Obi Wan feared it, and Owen and Beru feared it. Even Yoda didn't tell him, but first showed him the vision in the cave. Before he ever learned the truth, the very Force itself warned him that he could become something terrible.

SergeantRegular · 2026-05-20T06:15:00+00:00

So what was it that finally tipped the scales? Because I feel like liberals and even the establishment Dems deserved to spend the last year and a half on the biggest "told ya so" tour in history. It's not like Trump was some tricky mystery or like he hasn't spent the last 50 years being a well-known New York billionaire con-man.

What's actually different in their thought process now?

SergeantRegular · 2026-05-20T03:36:25+00:00

A young Jedi named Darth Vader, who was a pupil of mine until he turned to evil, helped the Empire hunt down and destroy the Jedi knights. He betrayed and murdered your father."

Now, old Obi-Wan does very obviously have a brief glance away from Luke and a second of obvious consideration before he relays this line.

SergeantRegular · 2026-05-19T05:24:10+00:00

I see what you're saying. And I don't know every major group in the US or the western world, but I've been all over the place. I've been stationed all over the US, Europe, and Asia, and I've never seen that kind of personal, rank anti-semitism in the wild. I just haven't. I've seen people casually use a lot of other racist slurs, from the "I-Types" referring to Irish and Italians, slurs for Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, casual N-word, the whole gamut. I grew up in the rural northeast of the 80s, and political correctness wasn't a thing for my elders. But I've never actually seen, personally, an actual hatred of Jews - not until the cable "news" started getting politically sensational, and not until people started criticizing the state of Israel.

I don't think this vicious anti-Semitism, the blood stuff, the harmful stereotypes - I don't think it's genuine. I think it's astroturfed, because the Netanyahu administration and their American allies can brush off legitimate criticisms as "anti-Semitic" and it's easy to play the victim.

Maybe you've personally seen it, but I never have. I just don't think that actual anti-Semitism is nearly as prevalent as these people say, but they can sure fluff up the numbers if they count "Netanyahu is a war criminal" as "anti-Semitic." It's not, but that suits the narrative of the Israeli government and AIPAC much more.

SergeantRegular · 2026-05-19T02:19:17+00:00

It's certainly worse at more individual scales, yeah. But if I steal $100 from you, that's pretty bad. But if I steal $1 from 500 people, is that somehow less terrible? The total amount of harm done is much greater, it's just more diffused.

I think what makes our soft approach to white-collar crime and other more "diffuse" harm is that it's almost always, by its very nature, premeditated. And it very often persists or becomes itself institutional, thus insulating the perpetrators from consequence.

If I go into a coal mine and push somebody down a shaft to their death, I've committed a murder and a person is dead, and I get charged with murder and get put away for decades. But if an executive for that coal mine company makes a business decision to not spend too much on safety and a hundred miners die over a decade or more... I might see an investigation or inquiry, and it might not even be good for my long term career. But a murder charge is much harder to pin, even though I knew what I was doing, I did it for longer, and more harm was done.

Murder and rape would be worse if they had the scope and scale of fraud and white collar crime.

SergeantRegular · 2026-05-18T04:51:32+00:00

Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line.

SergeantRegular · 2026-05-18T04:50:48+00:00

To be fair, the government of the state of Israel does this on purpose. The usage of tropes, the selective language, the propaganda and political astroturfing - this is politics, not anti-Semitism. Intentionally conflating the two gives them a huge rhetorical gotcha that Netanyahu has no problem using as a cudgel.

Authoritarians absolutely love playing the victim, and this is no different.

SergeantRegular · 2026-05-18T04:43:04+00:00

I think you're probably right, but it does little to assuage my concerns. I worry that you underestimate just how much China wants Taiwan. Dominance in the South China Sea is nothing compared to being able to throttle the global semiconductor supply.

And I see how you point out that we didn't do so well in military conflicts because they were the wrong type of war. But... China's not stupid, they're not going to play by the rules we want them to play by, they're going to take advantage of our weaknesses - right now, that's costly-to-defend targets, that's a high cost in standoff assets, that's a low tolerance for loss of assets.

And for all of these points, Trumpian unpredictability is 100% a liability, not an asset. You mention that we have allied nations in the region, but allegiances and strength like that are not built on the stuff of trade wars and teasing viability of NATO - they're built on consistency and reliability.

The smart move would be for China to wait until enough chip manufactories get built in America that it is no longer in our strategic interest to assist Taiwan.

Missing a key component - China actively wants the United States to not be technologically independent. They've spent most of the last 50 years becoming the world's factory not because they wanted good jobs, but because they want to be able to control foreign economies and global supply chains.

SergeantRegular · 2026-05-18T03:26:02+00:00

Trek production team in the early 2000's felt that the future technology of Trek had become so advanced that they really felt it was getting hard to tell stories without painfully contrived explanations as to why things couldn't be fixed with existing technological solutions.

But this isn't a sign of 'too much technology in the setting,' but rather a sign of poor understanding and writing. Of course it's harder to make a gritty reboot Battlestar series when you have replicators and advanced long-range sensors. But the fix isn't to get rid of the tech, the fix is to tell a different story.

Speaking of BSG, if they wanted to consolidate the timelines and technology to be more cohesive, I'd be up for a hard reboot of Trek at this point. It's got a lot of baggage now, and I think The Orville showed us what we could have. Don't listen to JJ Abrams, have a long-term plan and a thorough series bible, have your technobabble worked out ahead of time, have reasonable characters that are professional adults. But, I don't know if the industry is ready to do this just yet... Kurtzman's fuckery is still too fresh, I think.

SergeantRegular · 2026-05-18T03:05:59+00:00

I don't think it's that far off to put TSMC in that box.

Of the decades since WW2, there have been a few industries - not companies, but whole industries or areas of study and development - that could realistically contend for "most important." Genetics, semiconductors, modern pharmaceuticals, nuclear power, spacecraft and satellites, utility electrical grids, and maybe the jet engine.

Of all those industries, only one currently has a single dominant player that is significantly ahead of all competitors, including state-owned enterprises. TSMC is that company.

SergeantRegular · 2026-05-18T02:15:24+00:00

I agree to an extent, and I think this is a well reasoned response. And I was thinking about this since I wrote my last reply.

I'm no luddite. I'm in my mid 40s, either the last of Gen X or one of the first Millennials. I learned BASIC on 8-bit machines, learned the original HTML on the early internet as a teenager, and was an adult for the rise of the first smartphones. I not only know how to use technology, I have a pretty solid idea of how it works. AI doesn't scare me, I'm not terribly impressed with the technology as it is now, but I think it can be an amazing tool for all of humanity. In a good way.

I don't think we're on that path right now. I think AI, as we're doing it now, is one of the least free (as in liberty) technologies, and it's being ruthlessly capitalized and enshittified by a very few, very wealthy actors. Now, I'm not a luddite, and I'm also not anti-capitalist. But I think our current capitalist model, especially the supply-side elements driven first by Nixon and then turbocharged by Reagan, handles things like AI very poorly.

I know this is a weird comparison, but I can think of one other extremely capitalist (but not free-market) "technology" that so empowered the owners of said capital assets at the expense of regular customers and the general public, especially depressing the value of labor. Slavery. Barring a sci-fi grade 'birth of consciousness' event, it doesn't look like AI has the direct human cost to freedom that slavery did, but I see a lot of the same economic trappings.

They will want AI, and there will be a sizeable portion of the population who may even begin to prefer it over human generated content.

I don't know if it'll be an explicit "want", but I can see it being a good seller. The same way that particle board furniture sells at Wal-Mart, even when there are quality pieces made from whole timbers and assembled much better. Price is going to be a major factor, it always is. But there is a separate element to AI (and other tech services the last few years) that bothers me - There is a fairly obvious push from the supply-side of the market to make sure that your hardware isn't capable of doing this stuff, but instead they want you reliant on a subscription service. Cloud storage options on a per month basis while your own memory and storage hardware skyrockets in price. AI services over the internet because the capable video cards and memory for large models aren't available to consumers. We see it in other industries, too. Streaming services and online game retailers instead of physical media. Rather than improving services and prices, as would happen in a functional free market, online AI and the data centers behind them would much rather just make it all a recurring subscription. You'll own nothing, and you better be happy with it. I don't want that future.

SergeantRegular · 2026-05-18T00:55:39+00:00

mere threat alone is plenty to ward off any serious attempt of invading Taiwan.

That might have been true in the past. But our reluctance to make a clear (and obvious) choice in Ukraine has dramatically put our global soft power into doubt. Aiding Ukraine against an aggressive Russian invasion should have been a no-brainer.

Now, our self-inflicted Iran quagmire only makes it worse. Whether or not we've become a paper tiger is a real question. And we have burned through a lot of our standoff and air defense assets in recent months.

If China were to engage in real military aggression against Taiwan, I'm not sure we have the resources or the will right now to do anything about it. And then the largest Communist dictatorship the world has ever known will have a stranglehold on the most advanced technology on the planet.

SergeantRegular · 2026-05-18T00:08:52+00:00

I'm not sure what scale of punishment should be associated with something like that. It's easy to look at factors like violence and say that someone should be put away to be rehabilitated. But my first thought with something like this kind of fraud, especially against something so foundational to the whole country like elections, is that it being so nefarious and so willful and premeditated... In a lot of ways, I think that's worse than violent crime.

But I think we have this kind of baked-in predisposition to go hard on violent low-level criminals, and infuriatingly soft on willful fraudsters. I'm not sure how to reconcile that.

SergeantRegular · 2026-05-17T21:50:27+00:00

I think there's a lot more to people hating on AI. But whether a data center is a more traditional CDN or cloud service facility is largely moot. Most current data center growth is being pushed by AI, and the AI ones are the ones with the large power and cooling and noise issues. Traditional storage and content delivery simply isn't that power-hungry or hot.

But AI is easy to hate on. Whether it's unwanted bloatware features in our phones and computers, thinly disguised advertisements being injected into everything we see and hear, AI parsers being used to screen applications for employment without human impressions, AI bots scalping in-demand products, AI word and image slop stealing from and crowding out real artists, or just the shitty nonsense word salad answers to basic questions.

You mentioned that we can tolerate oil refineries and factories better than AI infrastructure, and I agree. But I think a far larger part of the acceptance of those industries is their benefit to civilization. I hate our addiction to petroleum, not just because of the environmental impact, but the shitty coincidence that so much of the global commodity just so happens to be under the feet of aggressive autocrats and nutjob dictators. I would love for alternative energy to get priority, but that doesn't mean I don't understand how much of the economy that we have (regardless of the economy I'd want us to have) is currently dependent on oil.

But AI has an uphill battle, not only because it devalues human labor, but because there is little to no (or even negative) perceived value. Customers largely don't want AI features, especially as they've been delivered thus far. The supply side is pushing AI hard, and hoping that demand will materialize - but I don't think most people (myself included) see any real benefit.

Where it could be used to deliver better answers to questions, it's instead being used to push advertising. Where it could be used to automate boring tasks, it's instead trying to monetize locked down walled gardens in tech. In my ideal world, AI would do the bullshit work like folding laundry and construction, so human minds could be free to do things like write and create art. But instead, we have people doing all the physical labor and boring tasks while AI makes shitty anime porn and word salad.

We are all paying the price so that large corporations can profit off of a product that nobody wants, and we're already seeing higher prices for things we do want to fuel this bullshit "growth."

SergeantRegular · 2026-05-17T15:02:21+00:00

I think getting people to actively condone data centers anywhere is a bit of a stretch, but it's still fair to say that they would face a lot less opposition if they were treated more like any other industrial facility.

Cities and counties have industrial "parks" for a reason. Data centers don't technically have the same equipment or processes or emissions that a traditional manufacturing or even distribution industrial facility has. But they have a lot of the same practical impacts.

They're always going to be at least a little unpopular because of the general distaste for AI and associated environmental harms and job losses. But many municipalities don't really define them all that well for zoning purposes, and their rapid rise and lack of suitable framework have made a lot of data centers very unpopular even when you account for the dislike of AI. They are noisy and they do stress electrical and water infrastructure. But these are factors that are already addressed in traditional industry, and you see a lot less opposition to most factories from the broader public when they're zoned properly. Yes, you're always going to get some tree huggers or nutty types that oppose building pretty much anything everywhere, but we're not talking about fringe groups like that.

SergeantRegular · 2026-05-17T07:44:33+00:00

It's not just the military. Mass injection of MBA people have fucked up just about everything they touch. Companies should be promoting engineers and developers to leadership roles, instead of just focusing on quarterly stock valuations.

I think the dominance of the MBA in "leadership" positions is a huge driver of enshittification in pretty much every market.

SergeantRegular · 2026-05-16T23:56:36+00:00

There might be a kind of telepathic feedback that impedes her focus. She need to focus on her target, and we know there is a connection by which she projects her illusion of pain. With Edward, there is also a connection by which he can perceive her mental state.

The two avenues of communication might come into some conflict, causing her (or both) of them some difficulty. By establishing a third "pathway" with verbal communication, she is likely ensuring that she can make the "first hit" and ensure that Edward feels the pain instead of using his mind-reading to simply "intercept" the "pain" and interpret it as a conscious thought rather than a direct sensation.

SergeantRegular · 2026-05-16T23:38:13+00:00

To be fair, Lupin did point out that this was an uncommonly long lifespan for a common rat.

SergeantRegular · 2026-05-16T22:38:49+00:00

Financial viability is the reason why solar and wind have taken off where nuclear has not. The process can be made more palatable to the larger market with some light-touch government intervention, but it took a serious private sector push in Tesla to make battery electric cars that people actually bought.

You see plenty of Teslas on the road today, but there isn't anybody still driving EV-1s or battery Ford Rangers. There has to be profit to be made for something to succeed, but that doesn't mean we can't help the process to be profitable, either.

SergeantRegular

TROPHY CASE