GreenSkree

I think it's more about finding something that clearly gets under his skin.

Weird that name-calling is that thing, but I guess it makes sense given how much time he seems to spend crafting names for other people.

For everything the conservatives are bad at, they are somehow crazy good at messaging.*

Their ability to take a positive term, redefine it as something it isn't, and use it as a hammer is impressive. The reality of "getting rid of DEI" clearly means more discrimination and hiring/firing based on race/sex/etc, but they certainly framed it as "best candidate instead of minority preference".

This is a repeating trend. Fake news, Critical race theory, woke, cancel culture, marxism, radical left, et -- these are all good examples of the right redefining and hijacking terms or language. It wouldn't surprise me if they try to do it with the word "democracy" to mean something like "far left woke Democrat ideals".

* Just to clarify -- "good at messaging" just meaning that it's effective at being taken up and repeated by a subset of the population. How people listen to and trust the stuff is beyond me.

The point? I think he expected the world leaders to come bearing personal gifts and favors. Trade some of the US's global position and power for his own personal wealth and power? I don't have proof, but it would be on-brand for Trump.

He's also surrounded himself with yes-men and crazy people (e.g. Navarro). He clearly has an elementary understanding (at best) of economics. Money good. China bad. Money go to China bad (trade imbalance). Tariffs keep money here.

Combine all that with the fact that he never admits responsibility for anything. When China pushed back, he retaliated. When they stopped participating, it leaves us in a stalemate that I believe will hurt us a lot more than them.

So, I think the trade imbalance is the justification. The goal is likely just personal power for Trump. But he doesn't really know what he's doing, doesn't care to learn, just thinking he's the greatest being in existence and everything bad is not his fault.

I think there's a few reasons.

• People are tuned into propaganda. I get exposed to it once in a while and it's abhorrent. Arguing, yelling, and just a deluge of lies. It pretends to be important. It pretends to be news. But really, it's more like 1984's 2 minutes of hate diluted down and stretch out so people can get their fill whenever they want (or for older people, just consume it constantly).

• For many less politically-involved people, they are still emotionally and culturally tied to their political "team". For many, it's easier to just go along with the shifts in the party than to change identity.

• People are lazy/busy/uninterested. People generally don't want to learn about economics, history, politics, sociology, psychology, etc. This leaves a huge hole for someone like Trump to say and do the things he's been doing without his uneducated base calling BS. I took 2 100-level economics electives long ago for my degree and saw right through his tariff lies because this stuff isn't that complicated.

• Messaging. The right-wing messaging is mostly half-truths and all-out lies, but they are incredibly effective at getting their messaging out and believed. A lot of it is just repetition, repetition, repetition. The left really needs to get their shit together. I'm not looking for propaganda like the right is doing, but the Dems started loosing so badly because the right would grab an issue like a rabid Chihuahua and just not let go. Benghazi is a perfect example. Fix the messaging -- keep is simple and just repeat it forever.

There's probably some (small) guardrails on the major platforms to deter spreading misinformation, but it's really easy to get a chat bot to take whatever position you want.

E.g. "Pretend you are a human on Twitter that supports (thing). Please make tweets about your support of (thing) and respond to our conversation as though my comments are tweet replies."

Or more creatively maybe something like, "I need to practice debating someone who thinks (thing). Please argue with me using the most popular arguments, regardless of correctness."

I haven't tried these, but have a bit of practice working with LLMs and this is where I would start if I wanted to make a bot farm.

The YouTube video is a repost. Pretty sure the original was Flash from the early 2000s.

Yeah. Outrage now doesn't mean outrage when it matters. Things will look very different in 4 years and conservatives always seem willing to fall in line.

And Gavin Newsom started a podcast and is cozying up to crazy right wingers.

This hasn't been true at any of the places I've worked.

There's always been some pressure from management, usually through project managers or business users, for urgency around certain features, timelines, releases, etc. Sometimes you'll have a buffer of protection from these demands, sometimes not.

One place I worked was so consistently relentless about the dev team's delivery speed that it was a miserable place to work. There was never time to fix the actual pain points because there were always new features being demanded or emergency fixes required because most code bases were a wreck and falling apart.

If I remember right, super delegates were the main reason Bernie lost the nomination.

They missed so many opportunities to make it actually a nightmare. Adding these should help...

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Edit: formatting

And beyond this, solving the problem is just the baseline. Solving the problem well can take an immense amount of time, often producing solutions that appear overly simplistic in the end.

I recently watched a talk about ongoing Java language work (Project Valhalla). They've been working on this particular set of performance improvements for years without a lot to show for it. Apparently, they had some prototypes that worked well but were unwieldy to use. After a lot of refinement, they have a solution that seems completely obvious. It takes a lot of skill to come up with solutions like that, and this type of work would be unjustly punished by algorithms like this.