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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Note that Musk was not a PayPal founder, he helped found “X”, a PayPal competitor that wasn’t really doing that well, but managed to merge with PayPal after PayPal was winning the market.

    Musk was also the one who about ran PayPal into the ground with incompetence and he was forced out of decision making to save the company.

    Don’t know if this changes anything relative to Thiel, but just wanted to highlight that Musk gets credited with PayPal but his history is first losing to them as a competitor and nearly ruining them as a leader, and finally getting a big sum off money for eBay for his failures…






  • Frankly Hilary wasn’t a good candidate, Elizabeth Warren would have been better, to illustrate it wasn’t about her gender, but her specifically.

    Hilary campaign was largely based around:

    I’m a Clinton, remember us from 16 years ago, when my husband was president and I had nothing to do with policy, and mostly remembered as the woman who got cheated on? Clinton was remembered fondly enough I suppose, but that was 16 years ago, and any momentum from that had evaporated. The youngest voters were toddlers when that ended. If they wanted a bit of credibility by affinity to an administration, should have been Obama.

    If you don’t vote for me, you are a terrible person.

    “I’m with her”, which is just a terrible slogan that indicates a backwards relationship between a candidate and electorate. Even the megalomaniac asshole Trump managed to focus on “America” rather than himself with his slogan.

    She didn’t do much to energize anyone, and despite lacking substance she still managed to have folks dislike her candidacy. Whether it be by ditching her home state to go somewhere that would give her a government position or by pissing off the Bernie wing, or, as stupid as it is, I even heard some Democrat mad at her for embarrassing Bill Clinton by “making” him cheat.



  • 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…





  • 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.