It’s not very wild when you realize you’re talking to addicts. The whole world is addicted.

I think the fun hasn’t even begun. The “market” or whatever. The collective mind hasn’t yet realized or the scale hasn’t quite tipped yet on how bad this all is. I think maybe too many people are silently making their financial move so as to not be the one to that sets it all off. Or they’re trying to tread carefully before the house of cards falls.

Like when Lehman went under in 2008. All those shit derivatives were plugging along. Some people knew it was rotten. The system kept going until suddenly didn’t anymore. Then all the red lights and alarm bells went off.

Even with current market downturn. I think it’s yet to go off the cliff. They keep bending the system and it’s bowing but it hasn’t really broken yet. When it does I think a greater than 50% drop in the SP500 is possible.

That’s not to say it’s going to all come crashing down in like a day or a week or even a month. I think the paradigm of the past 15 years is over. The one where’ there’s a relatively brief drop and then everyone buys “cheap stock” and then everything goes 20% higher.

I think we’re in for a long period of decline. Where people cannot simply dump money into investments and see gains every year. We could be in for a long haul where people put money into an SP500 fund and it loses every year. Maybe a 0%-1% gain on a good year due to sideways movement.

It’s kind of weird people are taking that literally.

Also just a weird is how the internet predominantly lays the blame solely on parents. And people love to absolve everyone else especially teachers of any childhood development responsibilities. LIke the saying goes, ‘it takes a village’. Teachers are as much parents as anyone else in the village. The aunts/uncles, neighbors, corner store clerk, mailman, police officer. When kids act up, the adults have to correct it.

Yet the internet generally just glares at the parents. Then again it stands to reason parents or broadly speaking people who actively engage in parenting roles aren’t chronically online. They’re actually raising children.

People wonder why things are the way they are. Maybe it’s because the village has absconded.

If I had kids I should damn well hope they get a beating at school when they step out of line. Figuratively of course. Because. The internet seems to have lost all reading comprehension. Maybe they weren’t beat enough at school either… Figuratively I mean.

its executive director of public safety, Chris Clem, who is a former US Customs and Border Protection agent who testified before Congress about border security last year and regularly appears on Fox News

So a bunch of chuds managed to take their weekend pedo hunting and turn it into a shitty startup.

The screenshot of files looks like an troll. I can’t believe nobody is pointing this out.

I mean really. Who even names folders like that.

Privatization probably.

People know what 4chan is. There’s no illusions about it. reddit and its derivatives are were the real trolling goes down.

I think it’s not new. “homegrown terrorist” -> “homegrowns”.

I’m speculating they’re going to use that angle. Using precedents set by The War on Terrorism ™ to justify the next steps. The 50501 movement needs to be preparing organized legal supports for anyone who gets disappeared. I bet this is who they are going after next. Summer is coming. The protests are ramping up. What if it’s as soon as the April 19th event.

Notice the “free market” vanishes when it’s a thing they don’t like. Suddenly we need strong authority to ensure it’s “fair”.

Those who take issue with loss of profits without ads must take it up with big tech. They’ve have literal trillions of dollars from dominating the ad industry. They have your money. Nobody else.

It’s the tech oligarchs. They’re doing their own gilded age. Their empires exist in the tech domain. Mostly IT services. They’re going after the whole pie. They want the entirety of American industry.

What they have in mind exactly is anyone’s guess. We’re not going back to the times of railroad or oil barons. We’re not necessarily going back steel and auto manufacturing. The future is in things like robotics, renewable energy, semiconductors, or whatever the future holds.

I think crashing the economy just to buy stock is old news too. The saying has become rather mindlessly echoed. They have relatively little to gain from this. The rich hold 90% of stocks. There’s little to extract from the remaining 10%. Plus I think people have believed too much in the idea that stocks are a shell game. It’s not as much as people think. The markets are still based on tangibles meaning actual industry. That is what the oligarchs are after. What’s better than owning stock in the industry is owning the industry itself. Complete total monopolies just like the gilded age and just like they’ve monopolized IT services sector.

The chronically online incels look for things to mass report. It’s part of their ongoing campaign to shove the Overton Window far right.

Reddits content moderation are cubicle farm employees that barely look at content; nevermind actual context or intent. They’re clearing tickets to make quota. Right wingers exploit this to control discourse.

You can try doing it yourself. Look for frivolous things to report as offensive. You can get quite a bit of things removed.

It feels like a warped in to another dimension. Did everyone start using only 5 years ago?

The music can come screeching to a halt for the US tech industry. They haven’t been innovating for a long time. Just relying on monopolization, rehashing old shit, or straight up VC baiting with useless garbage. The rest of the world needs to continue to realize they can do tech too. They can produce novel and actually useful things. Whereas the US industry has been strangling itself to death with anti-competition.

Especially with regards to AI. Once more others realize the milestone innovations in this field comes from academic research which is then taken by the private sector for profit. Others can realize and follow this path. They can spin up quicker than they think. With the education system being systematically dismantled in a pivot to identity politics protectionism over innovation, the future looks rather grim for the US. Bright for others though.

There was definitely a time when people were smarter. I read a comment on r/xennials that stuck with me. They were lamenting the loss of a the culture of their youth. I’m not sure I can rephrase it as well as they said it.

Basically they were describing how it used to be about how we questioned things. Like the show The X-Files. It was about seeking the truth. They noted how that show was reflective of how reality was. There was this common mindset that the answers are out there. That we can work together even to seek the answers and we will find them inevitably.

You see that doesn’t make much sense in 2025 because everyone has the answer to anything and everything. Except it’s their own answer. Not the answer. More than ever their answer is one which is derived from their internet / social media bubble.

There is no longer some big unknown out there full of mysteries to unravel. Not anymore. The zeitgeist right now is that I have my own world view and that’s the one. I know how the system works. I know the way. It’s the way I see the world. So why doesn’t everyone else come join my world view??? Are they stupid?

In the past we didn’t know everything. Nobody knew anything. Nobody had any illusion that they did. Nor could they whip out their pocket rectangle and find answers immediately.

In the past people had to be more open minded. They had to be honest about not knowing. Without modern media they had to be seekers of knowledge. As opposed to over confident purveyors relying on a quick internet search (these days a simple GPT query). The modern zeitgeist is one where everybody talks. Nobody listens. 8 billion deaf ears listening and learning nothing. Just waiting for their turn to talk. Everyone learned everything and they’re so damn sure of it.

Stupid people think they know it all. Smarter people are unsure of what they know. Of course there were stupid people before. But they knew they were stupid. Today the stupids can mask it by repeating words from the podcast, the tiktoks, the youtube videos they just watched.

It’s not uniquely an American problem. The American symptoms are quite a sight to beheld though.

Americans are going to take this as a statement that Canada themselves are paying the tariffs.

Failing through life with great success.

Attaching “tech” to everything makes it more palatable. Desirable even. It masks the fact that feudal lords are reinventing everything but with “tech”.

The gestapo are detaining and interrogating conventionally attractive cis white girls. That means nobody is off limits right now. I sure won’t be going anymore and I don’t fall under a categorically targeted minority.

https://variety.com/2025/film/news/american-pie-actress-detained-ice-1236339981/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/music/article-canadian-folk-duo-cassie-and-maggie-face-bizarre-loyalty-test-at/

Tech companies hire psychologists to behavior modify us to be engagement zombies. That alone must have done a number on intelligence.