Well, that and due to them being investigated for how they handle children’s data and access, it had appeared that a fine was heading their way.

The US Revolution was justified as being in protest against taxes, but taxes raised to pay for the Seven Years War which (chronologically, if not causally) began with George Washington ambushing French troops and resulted in colonists gaining significant territory. One of the nowadays less romanticised causes of the revolution itself was the block on westward expansion of the colonies by the British government too, incidentally.

Your outline there also ignores the many wars and atrocities that describe the westward expansion of the USA (and beyond, the Philippines for example) as it actually did happen too, they very much did not begin their imperialism with the start of the cold war.

The Stanford Review is evidence enough that at least Thiel was already an utter piece of shit before this.

That’s fine, there are a great deal of more impactful and meaningful things that people can do instead of voting. My point is that if someone’s sole contribution is voting, they haven’t actually done anything.

The ratchet effect works because vast swathes of people can’t perceive of any way to affect change beyond voting, thus creating a single (recurring) major choke point for going through the ‘correct’ channels.

If all you do is vote, you can’t complain.

“[Don’t] [let] perfect be the enemy of good” is such an overused and rarely useful phrase, most often little more than a blunt object used to insist that people accept tepid compromises rather than daring to demand genuine solutions.

Not that EVs are bad of course, but EVs for ‘everyone’ as opposed to mass transit isn’t a solution (although of course it is a slightly less bleak shade of shit than ICE vehicles for ‘everyone’), and doing that whilst enabling people who are already benefitting disproportionately from the status quo to benefit ever more dramatically is even less of one.

It’s really easy to compromise oneself into complete irrelevance too.

My understanding was that any hitherto success of LLMs in mathematics was in its trying approaches and information from different fields where they weren’t traditionally applied (within mathematics), they have surfaced potential links but haven’t created anything in any real sense. Still, a potential legitimate use for them that I personally hadn’t anticipated.