2,508 karma · joined March 4, 2010
meet.hn/city/43.1009031,-75.2326641/City-of-Utica
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1: https://www.zolkos.com/2025/12/03/vanilla-css-is-all-you-nee...
2: https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/subgrid/
3: https://railsdesigner.com/custom-elements/ (more Rails specific)
I imagine many fail cases can burn a lot of tokens/usage/time because failing LLMs can be very persistent. Maybe some upper bound (turn count, timeout) would help too.
What relevant examples of getting away with corruption can we glean from a pre-enlightenment, pre-formal-police, pre-constitution, pre-checks-and-balances, pre-judiciary-act, pre-telegraph, pre-paper-trail, pre-free-journalism, pre-internet, pre-camera-phones, pre-surveillance, pre-data-centers, pre-whistleblowers, pre-structures of accountability world?
Corruption has gotten magnitudes harder to get away with (even since 00s), which is why history is irrelevant here. You would need something extraordinary, like becoming a president with criminal immunity and self-pardon powers, and getting an electoral majority to support you being openly corrupt.
He prosecuted them, and chose fines over criminal punishments. If this was due to maliciousness or corruption, I'm glad that whoever openly explained it all in this interview gave up his plot. /s
> I’m saying you’re dangerously shit at reading between the lines if you don’t see the scheme when an ex-government person gets $400k+ per instance to show up and speak to financial institutions they/their administration didn’t prosecute out of profitability (or even majorly inconvenience their compliance department).
I'm saying that you're so good at reading between the lines, that you no longer see the lines. You say all these random facts, but aren't connecting them to prove any corruption. If our judicial system worked the way you read between the lines, we'd all be in prison.
> All the way back before the East India Trading Company
What happened in 1600s has zero bearing on what happens today. Even the world in the 80s and 90s is no longer remotely the same.
> if the only true consequence is a $$,$$$ speeding ticket
Nobody ever actually knows what fine they will get. One day it's a fine, another day it's a judge making an example. No business exec in their sane mind would ever risk this. No lawyer in a sane mind would ever advise this. It's an incredibly uninformed, foolish position to only see a couple of perverse incentives, and be completely blind to the overwhelming amount of positive incentives.
Let's take revolving door. Who would you want to be in charge of regulating an industry, a person who knows it inside out or a newcomer who has no idea how anything works? How would the latter have any hope at being an effective regulator? You would never accept this kind of lack of experience anywhere else in life. But for some reason we're all used to pointing out revolving doors as some kind of gotcha, without giving it the basic level of thought.
Dark money sounds bad, but anonymity doesn't imply corruption. Money also isn't enough. Look at billionaires trying to run for president, and where they got. You'll also be hard pressed to find any example where a politician picks a stance that goes against their constituents' opinion, in favor of money. Usually money piggybacks on a public opinion that already supports them, or is largely indifferent. History has shown that pumping money can rarely reverse public opinion to a significant extent, but sometimes can dissuade a positive opinion into indifference. Even that, unclear if it’s still possible in today’s world.
Kids for cash — I didn't know what it was at first. Sure, that's straight corruption. A couple of judges committed crimes, got caught, and received prison sentences.
I could go down every example you made, but I hope the sample above illustrates what I mean. "Documented history" is conjecture until it's adjudicated. You're making a mistake of putting "documented history" (insinuations of corruption in dark money, revolving doors, voter suppression) in the same bucket as clear and adjudicated corruption (like kids for cash), and based on this mixed bucket of good and bad examples, make a conclusion that there's always been outsized corruption in US, compared to normal baseline. Your basis for that conclusion is flawed.
This was a descriptive, not a prescriptive statement, of a real problem. He literally says that it is concerning that prosecuting large institutions can cause economic harm. He isn't saying they won't prosecute, he says it's difficult because of the downsides. Holder made a mistake of wheeling out a complex nuance to a public that isn't prepared to handle it.
I don't understand where is the evidence of malicious force trying to self-serve? Anything specific that points to corruption here? Is this like "yay, Holder gave us a loophole! We just need to build an incredibly large, successful business, and now it will be difficult for Holder to prosecute us, so we can finally start being corrupt"? Is that what you're saying?
What large successful business would want to squander it all on corruption on an off chance that the economic inconvenience would save them from prosecution? They are the most incentivized to identify and remove that sort of PR and legal cancer from their org.
There exists unprosecuted corruption for sure, just like any other crime, but claiming that it’s somehow happening on an outsized scale vs expected normal baseline? Based on what? Listening to people pointing it out who have everything to gain from selling this narrative? Conjecture and vibes?
Again, things can be complicated, even bad. That doesn’t mean they’re corrupt until there’s credible evidence specifically of corruption taking place.
Your position seems to be that if it can be corruption, it is corruption.
When you delete a customer database at work, it doesn't have to be because you're corrupt.
You're believing conjecture, because it makes you feel smarter, like you can see through the facade. The reality is that you're probably afraid to come off naive. We have to be stronger and fight this urge to cry wolf about everything, because sometimes real ones show up.
This is the first time in recent history we went from normal amount of incidents of corruption to straight up corrupt administration.
> “normal” often seems like a horrible bar to aim for.
If "normal" is a horrible bar to aim for, you should figure out what a world with zero crime would look like. I don't think you would ever want that world if you take time to think about it.
Mainstream democrats who actually know how to govern unfortunately don't have great rhetorical skills, easy slogans and sound bites, or the social media skills required to fight back against populist pundits. The mainstream media at one point also started going insanely harsh on normal democrats, while giving lay up interviews to trumpers, to avoid being accused of TDS.
Democrats fail to fight on both fronts because they often suck at being influencers, and are actually good at governing. They're boring government officials, nerds that try to actually tackle difficult problems in good faith, by taking all stakeholders into account, and finding feasible solutions.
Things are not simple. You're in a populist rabbit hole. It's easy to hate these suit wearing "corporate" dems if you don't actually appreciate the complexity of modern problems we're solving.
What we had before is a normal amount of corruption. There's no such thing as having zero crime. Just like we can say that air travel is safe, despite there being incidents, we can say there is no corruption, despite there being incidents.
The talk of shadowy cabals and conspiracies are fashionable, but never proven.
Corruption that actually meaningfully hurts the country and the world at scale (in recent history) only started with this administration.
You're going down a populist rabbit hole, I've been there, it's not a good one.
Bad news is, you're probably in the midpoint of that meme bell curve. Grown up structures and institutions are designed well, with accountability built-in. Many many good people work in them, who hate corruption as much as you do. Bad actors are whistle-blowed upon, persecuted, convicted, and imprisoned. It's incredibly difficult in practice to do anything significantly corrupt and stay unnoticed. I don't know if you work (like, at a large-size workplace), but imagine doing something shady at your work, surrounded by your colleagues. It's not easy. The amount of surveillance, paper trail, auditing that government work entails is way more than any normal business.
The irony is that your unending cynicism is actually turning you into a fool for the other side: the populists that constantly discredit institutions. They figured out that your cynicism (aversion to being scammed?) is so strong, that it can be used to scam you. They only need to discredit everyone else, that's easy. Make conspiratorial allegations based on perceived outcomes, not actual proof. Sell you all the cynicism in the world: everything is broken, everyone's bad, and you're one of the smart ones who sees it. US institutions are corrupt and worthless. This lets them pretend to be experts, because you're now a guest in their version of reality. And they directly financially benefit from your attention.
Institutions maintain real internal accountability (none of these alternative media populists do), implement real processes that work, tackle real issues in ways that take into account all stakeholders, and don't just produce slogans and talking points. I know they're old and not cool, but they work. Unfortunately, very few groups are left that actually defend them, you all got scammed by relentless, self-serving, financially incentivized alternative media into thinking that everything is broken.
Just because things are complex, doesn't mean they're broken. Just because measures taken aren't always satisfying, doesn't mean they are malicious. Don't get scammed into this world view by people who directly financially benefit from selling it.
What we’re witnessing now is what should be called corruption. That corruption that everyone has been screaming for years. But finally real.
Remember, the job of these people’s propaganda is not to say that they’re better than the other side. It’s to say that they’re all the same. That’s it. And when you claim that this corruption is just a continuation of previous corruption, just bigger, and not a difference between essentially not having and having corruption (there’s always some small percentage of corruption, just like any crime) is essentially sweeping for them. It’s repeating their talking points.
And since this is such a predictable thing, it's very likely done intentionally.
No guarantees about the content, use your own judgement. Curious what people think about an idea like this.
Tech: research by GPT 5.6-Sol, clarity review loop with Kimi K3, audio by Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS. Hugo for static site, Cloudflare Pages + R2.
Tech info: research is done by GPT 5.6-Sol, goes through clarity review loop with Kimi K3, audio is created with Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS. Hugo for static site generation, hosted on Cloudflare (R2 for audio files).
ASRock H67M-ITX, i3 2.5GHz, 16GB DDR3 1333Mhz, 2TB+4TB SSDs, DVD-RW, in this Mini-ITX Antec case[1].