I doubt Trump thought that far but his posse of inside traders certainly did. And they’re (probably) right.

BTC will never replace the petrodollar, but already acts as a refuge asset exactly like gold. It is valuable because it is reliably scarce and reliably in demand. It is not unreasonable that with US bonds cratering and the fed causing Turkish levels of inflation on Trump’s orders, some investors would divert some of that money to (perceived) alternatives such as gold and crypto. Much to the pleasure of Trump’s buddies.

What’s bizarre to me is that a lot of billionaires not close to the Trump syndicate will be getting fucked on the collapse of the US economy and it’s hard to believe they are getting a better deal than under Biden when the stock market was booming and they could already buy politicians and newspapers for relative peanuts. The supposed deep state is doing a really bad fucking job of fighting for its own survival.

This whole case has collapsed into a handful of choices:

1. Judge doesn’t declare the Trump admin in Contempt of Court (i.e. does nothing). This sets precedent that Trump’s administration enjoys full immunity from the judiciary, officially turning the US into a dictatorship. This is what has been happening for weeks and remains by far the most likely scenario.
2. Judge declares Trump in Contempt of Court, but is unable to enforce it. This is equivalent to scenario 1.
3. Judge declares the Trump admin in Contempt of Court and deputizes state police to enforce the ruling and arrest, if not Trump, at least some officials. This would be legal and remains the only constitutional solution, but would almost certainly trigger an armed response from the regime. Democracy doesn’t go down without a fight, but the end result is uncertain.
4. Pro-democracy factions use illegal/violent means to force Trump to comply (military coup, sudden Luigi’s Mansion remake, etc.). However it would seem that the masks fell off and despite decades of propaganda to the contrary, literally not a single living American is willing to put their life on the line to protect Democracy.

Democrats again playing backfooted.

The time to chastise congressional insider trading was last year at the latest. Now they’re doing the same, but on a much bigger scale and without fear of reprisal because the institutions meant to penalize insider trading have all been gutted. They are literally openly bragging about the billions they made from this move.

This is how fascism wins. Antifascists perpetually fighting last month’s battle while everyone else deals with this week’s crisis. Mark my words: Republicans will disclose their trades in a month or so and literally nothing will happen.

1. He’s dumber than you give him credit for
2. What is the point of the supposed cover story? To cover from who, about what? He’s literally paying people to vote, again. Next to that, buying a social media to influence it almost sounds democratic.

The reason that conspiracy theory is appealing is the same for all conspiracy theories; it’s more comforting to think the powerful have a clever masterful evil plan than the sad reality that we’re all making it up as we go, even the literal Nazis.

Relevant ContraPoints from 4 days ago

I mean yeah it’s all very complex for sure. Managing a cluster is very involved and k8s administration is typically a completely separate role from dev/devops. I am comfortable with the idea and I still run my selfhosted setup on docker because it’s easier and I have no personal use for multi-node setups.

However when you get down to it pretty much everything in k8s solves a real problem that in a “traditional” infra would require lots of ad-hoc bullshit. The ingress system of k8s is, at a high level, a standardized recreation of the typical “haproxy+nginx+ad-hoc provisioning” setup you’d find in a “classical” private cloud deployment. TLS in, send to nginx, nginx chooses a relevant healthy back-end and reverse proxies the request. K8s doesn’t really do anything crazy complex, the complexity is just inherent to having a many-to-many mapping of HTTP requests while optionally supporting multi-zone setups with local affinity and lifecycle management/awareness.

But unlike with a traditional deployment there’s not a greybeard guru in the back who deployed it all and knows the ins-and-outs so it’s quite common that the complexity is not understood and underappreciated by the “admins”. That complexity is a blessing when you need to leverage it but a curse when you lack the expertise to understand what is happening holistically.

Kind of like a linux distro… It’s amazing when it works but when libpam throws an error and you don’t even know what that library is or does, well you’re in for a fun evening.

The “problem” with k8s is not that it’s abstract-y (it’s not inherently any more abstract than docker), it’s that it’s very complex and enterprise-y.

The need for such a complex orchestration layer is not necessarily immediately obvious, until you’ve worked on a complex infra setup that wasn’t deployed with kubernetes. Believe me when you’ve seen the depths of hell that are hundreds of separately configured customer setups using thousands of lines of ansible playbooks, all using ad-hoc systems for creating containers/VMs, with even more ad-hoc and hacked together development and staging environments, suddenly k8s starts looking very appetizing. Instead of an abominable spaghetti of bash scripts, playbooks, and random documentation, one common (albeit complex) set of tools understood by every professional which manages your application deployment & configuration, redundancy, software upgrades, firewall configs, etc.

A small self-hosted production kubernetes cluster doesn’t have to be hard to operate or significantly more expensive than bare-metal; you can buy 3U of rack space, plop in 3 semi-large servers (think 128 GB plus a few TB of SSD RAID), install rancher and longhorn, and now you’ve got a prod cluster large enough for nearly every workload such that if you ever need to upgrade that means you have so many customers that hiring a k8s administrator will be a no-brainer.

Or you can buy minutes from AWS because CapEx is the absolute devil and instead you pay several times as much in OpEx to make it someone else’s problem. But if you’re doing that then you’re not comparing against “installing things the old-fashioned way”.

Is this considered porn? I am certainly, along with at least hundreds of millions of people, into shirtless Ryan Gosling. Specifically his pecs and abs.

Look, I am taking the piss, but not everything that might turn someone on for one reason or another is porn. The AI video of Trump is clearly satire and meant to disgust. What’s next, we can’t make satirical drawings of him grovelling at Putin’s feet because some people have a humiliation fetish?

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Dunno who hasn’t heard that one yet but it felt relevant.