I mean, some of them are vague to the point of being banal. The NDAA is just the bi-annual Congressional requirement to reauthorize US military operations abroad.
Why would anyone have that marked out as a conspiracy theory on the level of MK Ultra or Operation Northwoods? No reason you’d recognize the acronym as such.
Like the man himself or the whole assassination conspiracy theory thing?
Plenty of compelling evidence to believe Kennedy was murdered at the order of ex-CIA Director Allen Dulles. Even if you don’t want to go all the way down that rabbit hole, though, there’s even more evidence to suspect Kennedy’s secret service fucked up on the job - both in the planning of the parade and in the initial response to gunfire. The “magic bullet” thesis has a number of much more believable counter-explanations, not the least being Kennedy’s security detail firing blindly from inside the car and hitting the President by mistake.
Also, very deep CIA and mafia connections specifically running through New Orleans in the 1960s, such that letting Lee Harvey Oswald spill his guts would be bad for mission security, even if he had just been a lone gunman.
However you slice the Kennedy assassination, there’s plenty of big blind spots in the story where speculation runs rampant. And those blind spots are almost certainly the result of embarrassed/implicated state officials involved in some level of cover-up.
shit like MK Ultra actually and provably happened
The downwind implications of MK Ultra get incredibly muddy. It’s one thing to say “the US government was experimenting with psychedelics” and quite another to claim “The Manson Murders were orchestrated as a domestic terrorist event intended to crush the hippie movement in California and elect Ronald Reagan.”
You could say the same about the Gulf of Tonkin. Was this an American Navy vessel crew that fucked up by accident? Or a deliberate false flag intended to bring the US into Vietnam?
Bohemian Grove is another one you can take extremely deep. It gets brought up alongside Comet Ping Pong Pizza in the “elites are eating babies to stay young forever” conspiracies.
Part of the problem with this list is that you can take any item on it and flip it like a coin to get “mundane rational accusations of impropriety” on one side and “wildly speculative deep lore of a fascist puppeteer regime controlling the country” on the other.
This is the famous “Loo With A View” taken from a high end restaurant in Paris, incidentally.
Peak Shitpost. A++. Would expect to see it reposted again.
Putting on my D.A.R.E. T-shirt and clutching my state issued copy of the Ten Commandments and snapping an Amazon Ring Camera on my front door, so I help the state identify any of those nasty, America hating Antifa I’ve been hearing so much about.
I’m helping!
LintCoin’s value is through the roof, though. You’d be a fool not to hand them all your boring old American dollars.
And don’t even get me started on TulipCoin.
I think some people look at this arrangement and say “This is unsustainable, the cards have to come down at some point”, because it is a fucking stupid way to run an economy.
But, like… the money keeps flowing. And it keeps flowing because the Fed and the Treasury are implicitly backstopping the malinvestment. And their pockets are functionally endless.
I wish you could just roll your eyes and make these abhorrent economic decisions stop. But I’m afraid these people might legit die trillionaires without a regret in the world (other than failing to solve Immortality Science with an LLM), because we’ve stacked the economic deck so high up in their favor.
Which means now our tax dollars won’t just be used for data centers, they’ll be used for power plants too.
Sure… maybe…
Part of the problem with power plant construction is that our production capacity is largely maxed out. If you want a new gas power plant, you go on a waiting list that’s two years long (conservatively). Wind and Solar production are also at their domestic limit. Nuclear continues to be a pipe dream.
And, again, it cannot be overstressed that turning on a data center means a net-negative cash flow. These facilities cost more to operate than they earn, even under a ludicrously generous state contract. Why would you want to power them on these terms?
You gotta at least give yourself a full Friedman Unit.
We’re still only 3 days into this war.
The second big Iran-Israel conflict in less than a year.
And yet this is already manifesting right now in real life as we debate it on the internet.
Ah yes. A total nosedive of 0.30%.
This is the Uno-Reverse “Why you complaining when the DOW is over 50,000!” line. Any token sell-off gets reported on like it’s Black Friday.
Because Trump does not have control over the interest rates.
He’s lining up his pick to replace Powell as we speak.
Data centers in Silicon Valley stand empty, awaiting power
One of the more curious artifacts of the recent surge in data center construction has been filling these megaliths with hardware and then… not plugging them in. Either because turning them on would flatten the local electrical grid or because they’re loss-leaders for which data cycles only cost the company money.
So you’ve got this multi-billion dollar paper asset that wows investors while it gathers dust. And then you go off to build another one, because people will fling their unlimited borrowing power at you to reap another quarter of double-digit growth in speculative valuation.
the economy and stock market taking a huge hit
Two things that have also failed to manifest, in large part thanks to the prolific state spending following COVID.
Keep in mind, the event that really knocked over the tower of cards in 2008 was Greenspan’s decision to raise interest rates (very sharply) in 2007. Trump’s very obviously not going to do that. If anything, he’s been working overtime to get interest rates lower, because he knows cheap money = high (raw) GDP growth and low unemployment.
What we’re seeing isn’t recessionary. It’s a glacial shift in the economic priorities of the US, from a post-Reagan titanic banking juggernaut to a post-COVID more-WW2-style global arms depot. The US economy increasingly makes cops and bombs and machines that assist cops and bombs. And there’s no recognized upper limit for demand on these goods and services. Not under current geopolitical conditions, anyway.
I’ve had “AI Bubble Burst” on my bingo card since 2023.
Still feels like a hat on a hat. Unless you’re on bleeding edge hardware doing something truly novel with the OS, I’m not sure why a selective opt-in log of various bolt-ons and patches improves your experience.
Computers, at their heart, are still just a place you go to manage spreadsheets, email other people those spreadsheets, and pirate entertainment. So you’re always left asking the burning question “How will this patch improve my experience with spreadsheets?” And 99.5% of the time, the answer is “It won’t”.
“I’m on the bleeding edge of Linux! I get the most advanced features the distro allows! Yeah, it may periodically brick my home system from time to time, but its worth it when I can get…”
reorganizing the symlink layout of the NVIDIA firmware
“… which I literally cannot live without”.
you are scientifically illiterate
Because I’m not buying an overpriced humidifier?
The scam where I buy a shipping container at some point?
“People should be in the streets to stop the war”
“Will a protest march stop the war?”
“No! But… it’s tradition, you know?”
Hardly a scam. There’s nothing to insert money into.
This is just empty hype
I don’t think “pernicious” would describe the NDAA, no.