dhork

You have to pick a leader somehow. In authoritarianism, the leader is often the one who can take over by force, and can maintain that force over time (even across generations, for hereditary systems). While it's possible for someone who takes over that way to be benelovent towards their people, it's far more likely they will be violent and overbearing, because that's how they got the gig in the first place.

And after a few generations, the one in charge won't have any memory of how their ancestor came to power in the first place, and just take it for granted that they ought to rule. So now you have a leader who is violent and overbearing, only because that's how their parent taught them to be, not out of any real experience accumulating power.

The election apparatus in the US is extremely hard to rig. It's run by local officials, so in order to fix the counting of voters you need to get to thousands of individual county/city/town election boards, all at once. Those boards have members of all parties generally present on them so there is a fair amount of local oversight to overcome, too.

There was a bit of time in the early 2000's where the voting machines themselves were suspect but some good work by independant researchers shined some daylight on that. Now most votes in the US are either done purely by paper ballots (counted by machines) or on machines that generate verifiable paper trails, and are very hard to just casually alter the count without being found out.

Republicans rig the vote by manipulating their media. Roger Ailes was one of Nixon's media advisors during Watergate. The lesson he took away was that if the media didn't hold Nixon to account, he would have never had to resign. Ailes went on to run Fox News in the mid-90s, and the rest is history.

I found the perfect way to not get banned from Reddit: simply don't go there.

This particular decline was caused by a bunch of insiders, including one greedy pigboy, selling some of their shares.

That's not necessarily a sign of any problems at the company, though. These insiders are probably carrying this equity from before it ever went public and sell shares periodically as part of their (insane) compensation. For instance, the aforementioned greedy little pigboy sold $2m according to that article, but still holds more than $90m at current valuations.

Welcome!

But this is exactly what AI is being marketed toward. All of Apple's AI ads showcase dumb people who appear smart because the AI bails out their ineptitude.

There's nothing illegal about cryptocurrencies. It's just random numbers and code.

However, those random numbers have actual value, and governments regulate some transactions, particularly ones that cross national borders, to make sure those transactions do not hide a crime or go to individuals who the government has put under sanctions.

Some people of a Libertarian bent get involved in Crypto to keep their governments out of their business. But those laws still apply, no matter what the medium of exchange is, or how much those people whine about those laws.

Edited to add: I missed the bit where OPs question was about Samurai Wallet. Here is some info about them:

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/legal/samourai-wallet-breaking-down-dangerous-precedents

This is from a pro-Crypto online media source, and its bias is obvious. However, it is also from last April. The Biden administration was very hostile towards Crypto. The Trump administration has embraced it, and it would not surprise me if this prosecution disappears in a cloud of "quid pro quo"....

There were, like, six or seven different agreements, I read them all and only declined the most egregious ones, that explicitly said they would share my data with third parties without limit. I understand they need an agreement to cover basic data sharing between me and them, but I will not consent to having them immediately send the data to my insurance agent (or the government).

Right, there are legitimate cases for this. The argument, though, is that these companies are not to be trusted.

I bought a new Toyota recently, and know from others that their app has some car tracking built in to it, where once you connect the app to the car you can see info on trips and gas mileage and such. When I bought mine, though, I carefully read all the T&Cs, and specifically declined the one that said it would sell my driving data to third parties. Guess what? I don't see that historical data. A minor inconvenience, but it lets you know who they consider their real customers to be.

At least in this era of "Roman salutes", we are going back to the classical definition of decimate....