Every corporation is trying to spy on you. Why wouldn't they? There is no real punishment, and large reward. As long as that is true, superficial regulations around tracking will always be circumvented or hollowed out. We need fundamental change in the way corporations interact with society, and in what is expected of them.
Everyone saying everything other than "Consumers are going to need to be willing to spend more money for things, and people with less money are going to be hit the hardest as they benefit the most from the data economy."
Data has value is flatly true statement. So at best we can have system where you can keep your data and pay more, or sell your data and pay less. The rub here though is that the people who have the means to keep their data, also have the most valuable data, and in our current system subsidize the cost of people with less valuable data, who happen to be the people who would want the most to sell their data.
All of that is to say, the solution is not cut and dry.
This is the long tail of monopoly and cartel power. We need a fundamental change in the _size_ of corporations. They're otherwise too big to regulate and changing expectations will achieve nothing.
The problem is that in an unregulated capital system, money naturally flows uphill. The industrial revolution made this clear to everyone early on, and so we got anti-trust laws and progressive taxation. But over the decades, anti-trust laws have been weakened or left unenforced, and progressive taxation largely died in the 1980s. We need to reinvigorate these measures, and also look for more structural ways to counter-balance the advantage of capital over merit in our economy.
Those that can race tot he bottom and get away with it are usually the ones the have a better chance of survival. I don't like it one bit but that is a good summary of business nowadays.
The time to do this was 30 years ago. While today we need it more than ever, it is probably already too late: corporations will find those trying to do this and stop them.
One can easily imagine pragmatic Tories saying the same thing about the American Revolution: "We should have done this 30 years ago, there's not point in trying now."
Indeed. It started with intercepting letters and couriers, then storing phone calls, radio communications, operating labs to build DNA databases from blood samples, and now large-scale data collection for AI.
Archives tie Epstein and Maxwell individually to various companies in those areas, and a truckload of familiar family names show up along them. My assessment is that people like Thiel and Musk are not self-made, they are intelligence nepo children leveraging aristocratic/colonial offshore wealth of their families.
What is better than being rich and above the law due to your role in intelligence?
One thing is old money, another is telling everyone you are selfmade when in fact you are a nepo kid.
If you are old money you tend towards intelligence roles because they give you diplomatic passport and make you immune to the law. It is much better than owning 5 passports from some banana republic because in the end only military might of the colonial powers counts (e.g. the british crown).
So many of the silicon valley idols we cherish are in fact old money, parents were in intelligence, the child made a tech company, tech was national security relevant, they got funding and daddy handled their competitors through their government institution. Have a look at founders of YC for example. Or Mr. Thiel who officially came from nothing but miraculously has a university named after him and is super-deep into intelligence. Or Musk where unfortunately a lot of archives from South Africa are unavailable for research, but his wealth definitely does not come from repatriating colonial wealth from South Africa to the US.
In terms of realpolitik all is fine but if you start fabricating terrorist attacks to cover up a potential PR scandal for your shitty family you are way out of line. And at that point only the next large-scale attack helps you cover up the scandal. Several tangential names in the Epstein files fall victims to freak terrorist attacks - those are quite convenient because they get rid of idealist defectors and have a new thing to set the public agenda with.
It is how the world works and we have to accept it.
Many of these people follow a pattern, where they (apparently) come from nothing and very early in their careers become advisors or get capital from a very rich and powerful person/company. This should give you pause and realize that it doesn't happen to a normal person. The true answer is either their parents or close associates, people they trust. Bill Gates is an example where his true golden ticket was a contract with IBM that was only possible because IBM's CEO was a trusted friend of his mom.
Performing privileged work for the government in some shape or form which allows you to skirt the legal rules and makes you immune to certain issues (e.g. travel with diplomatic passport or invent fake identities to hide your real family tree). In force-colonized countries such as South Africa, the local colonial overlords openly looted the country, first in the name of the monarch and later for their own wealthy class which was still deeply connected to the European aristocracy. The colonialist class in South Africa most likely were also involved with the South African intelligence community and secret police, with all the special status this entails.
But simply focusing on five-eyes three-letter agencies is too narrow because there are thousands of "inofficial" entities surrounding them. And at least on paper if you are working in intelligence you're an idealistic government servant. History shows that most whistleblowers we read about are these kind of idealists, because they notice that not all five-eyes governments are equal. Some are monarchies, and the crown did many things which are incompatible with democratic values of US citizens and the narrative of the "American dream" they learned from Hollywood.
People always blame CIA and their black budgets, but what if CIA was actually subverted by the British crown and their colonial aristocracy?
The most famous spy in the world is James Bond, 007, not a "yankee". The British broke the Enigma and had extensive experience managing hundreds of colonies and their local populations, supposedly even introducing foreign pathogens as biological warfare on native populations.
Maxwell family was big in software and networking, especially for identity control. Epstein family was blacklisted from Hollywood due to antisemitism and moved into radio stations & broadway. Jeffrey was arrested by Scotland Yard in London and a bit earlier Jarecki was arrested in East Germany and later stationed for a very long time in Heidelberg, which is 1hr away from Thiel's official origin story, and also close to where the Trump family originated from in a different era.
Fred Trump sent youth abroad from NY area with the American Foreign Service (AFS), which during the cold war was at least relevant for national security, because each of the students could be converted into communists by foreign agencies.
When the King visited the white house, Mr. Trump was seemingly out of character and did not speak a bad word.
The connections between Trump and intelligence have really been hidden by the media, but they're quite obvious. He was running a "model agency" just like Epstein, so he was in the same business. His luxury real estate business for rich foreigners from East Europe follows the same pattern, and there he employed Felix Sater who came out publicly as a CIA operative during the "Russiagate" investigations. His businesses were in part a facade for intelligence operations. Nobody should forget Trump was a protege of Roy Cohn, of all people... This explains why he makes so many moves with almost certainty of impunity.
There's documents that show Trump's father searching for a boat captain who can ship goods from Florida to New York.
I have a feeling that black folks living in the Trump-owned low-income areas were the final destination for the weapons-for-drugs trades which also included names such as Epstein and Kashoggi. Germany gets linked into this through Terramar which was used to get machinery and chemical precursor materials to a country of their choice. Famously these deals were paid in cash at the New Jersey offices of German companies - if at all.
I think the casinos were used for drug money laundering, until he got a knock on the door and stopped doing that.
Even before Trump the Epsteins were in the pageants/model industry involved with the "Miss Universe" aimed at foreign aristocrats. Coincidentally another now-famous family name in those credits is "Sweeney".
If you properly taxed real estate in a progressive way, you wouldn't have to bother with taxing paper wealth at all---the collective value of paper is already reflected in the price of land. People with large paper fortunes inevitably buy real estate, and when they do, their paper wealth inflates the price. This is why median residential housing prices have dramatically outpaced median wage increases, along with anything else tied to real estate, like sports and concert tickets.
A progressive property tax would actually lower housing costs, by reducing real estate prices. There would be a homestead exemption, so there would be no impact on taxes for individual homeowners. I think it would tend to stabilize rents, as larger landholders would be forced to shed properties, which would be snapped up by smaller ones. The overall effect would be a decentralization of real estate, which in turn means a decentralization of wealth.
Clamping down on immigration will go down as one of the greatest policy blunders in US history. The American people are about to find out the hard way that national economies are essentially pyramid schemes.
Yeah, I am generally viscerally horrified by the procedures of ICE/CBP but I am still somewhat disgusted by liberals counterargument that we need immigrants to do jobs that are beneath us.
Nothing is beneath us, except what's beneath everyone.
It's convenient dismissing data based on disliking the person that cited the data, isn't it? Anyway, you can just read the study itself if you don't like Kirkegaard, which says the same.
I think this correlates roughly with the rate of stock ownership by income level. When the current equities bubble bursts, we will probably see more convergence between the income groups.
>I see that folks could see this as evidence that I live in a bubble...
Not all bubbles are created equal. In the US, Republicans tend to rely on a smaller pool of news sources (https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2025/06/10/the-politi...). And those few sources are increasingly interdependent. Outlets like Fox News and Newsmax generally follow Trump's lead, which is how they got into trouble on the election fraud claims. in addition, the Republican Party actively works to insulate Trump from criticism via memes like TDS (literally implying that anyone who criticizes Trump has a mental illness) and "fake news" (simply dismissing inconvenient facts), for which there is no liberal equivalent.
>Gen Z home ownership is outpacing millenial home ownership at the same age.
Not according to this Redfin report (also linked by others in the thread):
"Take 28-year-olds as an example: 38.3% of 28-year-old Gen Zers owned their home in 2025, compared to 42.5% of Gen Xers when they were 28 and 44.4% of baby boomers when they were 28." (There is an accompanying chart in the linked report.)
The boots theory is a concrete way of expressing the risk of ruin, which is the principle advantage of wealth (though our society has layered on many others): the rich can afford to take more risk, and consequently enjoy more reward. A poor person who buys the $50 boots has a much higher risk of coming up short for something else, and that lapse may have disproportionate consequences. So they go for the cheap boots, which end up costing them more in the long run, trapping them in an endless cycle.
Another way to consider it is through the lens of meritocracy. Consider two poker players of equal skill. Have them play each other until one has lost everything. Run this competition over and over, starting each player with a random stack. Over many trials, the player starting with the bigger stack will win in proportion to the ratio of their stack to their opponent's. Given a large enough ratio, this wealth advantage can begin to overcome greater and greater advantages in skill on the part of their opponent.
In the US, the ratio of the wealth of the top 10% to the wealth of the median has risen from 5.8x in 1963 to nearly 10x in 2022. In the same period, the ratio of the top 1% to the median has risen from 35x to 70x. And the effective advantage is probably much higher, as this calculation does not take into account liquidity: most of a median family's wealth is in their family home.
There's another important aspect of being wealthy that I've noticed myself. The less money you have, the more of your brainpower is spent in conserving it. Figuring out how to make rent this month, balancing your checkbook so you don't overdraft, keeping track of when payday is, looking through the newspaper to see what is on sale at the grocery store, is all time that could instead be spent thinking "how could I invest my money?", and "what are my longterm goals?".
Agreed. Color me skeptical. All of the interactions and decisions described are plausible, but in my experience with AI agents, they would require frequent human intervention.
The user's name is the name of an Anton Labs project [0]. Furthermore, the fact that the user is inconsistently bad at formatting, punctuation and capitalisation of their messages makes me suspect the user itself may be agentic-LLM-based, with a badly calibrated layer of "obfuscation" to pretend to be an oh-so-imperfect human.
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