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Comment by altacc

8 days ago

Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". I think for those cheering on it's a mix of both. Culture wars have made them gleeful when they see opportunities for others to suffer and they're ignorant of how this is negatively affecting them, their morals and society.

But it's definitely malice from Musk, Trump and the rest of the oligarchs. They have for a long time been clear that their plan is to tear down everything and rebuild around themselves and everyone else is a pawn to be used to their benefit. These people are purely transactional, they don't believe in societal goods, just what benefits them must be best for everyone.

I think the cheering is more a told-you-so cheer from people who suspected that Musk and his team aren't as compotent as they claim.

During the first Trump administration I regularly tried to discern the difference, but ultimately that was a mistake--a kind of engaging and draining analytical junk food--and one I'm not going to make a second time.

> Trump-scandals kinda killed Hanlon's Razor for me: A miasma inseparably blurring the lines between malice and incompetence, lies and ignorance, culpability and insanity, condensing into a greasy alloy which is definitely some amount of evil yet not worth anybody's time to separate and assay.

I refuse to feed the algorithm more pathological input for another denial-of-service attack. For anything from that crowd of repeat-offenders, I declare the answer to be both. If they want to assert something was just incompetence or just malice, the onus is on them to provide the argument either way.

It might be prudent to consider emigration or at least divesting from real estate assets. I assume property values will evaporate along with the stock markets if this train keeps on rolling.

  • > I assume property values will evaporate along with the stock markets if this train keeps on rolling.

    The US government can prop up the stock market for a very long time. Anyone who purchased Puts early on during COVID times found themselves on the opposite side of a suddenly generous Fed that poured hitherto unseen amounts of liquidity directly into the markets. The chickens only came to roost in the next administration, but ai suspect they could have kept at it for 10+ years and still kept inflation under 12-15%