Not to give any ideas, but a likely outcome is a US-based fork that has the offending bias removed, with a "ministry of truth"-y name.

There is already https://www.conservapedia.com/Main_Page

This is exactly what Russia did, but said fork is not particularly popular AFAIK.

That's certainly not the only (and I'd also not put it as primary) reason for extending the lifespan.

Still, breaking one's hip in advanced age is often a death sentence as many people never get out of bed again.

When an old person breaks their hip around here, people say something along the lines of "we'd better hurry up for visiting them one last time".

There's also a lot of reverse causation here. Healthy people don't fall very often and when they do they generally don't break their hips. Falling frequently and suffering broken hips when falling are both general signs of poor systemic health and overall fragility which portend a short remaining lifespan regardless.

This is fun - and really powerful.

In some way, multicellular lifeforms (like a cherry tree or a human) also have to contain a kind of formulation like this so that they result in the fractals of branches and blood vessels as well as the overall structure.

Really ironic that Britain left the EU, but is even further ahead down this road. British humour I guess.

Can you imagine the UK having a vote in all of this? Terrifying.

The chat control bill also has age verification to identify child users.

I think the point was that the law is not in effect just yet.

Hopefully it doesn't get implemented, but obviously they could force OS providers to implement this in Android and iOS.

Power wants to stay in power.

In a healthy society, citizens should always be wary of those in power and keep them on their toes, because power corrupts (and attracts already problematic characters).

Not driveling when they get thrown some crumbs or empty phrases ("child safety", "terrorism").

It is, but cui bono. I know that local software companies in my city had meetings coordinating the local software dev wage level. There's no reason to assume something like this isn't going on at a larger scale too.

Is that strictly legal?

Almost nowhere. But hard to prove in court. You should report it to the local authorities at least.

Nonsense. There's nothing generally illegal about vendor sponsored junkets for private industry attendees. Some companies have policies against their own employees attending such events but that's not a legal issue.

LOL. Or do the early 1900s thing and kick somebodies ass badly.

Yes, perfect AI content has multiple issues, that need to be addressed differently

- treating certain content in the same way that drugs are treated. Lots of countries are already moving towards age restrictions for social media.

- some kind of hardware-provided signatures for images and video, anything else must be assumed to be generated

Will be interesting for kids growing up - the peer pressure is now already very high to have smartphones, to be on Whatsapp, Instagram, TikTok, this will only get worse.

Maybe if I have kids I will found some Amish-like community with only 90's tech (only half joking).

I've also seen elderly people whose time was past (very old, bed-ridden, lost their partner) go into into what's basically hunger strike in the nursing home. They said "I'm not really hungry today", eating very little, getting thinner and thinner until the end.

It's now legal here, but family, religion and tradition can be obstacles to assisted dying.

In case you don't want to leave that way, you have to prepare ahead of time. There's different legal means in different countries, e.g. advance directive covers the case where you can't decide yourself anymore.

That, or the fast road to dictatorship. Escalate until you declare martial law, never to be revoked. The end.

The Ghorman massacre in the recently aired season 2 of Star Wars Andor is the playbook version of this.

I don't think the US is there yet, but the direction seems about right. As you say, step by step.

In the LA riots of 1992 there was also the national guard and the military: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots

Andor was great. I really enjoyed it. It's the AI robots you should really worry about.

Yes, you also always have some superficially similar event to reassure people that this has happened before.

It’s usually too much for people to contemplate that things are going to end.

Or worse, it’s bad faith, and it’s shared to lull people into accepting the change.

One of the clear things is that the right side of the political sphere is no longer constrained to narratives that have accurate correspondence to reality.

Even if this blows over, there will be something else, and then something else - and some superficially plausible rationale that contradicts previous positions.

And people who’ve seen this before will point it out - but people in the hall of mirrors will be stuck dealing with whatever is being reflected around them.

It’s genuinely cognitively hard to reason past such things, especially if reasoning past them is done alone - because then you are now stuck feeling like you are outside of your group - worse, you might have to join the people you were angry with.

This is one reason it takes a long time (months, years) to travel this distance - you can’t mentally switch allegiances and world views in a moment. There’s too many interconnected beliefs, actions - neurons.

But for people who’ve seen this before, it’s pretty clear cut.

I've been around and seen many things. I don't think it's that clear cut. But if you start from the conclusion and work your way backwards you can reason about anything.

Another problem is that these processes have a feedback loop. I don't like feeding that loop.

But yes, time will tell. I do agree certain things are normalized which probably shouldn't, but the system has some degree of robustness.

The proper thing for the left to do, IMO, is to present a clear and believable alternative. That also helps with the question of "join the people you were angry with". If the left doesn't understand why people are angry then they can't present this alternative. Standing on a hypothetical box in a hypothetical public square and yelling "the end is nigh" is not political discourse. The left also doesn't get to choose the laws it likes, just like the right doesn't, illegal immigration, as the term hints, illegal. Rioting and destroying things is also illegal. The only way a dictator can take over the US given all the checks and balances is when it seems that's the best alternative to enough people.

> In the LA riots of 1992 there was also the national guard and the military

The Governor requested federal help. Legally different.

The Insurrection Act of 1807 allows the President to do it without the request of a governor so I don't think there is a legal difference.

It is different when state governors impede the enforcement of federal laws and the President needs to send in the military. Eisenhower had to do that in Arkansas. It’s shameful but it happens.

The law is not on their side in 2025. That's the difference.

Did the President during the LA protest of the beating of an unarmed person ever say they wanted to be a dictator?

I edited this post because riots implies they weren't burning down their own neighborhoods because they didn't actually own anything there and had not been prevented from owning anything. Certain groups love to post the actually affected Korean store owners, but it's a gross one minority group was pitted against another to prove racism was ok in retrospect to cause the conflict.

I studied political sciences twenty years ago - even then it was established consensus that presidential democracies are vulnerable to authoritarian takeover. The position has too much power, is easily abused and there are not enough checks on that position. The US escaped that problem for a long time due to strong cultural norms - but you abolished them (i.e. gatekeeping the presidential nominees and replacing that with a televised drama) and working checks (but again, now party in congress and president march in lockstep). FPTP and gerrymandering just exacerbate that problem and entrench a very unhealthy "the winner takes it all without need for compromise" culture.

You need electoral reform post haste - but I do not seed even a start to that discussion, so I think you are hosed. Might not be Dictator Trump, but maybe Vance or some other guy who succeeds in this game.

And all who cry "if the democrats win everything will be ok again!!!!" - not it won't. The democrats are too slow to recognize the problem and even if they eventually do, there are no majorities to change the system. And finally: Democracy needs at least two parties - democrats cannot be expected to keep branches of the government forever. You need a sane and democratic second party. Republicans ain't it - but the current system gives them success, so why change?!

> I studied political sciences twenty years ago - even then it was established consensus that presidential democracies are vulnerable to authoritarian takeover.

Democracies are vulnerable to "authoritarian takeover" has been known and understood for 2500 years.

> The position has too much power, is easily abused and there are not enough checks on that position.

In most parliamentary democracies, the Prime Minister is much more powerful than the US President. This is particularly the case since the PM is PM by virtue of his party having the legislative majority.

> And all who cry "if the democrats win everything will be ok again!!!!" - not it won't.

A better argument would be that this isn't a partisan issue. The last President declared a Constitutional Amendment by fiat and attempted to do (good) things like student loan relief with blatantly illegal authoritarian methods due to the perpetual Congressional gridlock.

> In most parliamentary democracies, the Prime Minister is much more powerful than the US President. This is particularly the case since the PM is PM by virtue of his party having the legislative majority.

This is a grave misunderstanding. A legislative majority isn't a static historical fact like Trump's electoral majority, it's dynamic - those are identifiable people not just a statistic.

Liz Truss was the UK's Prime Minister for less than two months. What changed in two months? Probably most of the idiots who actually voted for her didn't change their minds, but that doesn't matter, her fellow Tory MPs feared the worst from the outset and were proven correct. If she hadn't left she'd have been kicked out, she's known to have actually asked if there's some way she can cling on and been told basically "No" because there isn't.

Ultimately, if they can't get rid of her any other way, her backbench only needs to affirm a simple motion, "That This House Has No Confidence In His Majesty's Government" and it's all over. It would never come to that, but that's the backstop.

Congress can also agree to remove the President. Indeed it would take only a few Rs to flip to do so.

We see PMs easily enacting massive legislative reforms and even Constitutional changes that are nigh impossible in the US, that was not a particularly controversial statement.

> We see PMs easily enacting massive legislative reforms and even Constitutional changes that are nigh impossible in the US

I'm responding to this part separately because it's a very different issue. The existence of "superior law" in the form of a written constitution, is very silly. There need be only a single law, the law of the land - and the legislature must be able to change it - and only them, otherwise why have a legislature at all?

These are only man's laws, they're no different than the laws of Football ("soccer") for example, they are not facts about the world like Mother Nature's Laws - and so to hold some of these laws superior to others is a waste of everybody's time. The resulting paralysis in the US is not something to be praised, it's just another rusted joint, a lost degree of flexibility and so a point of weakness.

In reality, the supposed "impossible" constitutional changes in the US simply enable learned helplessness. Democratic representatives weep that alas much as they wish otherwise they "cannot" fix obvious problems because change is "impossible" and then of course somebody who actually does want to change things just does and says (as we might expect remembering these are only man's laws) if you don't like it too fucking bad.

> There need be only a single law, the law of the land - and the legislature must be able to change it - and only them, otherwise why have a legislature at all?

The legislature can change the US Constitution. The federal Congress proposes an amendment with a 2/3rds yes-vote, then it must be ratified by legislatures of 3/4ths of the states.

The reason to make some laws harder to change than others is to protect civil rights. In the US, it is very difficult to legally infringe on the right to free speech, for example. In the UK, it is simply a matter of a majority vote in Parliament.

> Democratic representatives weep that alas much as they wish otherwise they "cannot" fix obvious problems because change is "impossible" and then of course somebody who actually does want to change things just does and says (as we might expect remembering these are only man's laws) if you don't like it too fucking bad.

Passing Constitutional amendments is perfectly feasible and has been done many times. It just can't be done without majority political support and the will to do so. They've been passed and "repealed" before, with Prohibition, for example.

A lot of kvetching in the US system (on both sides) comes from people whose ideas are simply not very popular and would like to change the rules so they win. In a democratic society, you need majorities of the population to agree. For larger changes, you preferable want larger majorities.

>We see PMs easily enacting massive legislative reforms and even Constitutional changes that are nigh impossible in the US

I don't know about UK but in Australia we need a Referendum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendums_in_Australia) to change the constitution and those have been historically extremely difficult to pass (only 8/45). The PM absolutely cannot alter the Constitution.

Yeah, it’s dangerous to generalize parliamentary systems too broadly. That isn’t the case in all of them. But as you can see in his comments, he thinks that having “constitutional” laws above other laws is also a bad idea.

Congress could, in theory, begin an arduous process (weeks? months?) in which eventually, if they succeed, again in theory it removes the President and... puts in his place his chosen replacement. It has never successfully done this, so from there we're in uncharted waters but it's hardly obvious that it is an effective procedure.

In contrast the Westminster Parliament routinely disposes of Prime Ministers who lose its confidence, it's already happened once in my lifetime and it's not some multi-week procedure in which there's some performance of a judicial process, just a simple question: Does this Government retain the Confidence of the House?

Margaret Thatcher decided on this course of action on a Monday, on Wednesday morning she rose to say, "Mr. Speaker, I beg to move, 'That this House has no confidence in Her Majesty's Government.'" and by the next morning the Callaghan minority government had fallen.

The length of time the process takes is entirely under the control of Congress. It could be done in a day if they wanted. The longer time periods seen with Clinton and Trump were to attempt to gin up the political support to follow through.

I was concerned with facts, whereas you seem focused on a fantasy about how you wish things were. But your fantasy doesn't matter at all. US-style Presidential Republics are a known bad design, the US nation building projects stopped doing this themselves because it doesn't work, the United States itself is just a slower decay, it's not an exception.

The problem wasn't the Crown, that's the big takeaway. Giving the same power to a guy who doesn't have a hat doesn't fix the problem. You need to hold this much power in commission, that's the lesson that gave us the present British arrangement - the Lord High Treasurer was much too powerful, so his power was given to a commission, today its First Lord though not nearly as powerful as the Lord Treasurer, is too powerful, that's the Prime Minister you gestured at - the formal office is "First Lord of the Treasury", with the Chancellor being Second Lord, and the whips taking subsidiary parts of the commission. If you ask me we should further re-divide this power.

But just giving all that power to one man (and in the US it has always been a man) is even worse. The US President has powers that a King had, which made sense in the 18th century but stands out today - that's why Trump can corruptly pardon people for example.

It's really baffling to see this take repeated, especially when we've seen European PMs rewrite their country's constitution. That's just not feasible in the US system. US Presidents are quite limited in their power. A lot of (justified) outrage occurs over the US President doing something that PMs can typically do with no issue.

You seem fixated on the practical process of removing one from power, which is of course irrelevant as long as their party backs them, which is the actual threat in both cases. In either case, if the legislature does not back them, they can be removed from power with little issue.

I see in a sibling comment you think this is actually a weakness of the US system...apparently the PM radically changing all the laws, norms, and unwritten constitution of his country is "not powerful", while the US President typically fighting a battle to get one single major piece of legislation through in his career is unitarian dictatorship?

> , the US nation building projects stopped doing this themselves because it doesn't work, the United States itself is just a slower decay, it's not an exception.

The US nation building projects felt that parliamentary democracies were easier to control, as direct election of Presidential executives sometimes leads to democracies electing leaders who are able to carry out policies that violate US interests.

I'm sure it is baffling, why are all these stupid facts contradicting your nice simple truth? Because it's a fantasy.

We escaped them because the tenth amendment and judiciary constrained federal powers in non war time to activity summing up to like 2% of the GDP and they needed an amendment to do anything outside of a little box. POTUS was fairly low stakes office in peace time, lower stakes to most than their governor and state legislators.

We tossed that all aside in the 1930s via threatening to pack the Supreme court. Federal powers are now everything because interstate commerce is now everything and without a functional 10A and with delegation to executive agencies POTUS approaches God level.

> no way Trump is turning into a dictator, for one thing he's too old. Is there any precedence to a 78 year old turning into a dictator for life

I agree that Trump is unlikely to turn into a dictator. But Caesar wasn't Rome's last dictator. And he wasn't the first to march on Rome.

Precedents are being set. Regardless of your views on illegal immigration, what's going on should be concerning because eventually someone with strong views you don't agree with will be in power, and if they can just arrest members of Congress, openly defy courts, ship ideological opponents to Guantanamo and send Marines into states they don't like, we're all going to be poorer for it. (If this shit stands, I'd argue the next Democrat in the White House should go FDR on the system.)

If history rhymes, I wonder if we aren't about at Marius and Sulla, rather than at Caesar.

Republicans used to limit themselves out of of fear of a Democrat being able to do it the next time they won.

Now it seems like the republicans are trying to speed-run to a point where there won’t ever be another Democrat to worry about.

> Now it seems like the republicans are trying to speed-run to a point where there won’t ever be another Democrat to worry about

The simpler explanation is they're bad at long-term planning. Most of Trump's Cabinet and advisors are, essentially, influencers after all.

We probably need to work on a Project 2026 and Project 2028 document set. Plans to use these newly-unlocked powers to reform how power is distributed in America, force forward long-overdue projects being resisted by vocal minorities and secure our republic from its tendency towards electoral fetishism.

Two heads of the same coin I guess! I agree though, we sorely need a counterweight to this administration. I keep asking my friends that support Trump if they’ll have the same staunch attitude towards strong executive branch powers if a Democrat gets elected next. I haven’t gotten a straight answer back.

It was requested by the governor. A lot different from today where the governor is actively opposing it.

I'll really worry about both, thank you.