I’d really like to have 100 randomly chosen Trump voters in a room and interview them to find out how knowledgeable they are about Trump, about his policies, about his first term, about the criminal cases, etc.

My guess is that at least 90% of them are brainwashed. I’m sure there are some that are completely aware of his record and are either single issue voters who are voting only on abortion. Some may be multi-millionaires who are voting just for lower taxes and don’t care about anything else. But, anybody who voted for him because of inflation / the economy has no idea what they’re talking about. Inflation was a worldwide problem and Trump’s policies made / will make it worse. Anybody who voted for him because he’s going to “fix immigration” has no idea what they’re doing because his policies are incoherent and will never work. Anybody who voted for him because of Gaza is an absolute moron because he’s just going to encourage the genocide.

We both know the government is never going to split them up

The American government isn’t going to. But, I do hold out hope for the EU. The EU already doesn’t like the US tech giants, and they’re much more driven by lobbying by European-based businesses, almost none of them on good terms with the US tech giants.

We’ve already seen what effect the GDPR had on the web, and it affects Americans even if the law doesn’t apply in the US. We’ve seen how Apple has had to design all its devices to use USB-C because of new EU rules. I think it’s pretty reasonable to expect that the EU might require Mastodon-type rules for social networks, that you can leave to an instance that communicates with your old one, and that your followers and followees change when you move. Facebook would hate it, but Google (whose social network efforts all failed) wouldn’t really be affected, so they might push for it just to spite Facebook. Some of the other big American tech companies might actually like it. Like, Netflix might like to be able to graft a social network onto their video watching platform so that people could watch and talk about videos together.

With the Biden administration going out and Trump going in, I think the FTC is going to go back to being a corporate cheerleader, but I still have some hope for the EU.

The only reason Facebook was at all successful is that they made it easy to migrate over from MySpace.

Before Facebook people weren’t locked into their social networks. In the early days of BBSes you were mostly on your local BBS, but you could sometimes communicate with another BBS if your BBS was part of FidoNet. When instant messengers like ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, etc. became popular, it was common to use a unified program that logged into all of them at once. But, already there was corporate consolidation. BBSes were often run by people out of their own homes, or at least by hobbyists. The early messengers were all commercial products.

Then there were the early social media websites: SixDegrees.com, Classmates.com, Friendster, (LinkedIn), MySpace, Orkut, and in 2004 Facebook. At first Facebook was closed to anybody who wasn’t a US university student. You even had to have an email address from a US university to register. But, when they wanted to grow, they made it easy to migrate from other sites, especially MySpace. They released a tool that allowed you to basically stay in touch with your MySpace friends from Facebook, but not the other way around. That slowly drained people away from MySpace until it eventually collapsed. These days, thanks to section 1201 of the DMCA, if you tried to release a tool that allowed people to migrate away from Facebook, you’d be nuked from orbit.

Now, every social media site is a walled garden protected by a moat and an electric fence. Every one is owned by companies worth more than $1b. People can’t leave because the FOMO is too strong, but they don’t want to stay because the sites are pure shit. You see that especially with Twitter. It is absolute shit since Musk took over, but many people feel like they can’t leave. And, when people do leave, do they go to Mastodon, which isn’t owned by a corporation? Nope, they mostly go to Threads, owned by Meta, or Bluesky, owned by a lot of the same people behind Twitter.

Unless the governments of the world step in and either break up the tech giants, or require that they are interoperable, I don’t know how we back out of this shitty situation.

Yep. Older people (Millennial, Gen X) grew up with PCs that could be heavily modified, run any program, even repurposed to run Linux if you were brave. Later generations who grew up with phones only get to use the apps that Apple / Google approve of. There’s no hacking the system, so you get whatever the algorithm says you get.

Older people grew up on BBSes and later “Bulletin Boards”, which were mostly the same thing just with prettier graphics, also with email, and sometimes instant messengers. Communities were smaller, and there was no mediator. Younger ones are stuck in apps that are designed around engagement, with a “celebrity” vs “fan” content model where it’s all geared around followers and likes. It’s all parasocial relationships from the “fan” side, and trying to keep up with whatever the algorithm wants from the creator side.

Almost everything in any religion is a “telephone game” retelling of things. These days they’re the same to most people which is what really matters.

Luce means light in Italian. Lucifer means “light bringer” and the mythos is about trying to steal the light (luce) of god. It doesn’t mean “luce” is bad.

I guess the Catholic church overestimated the education of its followers.

“Luz” is an incredibly common name in Spanish speaking countries. It means light. “Luce” means light in Italian, but seems to be less common as a name. Lucifer means “Light-bringer”, and the myth of the light-bringer is much, much older than Christianity.

Old religions thought things in the sky were gods. Venus orbits closer to the sun than the Earth, which means light reflecting from it is extremely bright, but that light is only visible near sunrise and sunset. During the rest of the day the brightness of the sun overwhelms the reflected light from Venus, and during the rest of the night it’s not visible because it’s near the sun, so it’s behind the earth. So, old religions talked about the brightest “god” in the sky, who disappeared when it got too bright or too dark. That led to the myth of the god who tried to be the brightest light and was cast down. That, of course, led to Satan, A.K.A. Lucifer.

I guess the Catholic church was giving its followers too much credit in their understanding of words.

It is. It’s that plus an important process for living organisms rather than just burning something.

What makes you think there’s a threshold?

I remember the days when BioWare wasn’t EA’s BioWare. Those were better days.

I don’t think there was anybody in the 1950s who was much worse off than they were in the 1930s. Yes, it took a while for women, non-whites, non-straights, etc. to get their full rights. But, even with fewer rights than a married white christian man, things were improving for them too. But, obviously, there’s a reason that the MAGA theme resonates much more with old straight white men than it does with anybody else.

Let me guess, you’re an American who has never lived outside the US?

But also, the free market would still allow others to fill the shoes of the companies that left.

The Free Market would also allow them to set up their business in Europe and go for that market instead. And, since they make a much bigger profit in Europe than in the US, that would be their focus. The only companies that would set up in the US are the ones that are not able to make the bigger profits available in Europe.

This is basically like the car market in the USSR after WWII. The major American, European and Japanese automakers didn’t operate there, but of course that didn’t mean there weren’t any cars. It just meant that there weren’t any good cars.

Right now, a lot of companies start in the US because the US is the best place to start. 330 million people, one language, good profits, etc. But, a punishing tax might mean that the profit margin is much less than 10%. 10% is a huge profit margin for most businesses, so it might drop from say 5% to 1%. At that point, Europe looks a lot more promising as a place to start. 450 million people, for the most part it’s one regulatory zone, you do have to have things in multiple languages, so that’s a bit difficult.

Then, after Europe there’s east Asia: Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan. Then slightly poorer countries like Indonesia and India. Maybe South America next.

The US would be near the bottom of the list if it was the only country with a punishing tax rate.

So, they don’t sell their shit in the US. Problem solved.

They’d still be profitable, but less profitable, so they’d be lowest priority.

If you’re American, you may not realize this, but there are a lot of products and services that are only available in the USA because that’s the most profitable place for them. The companies have plans to eventually expand to Canada, and then maybe Europe, but the focus is now on the US because that’s where the profit is.

If the US had extremely high taxes for those companies, they’d focus elsewhere. Sure, eventually they’d get around to the US once they saturated the European, Asian, Canadian, Mexican, South American and African markets, but it would never be a priority. And, for a lot of companies, “getting around to serving the US market” just wouldn’t happen.

Plenty of companies concentrate their efforts in places that are the most profitable and ignore areas that are less profitable.

Just look at how many companies are only available in the US and not available in Europe, Asia, even Canada. Sure, they might get around to the US eventually, but it would be lowest priority since it’s the least profitable territory.

Exactly. Post WWII the tax on the richest was 90%, it stayed there until the mid 60s when it was lowered to 70% and then in the early 80s Reagan and that congress lowered it to 50%, then briefly to even below 30%.

It probably wouldn’t have happened without the combined effect of the Great Depression rolling directly into WWII. With those two events, it was possible to raise taxes that high, and the rich actually (to a large extent) paid them.

Even though the “Again” part of MAGA is very ill-defined, I think a lot of MAGA supporters would point to the post WWII era as a time that America was great. A greater shared prosperity was probably a significant reason why things felt so great then. Unions were strong, rich people were heavily taxed, and everyone was better off.

But you could structure the law so that you can’t sell anything then.

So, why would they sell anything? What incentive does a corporation have to do business in a region where taxes are punishing? Why not just focus their efforts in Europe, South America and Asia?

It would be like Cuba. If you want a car, you can buy one… but it’s going to be a Franken-car built from the parts scrounged together from the last time there were car companies operating in the country.

Ok, so every American company becomes the subsidiary of a company registered in Bermuda or Ireland. They report no profits from their American subsidiaries, so they pay no taxes.

Corporations don’t have to “live” anywhere, so they don’t have anything to lose by ceasing to exist in high tax areas and “moving” to low tax ones. It’s why companies based in Kansas City switch back and forth from being Kansas-based or Missouri-based, whatever’s convenient for their taxes.