I’m actually with you - I don’t believe any one president can just wave a magic wand and do away with regulatory capture forever. I’m not sure what I said specifically that made you think I put that all on the president.

However it would be equally fallacious to say he can do nothing. It is still a very relevant question, which no one seems to want to answer: what CAN the next president DO to restore trust? Not necessarily restore it ALL but begin to heal the situation? No colorful metaphors. Actual actions that are within the power of the office. This is a real question.

That’s a list of problems. I guess I just have to keep bringing you back to “what should the next president do?” You know, about them.

But if I ask you that are you going to compare me to a bully harming someone? That’s my WTF here.

What? I’m literally asking what the next leader should do to start improving the situation, not asking anyone’s forgiveness. If you can’t name one actual concrete thing, just admit it.

It’ll take decades to make up for completely but what can the next president do to regain some trust?

This makes sense. What never makes sense to me is when people worry about viruses from ice cores that are a billion years old. Because it works both ways: viruses have to be pretty well adapted to you in order to harm you. There are no such viruses long before humans even existed. I’m sure there are exception, as with viruses that manage to jump species, but I wouldn’t worry much about viruses from before the time of mammals, yet some people freak out MORE the older the ice core is. They’ve seen too many movies about ancient evil escaping old crypts.

The more you know, the more there is for you to possibly worry about. Ignorance is bliss! Here’s a fun anecdote to calm your jitters.

Once upon a time I was trying to reassure my coworker who had an upcoming appointment. “I’m scared! I want to do it but I’m scared of the pain! It’s going to hurt!” she groaned.

I asked “where on your body are you getting the work?”

“On my stomach,” she said.

“Oh,” I said, “that’s a good place. It won’t hurt that much. You have a lot of fat on your stomach.”

She just frowned at me. One of the other cooks walked in and she shouted “He just called me fat!”

“The rhetorical ‘you!’” I tried to explain, to no avail. I never heard the end of that one from her.

This is a good example of how the past doesn’t go anywhere. Those drugs are still around as much as they ever were, or in even greater numbers. But we all know what they are now and what they do. There’s nothing to talk about so their names drop off the cultural airwaves. They’ve settled into the culture. You don’t hear about them, but that doesn’t mean they’re not around. The past doesn’t go anywhere. The future is just laid on top of it.

Well, that’s what a rhetorical question is. You’re making a statement, not a query, but the best way to couch your statement happens to be with a question mark at the end of it. I’m not sure this is the best example of one, but at least they made an attempt to label it as such.

Aren’t we as humans proving every year that goes by, that no matter how much power and knowledge you amass, you can still be an evil, childish, asshole? God is just a little further along that dotted line. He’s got all the power and knowledge. This doesn’t make him mature or good.

Cutting to the chase, just ask your mom if any man has ever touched her inappropriately or gotten her to have sex when she would rather not have.

Then ask her why she hasn’t ever told you this before.

The business of business is business.

Businesses want stability, safety, and predictability. Protests really are kind of the opposite energy. Their whole point is to shake things up and reroute the direction of the world, sometimes in big ways. They can also be unpredictable and unfortunately in some cases even unsafe. I remember seeing every store window on Telegraph Avenue broken the day after a big protest. It was sad. The family owned grocery store got it just as bad as the corporate clothing retailer.

Not long ago when the Hong Kong protests were off the hook and things were getting super tense there, some Hong Kong family visited us here in the US for the holidays. The younger generation were super informed and watching their phones and they told us all about the protests, the political actors, the demands, the rhetoric, and the energy in the streets.

Meanwhile, at dinner, the (very wealthy) grandma made a toast and said “Hong Kong needs peace! Doesn’t matter who’s in charge!” There was a super uncomfortable silence and you could see the youngs biting their lips. She has massive business interests there and just wants to keep manufacturing stuff. She doesn’t care about idealism or whatever else.

If a political candidate is really pro business, they don’t go about their agenda by staging protests. The two really just don’t mix. Businesses lobby and donate.

Another way of saying it is that some things are so expensive you don’t do them even if they could be useful one day. Do you have a second house? Your first one could burn down. You don’t? I guess you must be a greedy capitalist thinking only about short term money.

Then social media happened

Yeah, definitely part of the story. Another thing that happens to all user generated content sites is the following:

• they start small: some person starts a web forum or creates a cool web app
• it grows organically for a time, attracting like minds one at a time
• everything is awesome and the site’s growth picks up speed
• the site becomes harder to maintain. Software development, security, moderation, and server costs all start to get beyond what the site founders can handle as a hobby.
• they reach a size where server costs are beyond what anyone can afford as a hobby and at least one person needs to make the place their full time job
• ads are introduced because you can turn them on and get money - maybe they’re only shown to logged out users or something to control the inevitable blowback
• people will complain regardless but of course won’t donate a cent of their own to help
• ads on UGC don’t pay a lot so you need huge traffic to pay any actual salaries with them - this means SEO growth
• search engines now shower the site with traffic because it has a deep well of excellent content from its early days, and this is welcome because it drives the ad revenue
• costs also rise as traffic rises because the site’s software was never built for this scale and it needs professional attention and / or enterprise grade service. No one has the know-how for the most meaningful performance optimizations or an appropriate caching layer - though many half assed tinkerers will fiddle around thinking they know more than they do
• the shower of SEO inbound blows away any concept of organic growth, which is what made the place cool to begin with. Now you’ve got plain old anybodies joining and probably expecting instant gratification when they ask a question. Just as the operators are straining to grow the site to the next level, it rots out from under them.
• the site operators are under stress. They may have lapses where they disappear for a while
• someone starts an alternative site promising a return to the glory days of like minds gathering organically. At some point major downtime happens on the original site and drives migration to the alternative(s)
• back on the original site, the true blue mods from the old days burn out on all this and leave - probably one of them is the guy who started the alternative site. Dedicated mods with intimate and deep knowledge and judgment start to get replaced by volunteers hamfistedly applying rules-based systems and automation. That’s of course nowhere near as good and starts to erode the users experience
• heroic content creating users are now trapped between the unwashed hordes of the general public and shitty moderators, so they burn out too. The last-douchebag-standing effect takes hold, whereby the whole place is increasingly dominated by the few grittiest nutjob superusers who hold out / hang on the longest and begin acting like they own the place
• everyone wonders gee what happened to this place and they come up with highly specific explanations, but details really don’t matter - this entire progression is nigh universal and you might say inevitable from the start. The only communities that avoid this fate are the ones that have an extraordinarily easy path to monetization which they use very wisely, or the ones that close membership and dole out new accounts incredibly sparingly to handpicked individuals. But this exclusivity works against growth and feels “elitist” and the bills may still go unpaid as necrosis inevitably sets in without more robust growth. One day the site suddenly goes offline.

In addition to the many other fine comments here, I will add that when you think someone is so stupid there is often something missing. You may not understand what information they are acting on or you might be interpreting the context according to different values than theirs. As an observer, not understanding someone else’s choice can feel exactly like “damn what a stupid choice.” I try as much as I can to take these as opportunities to dig further and use my imagination to figure out what they must be thinking. Occasionally I come up with something.

This is the best answer.

Thank you for complexifying the stereotype of the mustache-twirling CEO, which most people can’t see beyond. There certainly are more people to blame than just CEOs - people with more power. The entire concept of a fiduciary seems like the seed of evil to me. Once you have a CEO beholden to pursue the interests of shareholders to the exclusion of all others, the incentives are in place for people to get hurt. The shareholders don’t really have to call a single shot (and they usually don’t). The financiers / shareholders are still guilty of participating in this system at all, of course, but surely the CEO is at least as guilty since he’s usually also a shareholder and will be the fiduciary in question to actually carry out the hurting. So I think it’s fair to hate the CEOs, actually, as much as anyone.

But I would agree that the politicians and lobbyists have to be on this list, probably at the top of it. They are the only ones who can do anything about this entire system, which, as soon as it exists, is a recipe for hurting people. The people who drive the regulatory capture that allows our system to become so shitty are surely going straight to hell.

What of the rest of us though, who don’t even run for office and give them a challenge?

You can impose that technicality if you want, but when corruption is perhaps the world’s top obstacle to funding solutions for things, I see little point except the joy of splitting hairs.

Corruption is probably the biggest thing that keeps it from working. Developed countries don’t have the slightest idea what corruption even is. We hear that word in the US and we think “oh dear, bribes!” But in many parts of the world the entire economy is basically spent on greasing every palm, high and low, to keep some regime in power. Whole generations of entire countries have basically gone up in smoke this way. It makes the army’s $400 hammer sound like an absolute bargain.

They go bad pretty fast. Mold spots within a week in my experience. I always try to use it all.

That was a swear, not a prayer.