Unfortunately, decades of media conditioning and extreme polarization has led to a situation in which the normal checks and balances have been severely degraded or are non functional.

A significant fraction of the population is happy to overlook excesses from 'their' side. Combine that with extreme gerrymandering and you have the recipe for a situation where a majority of elected lawmakers have no real fear of an election loss.

We have a situation where the same people who were apoplectic about Hunter Biden's laptop are whistling past things like the pardon of George Santos and the Binance founder(with Trump admitting he didn't who CZ was).

There is no easy path back from this situation. Democracies that have reached this stage of late have struggled to come back.

> like the behaviour of Fable, not the behaviour of Opus - the fact that many people speak about this is evidence.

I'm wondering how much of that is the harness vs the model. Overall, the 'feel' of a model seems to be largely due to the harness than the model itself.

You can thank Citizens United for that.

Good for you.

If that's enough for you, then by all means use Chrome.

Yeah, it's what I do. I use Vivaldi.

> you can sign into the Play Store with a Google Account that isn't tied to anything else.

The problem with this is that increasingly Google is insisting on having a phone number to create a Google account. Further, they are aggressively deleting old accounts that appear to be dormant.

The good old days of creating a Google account with just an email seem to be swiftly becoming a thing of the past.

I recently had to set up a new Android device for work. Since I keep all my personal accounts separate from my work accounts, I needed to create a new Google account on that phone. I ended up paying $8 for a month of the cheapest service I could find just to get a phone number so I could create that account.

The extent to which this administration will go to protect and enhance obvious and blatant corruption is truly breath taking!

What's heart breaking is that in spite of overwhelming objective evidence, the same MAGA folks who were apoplectic about corruption under the previous administration(remember Hunter Biden's laptop?) are now suddenly OK with it.

> Those second-order effects are easy to mitigate with sensible public policy.

Regrettably, sensible public policy seems to be in remarkably short supply these days.

IIRC, the Binance founder simply paid Trump off and got a pardon, with Trump himself admitting afterwards that he 'didn't know who the guy was'. So, the assertion that there are no real consequences anymore for 0.1% continues to hold.

Oh no! Surely under capitalism the competition from other producers would ensure that such a thing could never happen. Surely this is a freak event /s

Many commenters have pointed it out, but it's such an important point that it needs to be repeated every time. Capitalism without effective regulation has never worked out in all of human history. In the absence of an entity with a big enough stick (aka the government), overt or covert methods of collusion always emerge which leads to a race to the bottom.

Sadly for the Americans, approximately a third are so far down the path of 'govt bad' indoctrination that they need to relearn the lesson every couple of generations. Unfortunately for the rest of us, that third holds outsized political power due to the voting system.