Maybe hold the parents accountable. Betya then they’ll start caring about what their children are doing. Because yes, while there are adult perpetrators, there are also children themselves selling media they create on things like roblox servers. It’s a rabbit hole.

Bonus: you don’t have to invalidate everyone’s right to fucking privacy.

Extra credit: you can still tax the fuck out of these trillion dollar corporations that are ruining the world.

The NIF’s work is genuinely impressive. Achieving ignition ten times with a record yield of 8.6 MJ in April 2025 is real scientific progress and is amazing. American scientists are not the problem, nor did I say that they were.

But notice what you just linked me. NIF is a Department of Energy federal research facility. Publicly funded. Government science. The same category of institution the current administration is actively dismantling.

While there were past achievements, at the same time the Trump administration proposed 40% cuts to NIH and 55% cuts to NSF in 2026. By November 2025, $2.3 billion in NIH grants and $700 million in NSF grants had been frozen or terminated across nearly 4,000 projects. NSF awards dropped 50% in 2025 compared to recent years. Over 25,000 science agency employees left, many voluntarily through resignation incentive programs, many at early career stages. The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship halved the number of fellowships awarded in 2025. Universities across the country froze hiring and cut research spending in response.

The fusion breakthroughs you’re pointing to were built on decades of sustained public investment and institutional infrastructure that is currently being systematically defunded. The scientists who achieved those results are the same ones that are now being told their grants are frozen, their fellowships are cut, and their agencies are being restructured around defense priorities.

So yes, the US has done remarkable fusion research. Past tense is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The comment was about where we’re headed, being present tense. And where we’re headed is a country that just told its early career researchers their scientific purpose has been knocked off course by illegal funding cuts while other countries continue to make advance after advance with no signs of stopping, even further, being fueled by the exodus of researchers.

So, yes, the US is sitting in the corner having, at present, taken a very anti-science and anti-education stance through funding cuts and deregulation.

Reading comprehension gets them every time 🤔

Budget cuts:

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/cost-trump-administrations-attacks-research-funding

https://cen.acs.org/policy/nih-nsf-ostp-science-research-funding-cuts/103/web/2025/12

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/nih-nsf-cuts-2025-data

https://www.aau.edu/key-issues/federal-research-cuts-threaten-us-innovation-and-leadership

https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-026-00088-9/index.html

Proposed cuts:

https://cen.acs.org/policy/trump-budget-fy2027-science-nsf-epa-nih-fda/104/web/2026/04

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trump-administration-proposes-massive-budget-cuts-to-science/

Researcher exodus/brain drain:

https://medium.com/scitech-forefront/science-funding-cuts-break-the-research-pipeline-ce02c7073253

Meanwhile, the US sits in the corner playing with their feces

Newpipe is free. You can donate to support if you’d like. No account required, so no tracking. Subs and history are stored locally. And with an internet condom (VPN) no IP exposure.

We’re closer than we were, and I appreciate you engaging honestly. But I think the “capitalism as a tool” framing is where we still fundamentally diverge.

A tool is neutral. A hammer doesn’t have preferences on what it impacts. Capitalism does. It has a built-in optimization function that rewards specific behaviors regardless of who wields it or what guardrails are placed around it. It rewards the accumulation of capital. It rewards externalizing costs onto workers, communities, and ecosystems because those costs don’t appear on a balance sheet. It rewards buying political influence because the return on investment is demonstrably higher than almost any other capital deployment. That’s the system executing its own logic correctly.

You’re describing a government that “interferes where needed” to correct those outcomes. I’m asking who controls that government and why we should expect it to maintain that independence indefinitely against an opponent that compounds its political influence the same way it compounds its capital. Europe is the test case and the results are coming in. The interference is losing ground. European governments haven’t stopped wanting to intervene but because the structural pressure never stops and the political will to resist it has to be continuously regenerated while capital only has to keep pushing, it is a system you’ll never win against.

You said it yourself: the correct implementation doesn’t exist. Only one that minimizes harm. I’d push that further: a system whose internal logic actively works against minimizing harm isn’t a tool, but instead a system doing what it was designed to do. The harm is the output of the optimization function running correctly.

At some point “we need better regulation” becomes “we need to replace the thing that keeps eating the regulation.” That’s where I am. With as much abundance as we have within the world, why must we restrict ourselves to a single system of economics that has been proven to fail, that is both anti-democratic and anti-life?

As is often said, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, eh?

I’m sorry, but I have to vehemently disagree.

Europe is a useful example but not in the way you think.

The Nordic and Western European mixed economies you’re pointing to weren’t built by capitalism behaving itself. They were built by strong labor movements, socialist parties, and the credible threat of communist revolution making concessions politically necessary for capital to survive. The welfare state wasn’t capitalism working as intended but was capitalism being forced to share under duress. The moment that pressure lifted, the erosion started.

And it is eroding. Housing crises in London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Dublin. Healthcare privatization creeping into NHS and other systems. Austerity gutting social programs across Southern Europe. The same private equity firms extracting the same rents from the same essential services. The guardrails aren’t holding because capital accumulates political influence the same way it accumulates capital. Continuously, patiently, and structurally. It doesn’t need to win every fight but instead keeps the pressure on, just aa it has in the US.

The US didn’t fail to regulate capitalism in that Americans are uniquely stupid or uniquely corrupt (they are plenty of both though, I’m American, I know). It failed because capital had enough runway to capture the regulatory apparatus before the guardrails were fully built. Europe had a head start on the welfare state and is watching it get dismantled anyway. The difference is timeline rather than trajectory.

So yes, regulated capitalism produces better outcomes than what we have. Which is authoritarianism, greatest wealth disparity, lowest health outcomes, etc etc. The question is whether those outcomes are stable without continuously fighting the same structural forces that produced American oligarchy in the first place. History suggests they aren’t. Which means the guardrails aren’t a solution. They’re a holding action that requires winning the same political fight indefinitely against an opponent that compounds its advantages over time.

At some point you have to address the root, not just keep patching the symptoms. And that root, friend, is capitalism. A system designed to extract profit. The foundation is to amass profit, and the only way to do that is through exploitation. Capitalism rewards the most narcissistic, the most unempathetic, the most willing to exploit. And whenever capital amasses, it just becomes a simple math problem where buying influence results in deregulation which results in greater profits.

We’ve a planet full of life, nature, food, wonder, and instead we created debt, war, and capiralism. How can such a flawed system ever be implemented “correctly?” Instead, the American way is the intended implementation of capitalism. It always was.

Democracy poses political risk to authoritarians so…yeah, Palantir and “age verificatiom” is a great idea

Nothing becomes affordable in the US. We run on capitalism. How would oligarchs make more money if they lowered prices?

But capturing consumers, establishing monopolies, and stifling innovation? Hell yeah, let’s burn this place down! (Literally, like, sea levels are rising, water is becoming scarce, species and ecosystems are going extinct, etc)

Exactly what I said would happen.

Me smrt billionaire, me track token quantity. Dat look good. Use most tokens iz gud. Wat does kwalitee mean?

Yet why aren’t we recording all of their pedophilia, fraud, etc?

All billionaires are pedophiles and fraudsters unless proven innocent in my opinion.

Ive just used them by logging in on my pc on a privacy focused browser. Haven’t even tried on the phone.

GrapheneOS is doing fairly well right now for my needs. And I’ve been getting and supporting as many open source, privacy respecting apps as possible.

Honestly, it’s been kind of fun and heartening to learn about all of these projects that people are building because they’re passionate, driven, and want to help people. All without a stupid profit motive.

I so wasn’t sold I’m not an android user anymore.

This is why my glasses now have an IR blocking coating to interrupt facial recognition somewhat.

Not that they don’t have gait tracking or other methods 🙃

Time to start a new fashion trend. Algorithm scrambling cloaks and trench coats lol. Welcome to the bladerunner/cyberpunk era.

Absolutely we would, we’re paying attention. Most people aren’t.

What I worry about is the longterm effects. Look at children who have grown up with iphones. Most of them don’t know that other apps exist outside of their locked down appstore.

What scares me is the normalization through the generations of the surveillance state. Remember what we used to call spyware? I’d hazard a guess that basically every corporate application could be classified as spyware given the amount of data they collect on a user. But we’ve largely stopped using the term.

Chrome is spyware, but if you called it that you’d be met with “bro, what? It’s a browser” or even worse “so? I need it to access the internet”

Yet.

But it doesn’t need to be once the data exists, corporations can build their websites however they like once the data is mandated to exist. Think about how your browser, if not chrome, will often break/slow down on YouTube because google wants you to use chrome/have ads play on YouTube. Or how captcha will just sometimes break and force you to use a chrome browser (which exposes a bunch of data)…cause google again. None of that is mandated by law.

Don’t forget the legislation is funded by Meta. They want that delicious, scrumptious data that will help them legally avoid COPPA and target/collect data on child accounts and get them addicted while young.

And I know we will. We’re cool like that.

I imagine that, while good on the surface, the apps that will then require the age information called from the OS will just reject any platform that doesn’t provide it, essentially segregating the internet.

Which, adding more and more friction makes it more likely that users will just give up and submit to giving up their privacy.

I would still say no.

You should have a right to privacy. And there are still ways in which law enforcement could investigate and track perpetrators of crimes and implement “justice,” though as is obvious in America now, justice isn’t ethical either, and what can be labelled as crime, or even terrorism (take a look at NSPM-7.

Even if 100% ethical, I still have my right to privacy. Should I commit a crime, then I would forfeit that right. It would be up to law enforcement to enforce that law. By penalizing a VPN service, which is a leg service, it removes the right of privacy from everyone, not just myself whom they supposedly had evidence of a crime in this hypothetical. Otherwise, they targeted a VPN for their claims alone.

Regardless of that, taking down said VPN will not stop crimes from occurring. Users will simply use other VPN services as more exist.

Given the recent legislation to try an ban VPNs, this could mean that VPNs could be forced to track the traffic of users, which kind of defeats the point of them. Even in this 100% ethical government scenario.

Basically, law enforcement has the tools to individually track perpetrators already, if they were interested. In real life, they’re interested in protecting capital. Individual investigations are expensive. But working with corporations and governments to collect data and track all users? Well then it becomes much cheaper to press a button and arrest someone for whatever “crime” you define.

I think the real questions at hand are:

Is it ethical to remove the right of privacy of everyone in the name of “justice?” (No)

Are the laws by which certain actions are labelled as crime ethical? (Also, no.)

We believe that justice should be ethical. When capital and authiritarians rule, justice has no ethics.

And Jellyfin downloads start spiking.

Huh, coincidence I guess.

It’s never an option to tax the megacorporations that force us to use public roads that they don’t pay for to get to work is it?

Good ol corporate socialism. Privatize the gains and socialize the losses.

Tax the megacorps more and use that to maintain roads and expand public transit providing an actual choice for people rather than forcing the individual to buy a car, pay for maintenance, for registration, for fuel, for a license, for tolls, all just to get to work.