Flash forward eight years, to this past May, when Mr. Miller, still livid and now the White House deputy chief of staff, paid a visit to the Washington headquarters of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, where he berated officials for not deporting nearly enough immigrants. He told the officials that rather than develop target lists of gang members and violent criminals, they should just go to Home Depots, where day laborers gather to be hired, or to 7-Eleven convenience stores and arrest the undocumented immigrants they find there.

This time, the officials did what Mr. Miller said. ICE greatly stepped up its enforcement operations, raiding restaurants, farms and work sites across the country, with arrests sometimes climbing to more than 2,000 a day. In early June, after an ICE raid in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles triggered protests, Mr. Trump deployed several thousand National Guard troops and Marines to the city, over the objection of Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The crisis, from the immigration raids that sparked the protests to the militarized response that tried to put the protests down, was almost entirely of Mr. Miller’s making. And it served as a testament to the remarkable position he now occupies in Mr. Trump’s Washington. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, who reportedly accompanied Mr. Miller on his visit to ICE headquarters, seems to defer to him. “It’s really Stephen running D.H.S.,” a Trump adviser said. The attorney general, Pam Bondi, is so focused on preparing for and appearing on Fox News that she has essentially ceded control of the Department of Justice to Mr. Miller, making him, according to the conservative legal scholar Edward Whelan, “the de facto attorney general.” And in a White House where the chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is not well versed or terribly interested in policy — “She’s producing a reality TV show every day,” another Trump adviser said, “and it’s pretty amazing, right?” — Mr. Miller is typically the final word.

That last paragraph… Ooof.

I knew Miller was a nihilistic misanthrope who would take as much power as he could, but I expected Bondi, Noem and Wiles to be nearly as craven to demonstrate their value to Trump and carve out their own fiefdoms. I didn’t expect them to cede it without so much as a shrug.

Yes, but you see, now they can “read” the outline, and end up with just enough memory of it to reference the work in a condescendingly authoritative opinion about it.

Well, I’ll give my own impression: I was never a fanboy, but I think his PR team did a good job making him seem vaguely non-threatening and focused on bringing the sci-fi ideas into reality. I remember rolling my eyes when he appeared in Iron Man 2, and the “Tony Stark” comparisons always seemed, to be charitable, aspirational. But then he started tweeting about that cave diver being a “pedo guy,” fired his PR people, and it quickly became obvious who he really was.

Basically standard tech bro protocol. Appear neutral on politics and vaguely altruistic in motive, until they have so much money nobody can stop them from being their worst techno-fascist selves. (Altman seems next in line for this transition.)

Yeah, this post started as a reassurance that Tailscale wouldn’t enshittify. But it turned out to just be an argument about how to avoid enshittification that boiled down to two principles:

1. You shouldn’t make your product worse because it’ll eventually harm the company; and
2. Founders are magic and need to never turn over control of the company to others (be it new CEOs or VC) to resist enshittification.

Both are partially right and partially wrong.

For #1: Yes, making your product worse eventually harms the company. No, you can’t expect CEOs to accept that as a reason to not make their product worse because even if it harms the company, short-term incentives that lead to enshittification are eventually going to become irresistible. His comment about reaching “zen” with leveled growth and profit will never stop VCs from calling in demands and favors.

For #2: Yes, founders typically “get it” more than their VC- or failure-initiated replacements. No, that doesn’t mean founders are uniquely resistant to enshittification. This is your point too, and it’s why I don’t believe this person - they lose credibility here because they don’t acknowledge they aren’t special. Every tech bro out there thinks they’ve cracked the code to permanent tech hegemony. That exceptionalist thinking turns into enshittification, since the product-worsening or overcharging is easier to justify as temporary/necessary/not-a-big-deal (until it isn’t).

And all of this doesn’t explain why Tailscale specifically gets immunity if the principles are true.

So interesting post, and a lot more self-awareness than most founders which is still a little reassuring, but a lot of warning signs too.

Edit: clarity

“You’re either going to take a massive tax increase or you’re going to decrease taxes. So for conservatives like myself, that’s a no-brainer,” Chaffetz said.

Ah! “No-brainer” makes a lot of sense to me. That should really be the GOP’s tagline.

But the bottom line is that Mike Lee and all the other Republicans aren’t responding because this will be out of the news cycle in 3 days so they’ll never have to answer for it if they can just avoid making further headlines.

That’s some quality conspiracy thinking!

But there are too many people who could have been early adopters and have any number of random motives for this to be “likely.”

Heck, I was watching Bitcoin when it was like $0.002 a coin and someone spent 10,000 (presumably home-CPU-mined) BTC to buy a pizza. There were a ton of people there at the beginning, the barrier to purchasing a ton was very low, and unlike me, a lot of them certainly had $20,000 to spare and believed in it enough to buy.

Is it just me, or is this graph (first graph in the article) completely unintelligible?

The X-axis being time is self-explanatory, but the Y-axis is somehow exponential time but then also mapping random milestones of performance, meaning those milestones are hard-linked to that time-based Y-axis? What?

They say he was arrested for the “assault,” but yep, they intentionally phrased it to conflate “verbal harassment” with actual (if true) criminal conduct. It’s a meaningless phrase.

If anything, they put it there because to the right wing base, it justifies police violence or could support disorderly conduct, or one of the other catch-all pretextual “crimes” used when police want to arrest someone for no real reason.

Even if any of them believe they are praying, their “faith” is a sham in support of their real religion: power. To Republicans, “politics” is the religion founded on increasing personal power through performative speech and conduct.

They are hollow, nihilistic simulacrums of human-like virtue, expressing themselves only to drain the actual human value and agency from the public.

The DHS views the situation differently. In a statement to NBC, a department spokesperson said that “Garcia assaulted and verbally harassed a federal agent and that he was subdued and arrested for the alleged assault”.

They say this every time, whether or not there is footage obviously proving otherwise.

Apart from being so insulting and pathetic that this is the government’s generic response to unconstitutional arrests (though he is suing under a tort law due presumptively due to qualified immunity), it’s also outright defamatory to falsely claim that someone has committed a crime and assaulted ICE.

The story doesn’t provide evidence either way, but if this just is their typical Baghdad Bob propaganda, I hope the victims of ICE start to sue for defamation as well - drain the new bill’s obscene funding with a wave of court-ordered compensation to ICE’s victims.

Yeah, Match.com isn’t satisfied until everyone is miserable.

It’s weird to think about how dominantly successful any app that took a principled position and resisted enshittification starting in 2010 would be now.

I think civilization is probably just ending after these last few generations, frankly.

Probably for the best…

Yes, but it’s legitimately different when you are a huge company versus a struggling artist. A company like Nintendo has the capital and staying power already to reap generational rewards from embedding their IP into a culture.

We’ve seen the exact same playbook with universities. Pull federal funding for racist political priorities, and other funding if they don’t start toeing the line.

It’s just the creative writing variant of shitposting.

Sometimes more literal than others.

Don’t forget to bathe in raw sewage.

I think a general strike would be effective, but dangerous when people are kept so close to poverty.

Remember the pandemic, we “all” stopped going into work? Except the grocery store workers, and the food processor workers, and those that distribute the food, and water treatment plant staff, and the power plant, and hospital staff, and taxis, and drug store workers, and so on and on. Do those people stop working? How many people can’t obtain the things they need beyond their next paycheck? What if in addition, the store shelves are empty?

I agree, it’s the most feasible way to fight back, so don’t get me wrong. But just like union dues and preparation enable a local strike, accounting for food, water, amenities…a general strike would need to do that or else we would be fighting a war of attrition not just against billionaires with multi-year bunkers but also against ourselves.

Well, Jan. 6th was that too. Every boundary push is a practice run to push further.

The things that happened earlier - arresting US citizens before grudgingly releasing them, deporting them and legal residents - was a trial run for today. Today - planning denaturalization based only on Trump’s mood at the time - is a trial run for tomorrow. And we can guess what that is.

At least there are no official death camps in this bill.

Sorry to be a downer, but ICE’s funding is now high enough that one of the few plausible explanations for it is that they plan to create concentration camps of immigrants (and, hey, well we have all this money and space, maybe just all other undesirables too…?)

Yes, I opt out. The point of the scan is to (1) build a thorough database (although DOGE probably already did that, we just haven’t found out yet), and (2) to accustom you to your identity not belonging to you.

The second point is the real point of opting out - as soon as nearly nobody opts out, and they’ve made headway on a database, it will no longer be optional. Opting out in that sense is the only vote you’re going to get to cast against it.