|
The MoA Week In Review – OT 2025-275
Last week’s posts on Moon of Alabama:
> Trump does not have the legal power to close the airspace over another country, even as he appeared to be threatening an attack or seeking to push Venezuela’s leaders to think he was contemplating one. <
—
Other issues:
West Asia:
EU:
EU and Ukraine:
UK:
Use as open (not related to the wars in Ukraine and Palestine) thread …
DunGroanin’: replies in-line. Let’s work this some, this is an unusual oppty to actually make progress.
DG: Thanks for the architecture suggestion – sounds like it would be secure in terms of not being able to be switched off by any host put under legal pressure by a government.
Tom: It’s tuff to squash a distributed army of ants when they’re in the grass, DG. They’re so damned little, they’re not worth the effort it takes to find and squash them. This is the fundamental principle of guerrilla / asymmetric warfare
DG: So for illustration say this site MoA under b’s control would be safe in such a technical ‘hole in the wall’ but does that mean our establishments barkeep is?
Tom: No, but the notion is that no node in the network can damage the sys. They’re either forwarding or not. Yes, each node can:
a. corrupt/alter content. There are well-known, widely-used mechanisms (cheap one) that serve to make it really expensive to mess with content,
b. Record from-which-prior-hop and to-next-hop in the network. If a msg goes thru several hops (like The Onion Router does) that prior-next hop info loses value immed. End-to-end comms are really tough to trace
DG:The big ranchers can still go after the known outlaws! Put up ‘wanted’ posters. Put together a posse to physically find and drag onto the gallows – after a fair trial of course, you understand. If it wasn’t done as a literal ‘dead or alive’ bounty.
How would any future bar minder be able to avoid such a fate?
Tom: At some point of oppression, that scenario becomes valid. If the node operator (not a barkeep, not that involved, not necessarily creating content, but just movin’ packets from point A to point where (in this side of computer, out that side). That’s fairly innocuous. If said network actually proved itself useful on other counts, like trading or commerce or education, etc. it’d be tuff to hang that albatross about its neck. So, keep the role of the network-node operator very constrained: yer movin’ packets. That’s it.
Now let’s talk about the other players: the content creator (e.g. our Barkeep, or just about any one of the posters here now), who double as content-producers and content-providers. Here, I’ll put on the content-provider cap. My function is to learn some stuff, read, talk to peeps in my neighborhood, do a little writing, make a doc. I have a seed database (on my computer) of addrs on the network I want to send the doc to. I send it. The doc transits some number of unknown-to-me, and unknown-to-anyone-else nodes as it goes to its destination.
Now I’m wearing consumer-hat. I log into the network, and one of those hosts out there, which serves as a post office node, just like email sys has – has a doc ready for me to download. So I download it on to Peeples-Network client, runs on my desktop, and I read it. Yay! It’s really a cool doc! I say “gonna show some luv to this author”. I send out a payment msg, wends its way back to Author, he stores these Kudo-with-Money docs on his computer (runs the same client I, as consumer, have on my computer), and by and by he redeems those Kudo-Docs for $.
All the while, Mr.Consumer-Boy (me with hat on) says, “in addn to kudos to Author, I’m gonna forward this doc to some cool people” and I do. Got my own list of folk I trade docs with. Out it goes, sooner or later, thru some legerdemain, shows up …. on DG’s client (which is same software I’m using, free downloadable client sw)… and then a lot more ants get the doc, and so forth. No central auth regulating knowledge-and-info commerce.
DG: Obviously the punters, us, would still be traceable because we use our real names / emails etc ; or if we make ourselves easily foundable by being honest in stating where we are and provide enough circumstantial clues for any half decent AI Sherlock to find us without much problem.
Tom: I addressed this issue glibly above. Key point is that a person’s identity is likely not-known, and can be kept not-known, but their brand, their symbol-of-this-is-a-legit-me, is widely known. Sorta like the public-key, private-key notion. I need to believe that the token really came from the legit token-holder. Don’t need or want to know who the token-holder is. Build the brand (reputation for producing hi-Quality content) around the token, not the person behind the token.
Yes, there are vulnerabilities; when I redeem atta-boy Kudos into money, doesn’t that create a trail? Can, but not necessarily. Bitcoin addresses this issue to some extent, and … I’m out of my depth here, but others aren’t. I see this as solvable. There are a bunch of professional security-types that have lots of motivation to create this sort of facility.
People can be found with the skills to plug the security holes. They don’t have to plug all of them, they mostly need to make it pretty expensive to find the ants. And if the ants are doing relatively innocuous stuff – bitching about the world’s injustice for ex – the security apparatus isn’t going to involved. Plotting assassinations? Then you’re going to get yourself squashed. Don’t do stupid; do graaaaddduuuuaaaal, distributed, little-bitty-bite annoyance that becuz numbers adds up to major probs for the predators.
The idea is to use the ants for doing what ants are good at. Get a lot of ants.
DG: I’m pretty sure that would be a bit chilling for some of us but would the site still be secure? Hope that makes sense.
Tom: Makes perfect sense. You’re concerned about all the right things. Now let’s move beyond “concern” to “problem solving”. Well overdue, this.
BTW, thanks for bringing it up.
Posted by: Tom Pfotzer | Dec 1 2025 17:13 utc | 203
@Tom_Pfotzer #195
Tom: But did that stop them from using debt to keep what passes for our economy running? Didn’t stop them, did it? Why? I’ll explain in a second….
You are conflating the morons of the past: Obama, Dubya Bush, Biden – with the present and future.It certainly is not the case for the present ie Trump; time will tell for the future. But I will note that even autopen senile Biden continued Trump’s China tariff policy.
FDR was loved not because he was always right or even moderately smart on policy matters. FDR was loved because he tried lots of shit and it was obvious that he was trying. Most of the programs he enacted didn’t do diddly squat, but he kept trying new ones.
That should sound familiar…
Tom: Of course. But that process of enshitification has benefited the ruling class. It’s what they wanted, and what we got, and what they chose for us is what we have. Less debt stops the economy as it currently _is_.
Not really. Most of the benefits went to the PMC servants, not to the ruling class per se – the lawyers and DEI coaches and what not.
Have you not noticed that the new ruling class – the tech barons – were specifically not part of the general enshittification process of the overall US economy? But that those companies are now, too, embarking on the enshittification journey for their platforms? Enshittification is an outcome of monopoly and zombie companies.
Tom: It is _waaaay_ harder than you’re representing. In order to get to the economy you posit, a pretty fair portion of the ruling classes’ attitudes, values and choke-hold on the US institutions has to be revised or destroyed. This is why so many people say “gotta crash but good before change is possible”.
I’ve never said it was easy. What I am saying, is that it is absolutely doable – once people of sufficient will get into the right places. I noted in a previous post – the Cabinet under Trump. Compare and contrast those people with the sad lot under Obama, Trump 45, Dubya both terms, Clinton to understand the difference.
Furthermore: Banksters are cowards and pussies – they are cowed by real power because they operate like Wormtongue via innuendo and influence via money.
This isn’t a guess – this is borne out by historical fact. Putin demonstrated this in Russia, bringing not just banksters but outright gangsters turned oligarchs to heel. And Putin didn’t do this alone – he was the tip of the spear for the sovereigntists in Russia.
This is also why the “globalists” ie the banksters push WEF graduates into positions of power. They want pussies like themselves in the positions of sovereign power in order to mitigate this danger.
There are plenty of sovereigntists in the US, and they are starting to act.
Allow me to point out that still, after all the mountain of evidence that our economy is fundamentally unsound, still the ruling class refuses to do fundamental change. To wit:
LOL. You don’t know shit and still won’t admit it.
First of all, reshoring doesn’t happen in 10 months. It takes years. Trying to “prove” reshoring is, or is not, happening during the first 10 months of the Trump presidency is, at best, a fool’s errand and at worst, a scam knowingly perpetuated in order to win an argument.
Secondly, we are in a historic bubble of LLM/AI bullshit. It isn’t quite as bad on a pure purchasing power parity dollar basis as the fiber optic bubble of the 1990s, but the net destruction of value for this bubble is going to be far worse simply because the actual benefits of LLM/AI are minimal.
The fiber optic buildout was predicated on real productivity increases in telecommunications; the LLM/AI bubble is predicated on (at best) massive job losses and in reality, mostly hot air and fodder for PMC commenters. That is one of the bigger ironies: the talking heads in existing power, as well as the alt-news commentariat, are precisely those who benefit the most from LLM/AI gathered news and information even as LLM/AI does diddly squat for anyone else (and arguably makes other users dumber).
But getting back to the historic LLM/AI bubble: massive bubbles are black holes for capital and focus. The Great Depression arose because the “innovation” of margin debt feeding into the 1920s stock bubble sucked in capital from literally the entire world. And since money was gold back then, it meant the entire world’s gold ie capital was flowing towards the US and the US stock market, not to mention domestic capital. This resulted in massive productive economy stagnation for at least a decade and a half – masked by the “gains” of the stock market.
Sound familiar? It should, if you have been paying any attention to economic reality vs economic hype.
To be clear: I am again not saying that all is well, or will end well, or even that we are certainly on the right path. The massive US national debt is not going to default because the US can print dollars – but the most likely outcome is a hyperinflation, either in a year or over several years. That’s the most common historical outcome to address an oversupply of debt. Fools say that wars are started because the wealthy benefit from hyperinflation during said wars – this is historically utterly false. If you look at the top 10 wealthiest in the US before the Civil War, before WW1, before WW2 – and compare to the top 10 wealthiest AFTER the wars – they are almost completely different. Inequality also falls during these wars – it does not grow because workers have to be paid to produce what is needed to fight said wars. So while there is hyperinflation during a war, the workers get paid commensurate or greater wages and so gain economically, whereas the existing rich get their funds inflated down even as nouveau riche appear who benefit from the massive economic disruption of a war economy.
So that’s what really happens during wars.
The other possibility – outside of war/hyperinflation – is massive growth.
The US, now that it has offshored so much of its production, is in the position where an industrialization spiral can once again occur. Industrialization is the one exception to the hyperinflation outcome of debt.
This is a binary solution set.
Posted by: c1ue | Dec 2 2025 15:37 utc | 277
|
