Or, you know, Google could go back to its link-ranking system for now until it figures out how to keep AI from hallucinating.

AI is still premature. Experimental. It should be regarded as such, like an early-access game.

It still seems to be a thing, that the only possible communism is post Stalin USSR (or 21st century China).

Not discussed often is the degree to which western industrialist interests aggressively acted to sabotage efforts for societies to form an egalitarian socialist democracy. Both the British empire and the US empire are guilty of this, often to the point of brutally overthrowing such governments in favor of puppet dictatorships.

So one criticism of communism might be that they are susceptible to intervention by larger bullyish states, but that’s true of any society, regardless of how it’s organized.

Plenty of political assassinations in history have been committed not by faction agents or hit men commissioned by a conspiracy but by solitary individuals with a grudge and a will.

While valid, the reason they’re encased in those big concrete pillars is to assure they’re safe for transport, and can survive accidents without leakage.

ETA: I should admit not ALL of our waste has been processed into vitrified HLW or packed for transport, but these processes are undergone before waste is shipped to a repository.

The classic move is to drag their lifeless body through the streets of the capitol to the cheers of people and the rain of ticker-tape confetti.

The reason Hitler killed himself and had his remains burned immediately was because he was afraid of this very fate.

You’re right. John Oliver did an LWT segment on nuclear waste and how we have an overflow problem at many local sites, and meanwhile can’t get budgeting to complete the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. (It has some NIMBY problems, though it’s one of the most stable regions to put a deep geological repository.

But the storage overflow problem is approaching critical in some places. The US may not have enough repositories for nuclear waste, but we need them badly.

In the current era, I do not expect this situation to improve, and may get worse, especially since the regime is against renewable energy development.

Burning, as in common cremation, turns someone to ash with some components that are not fully reduced. Vitrification homogenizes them even further.

But the point is also to take them out of the ecological cycle. The material of scattered ashes are processed by the ecology and eventually are reintegrated into larger and larger life forms again. By reducing a tyrant to a solid and locking them in a vault, their material is removed from the life cycle for as close to eternity as we can fathom.

Now if we had the option of throwing them into the sun, that would nicely reduce them to plasma, but that involves a heavy duty launch vehicle like the Atlas V. (My dad did the calculation once, and that would get about 150 lbs into the sun. Escaping earth is expensive.)

I didn’t say other nations wouldn’t be better off without US interference. The US has caused a lot of problems and overthrown plenty of governments, sometimes for no greater crime than being an ideological threat by its presence, or refusing to let capitalist interests exploit their resources.

But the US is responsible for a lot of stability in the world. This is one of the reasons the dissolution of USAID has been so disastrous. It was a vector by which the US did good and created stability.

And yes, the fall of the US would mean that some military adventurism from the US would not happen, allowing some societies to develop in peace…but at the same time, other societies looking to expand violently will also be emboldened. It will be chaotic and unpredictable.

Actually, I said nothing of adding any markers to indicate the remains are there, buried with the toxic waste.

The US is showing a lot of the classic symptoms of approaching civilization collapse, from unmitigated climate change to polarization of wealth and power at the top, to the open, extreme corruption of government officials.

All the horsemen of the apocalypse are getting ready to ride.

But in the aftermath, we’ll learn all the ways that the empire stabilized the rest of the world, and conflicts between local warlords will break out across the world like hives.

That’s because the key ingredient for a data center is not an abundance of water and power, but regional officials who can be bribed to fuck over the local neighborhood.

In other parts of the world, data centers are regulated, required to not overwhelm the local infrastructure, and not bother the neighbors, but here in the US, politicians come cheap.

I grew up to effing Sesame Street teaching me about pluralism and accepting neighbors that are different color / religion, etc. (But not gays. LGBT+ were still expected to stay in the closet.)

So I grew up believing that ours was a plurality. The great melting pot.

Then as I grew up, the Southern Strategy moved pluralism to the edge of the Overton window and then outside it. And despite that we promised not to turn into Nazis the way Germany did, we totally went there.

Though, thanks to the internet and Breadtube, I now know the US only aspired to be an all-encompassing pluralism one day, and that the ownership class was always, always working to sabotage any progress, since it was a direct threat to their wealth and power.

You’re assuming that the military would willingly be deployed in the US against civilians. While that has happened with various state National Guard reserves, it is not legal when it comes to the other branches.

This is not to say they won’t given that plenty of flag officers have been replaced with MAGA loyalists, but doing so would destroy unit cohesion and would risk mutiny. More likely, so long as the US military remains professional (and not conscripts), they’re likely to respond via malicious compliance, much the way parade discipline was lacking during Trump’s birthday parade in 2025.

I’m not in the service, but I’ve heard from many veterans that an attempt to deploy the armed services against US civilians, or to engage in law enforcement action would cause far more problems than it would solve. This is why, when Trump has deployed the Marines on US soil, their duties have been limited to protecting federal buildings and not engaging with civilians, assisting ICE or controlling crowds.

The Civil Rights movement comes to mind, as do the numerous labor movements.

Or do you believe revolutions have to be violent to count?

Is that a version of KYS? Because it sounds to me like a version of KYS.

Among all the possible examples of revolutionary action in US history, you chose the most pathetic of the lot.

The Republican party is dead set on ending elections altogether and installing a one-party autocracy. What we have is bad, but it’s not as bad as it will get once the parties don’t have to compete for votes.

So long as its possible to vote out Republicans by voting for Democrats, then voters need to be voting for Democrats, even if they block strikes and do nothing about genocides abroad. They might be bad but their Republican counterparts are far worse.

Civil war will certainly not look like the first one with battle lines, though if we see an interstate conflict, we might see fights over strategic points. The experts I’ve read suggest there would be flash strikes coordinated the way that flash mobs are, only armed.

We certainly have enough firearms to make for a bloody mess.

I certainly cannot afford to just… leave America, and that’s the case for the majority of US citizens. Given how immigrants are unpopular everywhere, there are few places that are ready to take Americans as refugees.

That’s not a power I personally have, though there have been two attempts to amend the Constitution to eliminate it, and currently there is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which is only a couple of states away from having legal force.

The worst of Democrats, establishment Democrats who focus on serving their donors are not fascist. They’re neoliberal, and granted, neoliberalism makes states vulnerable to fascist movements (a problem faced in the EU, Australia and Canada as well as the US) but that doesn’t actually make them fascist.

This is the Star Trek episode What Are Little Girls Made Of. and Peter Thiel is an android from the future trying to make sure his timeline comes to pass.