You're right, but bringing up the assassination of a terrorist just isn't convincing to a lot of people, regardless of it should be.
Luckily there are other things that all reasonable people will find it hard to disagree with: The Obama government crackdown of Occupy Wall Street and his appointment of one of the fathers of the CIA torture program as NatSec Advisor, who promptly went on to jail whistleblowers of torture with Obama vouching for it.
Unfortunately they have, on the key things that everything else flows from. That doesn't mean that can't change at some point. That would take sizeable evidence that isn't there yet, though.
Republicans have de facto done away with the Constitution, and the rule of law, and are shockingly corrupt - are you saying that democrats are on board with that?
If not, then they're not the same.
We get this in the UK too, Tory party literally steal £Billions using emergency powers in COVID to send money to companies totally unrelated to the contracts made. Then a Labour MP has a complex mortgage arrangement and misses paying a few thousand pounds of tax. And people come in with 'they're all the same'.
It's stunningly moronic to entirely ignore the scale of issues in this way. Well, moronic or intentional deception.
Lacing your message with insults neither emphasizes your point nor bolsters your credibility. democrats have assaulted the 2nd amendment, while enjoying all the benefits of having armed security for themselves. Hence, my original comment that they are just a uniparty, there is no right and left.
They're on board with doing away the rule of law, yes.
When in power, did they do something against the NSA blatantly breaking the law, illegally surveilling hundreds of millions of citizens? No.
Did the 99.9% of them not named Lina Khan do something to uphold the existing antitrust laws? No.
Did they time and time again change the rule of law to suit corporate donors, lobbyists, megacorps? Yes.
Did they jail people who were actually trying to help uphold the rule of law by reporting on illegal torture facilities? Yes. [0]
> Then a Labour MP has a complex mortgage arrangement and misses paying a few thousand pounds of tax. And people come in with 'they're all the same'.
Arresting thousands of grandmothers for holding up some cardboard, and defending it, is enough to show that they're representing the same interests. How much privatization did they actually undo over the last 30 years? Right, none, they either directly aided it or looked the other way.
Republicans and Democrats in terms of their cultural values are completely different.
Where they are not so different is in terms of the economic policies they create. One often notices that a few years later, Democrats extend and expand the Republican's policies.
Who started a class war and financial deregulation in the 1980s? Raegan.
Who enabled total deregulation? Clinton the in 90s with help and council from the Secretary of the Treasury Larry Page. By unshackling the banks from any rules, the Washington bureaucracy would enable the conditions for the 2008 financial crash.
And who does Obama appoint to oversee the 2008 financial crash? Larry Page.
Both parties have totally betrayed the American people in favor of the American oligarchs in terms of economic policy.
Who benefits from deregulation and offshoring? Not the now bankrupt rust belt states. Who benefits from bailouts for the banks but no bailouts for the average person? The Wall Street insiders.
There is billions in overt corruption, and you're right, that's wrong. But trillions that have been stolen from the average person via quantitative easing and given to big business to buy back their own shares.
I'm sure mitchellh will check out this comment section at some point - any updates on the move away from Github? I don't really see anything that's changed, but maybe it's behind the scenes. I was pretty excited on your initial post about it but it's been a while.
> I'm surprised so many people miss this dynamic on so many topics.
It's because the overwhelming majority of people, including the large majority of 'educated, "informed', Democrat voters', remain even as of 2026 far too tribal and addicted to cheering for the team they've been cheering for.
Another thing is that facing this reality is very scary. It's much easier to sleep at night if you believe that most of it isn't a show, including most of the tribe they've been voting for. The alternative is to admit that most of it is all one big theatre, and they've been scammed for their whole lives. That's another thing, admitting one has been scammed is painful and makes many feel like they're stupid, that they should've known better. Most much rather just not think about it too hard and believe "in the good of people".
In a sense I'm surprised that you're surprised as it's quite basic and well-studied human psychology.
Of course in reality the situation is even worse, as pessimizer aptly points out in a sibling comment.
The mismatched quotes are bothering me more than they ought to. :P
Not to distract from your main point, of course. You’re right. Democracy does allow the public to have some effect on policy but primarily it’s a mechanism for manufacturing the consent of the governed.
> It's because the overwhelming majority of people, including the large majority of 'educated, "informed', Democrat voters', remain even as of 2026 far too tribal and addicted to cheering for the team they've been cheering for.
It feels like you might be doing the same thing, just in the other direction. Any time a political party does something that is positive for Americans, it should be cheered and rewarded.
I still remember 62 Democrats voting against the Patriot Act while being labelled as traitors. We can cynically call them theatrics, or we could reward them for doing what is right in order to promote them doing more of the right things. The positive response to incentives is a basic and well-studied human psychology.
No, you still don't get it. There is ample evidence that the large majority of those 62 are only willing to do so if they're 100% sure it's going to pass anyway. This means their only goal is to gain brownie points, without actually supporting it.
That should not be rewarded, it should be punished. Ironically, it's even more harmful than voting in favor of it when it's going to pass. It's literally the worst thing one can do, because it muddies the waters.
The very few who clearly would vote against it even if it might not pass, yes, those should be rewarded.
I understand the point of politicians playing politics, but your accusation requires more than conjecture. I would love to see the ample evidence you reference. Otherwise, what I see are 3 public votes in 2001, 2005, and 2011.
Each time there was one party that voted against it in significantly larger numbers. Sometimes it even cost them their seats because it was such an unpopular stance (i.e. Feingold). In 2011 it was a vote directly against a popular President from their own party. Meanwhile, the party that supposedly has all the "Libertarians" were almost unanimous in support for each vote.
The evidence is that not once when they were in control they did something that went directly against these things. Under those periods these things either stayed stable or indeed got even worse. That's overwhelming evidence.
TINSTAAFM. There is no such thing as a free market under capitalism, as the first winners - which there are, even in a perfectly free market - will put their resources into making it not-free, as we're seeing here. These advantages accumulate and you end up with a few massive monopolies which the market exerts little control over. Not zero, but little, much less than most economists claimed for close to a century.
Keeping a market free would require magnitudes more regulation than right now - the opposite of what free market proponents advocate for.
Given this is obvious to mere mortals like us, how do economists defend the walmartization of every market? "It's working, don't fckit up", or "we're getting our bag, get yours"?
There isn't one adult who looks at this massive centralization and sees that it goes against the very principle of the thing?
Dozens of different religions have millions of followers. They're generally not compatible with each other. Many of the followers incredibly intelligent and accomplished in their fields.
I'm not saying this out of anti-religion, I believe religion can be a force for good and often is. But it shows that yes, this is possible. Also see things physicists, and especially physicians, believed for centuries.
> There isn't one adult who looks at this massive centralization and sees that it goes against the very principle of the thing?
There's a growing number who do. But the reason why they didn't get much attention for most of a century, and as such what made the fantasies of Hayek become mainstream, is of course tightly connected to the fact that it's the one that just "happens" to be the one most favorable to these mega corporations and their friends in financial and political institutions. It's clearly not a coincidence at all.
It's also just an incestuous cycle of professors teaching students who end up being professors who teach students. Takes something to break that.
I'm not an economist but it's pretty obvious to me that walmartization is downstream of Financialization which is not inherently free market (its a product of centralized banking and interest rate and bailout policies)
I don't see why Walmart wouldn't get this big even without centralized banking, bailouts, and hard money (say gold convertibility), thanks to economies of scale. In the late 1800s you had Standard Oil. That didn't need any of those things to arise.
Of course the things you mentioned further accelerate walmartization. But that's the chicken and the egg. The government does bailouts and prints cheap money because the corporations do exactly what I said: the winners (who arise naturally thanks to economies of scale) will put their resources into gaining these things.
sure. It's less likely let's say. More opportunity for competition to arise per business cycle when growth is still there but has natural drag due to money not being cheap.
> I would like feedback on the onboarding, on what you make of the currently online materials, and how I could make any of this clearer. Thanks!
Currently the page is a lot of slop text without the main question most people who know what ADRs are and might be interested will have: what are the main differences and what do you see as the main advantages over other existing systems that use ADRs, the most popular one being Matt Pocock's?
You need to realize that there are thousands of projects like these. Most people who are in your target audience is already using something similar, so it needs to be instantly clear what the difference is. You've got 5 seconds and having to scroll through slop takes up most of those. Just being realistic here.
Thanks so much for sharing Matt Pocock as a reference. I didn't know about him, and so I spent a couple of hours looking at his materials this morning — as you say there are a lot of versions of this out there, but this is particularly well done as far as I could tell, and I'm really grateful you helped cut through the noise for me! I am going to continue looking at this, but in the interest of giving you something tangible back:
From what I could tell Pocock uses ADRs in their typical form, and only after a decision has been made.
In ADRs for AI, the record is written during deliberation: The model structures an initial braindump (from a file or chat audio dump for instance) into a record with readback and ambiguities surfaced through questions with the ORRCF format (Options, Recommendation, Rationale, Confidence, Falsifier) and a human approves the recommendation or overrules it with more detail. There is a lot of tooling (MCP server, plugin, CLI, extension, iOS) because the record is a parsable, and analyzable, which, allows for its granular referencing and upkeep.
I'll work on your other questions. Thank you again for the reference and feedback.
PS: I think the other thing is: Part of my target audience are people who have never programmed before. This is scaffolded to be "vibe coding but with longevity." But it requires a different kind of effort — it's deliberative programming because for best results it requires you to be able to articulate the why behind your decisions. But that's something people who don't code can oftentimes be good at, for instance.
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