The internet era has brought about the rise of small dollar donors making an outsized impact (for better or worse - it's not always a good thing)
This has given rise to more forms of populism (left and right, benign and toxic)
In any case, it does provide some counter weight to large donor class.
Money tends to have diminishing returns past a certain point, when it comes to elections.
And I think people underestimate what dopes many large donors are - that just get milked by the party people pumping them full of sweet talk and don't really get much in return
>And I think people underestimate what dopes many large donors are - that just get milked by the party people pumping them full of sweet talk and don't really get much in return
They also see it like an insurance payment. Kick some amount to both sides in the hope that they leave you alone.
Trump famously won without having the largest donors. He only had 1 big backer (Robert Mercer) in 2016 before the Republican primaries, he was assumed to be a joke candidate. After he won the primaries, he finally got some recognition from the establishment, but even then, they were tepid on investing in him because he was assumed to lose the election.
He’s basically proof of the power of the common man’s vote in the US.
Trump was a billionaire, able to fund his own campaign, that hardly proves the power of the common man. Now, back to 2026, the richest person in the world has spent almost $500 million on helping Republicans in the midterms. Clearly him and Trump don't believe too much in the power of the common man's vote.
>Trump has spent much of the race so far breaking the mould of a traditional campaign, defeating a crowded field of primary opponents who vastly outspent him in ads and staff.
>During the Republican primary race, he often told his supporters not to contribute money and ridiculed opponents for accepting cash from special interest groups and wealthy contributors.
>He has so far showed little interest in calling donors to ask for money for his general election battle. He only began holding in-person fundraisers in late May.
What I meant was the 2016 Repub primaries are evidence that the common man votes for who they want, not who the large donors want. The Repub party leadership and previous decision makers were usurped, and hence the idea of MAGA supplanting the Republican Party. More evidence is Dick Cheney and the Bush family becoming quickly irrelevant.
not at all. wow people need to do some basic research on this. the Republicans are driven by a tiny handful of billionaires and with Musk, trillionaires. Democratic candidates OTOH rely to a vastly larger extent on millions of individual donors sending $100 or less - there are still large donors but their contribution to Democrats is close to an order of magnitude less than what GOP megadonors provide.
Of course, both of these funding models should be banned which would mean dismantling the Citizens United decision spearheaded by the now-known-to-be-fully-corrupt Roberts court, which might require a constitutional amendment.
Nice to see some Dart around here, even if it migrated to Rust eventually (as I am also wont to do). Just posting the github repo link for those that are lazy like me and want to go directly to the source: https://github.com/onepub-dev/reVault
You can still run it in a VM and access files on disk. Or if they're 1337 haxorz and keep the game in RAM you can still inspect RAM
There's no way to deliver a running program which you can't decompile aiui.
Like literally last night I did this to decompile an Android game whose APK on the Play Store is just a thin wrapper that downloads the real Unity game at runtime. It was a 30 second barrier
> There's no way to deliver a running program which you can't decompile aiui.
This may be straightforward on Android, but is it on iOS?
"No way to deliver a running program which you can't decompile" seems less like a rule of nature than the way it happens to work now. I don't think it's extreme to imagine that likely a side effect of this AI-driven gold rush to "free the IP" will be the further lockdown of general purpose computing.
It's naive to think that you can enumerate all the interactions of complex software like a modern game purely by observation let alone over a network link. Anyway all you're proposing here is an even more rapid industry death.
I'm not sure time or money inherently equal difficulty. There's plenty of things that take a long time to build and/or are expensive to build, but are still easy to build.
reply