100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
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User ID: 2039
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1hr ago
A Live Fire Experiment in UBI
This is a link to the 2026 Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) Budget.
Note: I'll make number page references to it throughout this post. This means when I say "p. 6" I mean the page that has "6" in its lower left or right hand corner, not the page number in your browser's PDF viewer.
1. WMATA is not self sustaining.
WMATA annually serves 268 million riders and makes approximately $2.03 in revenue per rider. Their revenue is ~$545 million, which is 1/10th of their budget. (p.1) By comparison, New York's MTA makes up about 35% of its operating budget via fares and tolls. 23% is from fares alone. (Note: I'm pretty sure I'm doing a mostly apples-to-apples comparison here. I'd be thankful if anyone finds that I am not and can point out any error.)
Public transit in the US is always a money losing operation. Everywhere, it is existentially dependent on taxes for basic operational support, let alone capital improvements or system expansion. The idea, however, is that providing a low cost transportation system "pays for itself" (indirectly) by providing more economic dynamism and potential for growth in a given area. Therefore, at best, and most charitably, public transportation is a public good in the textbook economic theory sense.
There are, however, economists who would debate the ROI of public transportation and more still who would question the efficiency with which the tax dollars that fund public transportation are spent. This leads us to;
2. WMATA cannot pay its own employees
ALL of WMATA's revenue can only pay for about 31% of personnel costs (p.6). Total personnel costs for FY2026 is forecast at $1.746 bn (compared to a forecast revenue of approx $545 mm). This personnel cost is separate from "services", materials, fuels, utilities, casualties and liability, leases, and miscellaneous. It is, by far, the single largest expense. "Personnel" is 6.6x the size of the second place "services less paratransit." Combining the two different "services" line items, Personnel is still 4.16x the size. Personnel expenses represent almost 70% of operating expenses for WMATA, whereas NY's MTA (link above) pegs theirs at 58% of operating expenses.
Grim, to say the least. To keep this post focused, I'm not going to go into a detailed analysis of WMATA's performance. Suffice it to say, however, that it is notorious for being late, delayed, always running incomplete or rerouted service due to maintenance and repair issues, and highly vulnerable to fair evasion. For a while over the past 5 - 10 years, WMATA stations were notorious for often catching on fire.
3. WMATA's tax based funding is pure redistributionism
Page 10 shows the operating subsidy for the key areas that support WMATA:
- Whole of DC.
- Maryland. Two counties; Montgomery and Prince George's
- Virginia. Six municipalities; City of Alexandria, City of Fairfax, City of Falls Church, Fairfax County, Arlington County, and Loudoun county.
For some context, with the exception of Prince George's county, all of these municipalities have median household incomes well over $100,000. The Virginia counties (not cities) rank in the top 10 of income for the entire country nearly every year.
The net operating contribution of all of these subsidies is about $1.996bn, about 14% more than the $1.746bn necessary to meet the "Personnel" operating budget.
Looking at the contributions by municipality, and without digging into service levels (i.e. number of trains and buses) versus population and/or tax base in each one, it doesn't look like anyone is getting "hosed." The only thing that sticks out to me is that metroBUS subsidy in Prince George's County seems meaningfully higher than elsewhere.
Staying focused on personnel, however, it is remarkable how close the local area subsidy is to that personnel budget figure.
** 4. Analysis and Opinion **
I think WMATA can best be thought of as a jobs program that redistributes tax money from several local jurisdictions to its 13,646 employees (p.19). That's an average "personnel" cost per employee of about $127, 949.58.
Then, using a combination of federal grants, about $800 mn of debt issuance, and its modest $545mn of revenue, it then actually finances, you know, running the trains and buses on time. Except that service, as stated before, is notoriously sub-par.
As an interesting comparative, the DC localized Federal Gov't Pay Scale link here would put $127,000 towards the lower steps of the GS-13 level. For anyone who has had exposure to Federal Contracting in the Northern VA, Southern MD, DC area, a GS-13 is pretty much where a white collar professional with anywhere from 5 - 10+ years of experience ends up depending on technical skill, advanced degrees, security clearance level, etc. It isn't a particularly special pay grade. GS-14 is where the "adults" live and GS-15 is meaningful (it's the equivalent to a colonel in the U.S. army in terms of seniority alone).
Now, to be fair, the $127k cost for WMATA employees is almost certainly salary plus benefits, whereas the GS scale is straight salary. Also, I will note that my $127k calculation is an average instead of a median. A WMATA bus driver isn't going to be anywhere near $127k. Still, I think the rough comparison is still informative.
WMATA is a jobs program for 13,000 people. It sinks tax dollars from some of the most wealthy parts of the country - and Prince George's county - into a workforce that fails to perform the basics. Its operating model - I hesitate to call it a business model - is so poor that it can only generate 1/10th of the revenue needed to keep itself afloat. The positive externalities it generates for the DC area economy are questionable because most of the local economy is inextricably tied into Federal dollars already - mostly through direct federal contracting. For the outer suburbs - Northern Montgomery County, Fairfax County, Loudoun County, Falls Church, western Alexandria City - Metro stations and bus stops are so spread out and so infrequently serviced that people living there will definitely have a car. Traffic on 495, 66, 270, and 50 are testament to this.
Thinking ahead to discussions about UBI, I think that the WMATA example is a far more accurate preview of what a UBI program would actually look like; horribly inefficient government allocation of capital for do nothing jobs but at a level of "basic income" that is actually quite high.
A simple plan like "government check for $1k shows up in your bank account every month" is still a very shaky proposition. The quick math there is something like 220 million working age adults x $1k per month x 12 months = $2.2 trillion per year. This is about 1/3rd of the total federal budget. And this is assuming incredibly minimal overhead. Would that be the case, or would the "Department of American Income" be staffed with, oh, let's say about 13,000 "administrators" who each make between $100k - $125k? The IRS has about 90,000 employees, for reference
Furthermore, the WMATA example is also an example of the PMC-Bureucratic machine carrying out its mission perfectly. That is to say invisibly. Who really cares about a $5bn budget of a regional transit system besides turbo autists on internet forums? Ho-hum. Boring. But then you dig in and see that this is $129k/employee being siphoned away from the tax payers in suburban areas. It's wealth redistribution in exchange for political patronage and non-productive labor activity. It's a serfdom of laziness and fealty at the ballot box. And that' the end state for UBI in the American political-economy.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3hr ago
it seems pretty clear in hindsight that Good was just trying to get away.
Is this exculpatory evidence? I don't think so. If it were, then every criminal who starts running from the police "because they got scared" would then have, at the very least, a get-out-of-evading-arrest-free card to play at all times.
Non-compliance with law enforcement orders has to remain chargeable. Otherwise, we get into a situation in which subjective interpretations in the moment bear the same evidentiary weight as objective facts. Again, I'd recommend everyone watch an hour of police bodycam videos and not just the ones that result in discharge of a weapon - I mean basic traffic stops / drug possession chargers. You see a pattern after a while of the cop going through this process of information elucidation to begin to establish facts and intent and also to suss out obvious self-contradicting lies. They're doing this so that, should they need to testify later, their evidence and procedure is as tight as possible.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3hr ago
I don't think you'd be surprised to hear me call this a slippery slope argument. There's a lot of implied necessary changes and conditionalities baked into your scenario.
finding an unlocked phone on somebody would be universally treated as a sign that person is a criminal.
This stretches credulity. And how does "phone" and "unlocked" get defined in a legal sense. If I assemble an old hobby kit radio, do I possess an unlocked phone in principle?
I think the more likely answer is that a lot of legislation is going to fall apart because of a technical illiteracy. Look at New York State's RAISE act (Recently passed):
- "SAFETY INCIDENT" MEANS AN INCIDENT OF THE FOLLOWING KINDS THAT OCCURS IN SUCH A WAY THAT IT PROVIDES DEMONSTRABLE EVIDENCE OF AN INCREASED RISK OF CRITICAL HARM: (A) A FRONTIER MODEL AUTONOMOUSLY ENGAGING IN BEHAVIOR OTHER THAN AT THE REQUEST OF A USER; (B) THEFT, MISAPPROPRIATION, MALICIOUS USE, INADVERTENT RELEASE, UNAU- THORIZED ACCESS, OR ESCAPE OF THE MODEL WEIGHTS OF A FRONTIER MODEL;
How can model weights "escape"? How is that different than inadvertent release and/or unauthorized access.
The entire "demonstrable evidence of an increased risk" is ambiguity on ambiguity. And this is being linked to model weights; giant matrices of very long numbers. How in the world can you create a direct causal line here?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
That's a choice people make. There's always going to be some sort of radical, free linux distro that the technically capable can load onto third party hardware.
Again, if you're buying fully integrated hardware, firmware, software from a corporation that puts these kind of things in place - that's a choice. There will always be bad faith actors out there. We should do our best not to reward them for that behavior.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
Do it! You don't need the $200 / month out of the gate. Pro is $20 (I think?) and it's hard to burn through a days limit unless you're hammering on it constantly or using sub agents.
Take a half a Saturday / Sunday and read a good prompt engineering guide. "Spec Driven Development" is one of the good keywords to use on Google or X.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
(including @MachineElfPaladin as well)
Ah, got it!
Yes, this is absolutely a massive potential problem. We will mandate that a human is put in the loop to slow down AI work in the name of safetyism.
I think, however, that this can only go so far and I know it is self-defeating.
Crypto (specifically Bitcoin) showed that even with something as hyperregulated as literal currency, people will find a way around it. You can't outlaw math, which means you can't outlaw encryption and cryptography in the digital world. It was a matter of time before people figured out the precise mechanisms to turn this into permissionless money. Are there still issues with BitCoin? Of course. Is it going to replace the USD? No. But it's already broken contain - MicroStrategy, a publicly traded "old" tech firm - is now effectively a Crypto Hedge fund that uses real USD from public markets as fuel for fake internet money scheming.
I expect that several companies will willingly hire their armies of "AI compliance people" and then will be defeated - fast or slow, doesn't matter - by new companies (DAOs?) that say "fuck that" to compliance and, instead, rely on new technologies to just get shit done.
Will this result in a wild west and semi-to-totally unregulated economy? Yes. Will there be a lot of chaos in the interim? Yes. But I do believe it's not only the only choice, but inevitable. The only alternative is slow death by bureaucracy.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
Can you add some more here, I'm having trouble parsing your meaning.
What do you mean by "compliance layer", for instance?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
I read business class as business class.
Like an MBA course.
But I not only agree with you, I am elated by this line of thinking (which I also arrived at independently). AI, well deployed, should remove a lot of the drudgery of modern knowledge work - TPS reports, powerpoints, progress reports and the like. Instead, you'll actually get paid to think well and deeply.
Obviously, this means 80+% of people are scared shitless because thinking is their least favorite thing to do.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
Vi keyboard shortcuts.
The "best" way is to train literal muscle memory. vi/m "grammar" is kind of a brain breaker if you try to front of mind process it. But if you just let your fingers fly to move line 38 to mark b, it usually works.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
jq
as in the programming language.
whenever I need to work with some JSON files (often messy) I have to take 30 minutes to re-learn it from the ground up. Then I am off and running. But the retention after more than a day not using it is zero.
This is notable because for work in general purpose programming languages, especially the venerable old python, all of the bread and butter things come back to me even if I haven't written anything in months.
Tiny little end note: this is all now no longer relevant because of claude code
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
Awesome comment. Thanks for the actual info and the great writing stemming from a single phrase in my original post. THis is why I keep coming back to the motte.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
The Pogroms Will Continue Until We All Get Along
This is some good old fashioned culture warring. Happy New Year, y'all.
This clip has been popping up on twitter recently, most likely because Elon Musk re-tweeted it.
It's a doozy. I'm probably in too deep in AI land, but I thought for a moment it may have been a very well done deepfake. The cliches are just too juicy:
- Calling for a focused investigation to various Republican personalities ex post facto after an (assumed) 2026-2028 Democratic sweep of house, senate, and white house. This is the pogrom vibe.
- Over use of the term "accountability" which is not only grating, but an open code word for punishment / retribution.
- Packing the Supreme Court.
A little Wiki background on the host here turns up the clown world dial even more. This is an atheist progressive white woman who has a podcast with a title that is synonymous with exasperation. She's been wanting to speak to the manager since before it was cool. The Wiki entry concludes with a Hasan Piker endorsement. Hashtag resistance, hashtag StayWoke.
I thought both left and right were starting to slip into a post-post-liberal dichotomy. Gen Z conservatism was figuring out how long is was going to stay in its Nick Fuentes giga-irony phase before figuring out how to TradLife it up but with good vibes. Gen Z liberalism was establishing a pansexual polycule, ordering designer embryos, microdosing, and flirting with anti-semitism. Yas Queen, Globalize the Intifada.
Turning down my own sarcasm, this appears to be like a kind of resistance-within-the-resistance of severly disaffected former Obama style liberals / progressives who have decided to go full Provisional IRA. It isn't the weirdo terminally online language of Gen-Z etc, but a hyper violent rhetorical style of a group that feels they are the besieged templars of the Final Stand against The Big Bad. I didn't think this was, well, real. I thought the "Karen" archetype was mostly a lot of bad looks on very bad days for otherwise milquetoast suburban ladies. Mostly, I felt sympathy.
But these folks seem serious! If this is TollBooth losing some of his childlike wonder of the world, so be it.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9d ago
AI 2027 Guys in 2040:
"Although none of our original or updated predictions were right, per se, we believe that we were wrong for the right reasons and that our logical argument and use of evidence provided important development in the overall conversation about what was previously referred to as AGI and/or ASI. While future forecasting is a notoriously difficult field, we can be proud in our own effects to attempt to look over the horizon. Ultimately, the journey to AGI/ASI may never be totally complete, but we can all be assured that the ethical dimensions of our arguments will have been forged in the hopes of guaranteeing the best possible future for humanity."
Give me a fuckin' break. These guys are boomer charlatans out of their depth who are now post-doomering in order to maintain "mindshare".
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
10d ago
Hmmm interesting.
Would a minmax strategy be to get the BigLaw job, then intentionally poop your pants (figuratively not literally) and coast in an "Easy" 40 - 60 hour, but fairly high status and well compensated, corporate job?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11d ago
Explicit meritocracy’s emphasis on grinding, explicit competition and credentialism does not seem to produce maximally good results.
I think it produces locally maximally good results.
This is Hill Climbing problem and what a lot of people get right and wrong, simultaneously, about things like Private Equity and quarterly results in publicly traded companies.
The search for maximum grindy efficiency / performance for a given game or domain will result, through vicious competition, in maximally good results to the extent that the game / domain is well defined and bounded. "Get more people to click on the red button vs the blue button" is well bounded. "Figure out the best way to live life" is totally unbounded and also subjective - an optimization frontier can't really be defined let alone achieved.
The classic tech/business text on this is The Innovators Dilemma. Christensen's major point is that constantly iterating to optimize an existing product for an existing customer need opens you, the firm, up to disruption by a new product - not one that meets the current needs better, but one that creates a wholly new way of satisfying needs/meta needs. The classic example is Ford "inventing" the model-T when everyone "asked" for a better horse.
Meritocracy, especially in today's over metric'd and quantified world, is good at hitting these bounded local maxima, but not so good at plucking out the next Big Ideas. You need, sadly, a bunch of weirdos for that. The problem is that everyone loves to think of themselves as "that misunderstood genius." Most of the time, you're just fucking weird. One one millionth of the time, you're Jobs/Wozniak/Musk etc. (sorry to over index on tech, you can do this same thing with almost any field, however).
The preferable "third way" is something like N.N. Taleb's concept of anti-fragile systems; systems that acutally get stronger for less than optimal (or, more accurate, stressful) situations. In professional terms, you want the Physics department to have one or two loonies who don't shower and use words like "chinaman" if they actually help the more "professional" researchers deal with edge cases or whatever. You want a guy in the office who is a functioning alcoholic but can close to mega-deals but is also a walking cautionary tale to the rest of the sales team. Over HR-ification (of which the Gino example is probably somewhat an example of. This is why Ackman got himself involved, I think) doesn't let talented-but-awful weirdos do their thing, and we eject some of the useful "stress" from the system.
The good news is that anyone with eyes to see sees pretty early that the grindiest of grinder fields aren't worth it. It's literally a trope that BigLaw / Consulting / Banking partner are all twice divorced alcoholics who never see their kids or get to enjoy their million dollar pay packages. These are lizard people who thrive on preftige alone. For a while, BigTech was sorta-kinda the exception to the rule, but has since been revealed to be both more grindy that initially assumed and far more of a office-politics and social climber firefight.
The way to win is not to play. Let us take heed of this young bard;
I don't wanna be famous / I just wanna be rich
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11d ago
If you totally fail at BigLaw, where do you go? Or, where is it common to go? Small biz corporate attorney? In house counsel for something very process driven? Leave law altogether?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11d ago
Where doing physics research requires being hired by one of a handful of institutions in the world, and if you don't meet their criteria or get unlucky early in your career, tant pis.
And your timing has to be close to perfect.
I was a young shithead in undergrad but, at the time, thought I was just going to go into the corporate world so my GPA didn't really matter. That .... turned out to be exactly true, but is beside the point! I've always wanted to go back and get a masters in something like computational linguistics, but I'd have to self-fund some sort of post-bac in math or other pseudo-re-bachelor-degree in order to be competitive for any non fly-by-night degree mill.
Academia, despite it's self-inflated perception as the "palace of ideas" is actually one of the most rigid "FOLLOW THE TRACK" career paths out there. The Marine Corps has far more flexibility in terms of self-determination.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11d ago
There are fields where proper experiments are very hard, and usually the conclusions you can draw from the experiments they can do, are generally very limited.
Can you provide examples of such fields? I am genuinely curious as one of my current interests is trying to figure out where we've actually hit hard or very large limits in scientific discovery. The problem is that simply "reading the current research" is literally impossible for someone who doesn't have a graduate understanding of math/physics/hard sciences.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11d ago
Right around the 0:24 mark. It's on a lawn / driveway in the background.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
12d ago
I have concluded that almost everyone (including our Motte effort-posters) forms a conclusion based not on actually trying to analyze videos and consider evidence, but rather, how they feel about ICE, ICE protesters, immigrants, and Trump.
Gotta say this is a pretty shitty thing to hear from a mod. This is the Culture War thread. There's going to be politicized views and pre-existing bias brought in, sure. I think the Motte is one of the places were people do a pretty good job of laying their cards on the table up front. The effort-posts then do a great job of laying out various positions. To say generally, however, that they don't consider evidence is not only wrong but wronheaded - it demonstrates so mal intent.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
12d ago
It's not clear whether you're being sarcastic or not. I'm somewhat compelled to report this to the mods for being low effort and probably antagonistic, but I feel like they have better things to do.
If you want to actually engage with my argument, I'm here for it, pal.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
12d ago
I like this theory. Thank you. The sound definitely did have something to do with it. To some extent, I've always been a little more sensitive than others to big droning sounds. I think I lack the ability to tune them out the way most folks do.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
12d ago
"A woman being aggressively approached by men dressed like hostile soldiers went into fight-or-flight mode and did something senseless"
Except that she knew they were ICE agents.
In the longer videos, you can see her hand "waiving through" the ICE vehicles before she is approached. She knew who they were and knew what she was doing. Perhaps she did freak out and panic when she realized the ICE agents weren't going to play nice anymore, but it's not possible to plead ignorance and "scary masked men."
More generally, a reasonable reading of the context suggests almost beyond doubt that these are cops. It's the middle of the day, they have lights on, there's a bunch of people with cameras filming what the guys with guns are doing. If this was actually some sort of impersonation of an officer or actual bad masked men (terrorists? chechens?), it seems less than likely they'd be so nonchalant about their terroristing being filmed by bystanders.
The "I got scared so I ran" defense is one of the most commonly trotted out by those that are the most comically guilty - and aware of the guilt. It's a retreat to infancy and a desperate spasm designed to cast of any and all responsibility whatsoever. It's not quite as bald faced as a temporary insanity plea, but it's in the same ballpark.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
12d ago
Great comment and on an original subject.
I'll share a personal anecdote as a means of homage.
I once worked, in IT, on what's called an infrastructure team. These are the hardcore, hands-on-servers guys who actually wire up all of the servers running in data centers and similar installations. I was not actually a hardcore hands-on-guy, but a dude who was empowered, via our bureaucratic overlords, to buy stuff. This meant I spent a good deal of time inside server rooms and data centers not as a technician, you know, doing stuff, but observing the technicians and logging all of the necessary purchases to complete the project. I passed the time mostly with idle chitchat and, for those Infra dudes who really were anti-social, by reading content on the old longform.org website before it 1) woke-ified and 2) closed down.
There was one particularly odd project that had a team of three (me and two other guys) in a totally windowless server room (they are mostly this way) for over a week. We had a deadline and so we were in there for 12+ hours daily. Because of the logistics and time of year, we would enter the larger site / building when it was dark and we would leave when it was dark. We'd then carpool to the hotel we were staying at, usually have dinner at the hotel restaurant, retire to our rooms, and do it all again the next day.
You can tell that this definitely put me in an odd headspace by the end of the week. I was definitely a little friend and wigged out.
On the final day of our work, the two guys were working on something when they (well, all of us actually) got an e-mail from back at our home office. The two other dudes were needed for a conference call about some other project. TollBooth, you are not (sad junior employee sounds).
The two guys can't take the conference call in the server room because it's actually pretty loud. Servers have to be aggressively cooled, especially when you have dozens or hundreds of them in close proximity to one another. This is done (well, at least it was then) by having cold air blasted up out of the floor on one side of the servers (the "cold aisle") and then, on the opposite side, the hot air is aggressively vaccummed down into the floor (the "hot aisle"). The result is a constant hum of fans and other circulation equipment that probably sits around 50 dB or so. You get used to it after a while and it doesn't cause hearing damage, but you can't have conversations more than about 10 feet apart. On a conference call, the other listeners would think you were in a wind tunnel.
So the others leave to take their conference call and I pull up longform or something. For about five minutes, I'm content. Hanging out on the company dime, more or less. Then, in an instant, I am filled with a palpable sense of dread. There is no proximate cause. Nothing was on fire or damaged. No e-mails foretelling doom had entered my inbox. But I was on the verge of legitimate panic.
I believe this was an episode of real life liminal horror. I was alone in a windowless computer cube with an omnipresent inhuman sound that actively suppressed basic human conversation. I had been in this room for a week, but only exited to darkness and yet another kind of liminal space (the hotel). Nothing in this space was human. No running water, no food, no bathrooms (not technically true as they were just down the hall outside of the server room, and we had been using them all week, but still). It was blinky lights, copper wires, the knowledge that an absolutely turbo-lethal amount of electricity was flowing over every inch of the room, and the sound, the sound, the sound.
Fortunately, I bravely endured got my fucking shit back together. I think I got up and used the bathroom and just that 20 seconds of movement shook me out of the headspace I was in. Other dudes finished their conference call, came back in with a pair of shrugs, and we finished up the day and the project.
Links to Chinese and Indian government crackdowns? Ok. I mean, there's a reason I don't live there and call both of those regimes authoritarian.
So the system is already irrevocably rigged against me. But ...
I should want to have a seat at the corruption table?
Why would "they" (I think you mean legislators) want this? If you're going to answer with "because they want total control!" Then you're just feeding into a straw man archetype.
I'm interested in preventing a censored future. And I also think there is a very real chance it could happen - look at England arresting people for tweets. But what you're presenting is an "you're already fucked!" blackpill doomer scenario that relies on a lot of circular argumentation and conspiracy thinking. There's a lot of logical leaps - they're gonna find a way to fuck you, bud! - without a lot of well thought out causal chains for how it would all actually happen. I find so little value in this.
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