That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not my fault.
And if it was, I didn't mean it.
And if I did, you deserved it.
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Really whether he did or didn't inform on Epstein is the least interesting and important part of the entire story. The more important question is whether the part about him outbidding Epstein on a mansion to money launder for Russia is true or not, and likewise on whether Epstein tried to blackmail him. The accusation that Trump informed on him was based entirely on Epstein believing he had from the sounds of it entirely based on the timing of his arrest. If we assume Epstein was wrong about that and it wasn't Trump that turned him in I don't think that really fundamentally changes anything at all. You still have Trump and Epstein having a falling out over Trumps other crimes, and events still play out in exactly the same fashion.
OK, in isolation saying it makes him look better if he informed on Epstein is true, but that ignores the larger story where the reason he did that was because of all the crimes he (being Trump) was committing. The rest of this is plausible, the thing I'm saying makes no sense is that this is somehow a pro-Trump move. This is like saying that you blew up a hospital with thousands of people in it because there was a serial killer in it as well. Sure it might slightly reduce how bad it makes him look, but it still makes him look worse than he currently does.
There's also the fact that Trump is currently doing literally anything he can think of to get people talking about literally anything but Epstein. The very last thing he'd want is to bring him up again even if it was somehow supposed to make him look better.
You didn't actually answer the question and just repeated yourself. How does implicating Trump in a new set of crimes without absolving him of the existing ones qualify as damage control?
Setting that aside, the second paragraph basically has nothing to do with the rest of this, that's an entirely different claim. Your argument is basically that the CIA and FBI knew about all of this and were in fact involved in it. That the only reason Epstein was eventually arrested was because the Miami Herald made too much noise for them to sweep it under the rug. That may or may not be true, but doesn't necessarily invalidate the claim that Trump told the cops in an attempt to silence Epstein.
There are a bunch of different angles you could come at this, but damage control by Trumps allies doesn't make a bit of sense. Damage control by foreign agents, maybe, although how sacrificing Trump provides any benefit to them I can't see. The only person I see getting any possible benefit in this scenario is the author making the claim and that's mostly just in exposure, literally everyone else involved comes off worse. It exposes Trump as a Russian agent, implicates him just as much if not more in Epstein's crimes, and paints his turning on Epstein as a self serving attempt to save his own skin. Nothing at all about this situation makes things better for Trump.
How would it be damage control? How exactly does claiming Trump was laundering money for Russia (in part because he was relatively speaking broke at the time) without actually denying in any way his close relationship with Epstein do anything positive for Trump? It's not like in this scenario he turned Epstein in out of the goodness of his heart or concern for the victims, it was a calculated attempt to silence him before he spilled his secrets.
I could see a variety of arguments for why this might not be true but "damage control" doesn't make any sense at all. Being the guy that tipped off the cops about Epstein isn't that much of a feather in his cap to offset all the crimes it implicated him in.
It took some digging, but I found it, it's this video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTz6X5Bh_lw The relevant part is around the 12:30 mark and it's an interview with a guy named Michael Wolff.
I heard about it on a youtube video a few days ago, but if I recall the claims are coming from the author of a book. I think it was a biography of Trump, but it's been a little while and that detail was only briefly mentioned. I don't think there was anything concrete in terms of evidence, but the source did have a connection to both Trump and Epstein in that he interviewed them as part of his work. This wouldn't be the first time an interviewer claimed something that turned out to be false such as the sports writer that claimed Trump Jr. told him they got all the financing they need from Russia and so don't need US banks, but there's also not any reason to particularly doubt the claims either.
So I saw a pretty believable breakdown that would absolutely explain this. It's basically because they had a messy falling out over Trump being a spoiled brat. The timeline is as follows.
The inciting incident was Epstein putting in what he thought was a winning bid on a new mansion. Confident in his bid he then showed the property off to his good buddy Trump and asked some advice on some renovations he was planning. Trump then went to his Russian buddies, got a "loan" and put in a higher bid on the property ultimately winning it. This pissed Epstein off who was further confused because he knew Trump had been having financial problems and didn't have enough money to cover the bid he put in. Six months later Trump sold the property to the same Russian who had given him the money in the first place for twice what Trump paid for it laundering millions of dollars in the process. Epstein correctly realized that Trump just used his property that he swiped from him to launder Russian money which pissed him off even more. Enraged he called Trump and threatened to expose the money laundering. In retaliation Trump then informed the FBI about what Epstein had been up to on his island which is what ultimately led to his arrest. Whether Trump and/or the Russians then silenced Epstein and whether that was about Trumps participation in Epstein's crimes or about the money laundering who knows, but it definitely makes some pieces fit.
Edit: Dug up the video the claim was made in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTz6X5Bh_lw
This is such a strange concept. Like fundamentally a subscription is just a mechanism to allow a viewer to easily keep track of new content on a channel. By viewing the channels contents you're engaging in 100% of the interaction you should be expected to have with a subscribed channel. If Google really wanted to address the problem of old subscriptions people are ignoring they should just prompt people to unsubscribe to channels that they haven't watched any videos from in a long time. Instead they're fucking with view counts because that saves them money. The whole thing is fishy, but Google has always treated being inscrutable and capricious as if those were virtues.
Same, but it depends on the goal. If the goal is to have an excuse not to pay creators while still cashing paychecks from advertisers it seems like a pretty smart move. A dick move certainly, but seems to be working exactly as intended.
The problem is that there aren't any really viable alternatives. YouTube has three major advantages and all three are necessary. First and most critically it has a viable business model (that is it has a way to earn money to pay creators). It's a shitty business model, but it is viable which already puts it ahead of most services that are coasting on VC funds and hoping they'll trip over a business model before they go bankrupt. Second it has the infrastructure and capital to actually serve content. Running a video streaming service is the single largest bandwidth consumer you could possibly come up with and that means considerable network infrastructure costs, to say nothing of the storage demands. Third it has network effect going for it. Nobody is going to watch videos on your platform if there's only a couple dozen of them total. The sheer size and scope of YouTube means no matter what you're looking for you can find something to watch. It's a one stop shop for AV content.
Every single competitor to YouTube has failed on one of those points, usually the first one, rarely the second. The last service I saw come close to hitting all three was Vimeo, but it flamed out not even a decade after it launched. Twitch.tv is struggling to make their accounting work and isn't even a direct competitor because they're pushing hard for live streams as opposed to pre-recorded videos. Alternatives like PeerTube have no business model and will never attract creators or a mainstream audience. Paid hosting platforms like Floatplane are replacements for traditional video streaming services like Amazon Video or Netflix not really platforms where just anybody can set up a channel and start posting videos.
To paraphrase a famous saying, YouTube is the worst public video streaming service except for every other one. Until someone comes along and figures out how to make enough money to reliably pay creators and has enough capital to actually serve that content reliably and in high quality YouTube isn't going anywhere.
It seems like YouTube is doing something where they don't consider views to be actual "views" anymore. I saw one creator reporting that you only get credit as a view if you also leave a comment on the video because I guess Google thinks this will somehow hamper bots? Sounds like a bunch of bullshit no matter how you look at it. Personally I think Google is just trying to avoid paying creators so they're only crediting them for a fraction of the views they get, but you just know they're charging those advertisers for every single view whether they're paying the creators or not.
He's a CEO that's practically the job description under late stage capitalism. That and being an amoral piece of shit that would happily grind up children if there were no consequences and it would earn them 1% more profit.
Ah, classic mistake. The grand jury would have indicted the ham sandwich but they made the mistake of trying to prosecute the guy who threw it instead.
As they start trying to crank up the fascism hopefully we'll see more of this and jury nullification pushing back against these constitutional violations.
Trump said he thinks the office’s makeover will stand the test of time.
“They can’t imagine anyone changing it,” he said. “People come in. They really love it. They love what we’re doing here.”
Guarantee that the next guy rips that gaudy shit out day one.
No but I think the point being made is that people that have been clinging to Win 10 as a refuge from the crapfest that Win 11 is are going to start running into significant problems soon. Increasingly you're not going to be able to get software for Windows 10. A lot of people are opting to migrate to Linux rather than going from Win 10 to Win 11, and as the holdouts on 10 are increasingly corned some amount of them will make the same decision.
Ah cool, thanks for looking all that up. I knew Proton pre-dated Steam Deck, I just wasn't sure exactly where in the timeline it fit between the original Steam Machine launch and the release of the Steam Deck.
It's kind of a shame that Steam Machine failed, but in many ways it was a little too ahead of its time and its failure brought us to the Steam Deck which is a much more sensible approach.
Ultimately none of this would have existed without Wine and ironically the Microsoft app store (or whatever they're calling it these days). The threat of MS getting a stranglehold on program distribution on Windows the way Apple does on OS X and iOS was enough to spur Valve into putting significant effort into making Linux a viable gaming platform, something we're all benefitting from greatly.
People seem to be downplaying somewhat how significant an achievement this is for Linux. The thing is, for most programs you can find alternatives because the point isn't the program it's what you do with it. People don't use Photoshop because they enjoy Photoshop, they do it because they want to create something, which means if you can create that same thing using a different program then you don't need Photoshop. On the other hand games are an experience. The point is the game. Sure you can play a different game, but that's not an Apples to Apples thing as the experience however similar isn't the same. That means games are uniquely placed as a roadblock for migrating away from a platform, something consoles with their exclusive releases have known for a long time. Giving people the option to play the exact same game under Linux as they can under Windows is massive because there really isn't any other way to solve that problem.
Couple technical nitpicks.
First it's debatable if Proton existed long before Steam Deck. I'm not sure the exact timeline but I think it was created as part of the Steam Box effort which wasn't all that long ago. On the other hand though Wine which Proton is built on top of most certainly has existed for a very long time before either the Steam Deck or even Proton (I have fond memories of LAN gaming with it back when Diablo 2 was new).
Second Proton doesn't enable ARM (at least by itself) so that claim is a little misleading. There is a project to realtime translate x86 instructions into ARM but that project (Box86) although it fulfills a similar role and could be used in conjunction with Proton isn't actually Proton. Using Proton by itself will not enable you to play x86/Windows games on ARM.
Lastly Proton is kind of irrelevant to the whole Linux vs BSD thing. Technically what enables that is that both implement POSIX standards plus use mostly the same libraries, frameworks (like Vulkan), and applications. Yes running Proton on BSD will let you game on BSD but that isn't really a result of Proton doing the work so much as it's a side effect of the fact you can run Proton on BSD in the first place. Additionally while there are technical and philosophical reasons why the distinction between Linux and BSD is important, practically speaking they're the same thing these days. OpenBSD isn't that much more different from a Linux distro as one Linux distro is from another.
Literally Republicans now.