I like how when people talk about corruption they think about Nancy Pelosi or some other congressman/senator making couple million $ on the stock market over their entire careers due to insider trading. Just last week Trump made a bet of around $1B on the price of oil going down before doing a fake announcement.
I just assume that at least half of those are bots on social media platforms. You go on Twitter and the quality of posts is so low, yet every post has a bunch of replies. The same is true for YouTube, it’s full of empty, inflammatory responses. And this has become more common with the appearance of ChatGPT. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have no incentive to come clean about it, since they provide both the source and the destination, which is very lucrative.
There is a lot of money "wasted" on intermediaries due to the closed nature of the global financial system e.g. 3-5% fees for updating a row in a database.
Besides those it allows other novel products that traditionally required trusted entities:
- p2p lending
- reputation systems
- p2p insurance
Also we have things like Open Banking i.e. sending money instantly for free which banks started implementing in 2015, one year after Ethereum mainnet went live which suddenly allowed people to send fiat money instantly and (almost) free. Banks and fintech companies having competition is a good thing for consumers.
So the people should talk to their representative. A government becomes authoritarian not only because of an authoritarian leader, but also because of the enablers, people like the spineless Mike Johnson.
A lot of big websites, e.g. YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, GitHub, have become really bad and sometimes unusable in the past year or two. I think it's mainly due to using unnecessarily complex frontend frameworks and the low quality of code generated by LLMs. It's a vibe.