you can also solve your examole choice by gun grabbing ans shooting the guy if he lets you take it.
Ah, but that wouldn’t be mutually beneficial, would it?
Also, this didn’t take long:
Some federal employees who accepted Trump’s buyout offer are now being notified that their buyout has been denied, and they are being terminated instead.
There are some offsetting factors that also prevent the “best and brightest” from rising to power: https://dealbreaker.com/2007/10/icahn-explains-why-are-there-so-many-idiots-running-shit
He moves up the corporate ladder, without a single original idea that might make his boss feel threatened by his potential.
Eventually, he gets to be the #2 guy at the company. He’s a little dumber than the C.E.O., but the board likes him, so he eventually gets to be C.E.O.
Of course, he assigns a #2 who is a little dumber than he is. “And eventually, we’re going to have all morons running our companies,” Icahn concluded. “We might not be that far off from that right now.”
Here’s a gun to your head, now, it would be beneficial to you to hand over your wallet m’kay?
No bullet in your brain, more cash in my hand, both parties benefit! See how that works?
Oh, you have a lump growing in your thyroid, mmmm… that is bad. We can cut that out for you and most people we do that to live a lot longer, but first we need you to mortgage your home and give us the proceeds. See how that works?
spez has too much money to care.
What’s the point of being Uberwealthy if you can’t just do whatever you want, whenever you want?
People keep quoting that Musk gave DT $250million to support his campaign, like hell… Musk bought Twitter and ran it into the ground to support DT’s campaign, that was far more significant, and far more costly than a mere $250M.
Oh, hell yeah. My parents got 4 and 6 year college degrees based off the income of a teacher, hairdresser, mechanic, and night watchman. 100% debt free. Then their parents, who had $0 to their name at the start of WWII, helped my parents again by buying them a starter house. My parents were both school teachers, on that salary they built a new house in a golf course subdivision, new cars every couple of years including a brand new 6 cylinder BMW… Then the 80s came.
I could see myself wanting to own multiple private islands, getting Larry Ellison to sell me Lanai is going to take a lot of money.
Current U.S. leadership: Our billionaires are gonna be bigger than all the other billionaires in the world put together. (I honestly believe there’s an insecurity motive there: if US billionaires don’t amass significantly more wealth, they won’t be competitive in the billionaire world against outside billionaires.)
U.S. Democracy: If one dollar = one vote, I guess we should save all that money we have been wasting on elections.
The real reason for the surge in prosperity of the middle and lower classes after WWII: decimation of the ultra-wealthy throughout the developed world. Remember: the post WWII US income tax on the wealthy was 91% - literal decimation, for those who paid.
https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en/expert-insights/whole-ball-of-tax-historical-income-tax-rates
One way a global index can respect local authority would be for the index to acknowledge that within that territory, there is an official name for things.
They can also be pragmatic and acknowledge a common local name, the global consensus name, etc.
In many ways, it’s just a further fragmentation like language.
This was outlined 50 years ago as part of Anarchist analysis of the system then. Not exactly an easy read, but “the second watershed” can be equated to “jumping the shark” or “enshittification” or whatever other term you want to apply to: a good thing gone bad due to the business owners switching from serving customers to enriching / empowering themselves:
https://archive.org/details/illich-conviviality/page/9/mode/1up
The alternative proposed by Illich to “Radical Monopolies” are “Convivial Tools” which empower individuals instead of central decision makers.
I actually tried Tox - maybe 8 years ago now… the real problem with it, or anything similar, is that you need both ends of every conversation to take the trouble to set it up. It was pretty easy to setup, IMO, but… as an example, in 2005 I had an engineer co-worker ask me about “that Linux thing” when I got around to telling him that pretty much everything he used on a daily basis was available in Linux, just under different names than he was used to in Windows “Oh, you mean I’d have to learn different names for Word and Excel and Outlook?” “Uh, yeah.” “Oh, that’s more trouble than I think I want, I’ll just stick with what I know.”
In the 1990s US ISPs would “give you” an e-mail account with their service: you@isp.com. Of course, this is insta-lockin for that e-mail address, you can never port it.
Owning your own domain name and running e-mail service through that worked, for a few years, but the big players have made whitelist / blacklist such a frustrating whack-a-mole game in the e-mail space that running your own e-mail server quickly became impractical.
Shortcut question: What’s a workable federated e2ee solution that’s available today? Quantum secure? Metadata secure?
I agree. Still doesn’t hurt to bring it up on appropriate tangents.
If the receiving entity then ingests all that copyrighted material into its AI, and the AI sends it piece at a time to other receiving entities, that should be the AI infringing on everything it is copying to make its answers.
Doesn’t show on my phone or app store, I’m on Android 15 in the US.
I have a Pixel 7a on Google Fi service running Android 15 in the US.
I don’t see that app on my list of all apps nor when i search for it in the Play Store.
All in all UBI would be a huge win, the poor could do more with a STABLE small income than they do with the unreliable sources most of them operate off of now. The whole needs testing bureaucracy can just die, saving Billions in administrative costs. Services and stores for low income people could do much better when their clientele has reliable income instead of being flat broke most of the time.
In my view, if UBI is good enough, there’s no more need for minimum wage, let people volunteer if they want to, pay to work in some highly desirable jobs, that’s fine.
I believe the primary objection comes from the people who hire the poor, they can’t imagine people working without the imminent threat of starvation and homelessness. If that’s how your workplace operates, that needs to change. With UBI I believe a lot of workplaces would self-regulate better, because if they don’t their employees will just quit.
Florida is making some progress on the early childhood side, they’ve been funding “Free VPK” for 20+ years now, and unemployed parents get automatic “Florida KidCare” insurance (basically Medicaid) for their children. Still, could be better.
Maybe we won’t be guillotining them anytime soon, but we can at least slow their roll: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVgNJf6CsBA
The ultimate answer:
They have been making these things for decades, they know how to make them better, they know how to make them more durable, they know how to making them even simpler to use and fix, they choose not to, for profit. That should be structurally discouraged.
Charge the manufacturers for the FULL, REAL environmental impact of shipping materials and end of life disposal of their products. Yes, that cost will be passed to the consumers, as it should be. It also rewards sale of more durable goods.