sgtlion [any]

Almost three thousand dollars per person, that’s baby, adult and pensioner, and that’s just a fraction of the total ‘real’ military spend.

No money for healthcare tho

In fairness, they designate their person of the year as having had the biggest influence this year “for better or worse”. It’s not supposed to be an explicit endorsement at least.

“Profit is like when you have extra berries!”

There’s your immediate key misunderstanding.

In capitalism, profit has precisely nothing to do with what you make or harvest, and is entirely dependent on what you can take from others. Whether that’s a net positive to society like growing and selling berries, or a net negative, like hoarding jobs to underpay and price gouge people.

Most of capitalism is the latter, simply because it’s much more profitable.

It’s not the answer by any means, but within this system, I would personally fully recommend self employment to anyone who feels they could do it. Self employed in a B2B trade was the best part of my career, and I’m hoping to soon to get back to it.

Full autonomy, got a modicum of respect, I got to tell assholes to fuck off, wrote off so many expenses for tax, I learned a lot.

Obviously YMMV greatly, but in my experience it gets a lot of unwarranted flak as an option. And admittedly not quite what people tend to mean when they say ‘Entrepeneur’.

UK and half the US. Rest of Europe close behind. I sure love our fresh new flavours of techno dystopia

Why do I have to push the buttons? I’m getting tired working out when to push them. Can’t the computer just press them for me?

This genuinely surprises me, I can understand having driver issues, but I honestly have had a perfect experience with extended desktop and screen mirroring, never a single problem. While finding Windows’ to be ass

Lol. We got an “At what cost” and a “China’s economy will crash any day!!”. And a “won’t somebody think of the ludicrously rich people?!”. This needs to be a bingo board at this stage.

China does have a domestic debt issue it’s trying to address by promoting consumption, and I would say sprawling food delivery industries are problematic, but these are currently minor, easily addressable issues.

I’m not convinced the world’s biggest holder of foreign reserves is going to hit uncontrollable deflation anytime soon. Nor do I think a failing “cocktail stall” (whatever that is) business and a person not being given a job are exactly indicative of national collapse.

I think dying to a Russian missile is more fatal. Support to anyone who evades conscription in a bourgeois war.

Ain’t no critical successes on skill checks yo

Yeah. Nobody seems to understand when I say that companies only do this shit because it makes consumers spend more money, not less

Does it even matter? Elections in the US have one, singular function - to make USians incorrectly think they have any say in their governance.

It’s also fine if Cuba and Mexico want to host an array of Russian nukes too? Or are major, consistently hostile security threats only valid concerns when they’re against the west?

It’s easy to get caught up in complexities. But the difference between bubbles and booms is just about the balance of time + capital going into a thing vs value that comes out.

Now I have seen some marginal value come out of AI. I personally reluctantly use it because I’m forced to if I want stay competitive in my tech job.

I don’t see a value from it that is anywhere close to the level of investment that’s gone in, basically nobody does. For all the memes, it really is just a markov chain with more dimensions. The whole question of bubble/boom is whether AI will be improved to a much more useful state (eg “AGI”), or whether we’ve hit an effective dead end with little but marginal improvements left until a real revolutionary step comes in 10+ years.

I don’t personally see AI reaching a fundamentally more useful state anytime soon, I think we’re at the end of this S curve. It’s an interesting discovery with limited useful applications, but as things stand it’s just a “fairly good” guess machine. Given that nobody seems to be making any fundamental improvements anymore, nobody can clearly state what the next step is, and we’re just jamming on extra tools and APIs, and 90% of people’s belief in it comes from overhyped marketing, most entities will rightfully give up on it / heavily reduce their usage in a few years.

With that being said, it’s quickly becoming a market that’s too big to fail. I actually think the biggest chance of it NOT being a bubble is governments desperately and artificially propping up the industry.

The AI can’t do your job, but the AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI anyway.

This sentence encapsulates what I’ve been trying to say a while. Just because AI can’t do your job, doesn’t mean it’s not a threat to it

Excellent, I can’t believe I haven’t thought to do this. Time to spend another month in this game

Oh for sure, but it just highlights how this person claiming that communist ‘truisms’ need to die hasn’t even read 4 paragraphs of Marxist theory

The Communist Manifesto is a very short read, but I mean come on, page 2 is literally about defining changes from feudalism and capitalism.

Libs make an argument that isn’t refuted by a 30 page book challenge IMPOSSIBLE:

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other - Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.

…

The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop.

Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturer no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.

From an excerpt:

A confession: I am no true believer in markets as the best arbiter of how our society should work, who should be in charge of it and how its productive capacity should be organised. Like other leftists, I am deeply suspicious of capitalism. I understand the temptation to look at all this verbiage about enshittification, throw your hands up and say, “What do you expect? Capitalism always produces crises of production. Enshittification is just a sweary euphemism for capitalism.”

…

Take Amazon: to fix Amazon, we need policy solutions. We need to ban predatory pricing … We need to impose structural separation …We need to end its most favoured nation deal … We need to unionise its drivers and warehouse workers. We need to treat its rigged search results as the fraud they are.

There’s a lot I don’t like about Cory Doctorow, and lots to criticise, but I do think he’s generally out too improve stuff.

Thank you. Step one to leftism is understanding materialism, this isn’t about mercy or being kind to fascists, it’s about understanding how rehabilitative justice benefits everyone way more than punitive justice.

I empathise with people’s anger, but I do wince and worry about the unbridled bloodlust I often see.