It isn’t just corporations that have ruined everything, it’s spammers and scammers and cybercriminals too. Searching any topic these days is a crapshoot, with a high likelihood of falling into a spammer’s tarpit.
To me it feels like the internet is evolving into a virtual Dark Forest. We float around in these little bubbles of sanity, hiding amid a yawning expanse of seething chaos.
Everything is easy if you can get everyone to agree. World peace, end of poverty, end of inequality, end of hunger/starvation, end of climate change.
Turns out this isn’t a very productive line of thinking. All hard problems are coordination problems.
They campaigned on the left and have been a minority government working in a coalition with the socialist NDP for the past several years.
I’m in Canada so I have the opposite reaction re: the military. Our military is a joke and if the US ever walked away from NATO we would be totally screwed.
Our government has been run by the Liberals since 2015. All they’ve done is destroyed the jobs market and put housing out of reach for ordinary people. Not a fan!
I think if you want to be a socialist you need to acknowledge that sometimes the government will be grossly incompetent and/or corrupt. Frankly, this experience is what has pulled me to the right. I simply don’t have trust in unaccountable institutions anymore.
Having said that, I think most of the damage to our society has been done by incompetent municipal governments which aren’t part of our party system anyway. They’ve squandered billions of dollars, been grifted by scam artist developers, and destroyed our communities with idiotic urban planning ideas that make livable neighbourhoods illegal.
40yo single dude checking in. I think the government lost my assignment form!
People change. The old stereotype is that people tend to be very liberal in high school and college but become very conservative with a mortgage and a couple of kids. I don’t know how often that actually plays out but it makes sense.
When you don’t have anything it’s easy to demand a lot of things from the government. When you have money you want to do everything you can to hold onto it and that means not paying taxes. It flips around again when people are super rich though: then they don’t mind paying taxes (because their effective tax rate is very low). It’s the middle class who get screwed the most.
And YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, BitTorrent…
People have a lot more choices now than they did in the bad old days of high cable bills. If streaming services charge too much people will just bail back to free stuff.
Yeah exactly. I’m not a biologist but I am aware that horseshoe crabs are harvested for their blood and its unique properties. How much evolution (in the last 450MY) have they undergone in terms of their immune system and other microbiological processes? We may never know but I think it’s quite a stretch to assume “none!”
There’s a lot of advantages that simply come with using a more popular distribution. For one, having a larger pool of package maintainers (and therefore more packages) is pretty important. Have you ever tried using NixOS as a daily driver? I did a few years ago. Very annoying having to create my own packages for so many different (and relatively common) things I wanted to use.
Did Ben Carson attempt to do surgery on himself? Otherwise I can’t explain at all how dumb he was. Wow! Thanks for the example.
Jill Stein may be an idiot politician with laughably unrealistic positions and a totally unworkable take on foreign policy (even dining with Putin) but she’s also a physician who practiced internal medicine for decades.
She’s not an idiot in general. I think she’s just unbelievably naive about people and their motivations.
I think in both cases you have a small and vocal minority within the group. Then you have the silent majority who never preach but just enjoy the lifestyle and the benefits it brings them.
It’s not really a backup X. In any given cell in a woman’s body, one of the X chromosomes has been inactivated into something called a Barr body. The remaining X chromosome is then the active one.
Women carriers of the gene defect for protan (causing protanopia in males) exhibit Schmidt’s Sign, an abnormal insensitivity to long wavelengths (red light). This is due to the highly skewed L:M cone ratio caused by the defective gene.
No, but Russian bullets will! Not one step back, comrade!
I think both you and I know the project wouldn’t have worked and in all likelihood it would’ve damaged his reputation. I can’t fault him for opting out of that. As for what he actually did with the money, I am not going to defend that!
We’re talking about two different things here.
Actually trying to end world hunger vs pushing a button and having it happen. The former is really hard and probably way beyond the means of any individual, no matter how wealthy. The fact that Elon promised to do it is only evidence of his extreme ego, not his ability nor his ethics (which his donation to himself calls into question).
If he could push a button and end world poverty at a nominal cost of $xxx billion, I think he would do it. But to actually put in the work over a lifelong project which has a high potential to fail? I don’t for a second believe he’s capable of that. But who is?
I don’t think you thought this one through!
To be the guy known for ending poverty for all time, having statues in every park on the planet? Or just another boat to park in your mega-garage of boats?
Easy choice.
Taxing profits just means the company will borrow from investors (by issuing bonds) and then instead of profits paying out as dividends the company shows losses from interest payments.
I would rather try land value taxes.
Putting a huge percentage of a company up for sale on the open market is going to tank the price no matter what the fundamentals are. It’s simple supply and demand: you’re putting a huge glut of supply on the market and not putting similar demand. All those sell orders will begin expiring as the offers drop in price.
The largest owner of shares putting everything on the market at once is strong signal that the stock is overpriced and so buyers will react accordingly.
By the way, TSLA has a P/E ratio in the 60’s so it’s not exactly a great deal anyway.
I’m neither defending nor attacking capitalism. I’m just pointing out that putting heavy taxes on illiquid assets leads to huge disruptions.
The increase in value of shares above book is called unrealized gains. They can be here today and gone tomorrow. Taxing makes no sense unless you’re going to reimburse the taxes if the shares drop in price.
They don’t care. If the advertisers pay for that spot then they make money! This has been the story with TV ads for decades.