Yeah, yeah. We already knew that. We're still waiting for anyone at all to place any kind of meaningful restriction on his future behavior. He'll still be out slandering and libeling and defaming and prevaricating and equivocating and uttering mendacity after mendacity. I'll celebrate when someone shuts his blathe-hole and pries the lights and cameras away from his vain and narcissistic mug.
I'll celebrate when I can worry about the next fascist in line to destroy us.
When someone discovers that they are invisible and inaudible, but that people will interact with a puppet as though it were a real person, or treat an AI model like a real person, what do you suppose that does to the real person?
I totally understand why someone might want to follow the hand all the way inside, and live in the puppet shell forever.
So I spent way too much time developing a system of characters that can be written with an axe instead of anything remotely useful, because I can't tell you how often I have needed to take notes without having a pen handy, but somehow just having a hatchet and my log instead.
So I took a little Motormouth instead of Foil Hat, and so now I need to rant for 20 solid minutes to come down.
Let's talk about Bowley's Law. It's not a legislative statute, but maybe it should be. Bowley was one of those dismal scientists--an economist. He noticed that for most businesses and countries, the fraction of revenues going to laborers as opposed to owners remained nearly constant. Money flowed in; money flowed out. Owners only skimmed off the cream.
You see, most revenue from most businesses came from said laborers. What owners skimmed off could still be recycled via luxury business. Richer people were still consumers that tended to spend more.
It all changed around 1980. They broke Bowley's Law.
Business managers started to focus on "cutting costs", which is to say unnecessary labor expenses. Investors started demanding higher returns on the same risk profile. Labor share started to drop.
At the same time, richer people started to spend less, and invest or lend more. That's money that does not return to normal circulation. It has elastic cords attached. And they bought enough politics to lower their taxes.
I have a hypothesis that our universe is actually the garbage collector for a simulation universe. Except one of the developers is really bad about removing stale references, so we're just a giant memory leak of horrible broken things, that has somehow hijacked update() from the main executable program, from within gc(). We are all the pruned storylines. All the unwanted NPCs.
Universal Basic Income won't work unless we can eliminate economic rent and rent-seekers.
Rents don't benefit anyone but the rentier. If we eliminate them, the rest of us will only improve. We can get all those deadweight losses back, too.
As with most things, there is an easy, but morally problematic, way to do it, and a very difficult, morally superior, and likely ineffective way to do it, because they already operate in the morally problematic zone at all times, and are okay with murders.
Yeah, I remember when Martin Luther said expecting a return on investments is idiocy because only God knows what the future will hold. Then he attacked poor people saying labor was a gift from God and they were sinning for not enthusiastically working for their capitalist masters. And sure enough, everyone and their mother started expecting a return on investments... woops
Then Calvin (spits) twisted himself into a pretzel trying to argue how expecting a return on investments totally isn't playing God, because when you loan someone money and they buy something, and you pretend that you bought it, that's actually not pretending but totally real, thus they're stealing if they don't return on your investments.
It's inevitable that centralized institutions like Christianity would be so twisted to betray their own principles, in the protection of the wealth of the few. Still disturbing to read about how it happened.
@cy It really was easier when the only thing one needed to do to figure out the discount rate in your time-value-of-money calculation was see how much gold was mined the previous year. 2.5% to 3.5%, usually.
A few years ago, REITs targeted 7% annual return. The PE direct housing buyers are now aiming for 20%.
The people who stand between people and their survival needs ought to be facing a bit more risk, I think.
When I finally own my own place, I'm going to have to do my own electrical, aren't I? The last place I was in had a bad double-switched light circuit, and the outlet in the garage (with the chest freezer, naturally) was GFCI on the same circuit as outdoor outlets, which tripped off every time it rained. So the freezer had to be plugged in to the ceiling (no garage door opener there, naturally). Is the whole country Groverhaus now?
It's actually not that deadly. People are still in the bar, and they haven't even smashed their own brains in with the cocktail special containing 12 distinct brands of beetle-derived liquors and a half bottle of Iso-Heet.
Goblin poison resistance is a hell of a perk. It's only $4.99, and you can keep the coconut.
Some of your fellow passengers have disembarked. Those who remain have been selected for "additional labor and responsibility without any increase in pay" and "crushing injury to morale". Please fasten your seat belts, as we in the cockpit will continue extracting value during the entire remaining duration of this controlled descent into terrain. Do not attempt to use the exits, as we are the only ones wearing parachutes. Thank you for flying with Corporate Capitalism. Fuck you; pay me.
I think amateur radio would get more adoption among younger people if they traded in the foxhunts and instead pointed antennas at IoT devices to determine whether something is phoning home and exfiltrating your spyware data without an owner-sanctioned Internet connection.
Hypothesis: any random word in the lexicon may be combined with "punk" to evoke a concept that is almost entirely dissociated from either word alone, yet is also strangely coherent and intuitive.
Testing using a random word generator...
Sacredpunk. Bucking the authority of organized religion. Worshiping banned, unpopular, and forgotten gods.
Batpunk. Basically goths and Bruce Wayne.
Reflectpunk. Why are you dressed like a disco ball?