Uriel238 [all pronouns]

According to Karl Marx, this is what capitalism becomes. Eventually, the ownership class captures government and turns regulation to benefit the companies that capture it, and those companies outside that loop cannot compete and die off.

And then it gets to where one player owns all the properties and the other players are going bankrupt one by one.

But US history shows us the capitalist will exploit labor by any means they can, ultimately pushing them into bonded servitude. (We don’t like to call it slavery, but it’s slavery.)

Young companies innovate. Old companies litigate

If you have to lobby the government to protect your company from smaller competition then your business model sucks.

I suspect, however, that they’re not going to be able to just stop Chinese offerings from being downloaded and run locally. And that is going to do most of the stuff for which people are turning to AI.

Young companies innovate. Old companies litigate.

I’m personally only reporting what was discussed in HMW, that Facebook and Google are having to pull back some of their layoffs, either because departments are short staffed, or because they got rid of irreplaceable positions and no one else knows how to do that job.

All the analysts at the beginning were shouting that the IPO was overvalued.

Making outrageous promises and failing to deliver is Elon Musk’s brand.

If you have money to invest, and you lost it in SpaceX without doing your due research, I have no sympathy for you.

(I have no money to invest. I was just following SpaceX and Musk’s dubious trillionaire status. He’s still, way, way too rich.)

I wonder if it’s related at all to this ongoing trend ( How Money Works on YouTube). Tech Bros got sore about the post-epidemic culture at their companies: People wanted to work from home, and knew that their talent was important so they got bold asking for pay raises and benefits.

And the tech bros took this personally. So first came the RTO mandates (which got rid of some techs, specifically the best and brightest) and then came later layoffs, some of which were blamed on AI automation.

AI automation was never actually that much further along.

Anyway, they laid off too many people, to the point that the remaining workforce didn’t know how to run the business and the tech. So they had to hire back some of the greybeards, and are still replacing lost positions with rookies fresh out of college.

The danger of the Pinto was exaggerated. Do a web search for the You’re Wrong About episode on the Pinto. The investigative reporting on the Pinto’s safety flaw used a demonstration rigged to explode. Other subcompact cars had a similar dangling fuel tank, and the number of actual Pinto explosions in the field was actually rarer than those of its competitors.

Sadly, as a neurodivergent on a fixed income who has no local friends, c̾o͎͕͐m̝̮̳͚͊͌̽m̽u͇̰̗̳̙͒ͪ͂̃ͧn͉̟̿̔í͔̬̠̩͕̿t͙͖̞̝ͩy̜̜̣͎̠̔̑̋ ͔͔̾͌͒͛ͨb̳̾u̥̮̾͗̒̄̏ͅĩ͔͉̺̙̖l̔̇ͥ͂̇dͣî̝͔̎̓ͩͣn͙̈́g͚̠̮̼̫ is entirely alien to me.

Seriously, I’ve tried to get into the local resistance / activism community and found they want me to start my own group and bring my alleged friends. Also I ended up on the email lists of dozens of orgs begging for cash and demanding I write to my officials, to the point I’m overwhelmed and have to unsubscribe from them piecemeal.

Online influencers who talk about community building have no empathy for spectrum folk who are isolated. Sometimes someone asks them and they don’t respond positively.

So whenever I hear organizing or community building it sounds like a tautological fictional action that no-one really knows how to express into plain words. It’s a circle that cannot be squared.

Obama was around for a second term, long enough for the recovery to be felt.

I think the primary thing that happened was due to the backlash of Obama being *1) black and 2) highly competent. Without Trump, the establishment Republicans were as boring as ever, so Clinton might have had a chance.

But then Trump came in and made racism great again, id est started saying the quiet parts out loud, which gave the voters permission to express their hatred openly.

And establishment Democrat corporatism was at its height. Obama was responsible for the disposition matrix (massive drone strikes burning villages), the FISC and the massive surveillance state. And we expected Clinton to be even worse: The Republicans may have been dastards. Trump may have been pure evil, but the Democrats sure were not friends to the US public.

And so Trump won with a minority, but by the Electoral College. And we underestimated how bad he was going to be, much the way we did with George W. Bush.

What’s crazy is the US elected Trump again knowing in advance exactly the kind of monster he is. I don’t buy the Trump regrets: Either the US constituency is very manipulable and they got played with the culture war, or it is very ignorant, and doesn’t take seriously the civic duty of voting in its own interest.

In 1980, Reagan won by a landslide, largely supported by the Religious Right, who didn’t care about any policy except eliminating abortion access. From then on, anti-abortion = Jesus, and (possibly coincidentally) Christian church membership has been suffering ever since.

But that might be an indicator that human beings are just very susceptible to certain kinds of messaging. It’s why nations restrict gambling, false advertising, confidence ploys, and so on. It’s why phishing and social engineering are matters taken seriously by cybercrime divisions.

Human beings are, in fact, that gullible.

And until we figure out how to counter it or effectively regulate it, then the ultra-wealthy who can buy massive marketing campaigns will have a technological advantage.

Fuck paywalls

The starving (and recent gutting) of the public domain demonstrates the institution of intellectual property persists in bad faith. Therefore media piracy is a legitimate means to acquire and consume media.

As the C-suite and its political and paramilitary minions have shown us crime is not about behavior and consequences, but who you are and to whom you bend the knee.