America had elections in 1944. It has no exception in its Constitution for war.

I had “Ukraine is fucked” as the first thing on my list of outcomes if Trump won the election. Does that count? 😔

Until recently the US supplied a lot of weapons to Ukraine. That did give US official opinion a lot of weight.

Since Trump and his Republican followers have stopped all aid to Ukraine this influence has evaporated. Why would you care about the opinion of someone who has literally just left you to die?

karnemelk. shudder

Meh. I see both?

Enshittification is a particular outcome of a particular stage of capitalism.

So, you’re “correcting” someone without them being wrong. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

As new technologies arrive they destabilize societies. This can be good (the pill giving women freedom from unwanted pregnancy), bad (distilled alcohol leading to widespread alcoholism), or mixed (the Internet).

There are always people in the upper echelons of society who yearn to be in charge. They seize any chance to take over. Sometimes this requires support from the masses. One way to do this is selling a dream of a better future for all. They may even believe it!

If the power balance shifts there may be a time of genuine progress, but eventually the people with power figure out how to exploit the new system, and everything new is old again.

Like when Trump published the minutes from his “perfect phone call”.

Obama could have pardoned the prisoners and apologized for holding them for many years without trial, in blatant violation of the plain text in the US Constitution.

Am I the only one who was reminded of the opening video in Fallout 2?

https://youtu.be/0_BYycHO_6A

Yeah during Trudeau’s speech the only thing I was thinking when he was listing all of Canada’s resources is, “are you trying to encourage a US invasion?!”

I guess we’ll never know if the system you describe here would work, since it has never existed. Companies have been using induced demand, loss leaders, cross subsidies, bundling, marketing, and a million other similar tricks to limit consumers access to knowledge and confuse them since long before Adam Smith fantasized about capital as the best of all possible worlds.

Fixed that for you:

Capitalization Breeds Innovation

Firstly, I challenge the assumption that efficiency is the most important goal. This was addressed very convincingly almost 70 years ago in The Affluent Society:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Affluent_Society

This book explains that we should not use the same policies for a society which is constantly struggling on a knife edge between starvation and death. That was not the reality 70 years ago and is much less tha case today.

Even if we assume that efficiency is the most important goal, what you are actually arguing for is well-designed markets as the tool to achieve that. I question even this, since a profitable company is by definition less efficient than one that makes little or no profit, since profit is the extra wealth that the company extracts after paying all bills.

Even if we assume that a for profit market is the best way to manage resources and achieve efficiency, capitalism is fundamentally a bad model for that, since practices like hiding information from consumers or capturing regulators are great ways to increase profits without improving efficiency or managing resources effectively.

tl;dr fuck capitalism. 😉

I think this is not really true. Capitalism means that even if you are not greedy you are forced to destroy all rivals and collect all capital for yourself… otherwise you will be destroyed.

Marx identified that capitalism by necessity leads to an endless cycle of collapses. There is no way to avoid suffering under capitalism.

This feels so weird to me. I don’t know anyone who has used SMS for communication in many years.

I don’t like the implication that people working for non-profits should make less money than people working for for-profit companies.

If a network engineer makes $130k at a non-profit versus $140k at a for-profit, they are effectively donating $10k a year to the cause. Very few people making $130k are donating $10k a year.

Yes, there are always more efficient and cheaper ways to work, but forcing non-profits to grind and answer and defend every penny spent just makes them shitty places to work on top of the financial hit the employees are taking. 😔

Interesting! I looked it up and the lizardman constant appears to be 4%; not too far from the 6% of Greenlanders in favor of selling their country.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate_Star_Codex#Lizardman’s_Constant

I feel personally attacked.