Explain Like I’m Five

The nice thing about trials of corporations is discovery. We have evidence of Google intentionally making search worse, increasing the time spent looking for results, and this improving ad sales. All that came out in discovery.

LMGTFY In August, before the United Auto Workers strike, the Biden administration announced $15.5 billion in funding and loans to help car manufacturers redesign their factories for electric vehicle production.

Dams are scary too, I just hope people are able to decommission them slowly when the time comes. Otherwise the deluge is going to suck.

Looks like you can do it manually. Build your own Google flavor https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/134847/how-to-filter-out-a-long-list-of-sites-from-google-search

The ones that are successful at enshitification have captive markets. They’re a monopoly, monopsony, or in another kind of inelastic market. https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/

The vast majority of these will not come to pass if the government is not in active fear of revolutionary change. That is the only time they will be convinced to budge from the status quo.

A similar thing happened in the 30s in the US. Most people don’t know that FDR was a trust fund kid and the inheritor of a fortune. The only reason he did the reforms was to prevent the country from going commie. Enough of the other capitalists fell in line. Those who didn’t, tried to install a military dictator, it’s called the Business Plot. Some of the smarter ones founded the John Birch Society, created various nonprofits, and selected religious leaders to empower with bags of cash. From there they slowly created the media, education, religious, and cultural right wing ecosystem that claimed the political system in the 70s.

If we don’t want a similar claw-back of power we need to ensure it doesn’t happen again. We need to make sure no one is capable of corrupting media, education, religion, and culture at such a scale. I’d argue we need to eliminate the ability for people to own the means of production. After that is done almost every other problem we have as a society will be easier to manage.

You can get a lot of rice and beans for 75 dollars. Definitely sounds like a rough couple weeks tho

Mirror for folks on voyager: https://web.archive.org/web/20240208172049/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/08/business/economy/commercial-real-estate-banking-industry.html/

I would call WWE shitty because of what they do to their performers. The performers are artists and deserve our respect tho.

I’ve seen the LTT video on that. Trouble is I’d need a computer to power it since my work computer struggles as it is. I work from home and the office and being able to use it in both environments would be helpful. Base stations are a pain in the ass to setup when you want to switch location a couple times a week.

One of the standalone headsets make a lot more sense for my use case. I’ve been thinking about getting a quest 3 but I need to use one to see if the fidelity is good enough. I wish there was a linux based headset I could tinker with but the VR market is still young. Hopefully Valve will pull a steam deck in VR.

Admitably I have too much money, but I might buy one of these in a few years as a monitor replacement. Depends on how good it is and how good the alternatives are

Joke aside, looks like they’re using a higher bandwidth of light, 222nm compared to more common 254nm uv for medical uses. It doesn’t penetrate the skin or eyes sufficiently to cause damage.

Country is a little vague so I’ll supliment state in it’s place. I’d argue there are communist societies but no communist states. “communist states” may be an oxymoron.

A useful way to think about self described communist states is that they are attempting to build communism. Whether or not their strategies are effective is up for rigorous debate of course.

Communist societies on the other hand have existed since the dawn of humanity. I read an interesting book titled The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. They cover a variety of indigenous groups’ economies and social structures. Some could be described as communism, others were as exploitative or worse than our current society. The San tribes are a modern example of an egalitarian society or maybe more accurately a group of egalitarian societies. I’m also interested in the Zapatistas and what the folks in Northern Syria are doing but I doubt they constitue communism.

Anyway I’m no authority on these things but I hope you found the perspective interesting. The audiobook for the Dawn of Everything is fastinating and a local library might have a copy if you want to check it out.

Any society that is not communism is not free. If your continued existence is dependant on you working for a wage you are not free. Being “free” to sign a contract that removes your rights so you can work and thus eat is not freedom.

A free society does not need to coerce you into doing things that are good for society. You do them because they are fun or fulfilling. In other words, the same reason people work on open source software.

Agreed, If it wasn’t a forced arrangement I wouldn’t necessarily nave a problem with the price

Having app developers be able to avoid Apples forced 30% fee is great. The fee is pure rent seeking masquerading as curation.