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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • If this is a transition from how I live now to never needing to work again, I’m guessing the first 6 months to a year would just be disbelief and slacking. Video games, TV/YouTube, etc.

    I’d probably do more of the things I do with my limited off time: gardening, taking care of family & pets, taekwondo.

    Honestly have no idea what I’d do once I became accustomed to it. Maybe travel? Participate in local politics more? Volunteer? I would definitely have a sense that I needed to do something to make my life “worth it” that I currently get from working to provide for my family.

    It’s definitely a result of conditioning, not some fundamental truth of the universe. But nearly 50 years of that conditioning is hard to break overnight.




  • I read a pretty convincing article title and subheading implying that the best use for so called “AI” would be to replace all corporate CEOs with it.

    I didn’t read the article but given how I’ve seen most CEOs behave it would probably be trivial to automate their behavior. Pursue short term profit boosts with no eye to the long term, cut workers and/or pay and/or benefits at every opportunity, attempt to deny unionization to the employees, tell the board and shareholders that everything is great, tell the employees that everything sucks, …




  • ristoril_zip@lemmy.zipto196@lemmy.blahaj.zonesquander rule
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    2 months ago

    He’s doing what all the “everybody could be rich if they just did X” jackasses do: see some people who don’t have money make bad decisions and generalize it to all people who don’t have money.

    Middle aged parents with 2-3 kids and jobs in the $40k to $60k range aren’t going out all the time, buying the latest gadget, buying new cars, etc. They’re scraping by.

    They could do some “personal development” if they had the time and energy after working full time and caring for children. But they don’t.

    Actually I’d like to see a comparison of the number of people in different income groups who “splurge” on the stuff Buffet is accusing them of versus those who have to “splurge” on an unexpected expense like a medical condition or fixing a broken car or an unexpected home repair. I’m betting people actually end up spending money on the latter way more than the former.

    And it’s just disgusting hearing him complain about people using credit cards when he and all the other economic vampires in his cohort have been purposefully restricting wage growth since the 1970s when they introduced credit cards as a trap for young people who expected their quality of life to increase with increasing productivity the way it had for decades before.




  • ristoril_zip@lemmy.ziptoScience Memes@mander.xyzVoyager 1
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    2 months ago

    Keep in mind too these guys are writing and reading in like assembly or some precursor to it.

    I can only imagine the number of checks and rechecks they probably go through before they press the “send” button. Especially now.

    This is nothing like my loosey goosey programming where I just hit compile or download and just wait to see if my change works the way I expect…


  • Well just for one example, Joe Biden has been aggressively using the powers he has via the department of education to cancel outstanding student loan balances that were completely legal and very profitable for usurious loan servicing companies.

    No Republican would do that.

    He and the Democrats leveraged their control of Congress in 2021 and 2022 to pass legislation that is going to do more to reduce our contribution to climate change than ever before. Not enough, but way more than any Republican would do.

    I feel like that means our democracy is sort of working.

    In so called “blue” states, they’re expanding voting access.

    I agree that campaign contributions are a serious challenge, but for example Bernie and Elizabeth Warren have done great things without contributions from billionaires.

    We can do this, but we need to stand up in the face of fear and push as hard as we can. The only thing to fear is fear itself!

    Vote Save America can help leverage donations to the most effective campaigns possible for progressive causes.

    https://votesaveamerica.com/


  • That’s the mission of the people who are trying to tear apart our democracy: make people think the whole system is broken and beyond repair.

    That’s where all these people arguing against voting for Biden and Democratic majorities are coming from. They don’t actually think the two parties are the same (or they wouldn’t if they were honest about them). But they sure as heck think America would be better if not everyone could participate in it’s governance.

    So it’s up to us to work on defending the democratic power we have and work on repairing and improving our democracy. That means completely redesigning the campaign finance system. That means expanding voting access. That means expanding the Article 3 courts from top to bottom. We need to fix our media. Break up monopolies and oligopolies. On and on.

    We can make our democracy better if we work together to fix it.


  • ristoril_zip@lemmy.ziptoMemes@lemmy.mlAlways has been
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    3 months ago

    I dunno I think there’s probably been one or two “honest” inflations where a vendor has seen her costs increase and has only raised her prices just enough to cover those increases.

    But yeah, I bet the majority of inflation has been rooted in avarice by shareholders and owners.


  • ristoril_zip@lemmy.ziptoPrivacy@lemmy.mlI did not know the origin of the quote
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    3 months ago

    I think what Snowden did was fundamentally good.

    My only problem is that he could have chosen to violate the bad law in the way King and others have violated bad laws in an effort to shed light on their badness: break the bad law in the open where everyone can see, then get arrested, then put the bad law and the system behind it on trial.

    By running away, he’s given the people who are doing bad things a line of attack against him. It’s bullshit, and doesn’t change the fact that widespread warrantless surveillance is wrong. But some people will take the attacks against Snowden seriously. If he had turned himself in and gone to trial, that line of attack would be gone.