uriel238
@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone
- Comment on When will we learn 1 day ago:
Masturbating doesn’t warrant hurricanes.
But using fossil fuels and methane to run your hyperscale data centers absolutely does.
- Comment on That’s just unrealistic… too few poop breaks. 2 days ago:
Still necessary to quiet-quit at $48K and keep looking for openings in competing companies.
According to a How Money Works video (a while ago), tech companies stopped paying for training or promoting from within, so employees just started keeping their résumé current, and keeping an eye on openings. As a result, companies actually paid more to fill their middle-management positions than if they kept on promoting from within.
It is scary just how incompetent top-down companies are at maximizing their profits, especially considering how much data-driven research there is on human resources.
- Comment on When did humans stop creating wonders? 3 days ago:
In Rise of Nations modern-era wonders are science projects like space programs and supercolliders.
The LHC is absolutely a recent wonder.
- Comment on Title 4 days ago:
Decades of arguing on the internet has mellowed me out some. At this point if someone is hostile without adding anything meaningful to the thread, I ignore them.
If they’re being a dick but made a point that might be seen as valid, I’ll talk to the lurker who’s reading the thread.
I feel the most useful when I can link to content that is informative, say a deep dive or a source that has academic or press chops. This is even useful if I agree with the other correspondents because then it’s no longer just the hearsay of a bunch of dudes on the internet.
- Comment on the tech billionaires have lost the plot 1 week ago:
There’s evidence that extreme amounts of wealth and power do drive one mad. One study had people play monopoly with one player (chosen at random) starting in a privileged position (e.g. extra starting money, and twice the income passing go). They became assholes really quick, and believed their victory in the game was due to superior playing.
But it gets crazy when you’re so rich that no one will disagree with you about anything. Surrounded by sycophants, it becomes easy to assume you’re the smartest person in the room and expert of everything.
Some world cultures see it as an illness just to hoard massive amounts of wealth, but here in the states we nurtured a culture in which superlative wealth became a common ambition. Especially after the California gold rush, and get-rich-quick schemes became the norm.
- Comment on When the Democrats regain power, their centrist leadership will claim, "We can't do anything because...". Don't be fooled. We need to get the corporate centrists out and real progressives in! 1 week ago:
I’m totally game. Someone well above my pay grade needs to organize a panel of legal and civic experts to hammer out a charter and make sure it’s got ironclad protections against corruption.
Otherwise, we’ll just be here again in a decade or two, and they’ll have the experience of this time to guide them.
For one thing, Citizens United only scratches the surface of money in politics. How Money Works did a video about just how entrenched it is. (Here on YouTube). And presently, politicians at the state and federal level expect to be able to enrich themselves by using the power of their office.
This is why it’s way beyond my pay grade. We need historians to remind us how systems failed in the past, so we assure we don’t repeat the same mistakes. We need legal scholars to check how our terms could be misinterpreted by bad-faith judges given authority, while making sure the language is plain enough that high-school students can understand what it means.
- Comment on When the Democrats regain power, their centrist leadership will claim, "We can't do anything because...". Don't be fooled. We need to get the corporate centrists out and real progressives in! 1 week ago:
Yeah, busting the rail strike really tipped the hand of the establishment Democratic party to show they still are captured, and the blue-dog ranks are in office not to serve the public or to make specific changes but to get rich by peddling their political power. Given they’re negotiating with MAGA more than they’re coordinating with progressives and DSA, I’m really expecting some Democratic officials will flip so they can continue exploiting their positions for personal gain.
Heather Cox Richardson notes that this sort of thing has happened before, in which business interests dominated the government and enacted policies that wrecked the economy, but got magnates very rich, but the backlash was a revival of public serving interests. In the case of Roosevelt and the New Deal, there was the threat of communist revolution, as we were also watching what was going on in the Soviet Union, and even communism had to be better than living in homeless encampments and barely surviving on flour paste.
We already have a conspicuous number of homeless encampments, and while we’re not yet living on cups of noodles, we can’t afford food and fuel at the same time, we’re skipping meds, and we’re also suffering from food poisoning while watching corruption and money getting poured into an unpopular war where our soldiers and sailors are being unnecessarily treated like shit.
Hopefully things don’t have to get much worse before the mischief begins. I suspect we’re all hoping the midterms turn out well (and we survive to the new Congress) which might save us from getting our hands dirty. But when there’s no hope at all, some of us may realize we really don’t have anything else to lose.
- Comment on When the Democrats regain power, their centrist leadership will claim, "We can't do anything because...". Don't be fooled. We need to get the corporate centrists out and real progressives in! 1 week ago:
I, too, am pessimistic about our chances. But some folk who are more read up than me about it (e.g. Jamille Bouie, Helen Cox Richardson) express more optimism, citing trends and moments in history that rhyme.
Although, I am worried that our ultra-wealthy are exponentially richer than the robber barons ever have been at any other time in history. Once they’re done financializing the US into a wasteland (of quarries, oilfields and data centers), they’re going to move onto the rest of the developed world, and they are rich enough to buy all the elections and control all the governments.
So if we can make our stand here, and recognize our billionaire class as the existential threat that they actually are, (and as Paul Krugman suggests, tax them out of existence) we’ll be sparing the entirety of human civilization a lot of devastation.
- Comment on Happy Kirkiversary 1 week ago:
That’s why I said it’s remotely plausible. For that hypothesis to work we’d have to justify why Israel wanted to kill him.
I remember reading in a historical bio that it was Hermann Göring who convinced Hitler that Ernst Röhm was a threat and needed to be removed from power, because Göring wanted to run the party, or at least be in line behind Hitler, and Röhm was in the way of that ambition.
Likewise, it’s not necessarily Israel or the Netanyahu administration that would have sought to kill Charlie Kirk, but someone within the regime that has access to the levers of control, and could convince them that, for sake of the security of Israel, Kirk needed to be eliminated.
So the question to ask is who that might be, and what grievance he might have with Kirk enough to use the state to attack him. As I have no idea, I personally don’t believe Israel assassinated Kirk. But if I were to steel-man the conspiracy theory, this is how I’d approach it.
- Comment on When the Democrats regain power, their centrist leadership will claim, "We can't do anything because...". Don't be fooled. We need to get the corporate centrists out and real progressives in! 1 week ago:
We need to organize twelve million Americans under a common manifesto.
If the Democrats don’t take power in 2029 (both houses of the legislature and the executive), if they fail to move quickly, overhauling SCOTUS and ironcladding elections to stop tampering and voter suppression cold, then the US public needs to occupy Washington by multiple millions with a list of demands.
Or general strike.
Or riot in multiple municipal areas hard enough to overwhelm responders.
Or go on a billionaire assassination spree.
If we cannot do that, then we’re all going to be packed onto the cattle cars. Not necessarily all together, but the US will fall to one-party autocracy.
US Dictatorship by 2033 is on the BINGO card.
- Comment on Don't worry about it haha 1 week ago:
Restrictions to child labor in the US are about factory work. And states are passing exceptions so that teens, especially delinquent teens, can work near dangerous machinery.
But kids have always been allowed to do agricultural work for less than minimum wage.
- Comment on Happy Kirkday! 1 week ago:
Don’t laugh! As the Islamic Golden Age was pivoting towards religious extremism, algebra was labeled as sorcery and turned into a capital crime.
- Comment on Life 1 week ago:
I think if I can link people (or provide websearch-ready key words) to good takes and deep dives relevant to the subject, then I’m doing a good thing.
Otherwise, I tend to be a Tad Verbose, which is also my porn name.
- Comment on Happy Kirkiversary 1 week ago:
He was in that rare space of occasionally making antisemitic statements while also being consistently pro-Israel, so on the presumption Israel is a Jewish nation, the grounds for an assassination attempt by an Israeli radical extremist is remotely plausible.
As a note, Israel is not a nation for Jewish people. It’s a nation for rich people who happen to be Jews. The class divide between wealthy Jews and working class Jews is historically greater than solidarity between them. (As it is with Christians, LGBT+ or most identities.)
There’s a lot of pro-Israel antisemitism cross-sectionality, especially in Protestant Evangelism as it is ministered in the United States.
The white Christian nationalist movement is pro-Israel specifically because they are looking forward to the second advent (the apocalypse in Revelation as a future prediction). One of the prophesied events as the end times approach is the return of the Jewish people to Israel. Hence, their pro-Israel efforts are part of an effort to hurry that process along. (Prophesies never ever worked that way, but whatever. It’s not my parade.)
But also in that same biblical interpretation, the Jewish peoples are damned to Hellfire while Christians (as narrowly defined by the movement) are gathered unto Heaven. So for the white Christian nationalist movement, Israel is a tool to serve its own metaphysical purposes.
- Comment on Fox News sharing billionaire propaganda 1 week ago:
This is why regulation is necessary. The moonshots returned $14 for every $1 spent thanks to science and innovation we benefited from it. Lobbying government returns $120 for every $1 spent.
Financialization returns exponentially more. In fact, most of the billionaires that exist are finance bros that got rich from private equity and market manipulation. Stock buybacks are a recent number-go-up tactic. These things, like rent-seeking, don’t actually produce value but make profit.
So when we say the ultra-wealthy got rich by exploiting, we are totally underestimating the amount of wrongdoing they are committing.
But then Marx notes in Das Kapital that the capitalist will always seek to capture government and regulatory bodies in order to game the system, thereby destabilizing it until it collapses. The process feeds on itself and gets worse at an accellerating rate.
Unless something very radical is done, civilization worldwide is going to fall.
- Comment on Fox News sharing billionaire propaganda 1 week ago:
FOX News is the billionaire propaganda mouthpiece. It’s all it does.
Well, MAGA ideology propaganda, but same thing.
- Comment on Fox News sharing billionaire propaganda 1 week ago:
They shouldn’t but they do, because the billionaires and corporations have bought the government. That is to say they’ve bribed the officials in the government, though for a while now there are no laws or enforcement mechanisms in place to prevent this kind of corruption.
Lobbying the government is very profitable, far more so than any kind of positive innovation that capitalism is allegedly supposed to promote. It’s why governments criminalize this kind of influence from business interests or wealth. Usually companies just pass laws so that smaller rival businesses cannot compete, but they can also pass laws to give companies huge subsidies, no-bid contracts and tax cuts.
Financialization, it turns out, is even more profitable, which is using financial shenanigans like private equity to turn a reputable business into a giant ponzi scheme. The financial bros are long gone when the massive loan burden of the company is due. It leaves huge sinkholes in the economy, including Toys R Us, which is now a bunch of abandoned warehouses and unused giant outlets.
Currently, our ultra-wealthy, most of whom got rich through financialization, are trying to do the same thing with the US, itself, getting elected officials to pass huge budgets giving them no-bid contracts where they can charge grossly inflated prices. In the meantime, all this is incurs a huge amount of national debt.
Since Trump is doing everything in his power to isolate the US from the rest of the world (he wanted to do this since the beginning of his first term), when the bond market collapses, there won’t be anyone in the world willing to help us out, and the US will be reduced, like Toys R Us to husks of storefronts.
And then, our ultrawealthy can buy up US land for a song, and turn it into quarries, oilfields and data centers as far as the eye can see, though they seem completely oblivious about how they’re going to keep the workforce alive to run them.
- Comment on To be happy… 2 weeks ago:
I think air frying technology isn’t so grand as a stable, functioning society.
Essentially we got fucked once Falwell figured out anti-abortion-access radicals will vote against their own interests. It didn’t hurt that white America really hates blacks.
Anyhow, that helped to get Reagan in to power and the economy turned K-shaped and never recovered, and at that point liberal democracy in the US was doomed.
- Comment on Paid Time Off Hypocrisy 2 weeks ago:
Trump and his oligarch friends do not give a wit about the working class, in fact resent us. They would rather work us to death like slaves at a sugar cane plantation than treat us with decency even if the latter is more profitable to them.
This is why in the US labor unions have had to claw all of the worker treatment regulations that existed (and are no longer enforced) in the workplace, from the weekend and forty-hour work week to safe working conditions.
Since it’s easier for the owner class to bust unions than it is for workers to form them, civilization might just be screwed until we figure out how to universally teach class consciousness.
- Comment on Paid Time Off Hypocrisy 2 weeks ago:
Oh no. Massie is scary as fuck when you look at his policies and voting record. He just believed the MAGA flavor aid stuff, such as exposing all the elites in the Epstein files.
As with all of Trump’s prior cronies, Trump commands absolute loyalty but returns none, and so when Trump’s policies change, well, US was at war with Iran; therefore US had always been at war with Iran.
- Comment on The American Dream, minus 60% 2 weeks ago:
Here’s hoping! Getting the unruly mobs out for a visibility rally is a first step. We also need to get everyone to agree on a manifesto by which to make our demands, and that means getting a bunch of legal experts to create a charter.
Definitely beyond my pay grade.
- Comment on I'm not sure they will 2 weeks ago:
Something similar happened in January 2013. In protest of the SOPA/PIPA bills that threatened section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, Wikipedia went dark.
It got everyone’s attention, especially students, who had grown accustomed to Wikipedia’s ubiquity as a resource.
- Comment on The American Dream, minus 60% 2 weeks ago:
I am not surprised, nor am I impressed.
Don’t bother blocking me. I’ll do it for you.
- Comment on The American Dream, minus 60% 2 weeks ago:
Smaller insular groups get wiped out by infectious diseases, but they don’t communicate them to other insular groups. And that is the going hypothesis of why we really like to organize in small bands about the size of our Facebook friends list, and want to throw rocks at people from other tribes.
Larger intermixing populations gain their immunity by first having a lot of them die off. This is one of the benefits(?) of ranching livestock, since they’re a vector for diseases that commonly get transmitted to their human owners. The epidemics happen, and then the survivors have the antibodies, and even pass them on to their kin.
Nowadays, we have centralized disease control. It may be failing in the US but the rest of the developed world still have a robust system. But human beings haven’t had time to evolve (very much) towards large pluralistic societies that combat disease through science and proactive prevention.
Given enough time, I’d think we might, since large pluralistic societies also develop science, technology and arts much faster in general, often much to the chagrin of moral guardians like religious ministries.
- Comment on The American Dream, minus 60% 2 weeks ago:
You’re engaging in violence fantasy. If you were here and tried to carry it out, you’d be dead and countless innocents piled on top of you.
You’re also totally underestimating the size of the response necessary.
Additionally, far-right Charlie Kirks are sponsored by the oligarchs, while far left ones are labeled as terrorists and hunted down by regime paramilitaries. We’ve seen this both during the German Reich and during the US civil rights movement. Why do you think the entire developed world is determined to strip anonymity from social media access?
We’re not fighting against a unite-the-right rally. We’re fighting the entirety of the federal government, and cooperating state governments.
You’re also asking some of us to sacrifice ourselves, which is a huge ask on its own. But the least we need to do is make sure those sacrifices aren’t in vein.
Something tells me you’ve never been in a society under attack by a captured government. Something tells me that you’d cow in your own dwelling if the circumstances rapidly developed around you. But do feel free to tell specific tales if I’m wrong. I’ll read them.
- Comment on The American Dream, minus 60% 2 weeks ago:
Such as?
To fix this we need to organize twelve million Americans. We could seize Washington by force. Occupying Washington with six million supported by the other six would likely be enough. Or we could stage a general strike and support those workers not earning a living.
But we need to create a larger organized revolt than has ever been done before. And we’ll need a manifesto that everyone can agree on.
It turns out that’s actually quite difficult.
- Comment on The American Dream, minus 60% 2 weeks ago:
Firstly, racism is always a thing. Xenophobia is how humans kept infectious diseases at bay for most of human existence. But then we did the agriculture thing and decided to try out larger societies. Throughout history, though societies have always had to contend with half the population hating the other half enough to get violent.
The whole point of post-enlightenment civilizations is to treat everyone equally. But the US’ economy depended on slavery, and we weren’t ready to give rights to women, and those left cracks fit for social wedges.
Secondly, racism is a tool and always has been. The owner class has always resented the working class, and now they can live so far removed from us that they don’t even pretend or develop empathy by sharing the street with us. Heck Thiel wants to make his own Rapture in which everything is automated.
Racism is the hook by which the massive, oligarch-owned, far-right, propaganda machine draws in its viewership before feeding them the MAGA ideology and encouraging them to isolate themselves from all other information sources (and the libs). It turns out in the last century we’ve developed a lot of psychology. It’s just not used as much to heal minds.
But the owner class hates us all. It may hate non-white non-Christians slightly more, but the thing that disgusts them the most about us, by far, is that we are poor. And they’re just as eager to deny us a means to survive as working-class white men would to black men.
- Comment on The American Dream, minus 60% 2 weeks ago:
Oh it’s worse than that. Once America’s billionaires plunder the US treasury and tank the bond market (so we can’t borrow any more), they’ll make good their escape and then do the same to the rest of the developed world.
They’re richer than any royalty or industrialist robber baron has in history by at least a factor of four, and can afford to buy all the elections and capture all of the governments.
Quarries and data centers as far as the eye can see.
- Comment on The American Dream, minus 60% 2 weeks ago:
We only need to organize twelve million Americans to counter this.
Sadly, we’ll need to organize twelve million Americans to counter this.
- Comment on Walmart actually teaches their employees how to get food stamps 2 weeks ago:
Although, the billionaires and trillionaires are a symptom of the endgame. By far, most of our billionaires attained their wealth though financialization, that is to say financial shenanigans that do not produce value and wreak havoc on the economy.
An example is private equity, which is what happened to Toys 'R Us, Radio Shack, Claires, and countless other brands.
Normally, once the feds detect financial shenanigans, we outlaw them under fraud. But the owner class reacts by capturing regulatory agencies and/or defunding them so they can’t enforce their regulations. Citizens United was the death knell for the US.
It’s going to take ending the owner class to get out of this mess, and if wait too long, the ultra wealthy are rich enough to do the same thing to the rest of the developed world.
And we have to do it before we run out of water.