President Donald Trump

Or maybe he simply made a better product? How did it go from nothing to being 1/3 of the internet? By making a better product. How did they survive vs corporate juggernauts with a headstart, such as Microsoft or Google or lolGodaddy ? By making a better product. How is there a failure here?

And:

- 10 million people who are remote and need internet don't have it. Including emergency services, mines, Ukraine frontlines. Increasing to $100 million+. Included lots of poor people that y'all communists claim to care about.
- Scientific progress is substantially slower - SpaceX accelerated space based research for materials science, etc
- The US relies on Russian satellites for crewed space missions
- US taxpayers pay 10x more for launches, and get a much slower pace of space innovation
- US probably falls behind China in the space race with corporate incumbents
- And that's just the start, even larger future outcomes from the US innovating in space again after falling behind.

So yeah, "and" is quite significant. I don't like Musk at all, strong dislike, but you don't have to like someone to see that their output is a huge net positive relative to their consumption. Unless you're a child. Musk is clearly the most competent person to allocate funds for space activities. Far more competent than governments and incumbents. All all because society allows the concentration of outrageous wealth rather than the Gorgonian model

And that's just one billionaire. There are many who made society and the economy much better solely through their actions.

Would I be surprised if Luciom had a foot fetish? Not especially. But for whatever reason, that doesn't sound to me like a screen name he would choose. But I certainly would be wrong. And if he is Luciom, he should just say so.

His latest spate of posts lean towards him being that one troll who said he pulled a gun out in a Zoom class. What was that dude's name, pointlesswords or something?

No chance, that dude was borderline illiterate and probably had never formulated one coherent thought in his life.

I actually agree with some of what you’re saying about billionaires, but I will say that it’s somewhat of an existential risk to have one person control 1/3 of the internet regardless of whether the service he is initially providing is favored by most people. Also, there’s so much of a first mover advantage in social media that it makes it hard to gauge what’s actually better and what just happened to be adopted (right place, right time).

There are lots of projects that are really good that are open source/decentralized but just not being adopted by the masses. Not because they are worse but because they are less easy to adopt than plug and play, and they are harder to find.

Regardless, if we are to live in this world where a few people control most of the internet and services, we need protections that make it so that we are able to use these websites and services without undermining the sovereignty of individual rights. It’s not the type of private property that could have been imagined by the people that set up our countries, or even people from 100 years ago.

Exploitation is not anyone's opinion.

It is a technical term for the gap between a workers wages and their value, which is taken by Capitalists as profit.

Most people don’t mean the Marxist term when they say exploitation.

I agree. I'm pointing out this is what WE mean.

I find there can be an equivocation going on when people use that term. They say exploitation is meant to be in the context of the LTV, but don’t mind if the morally negative connotation of exploitation as it’s used colloquially slips in. When you’re talking to lay people, I doubt it’s clear to them what you mean.

The exploitation Marx is talking about is a step forward from feudalism in his system, so it’s not meant to be negative, just a reference to surplus value being extracted from the workers.

It's hilarious that he has to ask how Jeff Bezos (to take the most obvious example from his dumb list - they all obviously have) exploits workers.

It's not hard to find headlines to support that one, as if this needs to be done for anyone that didn't just land here from somewhere outside the Milky Way Galaxy, but even if you want a well-backed, peer-reviewed source:

Mulugeta, Helen. (2022). Human Rights Issues at Amazon Corporation. Management Science and Business Decisions. 2. 19-31. 10.52812/msbd.50.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication...

But nobody makes people buy from Amazon so its ok!

You guys that think I'm a standard liberal don't understand how much I loathe capitalism, particularly its propaganda spreaders.

One reason I might appear to be one, is I don't support radical, revolutionary change. I believe the correct way to do it is over time (similar concept to shifting the overton window).

Dehumanization is inevitable when forced to sell your labor as a commodity.

Yeah, true. It's just the "Bezos sells people chit cheaper than anyone else so how is that exploiting people??" while pretending to be clueless to workers dying in his warehouses and drivers having to chit in a bucket to stay on their gps routes while delivering packages is definitely a pw-level troll.

The wonder thing is that we've run the experiment on which type of system treats their workers and citizens better.

Short version: Capitalism.

The Marxists started with the absolute belief you espouse "capitalism exploits the workers" and proceeded to kill hundreds of millions and horrifically oppress billions trying to make something better.

We've run the experiment. You're anti-science and anti-humanity pushing this viewpoint

Everything exploits workers and most working itself is dehumanising - it's not the sale that causes it. All systems exploit the less intelligent, less attractive, less witty, less strategic. Capitalism is just the least bad.

Marxists just have a fixed obsession with capitalism, and fail to see all the other bad things that are actually worse. It's where they stop thinking and looking. It's so lazy. Hence they create disasters worse than Nazism. Provably. Over and over.

It's more that Marx's analysis was not only false but out of date. Because Marx was a bit thick, he took so long to write his big book that, by the time it appeared, what he called 'capitalism' (that is, the inescapable way of the world) was already delivering cheaper goods, higher prosperity, greater life expectancy and, gradually, at least in prospect, greater equality -- all the things that he claimed could only be achieved by what he euphemistically called 'revolution' (which Orwell called 'a boot stamping on a human face forever').

Marx himself of course lived quite happily in non-Communist England and is buried a few hundred yards from where I sit.

I live quite happily in fascist America. Are you suggesting we should suffer?

mmm capitalist propaganda

Again, more straw men. I never suggested to use systems that have been tried and failed. In fact, I have suggested no systems at all other than to raise the tax rate on a small class of people.

I never suggested a system either. Capitalism is unsolvable! Everyone probably dies at the end.

I will curious to see how Trump is received in MSG, and also curious to see whether ABC shows the response on air. I very easily could imagine thunderous booing, especially if security lines are endless. I can't overstate how despised he is by most people in the city. And Trump is petty enough to actually make policy decisions based on things like booing. Probably the best thing for everyone involved would be for the Knicks to avoid any sort of explicit acknowledgement over the PA system of the fact that Trump is there.

Trial run for the reception he'll get at the World Cup if he attends.

Considering every external watch party has been cancelled cuz trump and it takes longer to get in cuz trump and everyone knows trump is there I’m confident every single person in attendance is begging for the opportunity to boo the living **** out of him

Unfortunately one of the few ppl hated almost as much as trump is dolan so he seems safe

They showed him during the national anthem and the crowd was booing loudly. That probably means ICE will be crawling all over the city by the weekend.

That’s a great idea. Maybe you could get a same day colonoscopy, assuming it cost more than 25 dollars.