> That people will get more angry at congress for doing nothing is icing on the cake.
I want to be optimistic about this. In practice it seems that the strategy created by McConnel to block any legislation at all has been doing/tricking the voter really well. As he predicted, credit for anything good goes to the current admin while anything bad also gets blamed on the current admin. I can see a likely scenario where "people getting more angry" will only make this strategy to block everything work even better. I hope I am wrong and the "nuance" that congress exists and isn't controlled by the president will finally get into people heads. I also hope that once it gets into their heads, the conclusion won't be that a authoritarian dictator is needed.
I agree with you: frustrated by a Congress that can’t pass any legislation, the one thing it doesn’t seem like anyone is willing to try is to consider compromises. Everyone seems fully convinced that if only the 50% (or more) of the voters who disagree with them would just drop dead, we could fix everything. And as a result, voters punish lawmakers, who horse trade and negotiate. Even though that’s the only way things used to get done until everything broke 10 or 15 years ago.
IMO the bigger issue isn't propaganda posts on tiktok created by the CCP but the more subtle influence the recommendation algorithm can have on what gets eyeballs. There have been several studies that showed that content the CCP doesn't like is a lot less prominent than on other, comparable platforms. Here is the first study I could find again while googling: https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/NCRI-Report_-...
I am not sure it's obvious that you could continue generating from any key image and it wouldn't deteriorate into mush. If you take that museum scene and look at the vase-like display piece while walking around it as much as you can it already becomes fuzzy and has the beginnings of weird artifacts growing out of it.
My parents had recorded something on our VCR and "to be safe" it recorded the first half hour or so of the following movie. The following movie was the original Alien. It stopped around the dinner scene before it gets really going. I must have watched that part of the movie ~20 times when I was around 10. I'd be constantly afraid about facehuggers hiding under the bed or behind the shower curtain when it was dark.
This was still somewhat the case in the late 90s and early 00s before Youtube and IMDB were really big. We'd go watch Star Trek Nemesis because it had Star Trek in the name or watch whatever looked good in the trailers last time we went. What was your alternative? Watch it on your CRT tv a year later, probably with ads? Rental existed, but at least where I lived it was very uncommon. I honestly miss it. Driving to the cinema with a bunch of friends, sometimes not even certain what we'd watch and how it would turn out. Really great! Recently I visited an old friend at his new (to me) apartment and it came up that he had kept all his cinema tickets from back in the day. We went through all of them swimming in nostalgia, a little blurry-eyed, while our wives laughed at us.
This! I'd argue that the only reason loyalty might not always matter is because I am frequently not given a real choice because a given route likely has a very limited number of airlines offering flights and those might be dramatically different in number of stops, price and times. Air travel is one area where I frequently wonder how many benefits of it being a free market on paper we are actually getting. There is limited choice and direct competition seems limited
Bitcoin inherently relies on buy-in for its value. It's a shared fiction that becomes real because we share it. In that regard it's similar to countries. I literally cannot switch from Bitcoin to another coin and get the same value unless we collectively do it. It's a inherent property of its usage as a currency. I can switch from ChatGPT to Claude though without anyone else doing so and I get the same value. In fact, if Claude is superior I might actually get more value than if everyone switched because I now have a leg up on everyone else.
Nah, this time it's "capitalism bad! Evil VCs want to make a profit on the money the invested. How dare they! Evil people" (the speaker literally calls people "evil" for this).
> Nah, this time it's "capitalism bad! Evil VCs want to make a profit on the money the invested.
Yes, this is correct, but your sarcasm is misdirection.
The criticism is how they are attempting to "make a profit". With callousness and indifference. Dark patterns and exploitation. Growth at any and all cost.
What is the value in a rhetorical victory by ignoring the message of "how" to make it about "what"?
Well, selfish capitalism has lifted countless people out of poverty, brought wealth that was unimaginable a hundred years ago, extended life-expectancy and so much more. Meanwhile many, if not most, atrocities at scale have been driven by some misguided sense of moral virtue. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, even Hitler were all driven by misguided values or misguided solutions driven by a derailed moralistic system. Then of course we have all the terrible stuff done in the name of religion to appease some higher power. While capitalism of course isn't perfect and causes harm at times, it's sanity impossible to commit atrocities on the scale that "doing good" will frequently do.
Capitalism didn't do that. The beginnings of free trade were entirely imperial, at a time when capitalism was considered a radical and unsafe belief. Globalism would follow the expansionist policy of colonial powers which created interdependent trade networks along most of the routes sailors traveled regularly. Again - this modernization all happened during a time when imperial power struggles were the only respected way to rule. Capitalism is a post-globalist policy that was only enabled by socialized, government-commissioned expeditions.
What we know today as "capitalism" isn't even a pure or strongly-defined form of it. Laissez-faire policy wasn't able to survive without government intervention, so modern capitalism settled on being a moderate form of socialist republic. You cannot have an American economy without government intervention - the diametric comparison of communist economies to "capitalist" ones is a faux-pas that even first-year political science students don't make. Both forms of government rely on both private and socialized wealth, and neither of them can righteously claim direct heritage to the colonial expansionism that made their governments possible in the first place.
The conversation today is asking what the government's role is here. In the wake of Europe's Digital Market Act, it's plainly apparent that America's entrenched lobbyists have been hemming up serious antitrust proceedings for decades. Capitalist countries can and do regularly disagree over how capitalism instantiates itself and controls the conditions of a free market.
The trade companies were in fact companies. They were licensed by their respective governments, but they were companies. The Dutch East India company was in fact the first stock company.
However, that's not what I am referring to when I am saying capitalism lifted people out of poverty. We don't have to go that far back. Simply look at any chart of life expectancy, infant mortality or any other indicator of quality of life during Soviet times and after. It starts going up after they got rid of communism. Same in China after it opened itself to market forces and now that Xi is messing with it they growth is running into issues. Every country that has made the jump from low to middle-income country has done so by initially doing cheap, low-value-add manufacturing. At that initial stage everyone is whining about "exploitation" but subsistence farmers are happy to take the factory jobs and over time they wages rise and if the government doe sit right, their kids get better education and eventually the country becomes high-income. Take a look at the Asian tiger states for more recent examples of this. (the big exception are of course tiny tax havens or oil countries which are not reproducible or scalable.). Which country is seeing the biggest growth in Africa? Botswana which took the approach of liberalizing its economy.
Of course, anarcho-capitalism doesn't work either. I agree that the free market must be protected from manipulation by players in that market as well. I am also in favor of wealth-redistribution that avoids dead-weight-loss.
However, none of that changes the fact that trying to do "good" has done incredible amounts of harm directly and indirectly, especially if it involves punishing individuals or groups or trying to suppress the free market.
If an existing company sucks, start a competitor! Their suck is your opportunity
If the goal is one thing there might be nice side effects but they are never the goal. The moment the goal can be accomplished better by getting rid of the nice things the nice things should be disposed of.
For a while we had people creating nice products that also happened to make very good money. Most things arguably start out trying to make something good.
Im getting a picture of a horse pulling a cart up hill. When at good height to keep moving you don't need the horse anymore?
I printed a few for halloween this year. I found that the angle and strength of blowing made a huge difference. I'd say that I was able to pretty much recreate the sounds in the linked recordings. The benefit of the 3d-printed once is that you can have one with the face of Jeff Bezos.
I want to be optimistic about this. In practice it seems that the strategy created by McConnel to block any legislation at all has been doing/tricking the voter really well. As he predicted, credit for anything good goes to the current admin while anything bad also gets blamed on the current admin. I can see a likely scenario where "people getting more angry" will only make this strategy to block everything work even better. I hope I am wrong and the "nuance" that congress exists and isn't controlled by the president will finally get into people heads. I also hope that once it gets into their heads, the conclusion won't be that a authoritarian dictator is needed.
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