Mama told me not to come.
She said, that ain’t the way to have fun.
Same. I also like it for basic research and helping with syntax for obscure SQL queries, but coding hasn’t worked very well. One of my less technical coworkers tried to vibe code something and it didn’t work well. Maybe it would do okay on something routine, but generally speaking it would probably be better to use a library for that anyway.
The only way to have a roller coaster is if it started with Wells Fargo.
Nice!
I self host Minecraft on our LAN so my kids can play together, and it’s super nice.
Idk, no teeth getting in the way could be a game chamber. That, and many decades of experience.
Well, hopefully you’ll find a wrinkly old man someday to give your tender bits a bit of sucking.
Maybe. I think people are more selfish the larger the group gets. So if you’re a small tribe, most people will work for the good of the tribe, but if you’re able to easily move between tribes, there’s less downside to selfishness.
So my opinion is we should assume selfishness and design a society around it, and capitalism does a pretty good job at that.
But what if it’s an old wrinkly man going down like it’s no tomorrow?
Yeah, I’m certainly looking around, but they also tend to have spyware. I just want a simple car that goes and stops when I say, and is really easy to repair if something goes wrong. EVs should be perfect for this, but for some reason manufacturers get away with tons of nonsense on them.
With Donald Trump hitting the balls from behind.
You really need to consider the possibilities when deciding whether to take off the blindfold. I think it’s reasonable to reflect a bit on how you got there to narrow the possibilities down somewhat.
Buying what you prefer itself isn’t an issue, but that should be the reason instead of “I need it because X, Y, Z.” Most truck/SUV owners don’t need a truck/SUV, they just want one.
My issue with trucks and SUVs are that they make the road more dangerous, since there’s only so much a car manufacturer can do to protect against a vehicle more than twice as massive. That, and they’re artificially cheap here in the US because of stupid regulations intended for farmers that got applied to them to reduce emissions standards.
Eh, we’ll see how that turns out. If they can release here at the price point they wanted ($25k-ish), I’d probably get one.
That’s what they claim, but their moderation practices feel a lot more on the tankie spectrum than marxist leninist.
Same. I’m looking into an EV, and I just want a simple car that goes and stops when I instruct it to. I don’t need any kind of always-online service, I don’t need cameras, etc, I just need to get to work and back.
Yeah, our VP rides around in a 2-door coupe and he’s very tall, while my coworker (who is shorter) drives a big SUV because “he doesn’t fit in smaller cars.” I’m also tall and drive a Toyota Prius, which is small.
At the end of the day, none of that’s legitimate, it’s just an excuse to buy the car you prefer.
Larger cars should cost more because they take up more space, wear out the roads faster, and impact the environment more.
And if they didn’t source internationally, they’d have to pay local labor prices, so it’s more expensive regardless of the direction they choose to go. If you make imports expensive enough, local goods will become more attractive, sure, but not cheaper.
I look at what services I use and see if I can replace any of them w/ a self-hosted solution. Rinse and repeat.
Looking for more stuff to host will just overcomplicate things. I instead try to look for ways to consolidate services down.
Why? Why would ending protectionism necessarily demand competition?
Right now, corporations get off w/ light fines and their execs don’t face jail time because of the explicit and implied protections in our legal system. Companies can declare bankruptcy without reaching into the pockets of those w/ a significant interest in the company because of financial protections, and prosecutors very rarely pursue criminal charges for something done in a business context. The larger a company is, the less likely it is to fail, but also the less competitive it is, because it can just buy legislators to block competition.
Here’s the current lifecycle of a corporation:
At step 2, companies are vulnerable to scrappy startups, but by the time they get to step 3, it’s too late to hold them accountable since they can just drown them out w/ negative press, lawsuits regarding regulations (and few consequences for trollish suits), etc.
I believe that if we cut corporate protectionism (say, for anything 2 or above) and hold execs legally liable for harm their products produce, we’ll largely stop the flow from 2 to 3 and largely force those at 3 and 4 to improve their behavior. You wouldn’t get situations like Boeing since the execs responsible would’ve been in jail at the first instance and the rest would follow for subsequent instances.
Our current strategy seems to be to pass regulations to improve the behavior of corporations, but corporations naturally sidestep the law and pay off legislators to make the consequences small. Instead, we should be making it unprofitable for corporations to lobby legislators and hold them accountable w/ law enforcement and the judicial system. Make laws extremely simple so there’s no wiggle room, such as if your product harms someone and you knew enough to have prevented it, you go to jail and need to make full restitution to the injured parties, and anything you earned while working there is available to make that restitution (smaller companies would have protections, but also limitation on how much profit they can pull from the corp).
In short, make it extremely unlikely a company will get powerful enough in the first place. The smaller a corporation is, the more protections it should get, not the reverse.
For example, items listed on Amazon that sell moderately well, Amazon creates knockoffs for. They then sell them at a cheaper price under the “Amazon Basic” name until the original is gone, and then they increase prices. This is what the free market looks like.
I haven’t seen those originals disappear, and I’ve heard a ton of complaints from people about the low quality of many Amazon Basics products. The only ones I’ve personally found value in are their rechargeable batteries (basically rebranded Eneloop) and their mice (backup only, they suck to use), but pretty much everything else has been poor quality.
People are the important thing, not companies
Agreed. I do think that employee owned companies are the ideal, but they’re not the only way for a company to be structured.
How people choose to organize themselves is their business, the government shouldn’t be picking and choosing structures it prefers. However, we’ve pretty much done that w/ the legal structures around corporations.
My solution here is to tear down the existing corporate structures and only have some kind of legal protection for sufficiently small orgs. For example, if your org has 50 employees and makes under 50M/year in revenue, you can apply for federal asset protection in exchange for submitting to regular audits. You would be disqualified from those protections if your net worth is above some amount, if you own a substantial stake in some number of companies, etc. The intention would be to give small companies some amount of protection so people actually want to start them, and once you start seeing success, then you’re expected to buy your own private insurance or whatever and do your due diligence to make sure your operations don’t harm others.
I would also like to see civil lawsuits be dramatically reduced in favor of actual criminal prosecutions. So if you’re being discriminated against or harassed at your job, you would go to the police and they would investigate and potentially arrest your employer, instead of going to a lawyer to seek a settlement from the company. The former gets results, the latter is a high enough barrier that most don’t bother.
Improving the lives of people should be the end goal, not profit.
Neither should be the end goal, the goal should be leaving people alone so they can pursue happiness on their own. The government shouldn’t protect me from making poor choices, and it shouldn’t prevent me from getting rich, it should prevent me from being taken advantage of and ensure I have whatever basic necessities I need to pursue happiness on my own.
I think we need some form of government, but I think that form needs to be very focused on providing limited, high quality services. Instead of welfare and retirement programs, just give poor people cash, whether young or old. Instead of complicated IP protections, let the courts deal with the general idea of “fraud” and “theft.” Instead of laws that say behavior must be within certain guidelines, prosecute actual harm (e.g. no tickets for “speeding,” but prosecute “reckless driving” heavily, as in actually endangering others). The government should only step in when absolutely necessary, and otherwise leave people alone.
In all honesty, the role of a legislator should be very boring, most days they should do absolutely nothing. We don’t need full-time representatives, we should have regular people that assemble whenever something truly important comes up, like maybe a few times per year or so. If the legislature doesn’t have enough power to favor or disfavor a given corporation (i.e. it doesn’t consider enough bills to matter), the corporation won’t bother lobbying them.
I think that sort of approach can self-correct and result in bad corporations failing and good corporations succeeding, because the financial and practical risk of bad behavior is high enough to discourage it.
Obviously, I haven’t dealt in specifics at all and I represented it in fairly extreme language to make a point. The idea I’m trying to convey is that I think less is more absolutely applies to the government, and we should strive to simplify it to where it’s transparent enough that the average person actually understands what government does.
Gotta save those syllables, they don’t grow on trees you know…