Exactly. The words used to describe the model are just that. Words. The ruling class is always shitty people who have their heads in the clouds. They cannot fathom the struggles of the working class and have no idea how to actually make things better. It doesn’t matter how you structure the government when our rulers are always human-shaped embodiments of shit.

I understand why my post above gets so many downvotes. It’s natural for people to want to believe they have an answer that works. That what they believe in is correct and everyone else is wrong. I’m telling you that everyone is wrong, and we don’t have a model that works. Nobody wants to hear that, but it’s the answer I’ve arrived to after thinking about politics and economics for decades. It’s also why the people are so susceptible to demagogues. A man with a plan will come along, tell everyone what they want to hear, and lead society towards its next mass atrocity. It’s going to happen again. It will happen here in the USA. You can bet on it.

Here in NY we have 1 year leases capped at an increase of 3% per year. However landlords can increase rent another 3% if they can show that they had to do upgrades or emergency repairs or some other nonsense. They’ve applied for and received this exemption to double our increase EVERY SINGLE YEAR I’ve lived there, and it seems there is nothing to stop them from doing it every year until the end of time.

The infuriating thing? There are no actual upgrades being done. The roads are constantly full of potholes. The water lines constantly spring leaks. The power is constantly cutting out - brownouts are common, and blackouts happen every winter. We are responsible for paying all our utilities, mowing the lawn, and maintaining our lots, and the office is apparently responsible for nothing and spends nothing upgrading or maintaining the park. But somehow they qualify for that extra 3% increase every single year without fail.

• I live in a trailer park owned by Horizon Land Management. There are youtube videos detailing how trailer parks used to be cheap housing for the poor, but now that private equity companies like Horizon are buying them up, they’re raising lot rent sky high and parasitizing the people who are so poor they can’t afford to leave. Trailers were the cheapest housing many of us could afford. Where else could we go? They basically suck the blood out of us like vampires.

It’s two sides of the same coin. Everyone likes capitalism in the early days when there are lots of entrepreneurs and small businesses competing against each other. Mom and pop can run a family store. There’s a strong middle class and national prosperity.

But it doesn’t last, and capitalism always morphs into crony capitalism, where monopolies run everything and lawmakers are bribed to protect the rich and exploit the poor. It’s functionally no different from communism, which is a political and economic model (yes its both) that just speedruns straight to late stage oligarchy.

Both crony capitalism and communism concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a few oligarchs that control most of the nation’s resources. Both hand majority control over to one or a handful of major political parties. Both involve high degrees of bribery, corruption, and accumulation of wealth and power with the goal of exploiting the masses.

Marx was a liar and a terrorist. His work has done more harm to humanity than nuclear weapons. Communism is a blueprint that tricks the naive, the gullible, and the stupid and in every single instance without fail causes violent revolution that incorporates genocide to put the absolute worst people in power so they can oppress and tyrannize those weaker than them.

Crony Capitalism is the same end, it just takes longer and dresses the whole thing up in mask and gown and plays a charade to keep people from realizing the truth.

The human race has an inherent flaw. We can’t govern ourselves properly. Every single model of government we have ends up abusing the people who the government is supposed to represent. We don’t have a model of government that actually works as intended.

I’m a lifelong Windows user. I was using DOS and Windows 3.1 back in the 90’s. I learned how to set up and manage windows servers in college. I manage an active directory domain at work.

I did not like Windows 8 or 10. I think removing the start menu was stupid. Changing the right-click context menu was even more stupid. It seems every iteration of Windows up until Windows 7 focused on adding new features and improving the UI, where as every iteration after has stripped features away and made the UI worse.

Windows 11 was the last straw. I built a new PC earlier this year and run Nobara Linux on it. It’s not perfect, but it’s been fantastic and it works much better than Windows 10 or 11. Thanks to AI chatbots like Gemini I’ve been able to get help when it comes to learning terminal commands and configuring my OS just the way I want it. It plays all my games from Steam, GOG, itch.io, and even my ROM library. I’ve even been able to install Amethyst mod manager to install mods for Elder Scrolls Oblivion, which has been great fun. Amethyst also supports other Bethesda titles like Skyrim, Fallout, and Starfield. I’m very happy with it. It feels like I haven’t had to sacrifice anything. All my games work, but now I have total control over my UI, when my OS installs updates, and I have privacy again. No tracking BS reporting back to Microsoft.

Also at work we used to have over a thousand windows workstations. We’ve been switching our users over to chromebooks and now there are less than 100 windows workstations in our domain. Microsoft has lost me as a home customer, and over 90% of our business customers. I think they’ve shot themselves in the foot because I don’t see how cloud computing is going to carry them for much longer. I think almost half of microsoft’s cloud runs office 365 and onedrive, which home and office users don’t actually need. Libre Office exists and people can use dropbox instead, if they even need it. Many people can just use a USB drive like the old days. Microsoft Azure makes up just over half of microsoft’s cloud infrastructure, and a significant portion of their azure market is running AI clusters. I do think there is an AI bubble, and that won’t continue for long either.

I think Microsoft is going to have a comeuppance, and it will be well deserved. They brought this upon themselves.

Everything is shit because our leaders don’t feel any common identity with the people. They don’t feel any need to represent us. We need more nationalism, not less. I don’t see how we could have any less nationalism than we already have. The soul of the USA has been torn out and stomped under corporate boots.

Everyone who doesn’t support [insert group name here] or [insert cause here] is a NAZI

I would rather different countries wall off their internet than try to force their version of censorship onto what people post in western countries. I already think the UK should wall off their internet instead of trying to punish people online for breaking their stupid laws.

And all it took was shutting down 300 coal plants over the last 10 years.

The obvious solution to this is to not seek the bug bounty. The next time a critical security vulnerability is found, sell it to the highest bidder. I’m sure there are black hats out there willing to pay the money that the megacorp refuses to pay out.

You would have to be retarded to think anything good comes out of concentrating wealth into corporations by impoverishing the people. The rise of corporations isn’t something novel or new. It’s just aristocracy wearing a new mask. We are seeing the rebirth of nobles as a higher class that will be held to different laws and receive different treatment by society. The same thing that our ancestors rebelled against during the French Revolution and what the founding fathers fought against when they created our country. This is going to lay the foundation for monarchy and fascism. The same thing nobles always want. Absolute power.

Same. And it’s not conditional memory like others have suggested. Other people literally waste 10 to 20 minutes of my time when I visit the post office and when I reach the counter it’s done and done in less than 60 seconds.

Yes the same politicians. Jared Polis signed the plastic pollution reduction act. He also signed the Colorado artificial intelligence act.

iced cappuccino. It’s something tim hortons is known for. They have mid donuts and great iced caps. It’s similar to the McDonald’s frappe if you haven’t been to one.

I can’t wait to buy my anime waifu bot.

If I get the 2 for $6 breakfast sandwich deal at tim hortons, and an iced cap, it comes to about $11. How am I supposed to get an iced cap and sandwiches cheaper than that? And tim hortons isn’t exactly the lap of luxury. I only do this maybe once a week as my TGIF treat. 28 dollars for lunch is a tad expensive given current prices but it’s not gross excess in the current economy. It’s just not what I’m able to afford. Why is this politician acting like it’s some capital sin? It’s just the economy he helped create. He’s the problem here, not us.

And yes Dick Dale was a surf guitarist, but his experimental creativity was a departure from what came before him. I consider him the grandpa of the big psychedelic rock artists who came after him. Many big psychedelic rock artists claimed dale as an inspiration.

I like most types of electronica. Trance, techno, house, bounce, phonk, and even some dubstep. I still find new songs on youtube that I enjoy, even in my 40’s. Growing up my dad listened to a lot of psychedelic rock. I don’t really listen to rock anymore but I do recognize a lot of rock artists like dick dale, iron butterfly, and many others who created the psychedelic sound that progressed into techno and trance. I still hear a hint of miserlou in a lot of modern electronica it has a very recognizable guitar riff.

I agree. No public funds should go to AI. No taxpayer money should be used to construct AI or datacenters. When the AI companies start to collapse, they should receive no bailouts.

Bailouts are corruption. Why do the rich get socialism and the rest of us get crushing capitalism? When we fail, we get stepped on. When the rich fail, they get billion dollar bailouts? But they claim they deserve to keep all their riches because they worked hard for it?

I could be a billionaire oligarch too if all of my failures were compensated for with billion dollar bailouts. It’s not hard to succeed when you are elevated to the heights of the gods every time you face a little adversity.

Exactly. Look at the odds of winning the NYS Powerball. 1 in 292,201,338 and I’ve lost so many lotto tickets. By all rights I should be able to press this button at least 30 times without any fear whatsoever. 100 times is still far below any risk of danger. If I or someone I know were to die after pressing this button 100 times it would be proof that God has a vendetta against me. He would have discarded mathematical probability just to make me suffer.

I would press it at least ten times. A hundred times would also be tempting. There are eight billion people in the world. Chances are I won’t know anyone who dies.