To anyone with half a brain not poisoned by conservative ideology this always was, and is, obvious. Crypto has always been pitched as a get rich quick scheme which only appeals to the financially illiterate.
Yeah the best way to fix this would be to enforce the separation of distribution and production via the Paramount Decree. Separate content production from the streaming service itself. Get rid of the vertical integration plaguing the industry and we'll get better content since quality will be the territory on which studios have to compete with each other again.
When this is all over and Trump has been consigned to history's dustbin, at the very least the public deserves to know the names of the individual federal agents and entire chain of command responsible for these atrocities. The people responsible for this wanton cruelty need to be charged and tried criminally for their actions. Nobody is going to forget this and I think a lot of Americans will demand justice and accountability once all is said and done.
At this point we all know Musk only did this as part of his general "hyperloop" boondoggle to kill California high speed rail. Why do we have to continue to pretend this was anything other than an idiotic PR stunt?
Ah yes, the hyperloop is what killed California high speed rail. If only it weren't for those few tweets, it would be successful and done by now.
Or maybe there's another reason these high speed rail projects consistently fail. An insane regulatory and litigious environment where no technology progress can be made. Meanwhile, in Asia, rail is being laid at insane pace.
What do you think it'll take to match their progress? Do you honestly think Elon is the reason this is all failing?
> If only it weren't for those few tweets, it would be successful and done by now.
Not what I said. I said he did it to try and kill high speed rail, not that he was solely responsible for its failure. And Musk did a whole lot more than tweet.
Didn't a number of companies led by Facebook already attempt to do this with Libra (Diem) and basically got nuked from orbit by US regulators? I have to assume this is primarily happening now because there is a more favorable (nonexistent) regulatory environment.
the reality is that most new projects started by Meta are going to be nuked from orbit when democrats are in control (even if started during republican control). Stripe has less reputational risk so is less likely to experience the same.
From what I have heard it wasn't just the US but other governments as well which came down on them quite hard. States broadly do not like it when a bunch of huge corporations get together to issue their own currency.
I really dislike this kind of rhetoric. This has nothing to do with socialism. Corporations profiting from externalities and pushing costs onto regular workers is just capitalism. If you have a problem with it, maybe you have a problem with the inevitable concentrations of wealth and power which result from capitalism.
Well, what if the corporations would pay the bills - then they would increase the price of the product so the people would pay for it again. Now you can say that you do not use Metas or Googles products, but their business models is ads - and you DO pay the products advertised for.
In scenario 1, a corporation externalizes some of its costs. Those costs are then paid by people who may or may not actually use the corporation's product — people who never chose to be part of any transaction. This is coercive because the people paying for the corporation's externalities are forced to: they may not use the product, or do so to different degrees not proportional to the price they pay for the externality.
In scenario 2, the corporation does not externalize costs and raises their prices, offsetting costs by passing them on to their customers. The people paying the additional cost are those who know the price of what they are buying and willingly engage in the transaction for the good or service.
Do you understand why scenario 2 is bad and scenario 1 is less bad?
That is just a very simplified and incomplete model. I never owned a car, so should I advocate to stop all fundings for streets? Well I consume products build by other people that use cars to go to work. Now, if I don't consume drinks of the Coca Cola Company, what if my cleaning lady enjoys those in her break? Direct vs. Indirect is not a good measure of value, PRICE is.
> I never owned a car, so should I advocate to stop all fundings for streets?
Streets are generally paid for by taxes, which are categorically different than corporate profits. In theory taxes are under democratic control. If you don't want to pay for streets you don't use, you can vote for a politician who passes that law. You have no control over the governance of a private corporation, but it can still pass its costs on to you via externalities (in the absence of regulations preventing it from doing so).
> Now, if I don't consume drinks of the Coca Cola Company, what if my cleaning lady enjoys those in her break?
What are you even talking about? What is the externality here? The wages you presumably pay your cleaning lady are hers to do with as she wishes.
> don't want to pay for streets you don't use, you can vote for a politician who passes that law
Just as you can build your own power plant (solar, wind) if you don't like the electricity prices of your provider... That works in theory, in practice you will have to pay...
That's a strange definition of capitalism you're using.
Most people use capitalism to describe a system where people trade goods and services with as little interference from government as possible.
In this case, the government has written laws in a way that indirectly transfers wealth from consumers to large corporations.
Saying that such laws are "inevitable" in any conceivable capitalist system is unfalsifiable and adds little to the discussion.
I think calling it "crony capitalism" to make it clear that it's the undue influence of capital on government specifically causing the problem here lends more clarity to the discussion.
> Most people use capitalism to describe a system where people trade goods and services with as little interference from government as possible.
This is not a real definition. Saying "most people" use the term to mean what you want it to mean in this argument is ridiculous.
Capitalism is a system of private ownership of capital. We live under that system. Anything you see that happens now is the result of that system because it's the one that exists.
There is no such thing as "crony capitalism". What came before crony capitalism? Was it regular capitalism? Did regular capitalism turn into crony capitalism? Or — more likely — is it all one continuous process and system of accumulation?
> Most people use capitalism to describe a system where people trade goods and services with as little interference from government as possible.
“Capitalism” is a term coined for the dominant system of the industrialized West in the mid-19th Century and is defined by the specific orientation of property rights in that system around the private and marketable ownership of the non-financial means of production (the “capital” in “capitalism”), and the way in which the system was fundamentally structured around—and institutions within it, including government, invariably served the interests of—the owners of that capital, who formed its ruling class, displacing the landed hereditary aristocracy of the preceding systems.
While the dominant politico-economic systems of the developed world have evolved somewhat since then, with modern mixed economies having structures in place mitigate some of the adverse impacts the original system for which thr label “capitalism” was created for has on the vast majority of the population that is not major capital owners, it retains the basic property structure and resulting class heirarchy of the original “capitalism”, and neither it nor the original tended tof eatite annabsence of regulation of commerce.
> I think calling it "crony capitalism" to make it clear that it's the undue influence of capital on government specifically causing the problem here lends more clarity to the discussion.
The commanding and undue influence of capital on all of society, government and otherwise, is literally the feature for which critics of the then-dominant system coined the term “capitalism” to refer to that system. It doesn’t need an extra qualifier for that.
It's always pretty suspect when you first hear about the opposition to something in its rebuttal. I've heard lots of critiques of the abundance movement and this is my first time hearing anything about housing cartels. Maybe someone had this critique but it isn't the dominant strain of criticism of the abundance people. It feels like Thompson picked the weakest argument to debunk rather than one of the many stronger ones.
I think if you're China the smart thing to do would be to immediately send Iran a couple nukes. Would put an end to the conflict pretty much immediately.
Honest curiosity — why did you choose a service like Redis over a more straightforward embedded solution like SQLite? In my head Redis seems better suited to distributed solutions but I've never actually built a desktop application so I'm probably speaking from ignorance.
PSCO stands for Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office. The dataset mentioned contains 47,784 mugshots of 18,007 recidivists spanning from the years 1994 to 2010.
