Trump's trademark skill is conning and taking advantage of people, just like Dogbert.

And most of the texts you can access at the local library aren't even at that local library right now. Libraries are part of a humongous network. If you're willing to wait a few days, there's an avalanche of material that you definitely can't instantly find on the internet.

Did you mean 30 years ago?

You're wrong. Sharing the fruits of labor and greater social cohesion are what lead to greater quality of life. Greater productivity leads to increased wealth among the owning class, but historically that wealth only reached the masses after hard, usually physically violent, conflict between the haves and havenots.

We are over a decade into Big Tech already making everyone's lives miserable (the malicious wielding of social media is something even the mainstream knows about now). His alternative of not working for big tech is literally the only way out of this.

There is some nuance in what "not working for big tech" means though. The general gist is to not take work making tools that can foreseeably be used to hurt people and the social fabric at large. Reject "disruption." Don't take money to make your life worse. That sort of thing.

> His alternative of not working for big tech is literally the only way out of this.

This won't actually work though. The only reason we even have this discussion is because we're rich enough that pure survival isn't even really in our instinct anymore. Most of us haven't experienced actual hardship for years and we live in luxury.

There are plenty people in the world who are smart and poor and living tough lives, who are ready to replace people who quit because they have te luxury to quit. Just look at the huge amount of Indian people moving across the world to work in tech. These people aren't going to let the opportunity to significantly improve their lives go because they're going to work on software that might negatively impact society at some point. You could see this exact thing happen when Elon took over Twitter. Many people left because they disagreed with Elon, while many H-1B stuck around because they (and their families) actually had something to lose.

I don't think many of us on HN realize how incredibly spoiled we are with the lives we live.

Please don't give yourself LLM-induced psychosis.

You think an RTX 5090 only costs $2000??

It does if you can get an RTX 5090 Founders Edition from Best Buy or Nvidia.

(I've been trying for a year with no luck - a few times I've gotten on the wait list for a purchase, but never successfully.)

Have you heard any anecdotes about someone who isn't a reviewer obtaining a RTX 5090 Founders Edition? I haven't.

Or the current man in control of Health and Human Services is at best saying nothing of value. (At worst, he's sidelining vaccines for multiple infectious diseases, but that's off topic)

What does "defunding the difference" mean? layer8 and phantasmish absolutely said what the difference was.

Every part of Earth's crust is jam packed with life.