A UBI is going to normalize condition and make “them” see there’s even more to participate in.
Sounds like you still prefer maintenance of a steerage class, assuming you’ll be a bit higher on the totem pole. But I mean, real talk is you’re still just one of billions. How you feel the world as-is is a meaningless measure for how you would fit into a UBI world. And I have no particular obligation to your sensibilities. shrug emoji You’re a “them” to me is not an unreasonable statement.
Or at least something useless but harmless, like smashing rocks into gravel with hammers. That would be much better than harassing and hassling everybody trying to go on a vacation.
Musk posted screens of his Elden Ring progress a couple weeks after launch. Given other players had to sink 60-80 hours in to get to the same point Musk was broadcasting, he was working 48 hours a day at his companies and on Elden Ring.
Bezos has given interviews about his habits. He works maybe 10-20 hours a week.
Billing 40 hours every week to run scripts that generate a Github repo structure in minutes has been profitable for me though. Not going to knock Musk and Bezos optimizing for themselves by gaming others agency.
Picasso offered a drawing in a napkin for $1M dollars, even though it took him 1 min to draw it. You know the gist. Bezos might do 20 hours a week of “work” because he scaffolded a giant organization around his brain, so he only needs to provide certain input. Besides, much of the non-work time, such as public speaking and so forth, is actually work.
Also the ultimate test is whether after confessing to your real contribution, people are ok. I don’t think any amazon employee was annoyed after hearing this so called interview, whereas is your company knew what you were charging them for, they would fire you.
He had 50 people invest tens of thousands each to build that scaffold.
He’s not a genius just well networked.
Idle idolatry of normal human beings with no effort to verify their real outputs creates an unfalsifiable truth Bezos is a lynchpin to reality.
Ooo oo I heard it through the grapevine, Bezos is not what you might call “divine”…
The rich did not invent science, engineering, and economic activity. Human behavior gives rise to those things organically. The rich are merely playing information awareness constraint games; a man named Farmer is a farmer, an engineer is an engineer, and there’s no reason to allow them agency to learn other things.
His value is rooted in traditions of political correctness to buy into that narrative, not immutable laws of nature.
Every worker faces the risk of their livelihood vanishing tomorrow. One slip of the tongue costing their job. Why are these guys insulated from the same?
Bezos parents were teenagers of no significant means. After they divorced, his mother married an "uneducated" (in the sense he had not attended college) Cuban immigrant, Miguel Bezos, again of no significant means. After Miguel graduated from the elite University of New Mexico, they moved to Houston so he could work for Exxon. During high school Jeff took on an elite internship working the morning shift at McDonalds.
It's not entirely rags to rich because gramps indeed did well for himself and had a nice big ranch out in the middle of Nowhere, Texas. But it's pretty close to it, and overall a pretty cool story.
You stopped short of detailing the well documented part of 50 people chipping in 25k.
That alone is a testament to how the country has changed. How many McDonalds burger flippers have that social network now?
His childhood and his family greatly benefited from pre-Reagan social programs.
How sad if the mega-mega-billionaires were mega-mega-millionaires. The rich of their childhood got through high taxes ok.
If such taxation is immoral, let’s discuss then the advantages immoral taxation in the past provided them and accept them as less uniquely gifted and successful on their own then.
He didn't found Amazon in high school. Instead, alongside working at McDonalds, he also graduated valedictorian, a National Merit Scholar, and so on. He then graduated from Princeton (almost certainly on a full ride scholarship), and again graduated near the top of his class (a member of both Phi Kappa Beta and Tau Beta Pi) with degrees in both electrical engineering and computer science. From there he worked for 8 more years until he set upon founding Amazon.
That's a power balance issue far more than a fairness argument.
If my boss is happy to pay this amount for my level of work output, why should it matter whether I'm spending 40 hours or 4 doing it? In fact, to suggest otherwise is downright Marxist, asserting that the value of my labor is the time I spent doing it, rather than the value someone else is willing to pay.
Do you subscribe to the labor theory of value for goods, or just people?
It's global thermonuclear war. There won't be internet, cell reception, or even a power grid.
The radio in those is pretty short distance (ham can do 1000s of Km) and they draw a lot of power that you'll want to save since (if you're lucky) you'll be running on car batteries in remote areas.
But now I'm wondering how the aftermath will affect propagation conditions.
Target lists of other nations do not include all large metro areas in the US. A list for Russia was leaked once; by NY, LA, Seattle, but the middle of the country was mostly untouched. Presumably local infra in many areas will be disconnected from the old larger grid but locally intact.
Still functioning gadgets with WiFi will be all over and can make a local mesh network. Dams, wind turbines, utility lines, will remain.
It’s not aliens with doomsday weapons hitting all human occupied places from space.
That said it’s really what survivors do about that. Not hard to see many in shock ending themselves given the lack of hands on survival skills, and connection to the manual labor that keeps us alive, like farming.
Why is the US government as-is a rational actor to get behind? More of its citizens in prison than China, it’s citizens vote against supporting each other through universal healthcare, and education, it’s opioid peddling execs, scandal plagued business leadership makes Mad Men look like Leave it to Beaver. China did not set the US on this path. It’s all homegrown.
Let such exceptional and gritty people be. Get some popcorn. Front row seats to the end of society are waiting.
I was referring to users choice of TikTok, not the “content of” TikTok.
Why should the US government decide which apps free people download? Free people ostensibly have no obligation to government security concerns.
Assange, Snowden, Swartz. Migrant children in cages.
Along with the list in my original post, and recent history I was alive for that includes numerous other examples; US citizens and its politicians are bullies who ignore their own bullying.
Whataboutism is minimizing bad thing by highlighting other bad thing. “Look bad thing parity!”
Shooting someone because your friend shot someone else does not make what you did ok.
A constructive approach would be to build schools, hospitals, and other local social solutions to community vision rather than allowing outside agents to gambling for themselves with the outputs of our agency.
We flip out over the potential for waste in too many hospitals while binning laptops and phones every couple years to save Apple.
There will be literal waste to any human endeavor. What character do we want it to have? Empowering a party drug addicted rocket man filling us full of high minded bullshit about a future no one can predict or helping people exist how humans tend to exist; building communal ties that don’t expropriate wealth and agency for some distant power hording edgelord.
Who is to say it is destructive and toxic? Elders who lack emotional context and for whom it quickly makes anxious?
The same was said by elders when DND and comic books came about. The same was said about the internet itself. About secularism and relinquishing maintenance of past spoken traditions of all flavors.
For an increasingly secular society to say “hey wait I meant we bin religion but not my profiteering!” is the height of hypocrisy.
The only past traditions of value are disabusing people their meatbag is more sacrosanct than another, and fighting like hell to improve equality of condition for all meatbags even if that costs some their figurative value whether measured in conviction to scripture or fiat currency.
That’s my two cents anyway. Relativity means reality is relative, and thus so too are individual motives given an individuals time spent close to specific information.
They don’t want thinkers who re-invent the wheel?