Inheritance is only one way the ultra-wealthy gained their status. There’s also exploitation, luck, predatory business practices, corruption, …

Some gained wealth legitimately, but they usually fall under the luck category and should have been taxed at a higher rate for decades.

Would they have called that constellation Ursa Major if not for the presence of bears in that direction? Maybe the constellation naming was like, “don’t go too far towards bear country if you don’t want to deal with bears that think of humans as food.” “Bears this way. Bears ahead.”

They could have made it even faster with a coat of red paint, but engineers thought that would have pushed the materials past their limit, so they chose to leave it black.

A lot of the traditional anime tropes exist explicitly to lower the cost of production. The artists may be skilled, but there’s a reason you see a lot of still frames where only the character’s mouth moves and stuff like that. It was necessary in the 90’s. Now it’s what you expect from the genre.

lmao

This goes for a lot of genres. Metalheads are like, “dude listen to this ultra black metaldeathcore album my favorite bad just dropped!” and it’s nails on a chalkboard, but also incredibly technically impressive with shifting time signatures and somehow if you play it backwards through a filter it sounds like Flight of the Valkyries. If you enjoy that, power to you, but most don’t.

A lot of all entertainment media is garbage. Maybe anime has a lower barrier to entry, so the signal to noise ratio is worse, but then again, the big movie studios are so risk averse that they mostly pump out boring, focus-group-tested sequels and reboots. Wait maybe there’s a barrier-to-entry vs financial-risk sweet spot that produces the greatest share of good stuff? Hmmm…

Now this is a memeable format if I’ve ever seen one. YoooOOOOOINK**!**

I haven’t used Linux regularly since 2006, which either means I’m out of the loop or an ancient bearer of lost knowledge:

I think it’s “G’noo” like “G’day” or “G’night.”

I’m hoping the brownshirts aren’t smart enough for that, but you may be right.

No longer a theory lol

I don’t know if any phones have this, but on a PC you can set up multiple partitions and have the password you entered determine which is logged into on boot. Then if the ICE brownshirts demand to see your sick memes, you can show them a boring install with some basic apps, instead of the install where you’re informing the denizens of the interwebs that Trump raped kids and the entire GOP is covering it up.

It feels like we’re losing ground. Why does 8GB of RAM feel totally insufficient to browse the same websites I used 12 years ago with 4? I’m so happy I maxed out my motherboard’s RAM (32) when I built a PC in 2021.

PROTIP:

Ebooks are trivially easy to find online, or you can check them out from your local library.

There’s a free and open source program called Calibre that can manage your ebook library, change file formats, edit visual formatting, and even remove proprietary DRM.

Don’t let Amazon being a bad company prevent you from using your old Kindle.

It just seems like this system is capitalism with extra steps, but the extra steps involve replacing the exchange of money with the peddling of influence. The capitalists are replaced by administrators, the hierarchy of wealth is replaced by rank in the decision-making apparatus. I get that it’s supposed to be democratic and protect the interests of the public, but so too is our regulated hybrid public-private system and we see how well that’s going. It also seems like, where our market system began as distributed and decentralized, which was a strength, and began to be ever more concentrated as businesses consolidated and corrupted government, this new system starts consolidated and married to government. A lot of people would say this is too much power in the hands of the state, and ripe for theft by an autocrat. I’m not saying it’s impossible for this to work, but the systems I have seen work best are those where the market does what it does and the government reigns in its worst tendencies when the motive of profit conflicts with the needs of people.

This all sounds philosophical. How does this system actually solve problems in a society where scarcity exists? Do people still have property rights? Who enforces those rights? Who makes the decisions on where scarce resources are allocated? Our current system has answers for all of these questions, it’s just contaminated by the influence of powerful scumbags. The thing is, the powerful scumbags are going to be scumbags in every system, and at least a decentralized market economy limits the ease with which they can exert control.

I want to know where they think this will go, because there is an obvious and looming problem: the content–the library–wasn’t made or at least hosted for free.

Somebody set up a website to host the interactions between people who knew things and people who wanted to learn things. The people exchanging information often got as much as they gave, and the person hosting the forum typically sold ads or information about the people participating in the discussions. The result was a virtuous cycle where content gets made and everyone is happy.

Now all those sites are scraped, and their information is regurgitated by slop bots into a “zero click search” where the creators of the information have no role, the seekers of information never encountered the source, and the hosts never get their slice of the pie. OK, well that works for now, but what about when something new is made and there’s no forum to talk about it because all forums get scraped into the slop machine? How will the slop center learn? Are we supposed to expect the AI companies will spend time meticulously testing how best to DIY a mass spectrometer or whatever?

This is basically it. Classic liberalism is everything from Margaret Thatcher to Bernie Sanders. The MAGA movement has regressed to fascism–a form of corporate authoritatianism.

So are almost all progressives.

You can’t. He’s trying to use liberal as an epithet when he means neoliberal. If we’re being pedantic, liberal refers to the full gamut of people who think there should be an open and free society, which usually includes a market and certain property rights. The conservatives use liberal as an epithet to decry the left and now the left is using it to decry the middle.

It would be funny if it wasn’t being used to convince naive progressives to sit out elections and let fascists seize power because the center left “only” wants 85% of what they want. You’re seeing it really ramp up because the US is closing in on a big election, and convincing dipshits to sit out elections is easier than convincing anyone the right can govern.