Honestly it’s a form of depoliticization because it’s not a serious proposal with any realistic chance of success. It distracts people from getting engaged with real politics and actually making a difference. And at the end of the day, isn’t that exactly what the billionaires want?

The update prevents CrowdStrike from working. That’s a good thing!

CrowdStrike blew it. 3rd party vendors should never have the power to freeze or crash people’s computers through incompetent, untested updates!

You can see it all play out in a microcosm on reality shows like Survivor. People cooperate and compete. They cooperate TO compete. They cooperate when it benefits them the most, and betray each other when they think they’re most likely to get away with it. Some people are more trustworthy than others. Some are extremely likely to betray, but then they struggle to benefit from cooperation.

Groups of people engaged in a kind of eusocial super cooperation are very rare and tend to be fairly small. They also tend to act the most like a clique; being highly discriminatory against the outgroup.

Perform terribly on modern AAA titles, sure, but that’s a tiny % of the total Steam library. A lot of people these days don’t even bother with new AAA titles, instead playing older games or indie games. I bet Valve knows this and is working on the ARM transition specifically because of this fact.

MicroEmacs was written in 1985 and has nothing to do with GNU Emacs (which people just call Emacs these days). It’s entirely outside of the vi-vs-emacs war.

Yes and by contrast Microsoft has been enshittifying the hell out of Windows in order to extract more and more money out of the corporations they have contracts with. They force everyone to use Teams, Azure, OneDrive, and Office 365 so that they achieve total lock-in and ratchet up the cost of the support contracts.

Microsoft is basically following the same playbook IBM pioneered in the enterprise: use a slick sales team to get your hooks into into the CEO, CIO, and other senior VPs in charge of IT in order to force all their crap onto the company by top-down fiat rather than bottom-up informed decision making.

McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King. I googled them all with the word brioche and there was news for all of them.

Thank you. Brioche buns are an abomination used by the fast food industry to trigger sugar reward signals and make their burgers just a bit more addictive. They’re not used with any good intentions whatsoever.

But the code still comes from the same place!

Zeesh. Rhymes with sheesh!

Can you do one of these for Windows 3.1 or 95? That would be sweet!

Honestly, I hate steam (the client) so much. I have a fair sized library of games that I never play because it’s just torture to me to start that abomination of a program. Why the fuck couldn’t they give it a simple, clean, elegant, native UI that doesn’t treat my battery with wanton disrespect?

I’m not hellbent on punishing people and I’m not lacking in compassion. I have a great deal of compassion for good people who are genuinely suffering and worse off through no fault of their own. I have been volunteering for 7 years as a tutor for newcomer families (mostly refugee families from Somalia).

These families are far from what I’d call free riders. They are tenacious and eager to contribute to society. They also happen to have a very strong community, unlike the neighbourhood I live in (more on that later).

The ruling elite aren’t the reason it won’t happen. The disappearance of local community is. I’m only 40 years old and yet I’ve noticed a DRAMATIC change in the neighbourhood where I grew up (and still live). When I was a kid everyone was kind and friendly. There were tons of other kids around like me.

Now there are hardly any kids around. I go for a walk and all I see are people my age or older, usually walking a dog with a scowl on their face. Society’s institutions are gone or moribund. Hardly anyone is friendly. Everyone is just looking out for themselves and treating their neighbours with cold suspicion.

This isn’t just my personal feelings or my weird neighbourhood. It’s everywhere and people are talking about it, if not always in the spotlight.

There are just so many people who are only in it for themselves and wealth has little to do with it. It’s the lack of community bonds. I would love to hear how a change in the political system could fix that but I won’t hold my breath for it to happen.

What you’re talking about, with families, communes, or other small communities, IS STILL WORK. It might not be compensated with money but it is compensated, usually with social capital or reputation. I do things for you and then maybe some time in the future you return the favour. All money does is allow me to (pardon the pun) cash in that favour on my own terms and potentially with someone other than the person I originally worked for.

What’s the problem with these informal economies (favours for favours)? They do not scale! As soon as the community is large enough that not everyone knows each other (the networks grow too large) then you run into the problem of being unable to punish free riders. If you do a favour for uncle Ted and then later uncle Ted refuses to lift a finger for you, you can punish him by telling the rest of the family that he’s selfish. However, you walking into uncle Ted’s office and telling his boss (who doesn’t know you) about it is unlikely to go over well.

“If I didn’t need to make money to live” is a non-starter. If you built a huge society with free food, housing, health care, internet and all that for everyone (all needs met) then you’d get millions of people choosing to smoke cannabis and play video games all day. The only way to get “free everything” society to work is with extremely small groups where reputation and social capital stand in for monetary compensation.

Lastly, I need to make a point about the individual and their choice to work for free for others or not. Take the example of an artist (say, a digital painter). They may be happy to stream on Twitch and give away all the art they create for free (with their Patreon revenue covering their living expenses). However, how likely do you think they are to take on a huge commissioned video game project for free? I’ll tell you: extremely unlikely. The free art is the art that the artist wants to produce. Commissioned art that follows narrow requirements for (say) character designs, settings, etc. is completely different: it’s work because it’s not the kind of art the artist chose to make.

“nobody will work if they don’t earn money from it”

No, it’s just a tautology resulting from how work is defined. Anything you do on your own time (not paid) is by definition not work. It’s a hobby, a chore, volunteering, etc. By contrast, anything you’re paid to do but would stop doing if you stopped being paid is work.

Looking after a sick relative may feel a whole lot like work. The difference is that if you don’t do it, who will? Asking a stranger to care for your relative for free just isn’t done. That’s why it’s work if you’re a hired nurse but not work if it’s your relative and you do it for free.

You can do this exercise with anything. Go to a restaurant and you expect to pay for your food after you eat. Go to eat dinner at your mother-in-law’s place and you don’t expect to pay. In fact, she’d likely be baffled at best and insulted at worst if you tried to pay her for your meal. Cooking food for strangers is work, cooking food for friends and family is not.

Anyway, don’t you think there’s some validity to the original statement? Why would you expect strangers to cook for you and care for your sick relatives for free? Note that even if you’re not paying them but someone else (possibly the state) then it’s still work.

GICs then!

Edit: looks like GICs are only guaranteed up to $100,000.

But honestly if you consider stocks and bonds to be gambling then you could really argue that buying anything is a gamble. Buy $100 million worth of onions and the price will go up due to scarcity, then try to sell them. Someone actually did this years ago and made a ton of money while bankrupting a lot of farmers and investors. The government responded by banning the trading of onion futures!

All this is to say it’s actually impossible to fulfill the genie’s rules if you take into account market fluctuations on the price of anything you buy.

Perhaps Mikhail Khodorkovsky. I’m sure he managed to squirrel away some of his wealth and now lives comfortably in exile, albeit with a huge bullseye on his back. But if your standard is “lose 100% of their wealth” then that almost never happens to anyone, even working class people who declare bankruptcy due to overwhelming debts.

Does Muammar Gaddafi count? He lived like a king with an anime-style cadre of elite female bodyguards, being essentially the emperor of Libya. He died after some soldiers dragged him out of a ditch and summarily executed him.

They also had real estate investments and conflicts of interest that were in jeopardy. If everyone stopped coming into the office then the property values in the area would drop off a cliff (no one buying lunch at local restaurants, shopping on breaks, etc). Unused offices close, property values continue to plunge. Bad for anyone who owns commercial property in the area!

Employers lost their minds when they saw their office employees comfortable and happy. They realized that WFH gave them just a little bit of control over their day, and that meant the employers haf just a little bit less.

More specifically, managers lost their minds when they realized that holding meetings all day doesn’t actually accomplish anything productive. There are countless middle managers out there who faced an existential crisis when they saw people’s productivity actually increase during WFH. Everything they’ve done since then has been one ham-fisted attempt after another to shove the cat back in the bag.

Are you using low moisture mozzarella?

Employers are inherently ableist. They discriminate against people who are unable to do the job. They also discriminate for reasons unrelated to job performance, but then measuring job performance is very difficult even when someone has been working at a company for years.

Note that in professional sports and in Hollywood it’s quite easy to measure performance. Accordingly, you see athletes and actors compensated in a way that’s much more in line with their job performance than other industries.