They’d make for some mighty fine eatin’.

I see what you’re saying. But to me it’s very much a “You can’t swim in the sewer without getting covered in shit” morality-play.

The very act of providing a service that earns more than a billion dollars by necessity requires the cooperation of a number of different entities. As you described, Ticket Master, Publishers, Distributors, etc… So while they themselves might not be directly exploiting people, they have to interact and make use of partners that do if they want to play in that billionaire paddling pool.

To me, exploitation by association is still exploitation.

But that’s me. Everyone is welcome to their own opinion.

Cant we outlaw corporations and continue as we are? Sure would be nice.

I think the world would do better if all of us shrank a bit to be more mindful of a community economy.

If my neighbour down the street woodworks in his spare time and makes bespoke tables and chairs, I’ll do everything I can to go buy from him rather than a corporation (for example)

Growing up on an Acreage, it was more common for us to buy a half a side of beef or pork from the farmer next door than to go to the grocery store. Same for vegetables from farmer’s markets or similar community markets.

It’s less about criminalizing corporations and more about refusing to reward them for making their profits off the backs of poverty wages and government subsidies…

Let me put it this way.

It’s possible to become a millionaire through a combination of hardwork, brains, luck and timing.

It’s impossible to become a billionaire after that without exploiting others, whether that is workers, employees, investors…whoever.

In other words, it’s possible to be an honest millionaire, but not an honest billionaire.

So the amount of wealth a person is entitled to is the amount that they can earn with their own labour without exploiting others in order to do so.

So if you own a furniture store, and you pay your employees a living wage, give benefits, etc… and after that you’re successful enough to be a millionaire…great. You deserve it. If you’re an employer and you own a furniture store, and in order to become a millionaire you have to pay your workers minimum wage and rely on unfair labour practices to inflate your profits…you don’t deserve it.

I use the furniture store example because I worked for just such a guy. Family run business. Paid us all well enough. Gave us benefits. Made sure we were taken care of. Treated us like family. And he was financially very successful while managing to do so. Could he have made even MORE if he had taken it from wages and benefits…sure. But that wasn’t the type of person he was.

To me, THAT example is capitalism working as it should in it’s purest form. Corporatization is just a bastardization of the concept created by venture capitalists and shareholders.

I’ll be honest, I doubt any real money is being dumped into this.

More and more, things like this come across as people giving Trump nonsense toys to play with to feel bigly important and distract him as he gets more and more infirm. If any money actually moves towards this, it’ll be actually diverting into someone’s pocket along the way.

It struck me the most when he made the announcement of a new class of Jumbo Jet and he was literally sitting there at his desk like a kid playing with a lego airplane model.

He is increasingly a addled child that they keep distracted with stupid shit like this so that they can get work done without him fucking it up for them by opening his idiot mouth. (like admitting that Venuzuela was about oil…for example)

The reason the “kill-switch” wasn’t made clear originally was because it literally didn’t exist until users very vocally tool them where to shove their AI crap.

It was added on afterwards.

Given the average intelligence of most humans, I’d be willing to wager that most elephants are smarter than that.

It’s only a matter of time. I want nothing to do with any company that is giving so called “A.I” the time of day.

Well…fuck Udemy I guess.

One of my old employers used to pay out small bonus incentives onto a prepaid credit card for each staff member, and I called it my “fun money” that I would invariably spend on Udemy enrolling in whatever seemed interesting to me. It was truly enjoyable and I feel like I’m a more well rounded person because of it.

And now AI is going to fuck all of that. I want to learn from PEOPLE, not LLM’s cosplaying as A.I.

Did Robotaxi just flat out steal the Cyberpunk font in order to try to look cool? It seems like a very Musk thing to do.

But not the kiddie fucking…

Jesus fucking christ, America.

I know it’s not the point of the article, but holy heck, she doesn’t look 43! I had always thought she was younger than AOC.

It’s never a bad idea to learn another language.

It’s never a bad idea to learn. period…full stop.

The act of learning anything wires our brains in a thousand different ways; increases our critical thinking skills. Increases our verbosity and our ability to communicate our own ideas more effectively. It increases problem solving skills, etc…

The very act of learning is something that should be practiced every day with something, whether that’s a new language, or a hobby, or being a history buff…it doesn’t matter. What matters is the learning itself.

So if Russian is what is giving you that interest right now, do it. At the very least, chicks dig polyglots.

History largely proves otherwise…

Everything this idiot says tends to be the opposite. And frankly, I can see it.

The Europe I see (as a Canadian, with immigrant parents from Portugal) is the same Europe I’ve always seen; It has it’s share of problems, sure. But for the most part, they’re older, with a lot more history to draw from, and as a result are just more level headed than the idiot teenagers revving their engine and trying to pick bar fights that is America.

Europe as a continent has been through enough shit that they’ve kind of, as a culture, learned to say “woah…okay…let’s take a step back and look at this a bit before deciding to be an asshole.” Canada kind of inherited some of that by virtue of sticking in the commonwealth longer and having a peaceful transition to independence instead of kicking our feet and threatening to move out at 16 like some bratty teenage countries did.

(Apropos of nothing, I also think that this is sort of the problem with a lot of Eastern Bloc countries. With the fall of the Soviet Union, a lot of them (Russia Included) were kicked out on their own all of a sudden and are essentially entering the teenage years of their independence)

Does that mean Europe is perfect? No…of course not. Far from it.

But they’re a hell of a lot more put together and strong than the U.S. is at the moment.

Trump is projecting, as usual.

I’m talking about when I was a teenager. Neither iPhone nor android was a thing. I’m talking dumb phones

Since she had been identified as under 16, they feared “her friends will keep using Snapchat to talk and organise social events and she will be left out”.

FFS, we all got along just fine and dandy with group-chats via text message. We weren’t fucking cavemen.

The fact that this is her fear (and the fact that it’s a legitimate fear) proves just how much controls like this are needed. It’s literally digital crack that they think there’s simply no other way to communicate anymore (both her and her friends)

100%. It’s a matter of where does the technology stop being about “useful for us” and starts being “useful for them”.

A digital whiteboard would be a good feature (not ‘necessary’, but cool). It’s when they decide it needs to be connected to the internet that it becomes “is this technology serving us…or serving them” that’s the problem.

I’m not anti-tech at all. Quite the opposite. But I remember the mid-2000s when all of this tech was getting off the ground and it was being innovated and invented for OUR benefit, not for the corporations. That’s when this kind of stuff was fun.

It’s depressing to notice just how much pop culture from teh 80s onward was trying to warn us about this coming shittorm. It’s like, as soon as Reaganomics came on the scene, there were those who immediately saw it for what it was and started fighting. (Punk Rock, Literature, Movies, etc…) and it wasn’t enough. No one paid any attention and we are now where we are because as a culture we got sucked into chasing more shiny shit at the expense of our own good.

I remember when fridges with screens were first becoming a thing, and one way they tried to sell them was the convenience of being able to leave notes, shopping lists, photos, etc… for other members of the family. And even back then, before the advertising apocalypse, I remember thinking, what in the actual fuck makes this 1000 dollar feature any more useful than a 20 dollar magnetic white board and a dry erase marker?