Surveillance capitalism is going to swing around to full communism.
Airfare, hotel rooms, now even groceries will have their price adjusted based on ability to pay. Getting a raise will have no impact on one's life, as all prices will automatically increase to absorb the additional income.
Why is tech high paying exactly? Maybe low supply of qualified labor? Maybe that can be solved with qualified immigration? We can call such a program H1B, for example, and it would benefit the American economy overall at the cost of slightly reducing compensation fir the already extremely highly paying tech jobs.
"I'm being short-changed!" claims rich minority whose high pay even fresh out of university leads to SF rents being unafordable by key workers.
Irony is, that doesn't prevent such sentiments as yours leading to people like Trump. I had a chance to live in the USA years back, I'm glad I didn't bother to take it.
Are convenience stores getting h1bs for their shelf stockers? How the hell is the baseline population an appropriate metric for evaluating a niche role?
I'd imagine that most couples would still want to be able to close a door when they're on the toilet.
I'd rather sleep in a shared room at a hostel and use a toilet in a stall in a communal bathroom than in a hotel room without a proper door on the bathroom.
> I'd imagine that most couples would still want to be able to close a door when they're on the toilet.
Right?
My wife and I don't use the toilet in front of each other. Even when we lived in an apartment with only 1 bathroom. You gotta use the toilet while one is showering? You can hold it.
Even when I'm home alone and don't expect her to come home any time soon, I close the door. I just feel so exposed with the door open. Even when I lived alone, I'm pretty sure I would close the door.
Journalists really need to stop using "millionaires" when they mean billionaires, centi-millionaires and deca-millionaires.
About 1 in 5 American households are millionaires.
"Millionaire" as a label is mostly describing mundane middle-aged, middle-class people who have spent a few decades paying down a mortgage and saving 5-10% of their salary into their 401k. As a group, they pay both the highest percent of their income in taxes and their taxes are the largest share of the federal budget. It shouldn't be used to mean "rich" the way it would have in the 1960s.
8h on zoom is far more desirable than 8 hours in person shuffling from meeting room to meeting room for me.
I can have the call in the background while looking at something else without it being impolite. I can eat, drink, or use the restroom at will. I can wear comfortable pants. I can throw laundry into the wash in the couple minute gap between meetings. And when the last meeting ends, I close the laptop and I'm already home, no miserable drive in rush-hour traffic.
Of course, there is something worse than in-person meetings. Which is meetings that are hybrid, with a groups calling into zoom from two different conference rooms in different locations. Those manage to be far worse than just everyone individually joining the zoom. And ironically, that's the type of meeting that becomes common when you force your distributed workforce back to offices split across a dozen locations.
> I can have the call in the background while looking at something else without it being impolite. I can eat, drink, or use the restroom at will.
This works great when you are one of a dozen anonymous people on a zoom call. less so when you are the senior person in the meeting who everyone is actually talking to and expecting you to make a decision.
But this response kind of proves my point. If you are the principal in a meeting, the fact that everyone else in the meeting is zoned out and doing something else is not great.
Do you want your country's current political leaders to have more weapons to suppress information they dislike or facts they disagree with? If yes, will you also be happy if your country's opposition leaders gain that power in a few years?
What we're talking about here are legal democratic weapons. The only thing stopping us from using these weapons right now is democratic governance. "The bad people", being unconcerned with democracy, can already use these weapons right now. Trumps unilateral application of tariffs wasn't predestined by some advancement of governmental power by the democrats. He just did it. We don't even know if it was even legal.
Secondly, the people in power are who are spreading this misinformation we are looking at. Information is getting suppressed by the powerful. Namely Google.
Placing limits on democracy in the name of "stopping the bad guys" will usually just curtail the good guys from doing good things, and bad guys doing the bad thing anyway.
They already do and they don’t even have to be powerful.
A conspiracy guy who ran a disqualified campaign for a TN rep seat sued Facebook for defamation for a hallucination saying he took part in the J6 riots. They settled the suit and hired him as an anti-DEI advisor.
(I don’t have proof that hiring him was part of the undisclosed settlement terms but since I’m not braindead I believe it was.)
> A conspiracy guy who ran a disqualified campaign for a TN rep seat sued Facebook for defamation for a hallucination saying he took part in the J6 riots. They settled the suit and hired him as an anti-DEI advisor.
There are already laws against libel and slander. And yes, people like Trump and Musk routinely try to abuse them. They are often unsuccessful. The existence of the laws does not seem to be the relevant factor in whether these attempts to abuse the system succeed.
Hasn't means tested social welfare basically been proven to be bad in every way, regardless of political or economic belief system used to analyze it?
There are lots of positive things that can be done to improve affordable housing - removing impediments to housing density like allowing multiple units on a lot, increasing building height limits, removing parking spot requirements, removing requirements for extra staircases, lowering property taxes, and removing bureaucratic approvals that are full of secret bribery and favortism.
But just stealing money from one set of people to give someone else below-market rent doesn't fix the systemic issues at all, and creates perverse incentives where people are locked into semi-poverty to keep their means tested housing.
Society is not made better by someone refusing a higher-paying job because it would mean they no longer qualified for their apartment.
If you think taxes are stealing, versus financial contribution for being allowed to capture value or maintain ownership of wealth (whether inherited or aggregated), middle ground is unlikely to be found. I like taxes, with them I buy civilization. Vienna is a public housing model shown to work [1].
Taxes aren't theft. But there's an enormous difference between paying for things like law enforcement and public sanitation versus subsidizing housing in desirable areas for politically favored groups. And if we want certain people to be able to live in certain places then it would be more efficient to both give them cash handouts and remove restrictions on new construction instead of artificially distorting the housing market.
> the audience understands that it's a caricature with a lot of truth and a bit of simplification
I suspect a whole lot of TV fails both parts of this test. The audience doesn't understand and there is only a little bit of truth and a lot of simplification.
There's merit to your suspicions. For example, the 1996 movie A Time to Kill depicts a black father avenging the rape and attempted murder of his ten-year-old daughter by two white men, using it to depict the evils of white racism, and justifying vigilantism. The rape (but not the vigilantism) is based on a true event, when the author witnessed the "harrowing" court testimony of a 12 year old rape and assault victim, with two simplifications: there were two victims and one assailant, instead of two assailants and one victim, and the races were reversed: the perpetrator was black, and the victims were white: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Time_to_Kill_(Grisham_novel)...
Similarly, the film Bad Ass features an older Latino that beats up white skinheads that were harassing and threatening him. Based on a real event, where an older white man was being harassed and threatened by a black man: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Ass_(film)
The film River's Edge is about a boyfriend that kills his girlfriend, both white teens. Based on a real murder, but the perpetrator there was black: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River%27s_Edge
In Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Nazis have free reign in Egypt, and the locals support and cheer for the British and Allies, to the point of breaking into song lauding British sailors. In reality, Egypt at that time was effectively under British occupation, which the Egyptians fiercely disliked, and hated the British (they would have a revolution against them in 1952).
Heck of a lot of "support cost" to get to $670k
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