JesseK

Justice only happens when decent people make it happen. Karma was always a fairy tale.

Lead. At least for the 50+ crowd. We grew up in the period before leaded gasoline was phased out. Those in the 60+ range took the direct brunt of it while children, and it led to a huge spike in violent crime in the 80s - and to a brain damaged electorate today.

Yes. It is utterly bizarre to watch.

Maher is in fact a complete imbecile and has been his entire career. No idea what anyone ever saw in his commentary or writing.

I honestly don't understand how people can have so much difficulty reading the nature and intentions of people like Trump and his enablers. They've always been extremely clear.

It's a pretty safe bet that it was largely written by AI.

if you ever needed any assurance that most tech CEOs are in fact lizards in skin suits, a post like this should eliminate any further doubt.
The utter and complete failure to understand human empathy is rather shocking.
We allow these people to run the world and then wonder why it's going to hell...

This spending on a rush to space is one of the most amusingly misguided concepts I've seen to date - and I'm a hard sci-fi fan. These people have fallen for their own fiction and lack any appreciation for the number and scale of the hurdles that remain in front of any serious development in space.

It's important because the mere existence of billionaires severely distorts the political system in ways that the existence of mere millionaires does not. It is by no means a stretch to say that their very presence is among the most severe problems modern society faces.

It's basic math. There is no debating the fact that someone else having more money dilutes your buying power. If you don't understand how that works then any further economic discussion becomes a waste of time.

The problem has become simple. If people are permitted to buy politicians, then it becomes a remarkably inexpensive purchase for a foreign government to make.

It ain't a complex plan, it's true.

Not sure what point there is to pretending that the administration is in any way obliged to acknowledge the courts when the highest court in the land has spent the last several months granting him complete latitude to ignore said courts, just as the Congress has entirely abdicated their own duties.

Sure. Nothing is infinite, period. But you can for example pump the value of some pointless imaginary asset to the point where it essentially renders all other avenues of achievement or incentive nearly irrelevant - and then a lot of people who work for a living starve.

Obviously there are limits to physical resources - but the existence of billionaires absolutely makes the rest of us poorer, pricing us out of markets where they actually spend their money. Real estate is a big one, capital markets are another, and most crucially the political 'market'.

Most money in this day and age is not backed by a physical resource.

Sure. Nor is there any real support in the publisher driven industry, which has become far more exploitive over the last several years - to the point where they now punish success to nearly the same degree as failure. You're getting fired either way.

Money is not a finite resource - but it is absolutely a competitive one. If you and I each have 100 dollars we each can 'affore' 50% of the goods in the market. But if a third person enters and is given 900 dollars, you and can now only afford 5% of the goods in the market, due to inflation.

Corporations are fantastic at wasting money. The just get to pile their losses and dept into shell corps to 'dispose' of them - and when they REALLY screw the pooch, remind me who has to bail out Wall St every time? That would be the taxpayers.

Given that America's strongest growth period coincided with some of its highest marginal tax rates, I think it's pretty clear that by themselves they do little to hamper investment and growth.

Don't forget blatant and massive violations of antitrust laws.

There's the little noted fact that Amazon blatantly violated antitrust and anti monopoly laws by intentionally operating at a massive loss in order to drive most of their competition out of business in order to monopolize the online delivery sector. So by 'innovate' you mean 'broke the law'.

I've pretty much given up on firearm legislation for the foreseeable future. The US has embraced violence and open hostility to such a degree that we may actually need them as a matter of course - which is pathetic.

'smart' people who make statements in that category are lying, intentionally. They are attempting to present a world where it is morally acceptable for them to own everything, because someday you will too! It's a fantasy story crafted to forestall arguments against vast inequality.

So did they just post the wrong ad, or did that toss an AI generated one up that says 'out now' because that's the kind of thing that AI thinks you should put on game adverts when you autocomplete them?

These aren't the kind of problems you can solve just by being smarter, because again, we don't generally lack for solutions - we lack for the will or consensus to implement them.

As frustrating as it is, most of the serious problems we face today are not due to any lack of solutions - they're due to conflicts of interest over which solution to pursue, problems without stable solutions, or an initial disagreement over the nature of the problem itself.

The funny thing is this assumption that most of our problems are 'solvable' with more intelligence. Game Theory strongly suggests otherwise.

I don't think most people these days know what RSS is.

Don't forget Thomas Midgley Jr. - the ultimate poster child for why active government regulation of industry is completely non-optional.