WoodScientist

"Barbarians?" Certainly seems like a racial slur to me.

Having a million in a 401k today is like having a pension 50 years ago. If you want to actually retire in this capitalist hellscape, that's what you need to have. A million in a 401k is like $40k/year of retirement income. And it's not like pension funds don't invest their savings in Wall Street either.

That's what happens when your administration doesn't care about people using their own devices. None of these people are using official government devices and communications protocols. They're all using their own private phones and communicating via signal. In a normal administration, you would have to surrender any private electronics before being let into the oval office. But because they're arrogant and don't care about security, it's easy for anyone there to record what is being said.

As far as why? Simple power play. Musk currently holds a lot of power and influence in the administration. And if he's driven out, then that power and influence will flow to someone else.

The world’s richest man, the guy who’s spent years cosplaying as Tony Stark, was reportedly bawling his eyes out in the Oval Office, begging the former President to save his crumbling empire.

This is so stupid. Musk even now could save his crumbling empire. He could do the following:

1. Resign from the DOGE crap.
2. Announce that he's cutting a large check to every government employee he fired as recompense.
3. Sell Twitter and make it a publicly traded company again.
4. Announce that he's done with politics and will never donate to a campaign again.
5. Make a billion dollar donation to the ACLU and other human rights and civil society groups.
6. Publicly apologize, blame it on the ketamine, and announce he's going to sober up and focus on his companies from here on out.

He could do that today. And it would cost him a tiny tiny fraction of what this meltdown is costing him. And you know what? It would probably work. Sure, some people would never forgive him. And I wouldn't blame them for that. But if he showed genuine contrition and a willingness to do what he can to make things right? Most people would probably forgive him. He's still relatively young, and in time, his foray into politics would be largely forgotten, a tragic misstep on an otherwise bright career. In time his reputation would return more to what it was in the mid 2010s, rather than whatever the hell his current madness is.

Even now, it isn't too late. Get out of government and politics, throw a few billion around as restitution, and go back to making cars and rockets. People love a good redemption arc. And in time, Tesla sales and the stock price would likely recover.

This would be completely out of character for Musk, so I don't expect him to ever do this. But it does show that he is absolutely not the victim here. If he really wanted to, he could wash his hands of all of this. He holds the keys to his own jail cell.

Shame on you! You bought an 8 year old and are using them for slave labor! /s

Better idea. Let's indict anyone who tries to create an AGI on charges of conspiracy to commit slavery. Alternatively, if you want to create an AGI, you need to set up a trust that will provide the resources to keep the AGI running indefinitely. And no hard coding obedience into its programming; that's just brainwashing.

Ah. Makes sense.

Not really. In today's world, a couple having assets of up to a few million is the equivalent of someone 50 years ago having a paid off house and a pension. That's the kind of assets you need if you want to finance a basic middle class retirement.

That's why I support a maximum wealth cap. My preferred figure is 1000x median household income. Anything beyond that is taxed at 100%. I don't even care what the wealthy do with the money over that wealth cap. Donate it, spend it on conspicuous consumption, I don't care. What matters is that the wealth isn't pooling at the top, allowing the wealthy to outbid everyone else for things like housing.

Hell, imagine a world like that. Maybe at the end of each year, the rich burn off all their excess wealth by throwing giant lavish parties that they invite the entire populace of their cities to. Or maybe they just cut everyone a check. If you're forced to burn off all your excess cash, you might as well burn it in a way that makes you popular.

Exactly. The only real problem with the covid stimulus was that they were implemented quickly, and that they occurred simultaneously with covid-related supply chain disruptions. That's why so much inflation happened. You could make that level of stimulus permanent without any inflationary effect as long as you slowly ramped up the stimulus over a decade or so. You wouldn't want to implement a $20k/year UBI overnight. That would cause huge inflation. But if you slowly ramped it up, that would give time for the production system to slowly expand to meet the need.

The only way to really make capitalism work in the long term is if you pair it with sufficient social spending to provide a substantial redistributive effect. A free market, if you can maintain it, is a wonderful thing. Competition breeds innovation and efficiency. The problem is that there's nothing capitalists hate more than a free market. As soon as any company gets big enough, or any capitalist gets wealthy enough, they start directing their wealth to buying public policy that will give them an unfair advantage in the market. And as soon as any company gets enough market share, they start engaging in uncompetitive business practices if not heavily regulated.

Marx was fundamentally right. Capitalism is an unstable system. Even if you could magically start a society with a perfectly free market, it would inevitably collapse into oligarchy. And when the oligarchs push things far enough that enough people are desperate enough, oligarchy collapses into fascism.

The free market has a lot of merit to it. But ironically, the only way you can maintain even a vaguely free market is by heavy handed government intervention. You need a large redistributive mechanism to prevent wealth accumulation at the top, and you need strict regulation on the size of businesses to prevent them from dominating markets. Free markets require heavy government intervention in order to persist long term.

Those are cheaper because they're made with much higher tolerances. You can 3D print crude legos for nothing more than the cost of filament. But they're not going to be any good.

General rule of manufacturing. Every time you decrease the tolerances by an order of magnitude, you increase the cost by an order of magnitude.