Entertainment increases happiness and is a positive for humanity, even if I personally don't enjoy the entertainment. There is no comparison to wasting energy doing worthless make-work.
I was an early adopter of BOINC, a distributed scientific computing platform powering research projects, often protein folding with applications to Alzheimer's and cancer such as Folding@home and Rosetta@home, which distribute computationally expensive calculations to users' PCs who wished to donate their spare computing power. Sound familiar? Every time I think about how much energy is wasted on worthless speculation, I'm sick to my stomach thinking about how close we came to this technology being useful or productive in literally any way. It is disgusting. It is vile.
Operation Condor wasn't very pax for anyone living in Pinochet's Chile, or really anywhere in South or Latin America, but I'm sure your family did just fine.
We only directly applied napalm to the skin of a couple thousand children, what are those stinky hippies still whining about? They saw the USS Maddox get attacked twice while performing peaceful maneuvers in our own backyard, the Gulf of Tonkin! We only dropped 21,000,000 gallons of Agent Orange, it hardly causes birth defects any more, only a few hundred writhing harlequin babies a year at this point, what exactly is the fucking problem?!
in 2013, Reddit community managers cheerfully announced that Eglin Air Force Base, home to the 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne)'s Psychological Operations team, was the "most Reddit addicted city" https://web.archive.org/web/20150113041912/http://www.reddit...
all debates on social media have already been astroturfed to hell and back by professional posters for many years, but LLMs are certainly going to function as a force multiplier
We are debating ethics and morality surrounding a rapidly evolving field, not regurgitating trivia about the arbitrary legal status quo in the country you live in. Think for a moment about the various events in human history perpetrated by a government which considered those actions perfectly legal, then come back with something to contribute to the discussion beyond a pathetic, thought-terminating appeal to authority.
What Bitcoin is really missing before it can finally take off is yet another layer of fees and rent seeking; can't wait to pay 1.5%(!) of my portfolio every year in expenses :)
Gold did at one point in history have an actual use case apart from speculation and being pretty: it is almost uniquely suitable as currency and store of value (along with silver) because it is hard to create, easy to purify and non-destructively measure the purity of, fungible, and can be easily split and recombined into units of any desired weight
as far as having an actual historic or present day use case, blockchain snake oil is still in search of a problem only it can solve to this day
Seems weird to me that firefighters, police officers, paramedics, content moderators, abuse victims, and so on who struggle with PTSD and get caught taking ibogaine become felons for possessing a Schedule I substance, but not contract killers
The pharma industry spends more money lobbying US politicians than any other, almost twice as much as the next largest spender; 64% of pharma lobbyists are former government employees
>Before someone here says that they would be the CEO for less money than Michael. Can you get an appointment with the vice president of search at Google and Microsoft? Could you call their bosses and get though?
I'm sorry? My entire life I've been told that CEOs make 1000x as much money as me for golfing and writing a couple emails a week because they're genius Ubermenschen whose illuminating strategic insights add orders of magnitude more value than my measly toil, but you're telling me it's actually because other executives are willing to take cold calls from them? That's why?
>Why would you work harder to get rich if you don't get anything for it?
this comment wouldn't be nonsense if we lived in a political economy where money came exclusively from working hard / hazardous / difficult jobs, but in case you forgot, plenty of rich people have never worked a day in their lives and either lucked into an inheritance or sit on their ass and cash rent / dividend checks
Capitalism isn't "things I don't like", capitalism is when investors are paid simply for "owning" things rather than being forced to sell their labor in exchange for a wage like everyone else. Your company is selling shares to external investors and is not worker-owned; it is a capitalist firm that pays dividends to people who didn't necessarily do any work for the company. Words have meaning.
>if you put in the hours and you make things people want, you will be successful.
What thing does a landlord make? What are the hours on the job of owning dividend-paying securities? Being successful in this economy has literally nothing to do with "making things people want" and "putting in the hours".
Wouldn't be Hacker News without a constant stream of worthless single-sentence dismissals from insufferably smug self-professed Economics 101 graduates
Adrian Zenz is incredibly trustworthy and reliable as proven by all these other sources which I can't show you because, uhh, you wouldn't believe them. 30 minute old account nervously shuffles through pile of 15 printouts with Radio Free Asia letterhead while trying his hardest to maintain a smug expression
Socialism is when workers own their workplaces, and receive the full amount of value that their labor creates, rather than that value being arbitrarily allocated by the owners of the firm. It has absolutely nothing to do with your imaginary concept of everyone getting assigned identical compensation. Bizarre post, you may as well have typed some gibberish word rather than "socialist".
hilarious attempt at a metaphor, traffic deaths from personal automobiles have been in the top 10 causes of death worldwide for the better part of a century lol
Here come all the very smart economics 101 graduates to explain why rich people should be paid for owning money while everyone else is forced to sell their labor for a wage under threat of homelessness
there are thirty empty housing units for every single homeless person in the US, but sure, housing supply is the issue. let's deregulate the construction industry and have our own Grenfell!!! :)