chasing

No. You can do things that are immoral, harmful, predatory, and generally shitty while still being perfectly legal.

And people who want fewer regulations hampering businesses need to realize that this only works if businesses work within ethical guidelines that are not mandated by law. Otherwise the government will need to step in and protect people.

But to reiterate: Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's not evil.

(WhatsApp only had, like, 50 employees when FB bought it for $19B, as a bit of evidence that headcount isn’t necessarily a measure of value.)

The US has about 10x the numbers of guns per capita as Russia. To start. And I think we're not quite as inured to authoritarianism over here.

The GOP has been hollowed out to the point that they're incapable of admitting this to themselves and participating in corrective action. The courts alone aren't sufficient. And because our elections are held on a clockwork cadence there's not much the citizenry can do at this point.

Which is why I'm worried things are going to turn violent. When normal channels fail, people who feel like they have been pressed against the wall will act out in other ways. And a lot of people are in the process of having their livelihoods ruined.

One of the jobs of a software engineer is to be the point person for some pieces of technology. The responsible person in the chain. If you let AI do all of your job, it’s the same as letting a junior employee do all of your job: Eventually the higher-ups will notice and wonder why they need you.

Billionaires go radically apoplectic and turn into propagandistic freaks when the US government is simply not reducing their taxes fast enough. I actually think most people don't want this massive wealth gap, but we're reaching the point where it's impossible for the will of the people to find expression in our government, especially now that the billionaires are literally running the joint.

I can’t vote Peter Thiel out of being wealthy and obnoxious. And I know he doesn’t give a shit about me.

We waited until the ultra-wealthy figured out how to weaponize their power against us. It may be too late. But we have to reduce the wealth gap as a priority step to fixing democracy.

People often don't like the outflow of money. They complain about it constantly. "Netflix's prices went up!" "The store wanted me to pay for my groceries and wouldn't just let me walk out with them!" "I smashed my neighbor's car with a bat and now the judge says I have to pay for it." These things are not "literally" theft.

What a small-minded little greed-sack. I hate it that since these people have escape-velocity wealth we have to forever sit here and on some level pretend their ideas aren't dumb.

He repeatedly denied knowledge of the Project 2025 plan that's now in action.

Doesn't matter how many people voted for him or why.

It's a far stretch to say that this is what the majority of his voters wanted. Certainly many Republican voters have seemed very upset about this stupid blitzkrieg dismantling of core services.

You absolutely know that’s not what I’m talking about.

When wealth is siloed, workers are less able to advocate for themselves with risking their livelihood.

I'm sure there's an economic lesson, here, our country will completely ignore.