feedforward

Yes he is using as an example what is probably the most inefficient dam in the world.

It is not dirtier. In the first week of operation it is dirtier, but then at some point it crosses a threshold and becomes permanently less dirty. As that article you link to attests.

You're right, it's just part of the absurdity of Rand's vision. In the real world people do work and create something, but some bean counters figure out the heirs who own the majority stake of a company can make a few more bucks by destroying the thing, so it is done.

What is this but a post-Greenfell real estate lobbyist screed to make landlords a few more bucks in profit by removing fire safety requirements?

Russia considers Donwtsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhia the same country as Russia - why wouldn't they, everyone thought they were when I was in high school. Just like the US considered there was a South Virtnam separate from Vietnam.

Operation Babylift took children with parents as well as orphans. So many of the children the US refused to return to their parents.

They were prevented from leaving. Some of the so-called orphans taken from Vietnam were not orphans, and the US refused to let their birth parents get them back, siding with the American adoptive parents. As reported in the New York Times.

> You can't even read most Western propaganda in China because the government goes to great lengths to censor narratives counter to offical views.

Sure, because you can watch Russian news channels like RT in the EU, or read websites like rt.com - oh no, they're blocked.

Just like in the EU, where the government goes to great lengths to censor narratives counter to offical views, so does China.

> while congress pulls the ability to regulate intrastate trade out of a hat

The hat would be article one, section eight, clause three of the US Constiution which grants Congress the power "to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States".

> China is an enemy of U.S.

China is an enemy of the US, the Gazans are an enemy if the US, the Yemeni which the US are bombing are an enemy of the US, Biden just said Iran is an enemy of the US.

Russia is an enemy of the US, Syria is an enemy of the US, North Korea is an enemy of the US. Venezuela is an enemy of the US, Cuba is an enemy of the US.

It just goes on and on and on.

There's almost universal opinion on the mainstream, left and right that a cultural shift happened in the US between Eisenhower leaving office and Woodstock. It's not some narrative invented and pushed out.

The media does manufacture narratives. Youth in New York and San Francisco had a subculture in the 1950s which was framed as beatnik, and soon sitcoms were mocking beatnik. Small basement performance places would have patrons not clap to avoid noise complaints, so patrons would snap their fingers as applause. This was then presented as something unusual and pretentious, minus its original context. The same thing with San Francisco hippies - they arose organically, the mainstream culture took notice of them and presented them a certain way, and the cycle goes on.

Every social movement that arises is met with an attempt to coopt and to commodity by the corporate media and corporate America, this has happened for a long time.

Should point out when people go into the Sturm und Drang of the Great Firewall, that it was largely built by corporate America.

https://www.wired.com/2008/05/leaked-cisco-do/

It's not pointless. Social constructs are social constructs. The aristocracy twists language to reify into things what are social constructs.

For example the adjective rich. Which means people with money. Rich people being rich due to their relationship with pieces of paper is fetishism.

They are people in a scheme of relations of production with others, namely, workers.

I agree 100%! As a proud, patriotic American I don't want BIG GOVERNMENT interfering with the free market either - even if the windows of airplanes are being blown off mid-flight.

However, do not take this to mean I want the end of the billions of dollars the government gives to Boeing every year, for the R&D to build planes for the military.

The incredible bravery of the Houthis, who have very limited arms and resources is inspiring to me. They want the genocide in Gaza to end. This is what a real humanitarian intervention is. That a small band of brave people with limited resources can have such an effect is as inspiring as their bravery.

> a grift on top of the hard work of those that actually drove a company to success

Where does the profits and dividends sent off to the idle class aristocracy fit into this constellation? Your resentment seems to mostly be that some dufferent people might be at the workplace.

Have been following this a little and two things seem to be true:

Looking at the economic numbers, a lot of things look good, or at least, they are not so bad.

Multiple polls asking people how the economy is doing show they think it is doing worse.

Generally Biden supporters push the first point, and Biden detractors push the second. Some of the Biden detractors are Biden voters who want different economic initiatives.

One point is during Covid people got stimulus checks and evictions and student loan payments were frozen. Also interest rates were near zero, FAANGs were hiring like crazy etc.

Now people were hit by inflation and interest rates have shot up. FAANGs haven been laying off, and to some extent Fortune 500 - or at least hiring is frozen. And so on.

Also - let me put on the /e/acc hat for a second - I have a sure-fire way of accelerating AI. Remove all restrictions of selling Nvidia H100 cards to China! This will certainly accelerate the growth of AI, which according to /e/acc philosophy, will benefit all of mankind.

(I am aware of the saying that sarcasm and subtlety does not carry through Internet posts. So to prevent mindless replies to the suggestion made - I am not necessarily saying to remove those restrictions, I am saying if I put an /e/acc hat on, it seems obvious to me this would be one of the demands for removing any barriers to AI acceleration).

> what does this have to do with e/acc or the article

You mean the article where Andreessen's name is in the title of the article, right next to his picture?

Marc Andreessen wrote "It's time to build" in 2020 bemoaning that "we can’t build nearly enough housing in our cities with surging economic potential - which results in crazily skyrocketing housing prices in places like San Francisco, making it nearly impossible for regular people to move in and take the jobs of the future."

Then last year when plans were made for multi-family homes in Atherton, Andreessen and his wife sent out a letter that multi-family homes where he lives "will massively decrease our home values, the quality of life of ourselves and our neighbors and immensely increase the noise pollution and traffic".

Growth and "progress" when it's your environment and neighborhood being trampled on, government regulation and restraint when it comes to his neighborhood and property.

We can take this "movement" with the hypocrisy it is wrapped in.

Another option is Israel follows the overwhelming vote by the UN for a ceasefire.

> Part of the issue is pressure from the employees themselves to implement these kinds of systems— because what sane employee wouldn’t want more money?

The shoeshine boy Orwell wrote about in Homage to Catalonia, incensed that Orwell added a tip to his given wage?

In 1948 Jewish terrorists drove numbers of Palestinians from their homes into Egypt during the Nakba. Israel has refused to let the refugees they created return for the past 75 years. So while Israel is carpet bombing Gaza,the party to be condemned is - Egypt? For not cooperating in Israel's effort to drive the Gazans from their homes?

The answer can be found in the first word of the statement.

He said Stasi was limited so it is not equivalation. The US government and its infrastructure oligopolies monitor citizens far more than the Stasi ever did. We are pleading to a reduction down to a Stasi-like intelligence service.

Tangentially, J. Edgar Hoover was politically opposed to feminism, and COINTELPRO had a massive secret police action against feminists and feminist groups in the 1970s. Some of us want these issues hashed out at the ballot box, not by some giant secret political police force.

> urbanization increased social stratification

Urbanization increases social stratification in that the upper class and the upper middle class tend to live in or near cities. As far as the poor and working class, the majority live outside cities in agricultural societies, and in or near cities in modern societies.

Well the US Navy has already been attacking pirates there, in addition to weapons and military advisors to the Ukraine, patrols in the South China Sea and paying for (for the first time since Nixon visited China) weapons to Taiwan, plus occupation costs in Guantanamo Bay against the Cuban government's wishes, troops stationed on the North Korean border, naval patrols off the Venezuelan coast as New sanctions are considered, and the navy also sending more ships to the Persian gulf recently -

there are still those (like yourself) who want even more money given to the military industrial complex in pursuit of US worldwide imperial goals. Of course they monetarily benefit from.this (as you yourself said you do).

Myself I would rather the money go to fix bridges and schools in the US than bomb Gazan children etc.

> Like seriously, would you desire to go back in time to 1890? Okay, have fun if you're not white

The ancestors of the people living in Gaza were much better off than their descendants today, being bombed while the US Navy sits off shore to enable the massacre (coming via bombs made in the USA). Same is true of many in the world. Hunter gatherers in the Amazon were not being massacred by mining companies back then to the extent they are now.

> Not one of them through inheritance

Gates grandfather was president of a bank. Gates left his prep school for Harvard with a million dollar trust fund. His mother was on a board with the chairman of IBM which helped launch Microsoft into the big time.

Buffett's father was a congressman. His grandparents owned a chain of grocery stores.

Zuckerberg's high school was Phillips Exeter Academy. Currently tuition is over $50,000 a year - for high school.

Someone tell the Israelis whining about "October 7".

Feeling like a victim all the way.

You are talking about the people not only doing the work and creating the wealth, but doing the innovations and creating new things. Then you say these are the people who are "too full of themselves". That they should give up on how the commodity they create is used - and by your definition it is a commodity. That they should focus on the needed innovations and that's it.

Well if the workers doing the work don't have a hand in making decisions, who does? We know the answer, from our current era of heirs, limited partners and such, the scions one can see on Rich Kids of Instagram, although they leave the work to their private wealth advisors.

It's the most parasitic idea possible. "Just do all the work and figure out the innovations slave, the aristocracy will take it from there".