On a side note, I would like to say thank you to everyone involved in creating and maintaining this instance. I'm in the US, but I find the atmosphere here friendlier than on the other servers I've tried. I appreciate you folks letting me hang out with you.
I did set up a sustaining contribution, so I'm trying to do my part too.
If there is, I'd like to know how. I love federated access, but it would be lovely if I could keep a couple of accounts on separate instances in sync with each other.
That was a US-centric perspective, although I think it applies more generally. What you're talking about is classic economic theory, which was a pretty accurate picture in the past. More recent developments suggest that some important things have changed in the actual economy over the last half-century, which have been reflected in new economic theories.
The central problem is that businesses are no longer as sensitive to traditional market factors. Monopoly, collusion, and the capture of regulatory functions have allowed businesses far more control over both their markets and their labor costs. Meanwhile, wealth inequality has drastically reduced the amount of discretionary income that is available. The traditional economic model still mostly applies to the wealthy and what's left of the middle class. The majority of consumers no longer have the means to participate as they did.
Neither inflation nor deflation address wealth inequality. The relationship between salaries and prices is broken. Traditional economic indicators assume that businesses doing better means the average person does better, but that is no longer the case. Most of the gains now go to wealthy investors. That leaves us with a situation where the traditional economy looks great, but large numbers of people can no longer afford housing or food. Unless you are part of the 1%, that is not really a good economy.
When people talk about "the economy" they almost always mean Wall Street. That has less and less to do with the economic environment that those of us outside of the 1% live with every day.
Lower prices are bad for "the economy", but they are often good for the vast majority of us. We aren't the ones who benefit, even indirectly, from businesses making more money.
Experiments with a basic living stipend, and other similar ideas, have almost always found that the vast majority of people prefer to support themselves if they are given the opportunity. It has also been repeatedly shown that providing people with reliable housing and food makes them far more likely to get to a point where they no longer require it. The numbers indicate the helping the poor more than pays for itself in the long run.
The real problem is the people would rather let some die of exposure and starvation than support some who don't really need it. Everyone resents being taken advantage of, but that's only one side of the issue. Why is eliminating cheaters more important than saving lives? Particularly since all indications are that there aren't nearly enough cheaters to be a significant drag on the system.
There is also a myth that undeserving poor people keep the rest of us from getting as much as we should. Businesses get vastly more aid from the government than poor people. People who are wealthy enough to make their income from investments pay far less in taxes than those of us who work for a living. And the really wealthy are able to game the system so they pay little or nothing in taxes. If we started collecting a fair portion from them, we could easily afford food, housing, and medical care for everyone. Anyone who want to stop the undeserving from getting things they don't deserve needs to start there.
I think it is irrational, in the sense that executives' sole legal responsibility, at least in the US, is to make as much money as possible for their shareholders. Favoring control over productivity is a violation of that. They are gratifying their egos instead of doing their jobs.
Of course, in a sane world, how they treat their employees would be an issue, not just profitability.
It is mostly semantics. I answered the way I did primarily because I was responding to "There are already self-driving cars, aren’t there?". That seemed to be asking about functionality, not naming conventions.
Me too. Musk can't actually manage people, but he can pretend more convincingly if he can see them in person and yell at them. There are a lot of managers like that and there are far more executives.
My company looked at the actual business results from the period of COVID remote work. Productivity went up, so they decided to keep things that way. It also allowed them to get rid of all their office space, except for a sparsely populated headquarters building, which is saving them a lot of money.
Most studies have shown that workers were more efficient when working remotely. Why would any executive want to reduce efficiency and increase infrastructure costs? The Return-To-Office push is not rational. It represents an inability to adapt to changing conditions. If boards were doing their jobs, they would be quietly showing those executives the door and looking for better people to run their companies.
I understand your point, but I disagree. There are currently no cars that are considered fully self-driving as defined by the people who created them. Except for the ones that are really just remotely driven, they all come with warnings that a human the driver must be at the controls and paying attention.
Current self-driving cars are like a printer that works most of the time, but requires a human to read everything it produces and to occasionally write in a few things that it missed or got wrong.
No, there really aren't yet. Driverless taxis and delivery vehicles are all "monitored" remotely by people who effectively drive them when they get into situations the automation can't handle. Individual self-driving cars all come with a lot of warnings (which many drivers ignore) that they require an active and aware driver for similar reasons.
And Tesla, who have been lying about their self-driving capabilities from day one, continue to run people down and smash into other vehicles on a regular basis.
The systems are good enough to handle 99% of the driving situations they encounter. That remaining 1% is still a long way from being solved. And "pretty good" is not acceptable when failures kill people.
The list of possible permanent solutions will not include doing anything about climate change or the other conditions causing the problem. Instead, they will focus on making obscene amounts of money for giant corporations until it becomes obvious they aren't going to work.
It's been a while, but I always had good luck with a half-wave dipole. It takes some effort to put one up, but it isn't that hard or expensive. At the time, I was also able to get some ancient used gear for a couple hundred that could handle all the HF bands.
I've been thinking about getting back into that, with natural disasters becoming more frequent and severe.
There are probably houses out there somewhere that do not have one of these, but I have never encountered one. They appear with the same frequency as 10 million dollar lottery tickets.
Fundamentalism is certainly a contributing factor, but there are others. Conservatives have been working to cut back on education since the early 80's. Removing critical thinking training was one of the objectives.. Conservative policies are unpopular and are often supported with misrepresentations and outright lies. To succeed, they need a public without the knowledge or skills to realize their arguments are invalid. Unfortunately, they have gone a long way toward accomplishing that.
If people weren't stupid they would not put up with having the highest medical costs in the world while achieving the lowest quality of care in the first world. Health Insurance Companies exist because too many people haven't figured out that their purpose is to limit, or prevent, actual health care.
Curious Canid @ Curious_Canid @lemmy.ca Posts 9Comments 623Joined 2 yr. ago
On a side note, I would like to say thank you to everyone involved in creating and maintaining this instance. I'm in the US, but I find the atmosphere here friendlier than on the other servers I've tried. I appreciate you folks letting me hang out with you.
I did set up a sustaining contribution, so I'm trying to do my part too.
Thanks!