dejected_warp_core @ dejected_warp_core @lemmy.world

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1,142

Joined

2 yr. ago

How... how do they not have a smooth on-ramp for what is basically a straight upgrade to the same service?!

I did this once. Only way to get rid of it was to sell my house.

I was gonna say: we didn't vote for him! Approval rating should be at 0% on that point alone as zero voters approved of this.

I agree. The environment in which this must function is corrosive to the very idea, hence why I'm asking it openly here. It's a pretty dense minefield.

I'm no lawyer, but I've mused a lot about some kind of legal "dead man switch" that somehow renders the company value-less if it deviated from the intended path. Something built into the company's charter and founding documents, not unlike some kind of constitution.

Oh wow. If there was ever a Japanese take on something like RICO, "you have brought shame on your organization so all of your associates get punished" is probably the most Japanese one possible.

Yup. To put it another way, we'd be hard-pressed to replicate all of that with our current non-tree-based technology track, at even a fraction of the same efficiency. Chlorophyll is basically a miracle-molecule that makes all that possible, and we have yet to engineer anything like it.

Real question here: is it possible to walk all this back from the edge with more ethical companies? I'm thinking co-ops, Mondragon corps, union shops, etc. Basically build businesses that have motivations other than deepening the pockets of VC's and the like, yet have some kind of growth trajectory (or federate with other corps) to gradually subsume the market.

I get that massive funding makes certain things possible, like disrupting the market, or aggressively buying your competitors. And yes, the company charter would have to be bulletproof against hostile takeover, buyouts, and enshitification, in order to go the distance. But is that really all it takes, or am I missing something huge here?

Yup. This is classic narcissism. The role of the abused in this relationship is to perpetually make the abuser feel happy, whole, and loved; the abuser cannot do this for themself. By breaking with this pattern, the victim is living a life that doesn't feed back into Elon's, which is verboten in the eyes of the abuser. So, we get the hate-train turned pitty-parade reaction on Xitter, potentially drawing in more people to feed this bottomless pit of an ego. It's also textbook to not be able to self-assess, so he's totally unaware of the dissonance around claiming to be the victim while hating on your own kid and a whole social movement.

BTW, if this sounds like vampirisim, it basically is. Go watch Renfield for a playful, over-the-top, and yet informative, take on all that.

Slight tangent here: it's important for everyone to recognize how any organizational structure or bureaucracy contributes to the diffusion of responsibility. At best it's accidental, but at worst, it's used to protect those in power while ensuring the little guy is left holding the bag. At the same time, it helps everyone involved do their part since their individual role is usually very small and only slightly outside the moral bounds of the individual (if at all). You (anyone) may be in an organization that has the same patterns at play, * right now.*

This is also why RICO lawsuits are a thing, since it was nearly impossible to nail mob bosses to the wall without it. IMO, we still need something stronger as applied to the misdeeds of corporations, but I suspect that'll be a long time coming.

This reminds me of the dolphin jokes that Lower Decks got away with in almost every season. Dolphins + Universal Translator = Instant workplace harassment.

Yup. Consider the role of NORAD and the missile defense shield. USA is not only a poorly run meth lab, but it also provides armed security for the whole building.

As far as I can tell, the contingency plan is to continue pushing places like Dubai as a tourist destination and business hub. And, honestly, as long as that place continues to function as a major regional air-traffic hub, that might actually work.

Following the path of other regimes around the world, the USA builds their own "great firewall", segmenting most people here away from the global internet. At around the same time, personal VPNs become explicitly illegal. We might also see the government seize control of at least one certificate registrar, if they don't fire up their own, thereby "owning" TLS online.

On the upside, there's a chance we will see more grass-roots efforts to reboot a lot of institutions that were co-opted by the rich. You're just never going to hear about that through conventional channels. For instance: local newspapers with real journalism behind them. Or more small businesses with the intent to last, rather than sell. It's possible that more of those things will be co-ops, union shops, or even Mondragon inspired. Either way, there's a path forward for more community, real communication, and eventual prosperity, provided folks keep their heads and take things offline where necessary.

Can run as fast as Albert Einstein

Now, or when he was alive?

Once you’ve got that kind of money, I’m sure you have millions squirreled away here and there.

That's kind of right. He likely has liquid funds stuffed away in all kinds of places, possibly in different currencies on different continents. The only way to put someone like this in the poorhouse is to bankrupt every single one of his investments, while simultaneously freezing all his funds internationally.

From a finance perspective, a billionaire is a few orders of magnitude beyond "escape velocity" from ever being poor. I think most of us would need a few tens-of-millions USD in cash to even consider achieving such a thing.

Another way to look at it is that the billions in "net worth" he has accumulated are just ablative armor for real spendable wealth. Consider the move he made with Twitter: the objective was controlling the platform and discourse on it, full stop. Losing tens of billions didn't matter - it wasn't real money in the first place (mostly stock) and wasn't spendable in the conventional sense. DOGE is a similar play in that the kinds of unfair advantages being gained are worth at least what he's losing.

The fact that Ask Jeeves isn't an AI-only search engine is just beyond me. It was laughable that someone thought to personify a search engine 25 years ago, but now is pretty much the right time for that.

More than zero, which is too many for my taste.

Membrane keyboards are really the worst. I completely understand wanting to cost-cut to get units into schools and into the hands of kids, but that's too much. It's like someone saw a speak-and-spell and said "that's the ticket."

The 2600 depicted in the article thumbnail, was absolutely a beauty in its native environment of the late 1970's:

Take your weak attempt at trolling somewhere else.