fine_sandy_bottom @ fine_sandy_bottom @discuss.tchncs.de

Posts

5

Comments

1,679

Joined

2 yr. ago

I think there's a number of different aspects to this that could put it in context.

Yes there are a few obscenely wealthy people, like a dozen in the world, for whom it's just a game and pretty meaningless. For the remaining merely wealthy people:

Your means increase as you move through life and your responsibilities, commitments, and tastes also increase. I might earn 6 times what I did when I was 20, but now I'm supporting a family et cetera. This same dynamic effects wealthy people in a similar but different way. People tend to live beyond their means. Someone making several million a year might end up with a few holiday homes, a mistress or something, a bunch of truly expensive hobbies (like... a horse stud farm or something). They might realise they're "wealthy" but unless they earn a bunch more money they won't be able to race their horse in qatar or whatever thing they desperately need to do to validate themselves.

Another aspect I've heard of, is that wealthy people are often anxious of losing everything. If you have a business that earns millions, it's sensible to worry that the market might change and suddenly it's worthless. This is the reality for the majority of businesses that are not publicly traded. As in, great grandpa formed a company that made squillions of dollars selling woollen socks during the first and second world war, but by the 80s it was really just ticking over paying wages and by the 90s it was insolvent. It's natural to want to consolidate your position by buying some other company that makes hats or whatever.

The vast majority of people only accumulate enough wealth for their own lives. Once you've reached that point where you really couldn't reasonably spend the wealth you've accumulated, then you've probably already switched over to accumulating wealth for your progeny. Lasting generational wealth is more or less impossible unless you own a country or something because your progeny increases exponentially, and their lavish tastes increase, and their ability to make sensible financial choices decreases.

Finally, you don't end up with more money than you could ever spend by being satisfied with however much money.

just to take some piece of land

That's not really what wars are about though. It's usually some internal power struggle.

Again, I agree with everything you've just said, which is why we shouldn't elect septuagenarians.

Making a law against old people holding office is a whole other thing though. Laws about who can stand is antithetical to democracy.

You'd have to talk the talk though.

That doesn't answer my question though.

Yes it's very suspicious and likely something shady will be discovered soon.

What is it about the resignation that makes it more suspicious though?

There's actually a lot of people for whom this type of thinking is ingrained.

I live a somewhat isolated region in Australia and the sea food here is plentiful. We also rigidly apply very strict laws about the type, size, and number of fish you can kill.

I've seen first hand the impact over-fishing can have, with some areas now completely devoid of varieties which were prevalent a few decades ago.

It just doesn't compute to people who are not from this area. They see the laws as a draconian revenue raising measure. There's no concept that just a few people can decimate a population.

Can you help my understand why his attempted resignation makes it more likely he was covering something up?

I mean you're right, but it's not very enthralling.

It's mostly the contentious political questions that hit the front page.

The model the US uses [...] places the start of each season on the solstices and equinoxes which means that midsummer is actually the start of summer there.

We do meteorological here in Australia so December to February style. I had no idea there were places that put the equinox as the start.

That said, dividing the year into 4 seasons has always seemed very reductive to me. Our local indigenous aboriginals describe the weather in 6 seasons. People who have spent a life time observing the weather in the course of earning a living can describe what changes in patterns to expect from month to month. Of course, this knowledge is only applicable locally.

I absolutely agree, which is why we shouldn't elect septuagenarians.

However, because there's no imminent threat to life involved, laws precluding their election would probably be discriminatory.

Yeah this is the thing. Those undocumented immigrants aren't watching TV collecting social benefits. They're grinding away doing the jobs no one else wants to do.

Flying a plane just isn't analogous to being a politician though.

As in, if a politician has a heart attack or stroke it doesn't put hundreds of lives at a grave and imminent risk.

I'm not suggesting you're wrong, but isn't there an obvious inefficiency here that reduces the standard of care provided?

Like if a national healthcare system doubles the number of administrators involved, there will be less money available for actual health stuff.

Why not elect his preferred candidate and allow him to rule by proxy?

Everyone who isn't frothing at the mouth, apoplectic with rage at his involvement?

I'm genuinely surprised at the prevailing assumption that Musk's interests align with those of the general population.

Like if you hired actual experts to lead the DOGE thing they would be motivated to act in the interests of their employer (the government) because their future success would depend on their ability to do so.

Musk's future success is dependent on his ability to restructure government according to his own interests exclusively.

Case in point, the current visa fiasco. His position is very clearly aligned with his own interests.

I don't care who you voted for, this Musk thing is just bonkers.

Yeah this is me.

I was reading these comments feeling as though I must be very odd until I got to yours.

Debian comes with firefox ESR which I think is a good choice because it "just works", but it's also no one's "preferred" browser. I tend to use both LibreWolf and ungoogled-chromium all day every day.

I do use the terminal every day. Years ago I used oh-my-zsh for a while but I think eventually I just kind of didn't bother to install it.

For file manager and video player et cetera, I've always found the defaults to be good choices.

Yeah, still not convinced.

I work in a field which is not dissimilar. Teaching customers to email you their requirements so your LLM can have a go at filling out the form just seems ludicrous to me.

Additionally, the models you're using require stupid amounts of power to produce so that you can run them on low power machines.

Anyhow, neither of us is going to change our minds without actual data which neither of us have. Who knows, a decade from now I might be forwarding client emails to an LLM so it can fill out a form for me, at which time I'll know I was wrong.

... it's dead though?

Did you see lemmyverse.net ?