Because Ukraine is generally a fairly popular foreign ally with little mainstream controversy around supporting them. So if you wanted to undermine support for them, easier to knee cap support for the bill from the other direction.
Frankly I don’t like the “but we could be spending this better at home” argument because the people making that argument invariably would refuse to actually do so, and instead just give out another tax cut.
That money would never end up going in to a single payer healthcare system, SNAP, education or building out more sustainable infrastructure. We don’t do these things not because we don’t have the money for it, we don’t do these things because they would undermine the influence of large financial and corporate interests.
There is a much better argument to not fund Israel, and it is that they’re attempting to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip, have flaunted all of the treaties and agreements they made for near on 20 years, and they’re current leadership was undemocratically put in power.
I think there is just too much faith from the current crop of investors in tech start ups, many got hurt in the past by not investing in things after not getting good answers to “ok but how does this make money” or “can this actually do what you’re claiming”.
And larger more established companies like Google and Amazon are happy to feed the hype for a lot of these trends, particularly when all the new start ups are going to be buying stuff from them, so even if the start ups fail because they can’t make money or don’t do what they claim, the big companies still made money selling them server space, computing time, or huge amounts of data. I think investors who hold stakes in the big companies also lean in to the hype for this reason.
Everyone has a pretty good incentive to lean in to the hype, so they do.
gasp you mean, industry is lying to investors about a new technology to get more investment and creating a false narrative for the public to undermine criticism? Who could have seen this coming!
Innovation is increasingly detached from the profit incentive, and in-fact it has started to be a net detriment as walking off and gate keeping becomes the real profit generator.
It’s an issue that can’t be solved with regulatory oversight just because it’s at its heart a core issue with the structure and system of it all. You can try and ban bad behaviors but there is such a strong incentive to do those bad behaviors that people will inevitably find loopholes.
Restructuring systems is the only real solution when it reaches that point, but that is politically very difficult when the general consensus among decision makers at the highest level is “the government that governs least governs best”
if I need to go in to a command line and make a custom boot of the OS. I might as well be using a Linux distribution and not have the system reset my work every time it updates.
Private equity tends to fuck up otherwise successful or at least functional businesses or services, squeezing all the value out of them then selling them for parts. Vice may have been having financial trouble, but selling to private equity will probably result in the end of it.
Accusing anyone who criticizes you of antisemitism just devalues the term. Which is really fucking stupid because there is a modern rise in anti semitism, but it goes way further back than the current genocide in Gaza and most (not all but most) of the antisemitism is tangential or unrelated to Israel.
I totally agree, systemic problems require systemic solutions. If a system is failing “just being better” is never a solution.
My point is that failure here is in the economic system that encourages this kind of detachment. That the retirement system is built around accumulating value and investing into capital to pay for retirement later, makes these kinds of situations inevitable.
What I meant by stock buy backs as a way of generating revanue was more that it’s a way to take revanue and pass it on the shareholder without using dividends, which are what the corporate tax is on. The way I worded it was really poor.
I don’t think the current generation of retirees are screwing over younger generations maliciously, they just haven’t critically examined the whole economic system and don’t seem to get that the current system is incredibly unsustainable, they just want the money they were promised. They are so insulated from the decision making process that they don’t understand the reality of what they’re demanding.
Retirement rates are up and new workers in the work force are down. (Look at a demographic pyramid for more details)
Instead of “saving for retirement” by giving money to investors to invest in growth opportunities, now retirees are taking money out of the system to live on. Suddenly the pressure Is no longer on growth for companies, it’s on generating revenue that can be passed on to share holders, ether by stock buy backs or dividends. And there are not nearly enough new young workers coming to the work force and putting away savings in investments to make up the difference.
Capital is getting rarer now, if companies want it, they need to prove they can generate revenue, no more blitz scaling, no more “we’ll figure out how to monetize later”. Suddenly the free services need to make money, enshittification is the inevitable result.
I was interested in using older cheaper CPUs but they only have relatively modern stuff, which makes sense, but isn’t what I was looking for, and I’m looking at the SBC stuff now because that seems like the best option.
See, I knew about PCB way and was wondering if their products would even really work. Or if the sockets for the chips would be available for small batch stuff.
It’s a common issue in a lot of industries, where internal priorities and concerns end up having more influence on a companies decision making than actual consumer wants and needs. Why the idea of “the free market will optimize for the best products” kind of falls apart in reality so often.
Yah, that’s where I kind of started from in thinking about this, but then I started looking in to getting off the shelf components and ran in to the reality that short of cramming a desktop motherboard in to a laptop shaped box, there was just no way to make it work. The cooling alone was a no go, so it was a matter of using SBCs or ripping something out of an existing laptop, which kind of defeats the point unless something else is broken in it.
I can kind of get why the standardization sucks. Everything is so packed together in most designs, having standardized elements might limit a companies options for building something compact.
I do wonder how much extra bulk a bunch of standardized elements would actually add though. Like would the average person really mind the laptop body being half cm thicker?
The fact that such services exists drives me up a wall, that thoughtless and careless business like facebook, Amazon and Google have worked so hard to collect/sell people’s data, and now we have to pay third parties to hunt it down and get rid of it.
Gold value was also enforced by armies and taxes. It has uses nowadays that it did not use to have. Used to be gold was only useful as a decoration or as a coating that wouldn’t tarnish. The actual value was that you had to pay taxes in it.
Crypto has no value, less value than fiat even, because I can’t buy groceries with it, nor can I pay taxes with it.
Also, you can’t fractional reserve crypto unless you’re using a second crypto currency backed by a first.
Because Ukraine is generally a fairly popular foreign ally with little mainstream controversy around supporting them. So if you wanted to undermine support for them, easier to knee cap support for the bill from the other direction.