It’s the slow but inevitable achievement of end-state of a system designed to re-frame and re-centralize power in the hands of the elite following the liberalization of political power.

This is its purpose. It always has been.

If you don’t have a 649.2.2 Atmos setup, that’s your fault. Get hearing loss, scrub!

/s because… sigh…

The Internet is populated by people who think English grammar is cosmic law, so it doesn’t surprise me that they think you should bend over for dogshit urban planning.

Ironically, none of them follow the rule of shutting up if they don’t know shit about shit.

Green spaces: Just for viewing.

What kind of dystopian hellscape do you want the world to be, exactly?

*devil ray pizza

Because there is zero trust that this won’t be a one-sided liberalization, in favour of the fascists.

Would you be surprised to learn that business is actually a network of cargo cults, where the thing they’re trying to superficially mimic is other businesses that don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing?

I work for an online edtech company that saw massive organic growth during lockdowns, and has been chasing that dragon since lockdowns were lifted. They spent millions expanding their workforce at the time, while they severely pared down their school outreach team. They made multiple moves that only made sense if you assume lockdowns would last forever.

I raised this with management a couple of times, and their only response was “everyone else was doing it, too”.

Hey, do I work for you?

“We’re the front page of the Internet!”

“No, not like that…”

No, they’re advocating for sensible defaults. Just because you’re an enthusiast doesn’t you’re the market. Being supported is great, but believing you deserve to be sppecially catered to at the expense of the maajority is real smug bullshit.

“Look, I told you yesterday, I don’t care. Whatever I said the first time we had this discussion, today, on the 937th time, I no longer give a shit.”

I bet door-to-door salespeople would make way more money if they could just break into your homes, leave their junk on your table, and steal your credit card, and yet we don’t let them do that.

Right. But when the bar is owned by a Nazi, your options for pushing them out of the bar becomes a lot more limited.

“Reviewers” need to understand that, unless they paid their own money, from a bog-standard store, on or after release day, they are not reviewers, they are hired spokespeople.

The reasons why the wealthy like liberalisation matters, though. The reasom the wralthy want more wealth matters.

Money is power. The wealthy are competing to have the most power. Eventually, that turns to taking control of the state. So, the wealthy will back free trade and deregulation right up until they, personally, are in a position to attempt a coup. After that, regulation and trade barriers work for the particular rich folk who have taken control over the state.

Yes. It’s french for “boredom”, but the kind of boredom that’s results from life being too easy. It’s like being an over-achieving student in a class where the teacher is focused on the kids who are struggling to catch up.

As a kid, I could never trust adults who wanted to limit good things.

Guess what? This effect has been found in other experiments!

The marshmallow experiment is one of those that self-help gurus and LinkedIn ‘influencers’ love to peddle as being meaningful, in no small part because it tells people who had lucky upbringings that they are inherently better than others, and not just a product of their environment. But when it’s actually examined critically, it falls apart.

Le is pronounced “luh”. La is pronounced “la”.

What we’re looking for here is les, the plural, which is pronounced “lay”.

Removed by mod

I think it’s dangerous to imagine people follow these folks, or let them run rampant over society, because they aspire to be like them. That makes it so much harder to really understand why people support them, or even just refuse to tell them “no”, and makes it impossible to do anything about it.

People believe that life is a meritocracy. Even when they themselves can look around at the people near them and see that those in positions of power don’t deserve it, they still view society as a whole as “fair”. Yes, they personally have may have gotten screwed over, but, in general, the people who float to the top got there because they were smarter and more capable. Therefore, we should sit back and just let them cook.

They need some kind of trigger to see the billionaires not as people who have earned their place, but who have stolen it.