Rottcodd

As I just noted on another response, mostly it was that I came up with a delicious turn of phrase and couldn’t not post it. And yes, while broadly I think that Google deserves every bit of shit that’s thrown their way and more - that they could vanish from the face of the Earth tomorrow and the internet could only benefit - this particular incident really isn’t a good example.

I have to admit that I was so pleased with that turn of phrase when it came to me that I went ahead and posted it in spite of the fact that this specific incident doesn’t appear to be a good example.

It’s really sort of amazing how few years it took to go from “Do no evil” to “Don’t even bother pretending not to.”

Undoubtedly.

And that in no way contradicts, or even really addresses, my point, which is not about overall expenses, but about the distribution of them - the portion that goes to employee wages vs. the portion that goes to executive compensation packages.

They thought by raising wages, owners would cut into their own bottom lines.

I don’t think anyone actually thought that.

They’re simply making the point that the problem is not the wages paid to the employees, as you imply, but the obscene salaries paid to executives and franchisees.

That the American execurives and franchisees are not going to take the necessary steps to correct that problem pretty much goes without saying, but that doesn’t in any way change the fact that that is the problem

TikTok doesn’t engage in speech at all. TikTok is s platform on which people engage in speech. Those people include Americans.

So TikTok being legally considered a person or not, having rights or not and so on is irrelevant, since TikTok’s nominal rights aren’t being violated in the first place. The rights of the Anerican people are the ones that would be violated - they are the ones whose freedom of speech would be restricted.

IANAL but I presume that’s the argument they’re using - that when they say that it’s a violation of the first amendment, what they mean is not that it violates their supposed freedom of speech, but that it violates our inalienable freedom of speech (as it in fact, and obviously, does).

I guarantee that the ADA works for whoever is the biggest source of revenue, and thus the biggest funder of executive salaries.

That’s just how it is in a system of hierarchical organizations. The executive positions inevitably come to be held by people who have come to hold those positions because they were the most willing and able to do absolutely whatever it takes to fight and claw and scheme and backstab their way into them. And those people not only aren’t inclined to serve any interest other than their own - they necessarily aren’t even equipped to. If they had any actual integrity, decency or empathy, they wouldn’t have been able to do everything they did to win the competition for the position they now hold, and it would’ve gone to some other scheming, manipulating, self-serving psychopath.

And thus, we end up with something like this. Inevitably.

Wrong about what? I don’t even get what the point is supposed to be.

Are you saying that people transition from Linux to Windows? That seems obviously backwards.

Are you saying that Linux is female and Windows is male? That’s not even coherent.

What am I supposed to be trying to prove wrong?

Sort of.

More it’s just the way I’ve pretty much always been. Before I was even really aware of it, I apparently figured out that I couldn’t control the outside world but I could control how I reacted to it, so that was what I focused on. One could sort of say that I did it simply because it made sense to me, but even that makes it sound more conscious than it was. It’s more that it just never occurred to me to do things any other way.

It was only much later that I discovered that there was a philosophy called “stoicism” that advocated that.

“You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength.” - Marcus Aurelius

I recognize that the universe is so vast that it’s likely that life forms other than us exist in it, but that’s the extent of it.

I’ve seen no verifiable evidence that they in fact do, so I don’t “believe” that they do.

Really, I don’t “believe” in much of anything for which there is no verifiable evidence. I don’t even understand how that works - how it is that other people apparently do. It’s not a conscious choice or anything - it’s just appears that there’s a set of requirements that must be met before the position of “belief” is triggered inside my mind, and one of those requirements is verifiable evidence. Without that, the state of “believing” just isn’t triggered, and it’s not as if I can somehow force it, so that’s that.

As far as I can see, governments are comprised almost entirely of psychopaths, opportunists, charlatans and fools, so I see little likelihood that they possess concealed knowledge regarding any nominal extraterrestrial life. First, and most simply, if they did possess any such knowledge, it’s near certain that somebody would’ve blabbed something by now.

Beyond that though, I think it’s exceedingly unlikely that any alien life form capable of traveling interstellar distances would, on arriving on the Earth, seek out contact with a government, much less limit its contact to a government. If they’re that advanced, it can only be the case that they, in their own development, either never bought into the flatly ludicrous and clearly destructive idea of institutionalized authority or overcame it before it inevitably destroyed them, and in either case, I don’t see any reason why they would lend any credence to our mass delusion that this one subset of humanity forms a specially qualified and empowered elite that rightly oversees everyone else’s interests. That’s our delusion - not theirs.

Right, but it’s not a paradox - it’s a conundrum. It’s not just that the person saying it is part of the first group, but that they necessarily are.

Since people want to believe that they “know better,” there’s a strong urge to count oneself among the second group, which immediately places one in the first.

There are two kinds of people in the world - those who think there are two kinds of people in the world and those who know better.

What “entitlement?”

I don’t expect anyone to start a web site or service or to give me or anyone else access to it at all, much less for free.

I’m just making the very narrow point that when a company chooses to do all of that, and manages to make enough money to build a plush corporate headquarters on some of the most expensive real estate on the planet and pay its executives millions or even tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, then starts crying about not making enough money, that’s self-evident bullshit.

If anybody’s acting"entitled" in that scenario, it’s the greedy corporate weasels who spend billions on their own privilege, then expect us to cover their asses when they come up short.

I expect a wave of internet users to get upset and call paying for used services “enshittification”, because people don’t realise how much running these AI models actually costs.

I am so tired of this bullshit. Every time I’ve turned around, for the past thirty years now, I’ve seen some variation on this same basic song and dance.

Yet somehow, in spite of supposedly being burdened with so much expense and not given their due by a selfish, ignorant public, these companies still manage to build plush offices on some of the most expensive real estate on the planet and pay eight- or even nine-figure salaries to a raft of executive parasites.

When they start selling assets and cutting executive salaries, or better yet laying them off, then I’ll entertain the possibility that they need more revenue. Until then, fuck 'em.

I deliberately avoided having kids and I don’t have any particular existential dread, so I’m just sort of sitting back and bemusedly watching it all play out. I just read the latest bit about one or another obscenely wealthy and/or powerful blatant psychopath doing or saying something gibberingly insane and I marvel yet again at the fact that the world is run by literal lunatics and nobody seems to even notice.

And when it stops being cynically amusing, I shut it off and go do something else.

Money wins, every time.

And right there, you answered your own (presumably rhetorical) question.

The money people jumped on AI as soon as they scented the chance of profit, and that’s it. ALL other considerations are now secondary to a handful of psychopaths making as much money as possible.

Well yeah - it’s not an evil product. As an inanimate object, it can’t possess a moral quality.

Moral qualities are only rightly assigned to conscious beings - like, for example, corporate CEOs.

Or you could just not care so much.

If you post memes that are likely to offend someone somewhere, then there’s a risk that one of those someones is going to be a mod, and they’re going to delete it. And really, that’s just the way it goes.

Certainly you might prefer that they have explicit, precise and closely followed rules so you can accurately predict what they’ll do, but there’s really no requirement that they do so - if they want vague rules arbitrarily enforced, that’s their prerogative.

And really, what are you out if they do delete a post? It’s not like you paid for it or you have some sort of quota you have to meet. You just toss things out into the internet, and some of them float and others sink.

Firefox.

Seriously. Every app I’ve tried has come up short in one way or another. Lemmy is best in a browser and the best browser is Firefox.