9am-9pm, 6 days a week.

I’m a 10am-4pm, 4 days a week kind of person myself, however.

It’s the same bullshit pushed by anyone exploiting labor for their own gain.

Ultimately, you can’t blame predatory psychopaths for being predatory psychopaths. You can only blame those who let them get away with it.

And that’s all of us :)

(Oh and when I say let them get away with it, I mean: celebrate them, make them into statues, teach all of our children that only money and power matters and do whatever it takes to become just like them, in exchange for all humanity and dignity we could have had instead)

It’s all the same shit. The patterns are so simplistic and easy to identify. That is what made me lose hope. There are just enough people desperate to blindly follow a leader, any leader, that we, as humanity, will never make progress. I don’t understand how, evolutionarily, it made sense to make a democratically significant amount of people incapable of individual thought, but this is how it has transpired and that will be the end of us.

I don’t think he thought along lines of good or bad or evil at all. He noticed that he had a knack for firing people up, first in conversations, then in speeches, etc. Like any power hungry ego maniac he simply kept doing it and kept succeeding through an endless string of insanely unlikely circumstances. I’d bet a good 30% of the population would follow the exact same path, given those circumstances / opportunities.

He wanted infinite power, because he was likely infinitely afraid of the world. He never once thought about what’s good or bad. He only thought about how to get more power and how to maintain it. The inevitable conclusion to that game is always world domination with a bunch of genocide mixed in. You can see the patterns arising everywhere at the moment.

I’ve always drawn the dividing line between people who have to work and people who choose to work. The latter can spend every waking moment of their lives ensuring that the former never, ever become one of them. And it sure looks they are succeeding. If the survival of mankind hinges on rich people willingly giving up ANY of their wealth at all, then mankind will perish. To a rich person, giving up wealth is no different than someone suggesting to you that they need to cut your nose, ears and limbs off to save humanity. You’d say no to that as well. In fact, you’d do anything to avoid this scenario. And while you’re slaving away for a minimum wage that should be $25, and quibble over trans rights, the rich laugh into their fists, watching as you still don’t seem to have realised that the bargaining power would be in your hands if you could just unite for a fucking second.

That seems like good news. Interesting to see US drug policy being more lenient than the UK in many instances.

I have to sometimes dual boot into windows 11 and it’s pretty meh. Will directstorage be exclusive to win11? Then that might be a reason to keep it around.

Excellent point. I completely agree and should have perhaps put more emphasis on the fact that these practices are of course egregious and the onus should not just be on the user. There should be more public awareness of these privacy nightmares, however. Somehow people need to learn to start caring about this stuff, because if nobody uses Facebook, Facebook doesn’t have the power to act the way it does.

Has that ever been independently verified? I remember the WhatsApp founders quit over FB policy to use messages for advertising, but perhaps they’ve changed course on that. You’re right, the metadata alone would be insanely valuable.

I’ve worked in advertising for a decade and, while on the one hand, the industry indeed tries to track your every move, it’s rarely done well or in a coordinated fashion. Ever wonder why it’s still not possible to switch off ads for products you’ve already bought? Online advertising is mostly blind spam, which is why you will be advertised the thing you’ve just bought ad nauseam. If they had these ultra-accurate profiles of everyone, they’d advertise you something you haven’t bought. Using a basic adblocker instantly kills 99% of an advertiser’s ability to publicly gather your data. It gets more complicated in the walled gardens: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft etc. have an unbelievable amount of information about you, but they don’t willingly share this. They use it to milk you within their walled gardens (do note, that in order to avoid Meta, you cannot use Threads, Instagram, any of their hardware, Facebook or WhatsApp).

Ultimately, it’s still your choice whether you let them surveil you and it turns out people give these rights up willingly.

If you have an Alexa, it’s your fault that Amazon can spy on everything your family says. If you’ve given WhatsApp your mobile number, then it’s your fault that Facebook can read and analyse everything you’ve said to anyone on WhatsApp, connected to a near-perfectly unique ID against your name.

It is up to the users to not willingly provide this information. Trying to do this the regulatory way is all well and good, but it takes decades and the industry moves faster than that. And many countries don’t care at all anyway.

You simply have to give up this dream of corporate ultra-convenience. You have to decide to live a slightly harder life: Linux instead of windows, open source instead of proprietary. Mastodon instead of Twitter, Lemmy instead of Reddit, etc etc

(Some reasons) Why people vote for right wing populists:

• billionaires are above the law
• be it a pandemic, recession, whatever, billionaires profit from all crises
• there are two strata in society: people who have to work and people who choose whether to work. So long as the latter exists and invests all their time into ensuring that the former will forever be the vast majority of society, people will protest vote
• worse, the billionaires pay millionaires to tell thousandaires what the various classes in society are and who the ‘real’ enemy is and it will always be foreigners or the gays or some BS like that (an enemy that’s always simultaneously infinitely strong and weak)
• there’s billionaires in the first place

(I’m well aware that other things can be reasons, too, like perceived loss of living standards, increased political corruption etc. But honestly, I think it’s all down to rich people fucking things up…see below for some proposed fixes)

Approaches that could fix this (good luck trying that in the arch-neoliberal EU):

• ALL wealth above X amount simply gets taken from you. I know it’s complicated with shares in companies etc. But I’m sure where there’s a will there’s a way. Cap wealth at €100mil or whatever
• inheritance tax becomes 99% above £1million
• remuneration ratios: CEOs cannot earn more / hold more shares than 10x more than the lowest earning employee in the company. This has to include subsidiaries and 3rd parties, otherwise companies will just hire other companies to get around this

The above and the fallout from it, would instantly free up money for public services, free education and healthcare and eradicate homelessnes. You wouldn’t need a UBI, if public services were good enough and well funded.

Technically I’m far more radical in my opinions and think that housing should be declared a human right and all drugs legalised and all those fancy things, but honestly, it feels we have more pressing matters at hand, namely, inequality. Until that gets fixed, we can’t really progress as a society.

My main worry here being that it can’t be done. I simply don’t see how, as a society, we will ever gain the cohesion to implement decisive action against the ruling classes. They have become untouchable and would rather burn the whole thing down than give an inch.

The article doesn’t mention longevity problems with perovskite cells. I wonder if that’s been overcome as part of this research.