henfredemars

I’m old enough to remember the hard drive shortages.

They literally don’t care if people buy them or not. Overwhelmingly profit is in the server and enterprise areas now.

Some people will still buy at those high prices and they are more than happy to stick with that small slice.

No wonder Nvidia is the world’s most valuable company.

We know. Problem is, a third of us thinks the solution is killing the other third and the rest can't be bothered. As the famous saying goes.

And so we have learned; he is indeed incompetent and unfit, and America has decided that fealty to the bitter end is most important value.

Have they tried addressing the cost of living through proven strategies like busting monopolies, instituting strong social safety nets, and securing the essentials of life like housing, education, and healthcare?

Or are we just going to talk about how it will have been inevitable because the ultra wealthy will have their care secure as it is?

When I feed the cat again because I wasn't sure if I already fed him (I did).

We absolutely have a plutocracy, not a democracy. We live in a system of government where money is the same as speech, votes, and power. Not human beings. The money votes and the money always wins. Money is represented above all else.

Capitalism easily leads to this exact situation. Some people believe that it's the inevitable result that capital erodes regulation, but I don't think it's necessarily so. It depends on whether the political system remains strong enough to represent the public interest instead of the concentrated interests of wealth. When democratic institutions are healthy, regulation can evolve alongside capital to preserve fairness and competition. It's our responsibility as voters to preserve it. But, when they weaken or become captured, capitalism naturally tilts toward monopolies and self-reinforcing power, which is the situations that we have today. It's very difficult to come back from that, so there's a massive and scary temptation to throw out the idea entirely and give communism a try.

I'm a pessimist. I think voters are too stupid and lazy to fix this problem until they are literally starving. I'm also a believe in that words should have meaning. Is capitalism the reason America is sick? Not exactly. It's a vulnerable system that like everything else has rotted to the core when you don't take care of your country.

I think the obvious and blatant dementia is a dead giveaway. It's incredibly sad that we'd even consider having such a person well into decline in a position of leadership. He should be in a home receiving compassionate end-of-life care.

Can the universe not also approximate? Why must it be an exact result whenever a rule is applied?

I feel our core problem today is concentration of wealth and power. I think many layman calls this concentration and abuse capitalism in the same way that many people call any kind of social service communism.

Now, I personally believe that this is the end result of capitalism due to regulatory capture, and that capitalism is inherently unstable without a resilient regulatory framework to keep the system working. Still, I’m not sure that the term capitalism is perfectly fit for our situation today. I like the concept of a free market, but we don’t have a free market. We have a market where the rules are set by the big players to their maximum advantage.

Extreme and rapidly accelerating wealth inequality will be the death of us if climate change doesn’t kill us first.

I take issue with completeness in a very similar way. For example, imagine for some reason that in the simulation it’s impossible to think about penguins. Let’s say that penguins are so logically incomprehensible that we cannot implement this.

The implementation of the simulation could simply trap any attempt to think about penguins and replace it with something else. We would be none the wiser. The simulation still works even if there are states that we can’t get to or are undefined.

It could be that reality itself isn’t entirely complete and defined everywhere. Who’s to say this isn’t one big dream and that the sky isn’t there if we all stopped looking?

There is no escape from Plato‘s cave.