uriel238

Cuba has made some inroads into mutualistic society. It's the primary reason the US has sanctioned it so long and now is thinking about colonizing.

That's disappointing.

We're seeing all the symptoms of civilization collapse. The United States empire has already stepped down from the sole superpower (China doesn't have the capacity to force project, but the US is losing its own capacity) and the corruption, the wealth disparity, the persecution of its own citizens, the dismantling of social institutions all point to the same kind of decline and fall that we've seen with Rome, or the Ottoman Empire or Great Britain.

But what scares me is the quantity of wealth concentrated at the top. To borrow a quote from the Guardian (correspondent Gabriel Zucman), At the height of the Gilded Age, around 1910, the four largest American fortunes owned wealth equivalent to 4% of US GDP. Today, that same tiny fraction of the population, the top 0.00001% – which now includes 19 households – could buy 14% of everything produced in a given year in the US.

Or as I think of it, a multi-billionaire can buy a major election and control a government. A trillionaire can buy all the elections and control all the governments. That scares the Hell out of me.

And that's before we confront the harsh reality of the climate crisis, mitigation of which the international community has only taken mild, non-committal action. Outside the climatology community, the public completely underestimates the severity of conditions when the temperature rises above +2°C, and it's very unlikely we're going to stop warming below that temperature. We're going to run out of water, and most of the human population will perish.

I'm not sure if any of these define a finish line, but there are multiple factors that certainly count as escatological, a cataclysmic end of an age.

The problem is the top is captured and has been for a very long time. The difference now is it's mask-off and has lost the capacity to pretend to be public serving.

As the history of labor has shown us, it is very hard to organize bottom-up without leadership getting compromised or killed.

The left-leaning part of Silicon Valley is the countless technicians, programmers and developers employed there, not the upper management.

Even in San Francisco and Berkeley, the C-Suite are strictly FOX News Republicans.

Einstein had it right. The way to teach people is to get them to want to learn.

We had this coming once a college education became a necessary credential in order to earn a living (and since then, not actually earn a living). Once it became a necessity for survival, people went to college not to learn but as an additional bureaucratic hoop.

AI cheating is only the most recent iteration in a long line of tried and true methods, including providing sexual favors for your professor, having your fraternity / sorority vouch for your character and heritage, or having wealthy parental units make a sizeable donation to your university's science department.

Once the university system survives the shock (which it might not, since civilization is mid-collapse), then academia can get back to teaching and developing knowledge for knowledge's sake, and not because it is a means to make people richer.

The one I heard was a fleet of Tesla self-driving taxis across the US by 2025.

Instead we have news reports of Teslas on autopilot killing people while the driver is distracted.

And yet the IPO of SpaceX was justified with the presumed future success of its space-based data center program.

In the days of Friendster and Myspace, I created a page on one of the other sites, whose name I can no longer remember. Then Facebook dominated and I just didn't want to go through the effort again to create a new one.

Then Facebook started getting creepy. I remember for a while it had the social games (I only remember Cow Clicker by Ian Bogost, which was a parody of other social mutual-clicking games.

At other times there were tie-ins to other franchises. Coupons you could only get through your Facebook account. Since I wasn't allowed to see anyone's pages without an account of my own, I was never enticed to track my friends that way.

Eventually, Facebook went more and more full evil, and I just watched from afar.

Ah, I see the confusion and misplaced a decimal point. Corrected.

In the aughts, I had accumulated about ~~$30~~ $30K in debt, but managed it through consolidation programs, and got it down to about 3%.

Then the subprime mortgage crisis happened, and my creditors said sorry, but we're fucking you over no matter what the contract says. Your interest rate is 12% and feel lucky we don't raise it again.

Apparently companies will do that. I didn't pay them at all and just waited seven years to wait out statute of limitations.

I've been imagining so, like in the Star Trek episode What Are Little Girls Made Of? in which the mad doctor has ma444stered the ability of making android duplicates of people, only its revealed in the end he's an android, himself.