They will have plenty of Saudi money to prevent that. Instead what you're going to see is more embrace, extend and extinguish.

You're going to get more buyouts and more small struggling studios snapped up and crushed.

You should learn a little bit about current politics. Our supreme Court overturned the decades-long president Roe v Wade citing a literal witchfinder general from the 1800s because they had absolutely no other case law to make it possible.

Our highest courts have been compromised and are now a fully owned subsidiary of the Republican party. They will rubber stamp using whatever bullshit they need to come up with

Let me guess you probably think America was founded as a Christian Nation or some bullshit?

When I point out that AI is a fundamentally antisocial technology because of its excessive water and electric use while destroying jobs in a society where you don't work you don't eat inevitably a shitload of people come out of the woodwork to tell me I'm being a Luddite and then start using the good old buggy whip thought terminating cliche.

Then along comes crap like this to remind us that we are rapidly descending into a techno feudal post-capitalist hellscape.

The socialists and the Communists have always said capitalism what eventually fall to whatever their preferred system was.

But what if there's a third option? An option that doesn't include you and me? Where we are relegated to the kind of lives native Americans had on the worst of the reservations before the casinos?

There's about 2,000 people in America with virtually unlimited money and power working towards that goal and automated policing and military is a big part of that.

Because he saw how much good it did for Bush Jr and he thinks that it can cinch his third term election. Honestly he's probably right.

Americans have very little understanding of politics. Last year right before the election the number one search on Google was "is Joe Biden running for president" . Biden had dropped out months ago...

I don't think the average American is going to understand just how bad a deal it's going to be when Trump runs for a third term. So it's not going to occur to them they shouldn't vote for trump. I mean for Christ's sake's Trump has 28 credible right accusations eight of which are against children. Americans are clearly not paying attention.

No. You can rip people off by making them work long hours for little or no pay. You can use work visa programs and steal people's passports so that you can force them to work your farm and that's okay. You can do tens of billions of dollars of wage theft and that's absolutely 110% okay.

But we get really uppity about these kind of minor little scams no matter who is doing them.

Pirates and emperors I guess. It's like how if a postal worker steals your mail we send the prison for 20 years but when a rich guy from Florida steals a few hundred million for Medicare you make him a senator.

The key is if you're going to rip people off you want to do it right in the middle, you want to do it in a complex way that people can't understand easily, you want to make sure along the way you are bribing people who can pardon you, and above all else you want to make sure you don't rip off any of the 2000 or so billionaires in the country

If you can manage all that then you are in like flynn. My advice would be to try and rip off the taxpayer. You can almost always get away with that as long as it's meeting the criteria above.

Is that I have come to realize they are preparing to destroy capitalism and replace it with a new kind of feudalism with themselves as the Kings.

Don't think any of us ever imagined capitalism falling to neo feudalism instead of something like socialism or something. Even most fascist regimes tended towards capitalism like China does. So the idea of the trade of goods and services for money with the goal of people obtaining and using capital fundamentally breaking down not from the bottom but from the top is something I don't think people can really wrap their heads around.

Heck I have a hard time doing it the sentence above is just terrible

That's too bad it had an absolutely amazing sound chip. There really wasn't anything else like it on the market for quite a while. Especially at that price point. I think it was one of the first wave table devices.

The problem here is that we are all being forced to compete with China in a global race to the bottom.

What if instead of that we focused on the health and well-being of American citizens?

I don't mean American first bullshit nationalism nonsense. We don't have to close our borders or anything like that to make things better.

The only thing I'm talking about is ending the race to the bottom we have been trapped in since Nixon opened up the globe and the factory automation got going in the '80s.

Every year there is less work thanks to automation and every year we have to work harder because we are literally competing for work at this point.

Switching to a single pair of healthcare system like watch France and Germany have would save us about half a trillion dollars a year. We could take those savings and use it to pay off our foreign debt in about 15 years.

But we don't want to do that because it would wreck the value of the us dollar. We want countries to hold a bunch of our debt because that artificially boosts the value of our currency which artificially lowers the cost of buying goods from other countries.

It would be one thing if we got a bunch of good middle class jobs by having those goods manufactured here but we automate it 80 or 90% of those jobs away over the last 45 years. So we don't get the jobs but we do get the pollution and the increased cost to electricity and water.

Manufacturing in America needs to be the really high-end stuff like expensive medical equipment or expensive machinery that requires a lot of skill to build so that you get at least a handful of high skilled jobs and a lot of profit from selling that machinery overseas.

There's no benefit to workers from having consumer goods manufactured in your country anymore. Stuff like coffee pots and TVs and whatnot are almost entirely built by machines except where slave labor exists.

I mean I guess there is one advantage. If you like the comforting knowledge that somebody is a slave and has it worse than you because you measure your quality of life based on how much worse everybody else has it then bring back manufacturing jobs by bringing back defacto slavery seems like a good idea. The same with bringing back child labor.

That's a uniquely unpleasant thought process of the extreme right wing that I understand intellectually but I find morally repugnant for what I wish was obvious reasons.

It's money supply. We're talking about nation states here. When the government hands out money in the form of debt it creates that money out of thin air.

You can do that as long as there is economic activity backing that money and if you take that money and you actually invest it then you get that economic activity.

So for example back in 1980 when the Democrats gave Ronald Reagan his military spending in exchange for 1 trillion dollars of infrastructure spending that was a solid investment.

That infrastructure spending built entire cities and reams and reams of cheap houses that kept housing affordable so that Americans could own homes instead of being the target of rent seeking private equity firms allowing the country to build wealth and prosperity.

The problem is virtually all the debt now is just there to shift money to those 2000 or so billionaires.

That doesn't generate any economic activity to speak of. Billionaires don't take that money and build new things they take that money and buy existing things and Jack of prices using Monopoly power.

Rent seeking is always more profitable than actually building competitive businesses because instead of doing something new that might fail you are buying something existing that people already want or need. So long as you can buy up everything or get your friends to go in with you to do it you can really jack up prices. This is why we created antitrust laws back in the early 1900s...

Basically you can't keep transferring money and power to 2,000 people out of 340 million and not have severe consequences for those 340 million.

Somehow pissed off China I forget exactly how. One of the players said something to Chinese did not approve of. Probably something about democracy.

The player was forced to keep their mouth shut.

Nixon sold us on opening up China with the idea that we would influence them to become a democracy. Instead they influenced us to become an autocracy.

It's not China winning it's corporate capitalism winning. When people are afraid of globalism that's what they're afraid of whether they know it or not. The problem isn't a shadowy illuminati it's mega corporations and the fascistic connection between them and government.

Remember a core part of fascism is the blending of corporate and state power.

But American debt is both a positive thing and a necessity for your quality of life. And let me do a classic Ronald Reagan I'm explaining and losing now to tell you why...

So 80% of American debt is owned by americans. We literally owe it to ourselves. This is the equivalent of you loaning yourself money. Only it's a little different than that because you're not a nation state.

When America loans itself money that is effectively creating money supply. That is perfectly fine as long as that money supply is going to the general good and the general public.

Where it becomes a problem is where it is used to finance tax cuts for billionaires which is what it's being done since 2016 at least. That's a problem not because of the debt itself but because billionaires get all this extra cash they use to buy up competitor businesses and then Jack up prices using Monopoly power. But again the debt itself isn't the problem it's the power and leverage we are giving to approximately 2,000 people.

Now let's talk about the international debt. You want that. You want it very badly.

That's because the national debt internationally, which is only about 8 trillion or 20% of our total debt, is leveraged to maintain the high value of the US dollar relative to other currencies.

That high value lets us get trillions of dollars of cheap imports for a fraction of their actual economic value. It's basically a form of economic imperial tribute.

Everyone thinks about cheap TVs and coffee pots but nobody thinks about the hundreds of billions of dollars of steel and lumber and finished goods and industrial products we bring in. Those products are often used by manufacturing companies to produce advanced medical devices, cars and heavy industry equipment like planes and heavy construction equipment that we sell on to other countries.

All this is possible because we wrap countries up into our debt and make our currency and our country as a whole more valuable.

This is a complex almost colonial system (oops just triggered some people) that is why you have been able to maintain any semblance of a middle-class existence while automation devours middle-class jobs for the last 45 years.

Look at the value of the US dollar since the trade war started and the national sales tax hit and you will see it plummeting. That is bad news for you because that's going to make prices skyrocket. You haven't seen it yet because companies saw the trade war coming and stocked up on materials. They are running out and you're going to start really seeing it soon. And you have minimum three and a half more years before we can even try to start fixing this mess.

But everything above is way too complicated for most people to really get their heads around and like I said when you are explaining you are losing so we are well and truly fucked.

So jobs was directly involved in the Apple 2gs in particular it's pricing strategy.

It's generally agreed that jobs set the price of the 2gs way too high unnecessarily high even because he wanted to get in on the Macintosh project.

The damage he did sabotaged the entire project and it wouldn't surprise me if that's partially why he fell out with apple. If you actively sabotage an entire product line for your company that's not going to go over well. Even if it turns out long term to make you super rich and powerful.

Jobs was extremely clever I'll give everybody that. But it wasn't the kind of clever that makes people's lives better. The only reason Apple wasn't making crap on cream toast back then is it jobs did one good thing which he used a bunch of free software in the form of BSD to form the basis of his operating system. So he had a good solid base to build off of. The really high quality of powerpc chips at the time to help him out. They were expensive but thanks to jobs is marketing shops around making cute computers that looks good in a dorm you could get away with that.

But none of this actually made computing better. If anything long-term it's made it substantially worse because apple is just a company that makes expensive boutique toys. I guess you kind of sort of get a Unix workstation out of them so there is that. But what you don't get is a viable competitor to wintel. Since Apple exists in a completely different niche.

That stinks of obvious political corruption. I don't have $850 million dollars to bet but I think if I did it would be a fair bet to put it on this just being a slush fund for somebody's brother in law or the equivalent.

South Korea has a notoriously corrupt upper caste. If you remember that silly little Gangnam style song that was actually about their upper class elites and how terrible they were.

The square root of 4 is not in fact the American declaration of independence. Who knew?

Also stuff like this is a reminder that most education systems are not there to make good citizens and to educate and expand but to sort out who is most useful for companies to make money off of.

The problem with that is you get a lot of societal fallout from neglecting higher education. The kind of stuff us nerds have a bad tendency to sneer at...