One just has to accept the Leech of China, a.k.a. the CCP. And you have to accept their boneheaded economic decisions like creating a housing bubble that crashed. The CCP officials are corrupt in a pay-to-play system.

Come to think of it, this latter is also true now of the U.S. I guess for all el Bunko's whining about China, he and his rich friends, now cabinet secretaries, were actually taking notes.

And/or demographic collapse.

Jesus sees you.

You don't just take away privacy or decent wages or job security or healthcare all at once. You got to boil that frog.

Here in America it took us 65 years. This whole mess we're in started when Barry Goldwater lost. The corporate wing of the Republican party formed in alliance with the racists and the religious extremists. We were explicitly warned about it but we ignored the warnings.

It was supposed to say keep workers in line.

So the underlining premise is that we can't just explore for the sake of exploring because nobody's going to pay for it.

We have to colonize just like we did hundreds of years ago because in order to get the kings, well the CEOs now but they're basically the same thing, to fund the whole thing we need to offer them the possibility of a reward. A payoff for them.

I suppose we could fundamentally reorganize our entire civilization so that we did not need the blessings of kings to do cool stuff but I think we are nowheres near ready for that.

Not the way the .com bubble did.

The main purpose of all these llms is to replace White collar jobs. Everything else is just leading up to that.

So even when the industry shakes out and your left with two maybe three big players they're still going to need all that electricity to replace those jobs.

So we're not going to get any cheap capacity and infrastructure out of them because they're going to be using it.

Financially a bubble might burst when the industry shakes out everybody but the big boys, but it's not going to free up a bunch of electricity. It just means there will be fewer players and a bunch of people caught holding the bag on companies that never made any money.

Um... A good buddy of mine is a guitarist and pretty heavily into music and was using Spotify for ages. The only reason they switch to YouTube music is because 99% of what he wants is there and quality is fine and he's already paying for YouTube premium to get rid of the ads.

But if you're into music there's lots of stuff on YouTube music and Spotify that's basically unobtainium even if you're going to sail the seven seas which in America is a high risk endeavor since if your ISP catches you they will permanently ban you and usually you only have one maybe two isps if you're lucky.

And the venues have been bought up and you've got stuff like Ticketmaster to deal with.

Over and over and over again the problem is market consolidation allowing big corporations to fuck over anyone that works for a living including working musicians.

I think the problem is back in the day when we had those giant factories with tens of thousands of employees it was really obvious to everybody when they were getting screwed in mass and it was easy for us to organize. We also had the churches which the billionaires noticed we were using to organize and have gradually replaced with mega charges run by crooks like Jerry Falwell

Now we're all kind of spread to the four corners of the Earth as individuals. And it's also super tempting to become obsessed with being a badass individual who don't need no help and don't need no organization. It just plain feels bad to know that you have to rely on your neighbors for help.

So it's easy to divide and conquer us. We're all getting screwed in individual ways

It's a pipe dream that libertarians came up with to try and preserve capitalism in the face of automation devouring jobs faster than technology can create new jobs.

By itself Ubi just ends up with monopolies sucking the money right back out of people and that's if you can get it through which you probably can't because there is nothing that pisses people off more than giving somebody who isn't working money.

You can explain and explain and explain but is Ronald Reagan said if you're explaining you're losing.

Giving people who don't work money feels bad. It makes you feel like a sucker if you're one of the people still working.

I don't know how you overcome that and I don't know what you do with all the automation we are doing. We have been automating away middle class jobs since the eighties with close to 70% of the middle class jobs eaten by it and we're about to do another huge round of automation. The only thing that's kept our economy from collapsing is we had two major bubbles, the .com bubble in the housing bubble and those are both over and AI isn't really the same kind of bubble because it doesn't generate a shit ton of weird jobs doing stuff or a bunch of economic activity that filters down to regular people. It's just more automation that eliminates jobs.

I honestly don't know what we're going to do. I think what's going to happen is we're going to hit 25% permanent unemployment and then we're going to have a world war and then we're going to give the nuclear launch codes to religious lunatics and they're going to use them thinking that they're protected by God and then well, game over man game over.

But Ubi is not the solution. You won't be able to get it through and if by some miracle you do the money can easily be extracted right back out of people without a shitload of additional programs which Ubi is designed to eliminate.

Back in the days of Unionization companies created management to keep an eye on employees and make sure the company came out ahead all the time.

Over the years unions got busted and broken starting with Ronald reagan. Widespread factory automation meant that you no longer had tens of thousands of individual workers at a single site who could readily organize. Also the corporations moved in and replaced small local churches that could be used for local organization with big mega charges that they controlled with their mega church buddies like Jerry Falwell.

Without the unions they didn't need management the same way to bust unions and keep workers in liworkershey started using management as regular line workers. If you're paying attention your boss has been taking on more regular work year after year and less management work.

But the company still needs somebody to make sure that the company's interests are put before yours. That's HR.

HR is the next evolution and making your life worse and making billionaires lives... Well I'm not going to say better because they're already as good as they can possibly get but just plain letting them have more money in power at your expense.

Of course all of this triggers the fuck out of a ton of libertarian types because they don't like the think about all the systems in the world. Folks want to believe that they can be tremendously successful just with their own two hands and maybe a little bit of brain work and that they don't need anybody else. It's something you pick up when you're a teenager and most people never grow out of it.

Pointing that out also triggers people.

You were talking about yourself as well. I also don't see how this involving other posters changes the point I'm making.

I would expect just about everyone thinks their posts don't deserve to be marked down though. At least most of the time.

Also, is your post being marked down really the end of the world? I certainly get modded down on posts that I feel shouldn't have been modded down, such things are just a part of any kind of moderation system though. Any time moderation comes into play there will be inconsistencies and instances where individuals disagree with the choices being made. It's just the nature of things.

I don't know what to tell you, I do well with this in my own experience when it's applicable. While paying with a card is mildly more convenient I prefer to go to these few spots that are cash only because I'd rather save the money.

Also, where I'm finding this value isn't chain stores, it's small independent operations. You'll never see this type of thing from major chains as they have bargaining power with card companies so pay significantly less in fees. It's the small independents where there's value to this.

On a side note, what kind of chain differs like that on payment methods between locations? One of the major points of a retail chain is consistency which is why you're not seeing the prices change but that should also mean consistent pay options. Seems like some manager or franchise owner is trying to milk some extra money from their customers in your case. I'd contact the corporate end of their business.

I get what you're saying but I don't think there are many places in America sitting on large amounts of surplus power.