Billionaires and autocrats have sabotaged both systems. We are going to have to figure out a third way or we are going to descend into techno feudalism and that is going to suck for everybody but about 5000 people on the entire planet .

if you are reading this you are not one of those 5,000

Is socialism? Almost the entire world is against them except Russia that uses them occasionally as a thorn in the side of the United States.

America's gearing up for war with them. Prior to that we had cut them out of the rest of the world and all of the global markets.

So I don't think Venezuela which is under active attack by every capitalist nation in the world is a fair representative of alternatives to capitalism.

I do think we live in the real world though and we can't pretend that socialism works even if the only reason it doesn't work is that billionaires, who are themselves vehemently opposed to capitalism, will sabotage it making it impossible to properly implement.

The important thing to remember is billionaires do not support capitalism either. So capitalism is going to get sabotaged by billionaires too and therefore capitalism is not an alternative to billionaires.

We are going to have to figure out a third way. Because both capitalism and socialism have failed us.

There is no fix besides austerity and suffering.

That's because rich people don't want to have to spend the money to solve problems that are mostly your problem and not theirs.

You need to get out of the habit, a habit let's remember you were conditioned into by the wealthy, of assuming that nothing can ever get better and that good things aren't possible anymore.

That habit is an extreme and toxic form of conservativism.

Technically they can't ban them but they can't throw you in prison for using one. And they can throw people in prison for running them of course.

This is the ultra wealthy and the ruling elite moving the take over the last form of media where regular people can access information without their consent.

But hey, the girl who hands you your coffee says Merry Christmas now so that's a fair trade right?

And if you don't understand what that means that's the problem.

We are not slow, we are just "bubble-aware".

> USENET was never this bad

Um, not sure I concur. I encountered nasty trolls and doxing there.

If we start losing a war we will resemble them.

...paid off. Our Bribeocracy in action.

We were actively hiding the cost of college by giving colleges direct Cash subsidies from state and federal governments. They were passing those cash subsidies onto the students in the form of lower tuition. I do not know how much simpler I can explain this to you.

If you look at the actual operating expenses of colleges they have not increased substantially in the last 40 years. You will find some increases because there is more technology. Yes 70 years ago colleges did not need computers or advanced medical equipment to train doctors on. They also didn't need staff to keep all those computers and all that equipment running. So there is some increase due to do technology.

But that increase is relatively small. And can easily be accounted for by the new technology.

Meanwhile all of those subsidies are gone.

Suppose what we should have done is when you went to college we should have handed you a check and had you walk it to the finance office so that you would understand what the cost of college actually was instead of hiding that from you.

The reason we didn't do that is we were fighting a war with people who pretended to be socialists. So you needed to get socialism because that made America stronger country that could actually stand up to those enemies but we didn't want you to get comfortable with socialism so we hid socialism from you.

We did the same thing with the housing market where trillions of dollars were spent on infrastructure to subsidize baby boomer houses so that they could actually afford to buy houses. We also heavily subsidized the loans they got for those houses.

But if you really want to piss off somebody over 50 try explaining to them that they received a massive amount of benefit from socialism.

Everything is a grift. Capitalism is breaking down, or rather it's being broken down by monopolies and billionaires. So people have to try to find money any way they can and since you can't do it the traditional way of competing in a free market, because there is no free market anymore, you have to try to grift your way to a living.

Ay Ay...

Now I interview graduates who canâ(TM)t explain what a HAVING clause does in SQL

I avoid using HAVING when possible, it's screwy to troubleshoot, especially when dealing with nulls. Instead I break the query into multiple sub-queries (CTEs) via WITH statements.

That's DOGE's side of the story. Many employees found out they had to use their personal card for work travel and then file paperwork for reimbursement. That extra paperwork is created and processed on tax-payer's dime.

Cut-first-and-think-later...or quit.

If the crypto pop coincides with the AI pop, 1930's 2.0.

...cheap Russian oil. Profit!