It's obviously a shame that my primitive level of understanding gets me paid - with that terrible imaginary fiat currency, no less - for designing and creating financial software. Quite possibly YOUR money flows through my code, so be afraid! I do not, of course, claim to be an economist, but I do know what money is, and how it is created, distributed, and destroyed.

With that said, please understand that my comments are not intended to be definitive nor even instructional, merely amusing. Apparently I've failed, so I will crawl back under my imaginary rock. Good day, sir/madam/other!

Certainly! I'm imagining it flowing into your non-physical bank account even as we speak! ;)

So, what I learn here is that imaginary coins valued in imaginary fiat money are now worth less imaginary money than they were at some point in the past. Some companies traded some of their imaginary fiat money for a different imaginary currency, and the relative values shifted opposite to what they hoped. You can probably imagine the size of my imaginary tears.

Let's all remember that actual value resides in tangible goods which can be used to provide for real human needs, like food, water, shelter, the creation and transportation of the above, physical security, the human labor required to provide for the above, and hopefully, while we have "civilization", things which enrich our minds like education, and forms of art. Maybe I'm missing a few things, but I imagine you understand my point. Everything else is "valuable" only in the sense that someone is willing to trade something for it. You accept money for your labor or your goods in the hope that someone will be willing to trade you things of actual value in exchange for this money stuff that you can't eat. When you are trading imaginary things for other imaginary things, the "value" is a mutual agreement to perpetuate an illusion.

Oops, I hope I didn't just crash the global economy.

I second this motion. Can we take a vote?

Political parties' honesty should always be questioned, and NEVER trusted as the One True Source. Especially when they claim otherwise.

Willie was just doing a cover version.

1. The current set of people calling themselves "conservative" in the USA are not. Fascist populist authoritarianism is not conservative. If you object to the term "Fascism" go look up the list of characteristics of fascism and evaluate the current movement and its leadership according to them. It's not a 100% match, only about 90-95%, give or take. Spade is a spade. Duck quacks. Fascists are fascist.
2. The leaders (political, cultural, and financial) of the above mentioned movement are not trying to prevent facts from reaching the general public. They are trying, with considerable success, to prevent facts from reaching their power base, at least in undistorted form.
3. Traditional media - a loose term indeed - is, on average, fairly close to center, as measured by unbiased means. Individual outlets have their biases, but they all hew pretty close to verifiable fact, even when they are selective in the facts they present. They only look like they are leaning away from you when your own point of view is leaning heavily - in any direction. Just ask any far lefties about how traditional media leans, you'll find your opinion mirrored.
4. Social Media is an even looser term, and contains great quantities of subsets leaning in any direction you care to imagine, and is the primary breeding ground for extremism on the right, left, up, down, spinwise, antispinwise, or any other direction.
5. Hollywood reflects the society which purchases their products. Ponder on that a while. Actors, directors, and other creatives do tend more often to lean to the liberal, but that has been the case throughout history, as conservatism is by definition the antithetical balancing force to creativity. However, Hollywood survives by selling products, and must appeal to their market.
6. Voting fraud in the USA at present is a tiny set of statistical noise with as yet no evidence to indicate it has in the last several decades changed an election result outside of tiny local elections, and even those cases are rare indeed. Many other countries have laws and regulations that encourage or require voting, and make it easy to do so, again with limited evidence of fraudulent results. Conversely, it is common as can be for election fraud to be perpetrated by entrenched political powers who restrict voting and make it difficult to do, or make the process opaque and easily manipulated or faked. One could readily surmise that elections need more protection from politicians than they do from voters. Election integrity is most threatened by politicians who want to control the results, whether by voter suppression, packing and cracking, propaganda campaigns, or outright violence.

That hybrid was what I was doing before the pandemic, and probably where I'll end up again, although I envision a little more home and a little less office. I miss seeing my people at work, because I like them, but in terms of work and productivity, we're doing as well or better with everyone at home. More than half of my co-workers are in different time zones anyway, so very little has changed in that regard.

This. My company had its best and most productive year ever during the pandemic, and continued hiring new staff to keep up with the demand. We were kicking butt in development, in sales, in support, with everyone working from home. While the offices are opening back up, nobody is in a rush to force people back in - there's no evidence to suggest it's needed or even desirable. I know there are lots of situations that need common location, but pegs and holes are not all shaped alike.

Why does it work for us? Because we are doing work that can be done from anywhere with good internet, we already had the infrastructure in place to handle it because "everyone working from home" was always part of our disaster preparedness plan anyway, and we only hire highly motivated self-starters in the first place, and we treat each other as respected human beings, not "resources to be managed". Long before the pandemic we all took our laptops home at night in case we had an idea that needed some R&D in the middle of the night, or a customer needed help at any hour, or fire, flood, or disease took the office offline. In fact, having a capability to work from anywhere is required and periodically tested as per those disaster plans, and it has paid off during hurricanes, blizzards, and pandemics already.

When the cost to manufacture and distribute a good reaches effectively zero, the only way to make money off of distributing it is to create artificial scarcity through threat of violence. (A.K.A. force of law)

I've been watching the old-style recording industry go through its death and rebirth throes for decades now. It's an interesting study in the power of entrenched money to corrupt government, law, and economics, at least for a time.

Eventually the fact that copying and distributing a handful of megabytes of information adds zero value will get rid of the dead weight, but it sure takes a while.

Artists create, producers & engineers turn that creation into a thing that can be shared or sold, marketers and graphic artists help with promotion, services sell or stream the information and make access & discovery convenient and enjoyable, and lots of other folks have helping hands in the process. All add value, and can be monetized. Sending the bits over the wire, not so much, at least not on the individual unit scale.

Remember, music and making a living through making music existed for many centuries before "recording" existed. The vast industry creating and selling physical recording media was a brief blip in history. It'll be interesting seeing how the next century shakes this out.

Four things:

1. I agree with you on the general principles of liberty and the responsibility we each carry to defend liberty. We also have a co-equal responsibility to decide on the appropriate amount (or lack) of safety to be provided by our society.

2. Salesforce has and should have the liberty to decide what sort of business will be conducted using their licensed or contracted services. Others have the liberty to choose whether to do business with Salesforce. Caveat emptor.

3. The US Second Amendment was poorly and ambiguously worded, although it seems to have made sense in its contemporary context. It is in bad, bad need of rewriting to make clear its intent and limitations in current context, whatever the US people - not corporations nor lobbying groups - wish (in aggregate) that to be.

4. Liberty and safety are competing ideals, and have to be balanced. In any society made up of more than one person, you can't have the full measure of both. The rules of various societies are at some level a compromise between the two. That's why Franklin's famous quotation rightly bears the qualifying adjective "essential". It is up to all of us to collectively decide what "essential" means. Are "evil black guns" essential? In what contexts? Is Salesforce essential? When the freedoms of two parties are at odds, which should prevail? If your answer fits on a bumper sticker or in a tweet, I can almost guarantee that it is either idiotically wrong, or terrifically incomplete.

Current:
The Dark Forest, by Cixin Liu, translated to English by Joel Martinsen (10% done, so far excellent)

Recent:
the Dark Tower cycle (all), Stephen King
2312, Kim Stanley Robinson
Speak, Louisa Hall (I recommend this one highly)
The Annihilation Score, Charles Stross (recommended)

Up next:
My annual trip through The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and probably The Children of Hurin and a few other of Christopher Tolkien's contributions to his father's legacy.

I guess this is a meta-post about the posts I see here.

I find it disturbing how common it is for people to respond to an action or statement that upsets them by assigning a label to the person who made that statement or action, and then use that label as an excuse to dismiss the value of the person, thus making it permissible to ignore their ideas without consideration, deny them the privilege of making a case for their point of view, or even express a wish for harm or perhaps commit direct or indirect harm against that person.

In my experience, every person is different, and can wear a lot of different labels, and even conflicting labels, at different points in time. Much, perhaps most, of this labeling is an exercise in laziness and unwillingness to engage with the ideas or actions themselves, granting the person full person-hood and equal inherent worth.

Maybe we need a label for people who do this, so we can dismiss and ignore them because they are not part of our in-group. I think "human" will do.

All you humans, get off my lawn.

And stop dismissing people because you think they belong to some imaginary group that you or someone else invented to stick them in, whether it's "SJWs", "Illuminati", "Libruls", "Deplorables", "Welfare Queens", or what have you. Engage with the ideas, recognize that you don't know everything, but you do know something, and contribute to the conversation without trying to dictate to everyone else. /rant

"It won't work just because you say so. In fact it will fail, because I say so."

Change, it's going to come. It won't be very predictable, other than in a "picking the lottery numbers" sort of way.

UBI or some variant is interesting, and I look forward to the results of various experiments underway. Probably it will have problems, as do all human endeavors. Industrial revolution style wage labor is probably not going to last, though.

Personally, I'd prefer to see an outcome where everybody gets to eat and have some fun and freedom rather than a dog-eat-dog competition for the last scraps left after the ever-shrinking capitalist oligarchy skims off the last of the wealth created by human labor and moves on to watching the rest of us starve as their robots tend their fields and usher us sharecroppers onto the barren reservation. Or some such dystopian badness.

Not if it pays the mortgage and feeds my kids.