AI is some sort of technology, whoever develops this technology better wins something supposedly. Governments have nothing to do with this, technology doesn't belong to the governments.

we are talking about different things. You are talking about class division, all of this, I am talking about a person who does not have to work and yet he does it because he wants to, yes, but personally for him there is nothing to be gained except more headache, it is not about earning more, it is about doing something with yourself.

I am saying that doing something is an important part of living, doing something useful, where you feel useful, this is what this example shows.

Certainly, if you worked as an office cleaner most of your life, probably you will not be missing that work if you were able to get a pension and stop working, but I think you will still be missing the entire aspect of being useful in a wider sense of the word.

I think what makes us people is desire to be useful, doesn't matter how much money you make. I think people who do not have that desire are actually less than developed people.

My point is that a guy with all the money still chooses to do it, shows that people lose themselves when they have nothing to do that involves more than just enjoyment.

Just shows that there is no amount of money that replaces some sort of meaning in one's life. Bezos will treat any business correctly, obviously he will be looking for maximum efficiency, which is not easy to do when you are a billionaire, after all, any issues that can be sold by throwing money at it he can really solve this way, which may be the wrong approach for a new business that needs to become useful by standing on its own 2 legs.

But it is just interesting to observe, a guy with all the money and access, he still wants to spend time working rather than enjoying yet another sunny day on one of his yachts.

People were not born voluntarily, once alive we mostly don't die voluntarily. We won't stop voluntarily because it would be akin to dying voluntarily. We have to accept the fact that we are not in fact the Borg, we don't have one hive mind.

People are only annoyed because this is Apple.

If a clothing brand like Ann Taylor made an ugly $250 phone purse nobody here would bat an eye.

This particular thing has only been pushed recently, but various different visions of "interactive TV" has been a Thing for a very long time.

People were talking about it back in the 50s, probably earlier. But the earliest deployment in the US of something plausibly called interactive TV was Qube in 1977.

There's a parallel universe in which the US ended up with a cable-TV-based version of Minitel.

Our modern Western economies are messed up.

But even before modern economics, inflation was a fact of life.
See what a house sold for in 1850 vs. 1900 vs. 1950 vs. now.

The modern era of economics started with unpegging of paper currency from gold started this cascade of events.
From that point, money was worth what the country as a whole produced.

And we have this continued growth imperative, otherwise it is called a recession.

That is why people not spending money is 'bad' in the view of modern economics.
Because spending money goes into other people's jobs.
If everyone sits on their money, then goods will not be sold, and no services will be delivered, making other people's jobs' vanish.

But it is what we have, until something better emerges.
Just like democracy ...

We are told that "inflation is good" by economists -- for me, it's nothing but a tax. Asking an economist whose very paycheck comes from inflationary measures is same as asking a christian Bible scholar whether the Bible is trustworthy.

Inflation is not a tax, despite many holding onto this notion.
Some inflation is good, when it is no more than 1-2% per year.

In our current Western economies that are based on continued growth, if there is deflation, then people will defer spending since the money they have today will have more buyer power tomorrow.

Japan is such a case: they have been in deflation for decades. Read up on the effects that made on society.

Another issue with no inflation is that there is no borrowing costs, and some investors will abuse this to gobble up real estate (e.g. some investors bought high rise rental buildings, then raised the rent, making it unaffordable for regular people.
Other people will buy homes, and the unnatural influx of buyers will raise the price for other people.

That is why central banks use interest rates as a tool to curb excessive inflation.

Under 2% inflation is the least bad of the options available.

There are multiple reasons, but I think the biggest is that a different interactive screen ate TV's lunch.

The phone is superior in most ways, from the perspective of the pushers - usually maps to a single person, always with them, location trackable, etc. About the only advantage of the TV is being a big screen, but that doesn't seem to matter for much.

Another big one is there's no central player to lay the rails and the big players have competing interests. But I really think the deciding factor is just that the money folks don't see a need for a QVC "buy now" button.

It is always DNS.

Mainly because I started doing this in 1997 and managing /etc/aliases myself works just fine.

Because what use do you have for cash at home?

Drug delivery is the most obvious. I remember a couple of times I was preparing to head to the airport, needed cash, and might well have used something like this.

And even if you are going out, how often do you actually need cash?

I regularly use cash. "Need" doesn't have anything to do with it, I just prefer the simplicity.

I self-host email, and after spending weeks dealing with a very persistent asshole trying to break in to my systems, was looking at options a while back. (I still self host email.)

Proton was the first one I looked at, but they charge per-email address, including aliases, which is a blocker for me. (I use unique email addresses for each service I use, and more for other things.)

But this is even worse. I would never use a service that would start sending my email to someone else if I stop paying, that's insane.

There is no way Proton is anywhere close to namespace saturation. The big mail hosters have orders of magnitude more addresses behind single domains.

How is it different than other convenience-for-money transactions?

Paying people to bring you toilet paper or soft drinks is pretty uncontroversial. What makes money different?

I'd also note that $2.99 is less than the ATM fee at the closest ATM to my house. I don't use Robinhood, but it would be $.51cheaper for me to have them bring me money than to go to the nearest ATM.