35% is a good start, but nowhere near where it should be at. Middle management is the gutter where corporate detritus collects. Upper management that claims to need middle management are good candidates for replacement or redundancy themselves.

I've found that about fifteen to twenty years is good enough to give noticeable improvements. I bought a 4K LED-based TV a few years ago to replace the Plasma TV that I had for over a decade and there was a considerable difference. Adjust for inflation I paid less for a larger display with higher resolution and better picture quality. Anything I could buy now would only be marginally better in one of those dimensions and would cost more for it. In another decade or so I'll likely be able to get the same kind of upgrade where it's a larger display with a higher resolution and better image quality (though my eyes may not be able to discern the differences as they age) for less money again. I'm anticipating that I will have what can be considered a home theater setup by that point. Maybe I'll need to upgrade my house to be able to fit the display in it.

This sounds like giving guns to monkeys at the local zoo. I'm sure nothing will go horribly wrong.

How is this different than any other society precisely? Those that are wealthy generally have some form of public assistance to keep people from dying outright. Even in the U.S. there's little risk of anyone starving or going homeless unless they're a drug addict and even then there are programs to help those people.

It's often reported that upwards of 60% of the population is living paycheck to paycheck. Other reports put the percentage of the population below the poverty line at around 12% and generally trending down since we first started measuring it. By definition this must include some people earning above median household income. That suggests that there is a serious problem with people trying to live beyond their means and includes many who could be saving more money, but choose not to for whatever reason.

There is no magic society where this problem does not exist regardless of economic system. Are the poor in Venezuela better off because the country is less capitalist? Was Soviet Russia less happy to let its poor die or scratch out some meager existence? The only thing different under capitalism is that some enterprising people have managed to turn the poor decision making of some people into a business. Humans by and large value the future much less than the present. There's no fixing that. You could outlaw those payday loan companies and it would not make any of the people who do business with them less poor.

Do you have an examples of what these long-term practical solutions might be or is it just wishful thinking? Some people can certainly be taught the financial planning skills that they might lack which are putting them in this position, but if there were effective methods of addressing poor impulse control, addiction, and many other underlying causes that put people in this position someone would have found them by now.

You could always start a business to lend money to these people on less predatory terms. I'm certain that these people would be glad to take advantage of the much more generous terms. Not only would you put these legal Lon sharks out of business, but you'd be helping these people at the same time. In a free market you don't require anyone else's permission to engage in commerce. If you lack the initial capital yourself you could always find other like-minded individuals (judging by some other posts there are few in this very thread) and form a corporation with your combined assets.

Coyness aside, we both know that neither you or any of the others here will do that for what I think are reasons obvious to everyone even some are remiss to admit to them. The experiment is doomed to remain squarely in the realm of thought. But as they say, it's the thought that counts, even though it does nothing.

Parody is a right that we need to consider as well. What if I want to generate images of all of those characters sodomizing Sam Altman with giant purple strap-on dildos so that I have images for my newsletter? Copyright holders have no claims against satire or parody of their work. Why should it matter whether I create those images by hand or use a computer tool to assist in their construction?

If all of this leads to actual copyright reform then I won't be one to complain.

Laws are for honest people. We have thousands of laws that people break on a daily basis. Some are minor or largely inconsequential, but many are there to stop people from dying or causing serious harm to themselves. Making something that people want to do illegal only creates black markets and criminal enterprises.

This will be no different than environmental laws. The dirty industries will simply move to a location where the laws don't exist or are less strict. Never mind that the government will conduct the research anyway as it's in their interest to develop terrible weapons to keep enemy countries at bay.

That's a good one. Unfortunately for everyone this bubble bursting means that everyone will look for the next one to replace it with. No one wants to make real things that benefit people when they can get rich quick instead or sit back while someone else makes the real things for them, whether they're beneficial or not.

The best we can hope for is that the air is let out slowly instead of the whole thing rupturing at once. What happens in hard times at the beginning is that everyone panics and is out for themselves. No one is going to be looking to work together at that moment, though plenty of people will gladly lie about wanting to for their own benefit.

The Amish will probably be fine. They've ignored the whole and are already living like you want people to. The older I get the more I start to think that maybe they've got it figured out. At least better than most everyone else.

Anything can be addictive. That doesn't mean that we should go around banning things just because some person or group of people can't control themselves. Making it illegal almost never works to prevent the behavior as black markets will pop up in the place of legal alternatives.

Perhaps in the future people will be sentenced to extensive therapy sessions to help treat their underlying compulsions instead of putting them in prison or society will embrace some new form of social Darwinism and leave these people to die in the streets. Regardless, trying to ban behavior that humans want to engage in just creates criminal enterprise and the costs of combating it.

But why stop at gambling. Television is addictive. Video games are addictive. The internet is addictive. Sex is addictive. Coffee is addictive. What is it the allows you to justify making gambling illegal while permitting those other things. I want a nice clean line in the sand so that there objectively measures or criteria that can be applied.

Yes it would, but if they used Zoom or *shudder* Teams, they wouldn't be able to get a taxpayer funded vacation out of it. They could have a big Zoom meeting but the turnout would be abysmal and no one of any importance would be in attendance.

I've received this type of email before. It had such atrocious grammar and spelling that it was immediately obvious that it was a scam, but it's hardly difficult to bluff about something like this and hope to catch someone panicking and not realizing that it's bullshit. It's no different than the scammers that will call a person and claim to have their wife, kids, etc hostage and that they'll be killed unless $XXXXX is immediately wired to them.

The claims are bullshit. Anyone with a bit of sensitive information would keep quiet and find ways to leverage that information for additional access to other systems. Why would a scammer disclose information to shake down a ln executive for thousands of dollars when they could use that to get ahold of company data or secrets that are worth actual millions?

Neither of the major political parties seems to have any desire to make tough decisions or implement hard policy changes needed to course correct. Who can really blame them though when the public seems to keep voting for them despite that. Like too many addicts the chosen course of action is to keep engaging in the same behavior that brought them to this point. Unfortunately for everyone reality will catch up with them and the untenable position will collapse.

Someday all of this will be written about in history books that future humans will refuse to learn from as they do the same damn thing all over again. I'd give the British more shit, but the U.S. isn't all that much better and similarly has no political will on either side of the aisle to actually reign in spending. At least we might get to catch a glimpse of what's in store for us before teetering over the edge ourselves.

I'm not even sure I would pay $20 monthly for it, but $30 per month is $360 per year. That's about the price of buying a new game (that I will own forever) every two to three months. If we're comparing it to PC where I can get games on GOG or during Steam sales for a lot less it's closer to paying for ten or more games per year and not owning any of them. Never mind that if you have a console with a disc drive you can still buy used copies of games, often for prices better than digital copies on Steam would cost. Many libraries even have copies of console games that they lend.

This seems like a good way of losing a lot of customers to end up with barely any additional revenue.

It seems that much of what these people label as "end/late stage capitalism" is really the effects of government intervention creating market distortions that largely exist only to get around some stupid law the government passed to demand some behavior that no wants or would only be a quick path to financial ruin.

I personally like to contrast it with "mid-stage Marxism" where the centrally planned economy fails and everyone starts starving. The later stages are indistinguishable from the early stages of despotism, so making a direct "late stage" analogy proves tricky. Somehow none of those examples count as "real socialism" even though any example where private enterprise exists to any degree is an example of real capitalism. I also suspect these people compare capitalism to something akin to a Platonic ideal of communism and consider anything less out of capitalism that's less than perfect as an abject failure of the system rather than making comparisons between real world examples of both systems, but that's because "real communism" has never existed.

These people could implement their own Marxist system to predictable results and I'm sure their dying breath would still proclaim that it wasn't real Marxism somehow. This is an article of faith to these people and you cannot reason with any man so wholly assured of heaven. Unlike most religions that place eternal paradise squarely into the hereafter, Marxism preaches that it is possible here on earth. Like most other religions even highly intelligent people can fall prey to this deception and abandon all rational thought for the promise of utopia.

The reason they're doing this is that too many cities have made it effectively impossible to remove a tenant for non-payment of rent or require a lengthy court process. The inevitable outcome is that landlords will look for a way of ensuring that any tenants they do accept can pay. Anyone who can't isn't merry lost revenue, but an actual costly expense.

Let landlords easily kick out the bums who won't pay and they'll have no reason to try to ensure anyone that they do rent to actually can pay. Outlaw this and they'll just demand the full years rent (or most of it) in advance.