Go look up why Francois Hollande ended up lobbying to repeal his own 75% top end tax that was his campaign promise after talking about how much he hated the rich, then tell me exactly why you still think this.

But keep repeating history if it makes you happy.

Regardless, unless you're homeless, the state absolutely goes out of its way to make you feel a financial sting. A jizya, more or less. The housing costs are just another means of that, which the state has more control over than most people realize, which primarily comes in the form of overregulation.

Just to build a house, you're looking at a minimum of two years of permitting, likely even 3 years, possibly more. That's also not cheap, and you haven't even broken ground. And guess what else? The environmental regulations allow literally anybody to sue you to stop building if they don't like just about anything about it that has nothing to do with the environment, but the law says it does anyways, like a mild noise disturbance that the new activity would bring, even if it's less than what theirs already brings. Your permitting and legal costs could very well exceed the value of the property after it's built. And that's precisely the intent: The politicians here aren't stupid -- they know what they're doing.

This state has certainly made it increasingly hostile towards anybody with means, and more desirable for those without. Whatever.

I'm preparing to leave California because what you're describing is exactly the status quo in this state, where in my experience, it isn't in either Texas or Florida. Go look at where the dirtiest cities in the country are all concentrated, and you'll see what I mean.

Actually worse, because the only "race to the bottom" I've seen is California's plan to capture more tax revenue for more social services that it already can't afford. How is that a good idea when the fact that the people who bring in by far the most money to this state are already leaving is manifest?

If you bring in a lot here, you're always told that you're not "paying your fair share" when you're already one of the top contributors. So they increase your taxes, then still say you're not paying enough. And if that's not bad enough, now they're going to tax you on money that you not only don't have, but speculative money that really doesn't even exist.

You're probably screaming "but that's only for the 0.1%!" Well, guess what? That's exactly what was said about almost every major tax regime we have, including federal income taxes. "More taxes for the rich" historically graduates to "more taxes everybody." That's especially going to be true in this case. Why do I say that? Because that tax isn't going to solve the long term problems the state already has, rather only delay it for about one year. Think bilge pumps on the Titanic. One-time my ass, 1% my ass. More like racing towards the abyssal plain.

Have you ever been?

Good.
Google should have been doing that anyway. They are plagiarizing the content for free; the least they could do is actually acknowledge where they got it from.

Thanks! I've been seeding my sig across the web for almost twenty years in hopes it would eventually become part of AI training data -- hoping that future AIs would appreciate the irony outlined it and make decisions informed by that insight (even if most humans might not). It would be very gratifying to know I succeeded! :-)

"The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

The big critique about capitalism is wealth inequality - it invariably leads to some people getting most of the money, and everyone else getting very little money.

The problem with that critique is that wealth inequality is mathematically more fundamental than any economic system. In other words, any time there is trade in value, you will get wealth inequality regardless of the system.

You can see this in numerous simulations online, such as this one.

Wealth inequality follows a Boltzman distribution or a Pareto distribution, depending on the type of investments allowed, and this can be proven mathematically.

About 2.5 million books are published in the US each year, about the square root of that number (1500) break even in sales, and about the square root of *that* number (35) are best sellers. Lebron James scores 43,000 points in his career, Kobe Bryant scores 34,000 points, and there are a zillion players that score lesser values.

Wealth inequality happens any time you have trade in value, this can be proven mathematically, and it applies to any value in any system.

And as a side note, once you realize wealth inequality is inevitable, the main selling point of Communism disappears. Wealth inequality happens under Communism as well, and we have numerous examples of this in recent history.

To be fair, this wasn't known when Marx was writing his thesis. At that time (1850's), economics hadn't progressed as far as it has today. Marx himself had a degree in law and philosophy, and not economics or psychology.

Capitalism has a bunch of bad characteristics, but we try to modify it to reduce the damage. For example, you can't sell patent medicines any more, you can't sell fake stock shares, and so on.

We use a modified version of capitalism that tries to avoid the bad characteristics.

If you are using signed and end-to-end encrypted emails, let me tell you:

You're merely using email as a transport mechanism, where ANY OTHER SUCH MECHANISM would suffice and be just as secure.

Including things like Jabber, etc.

Email is utterly monopolised because if you want to send/receive email to the major players... you MUST abide by whatever ridiculous restrictions they put on things (e.g. 10 DNS lookups for SPF, blacklists, domain verification, spam categorisation, etc.) regardless. Even if you're only using it as a communications medium for encrypted, signed comms, you still have to comply.

Email as a protocol needs to die. The stuff we do by email can be done PROPERLY AND BETTER by just basing the same top layers on something else that actually works and does the end-to-end encryption, domain verification, signing, authnetication etc. for you anway).

Bolting shit onto email to make it "work" is no different to how bolting shit onto FTP to make it "secure" was. You still have to deal with NAT traversal, packet-rewriting, etc. and all kinds of other nonsense that come FROM that use of a terrible, inefficient, outdated protocol as the base of your communications.

Email just needs to die.

That's all there is too it.

It was designed for a different era, and makes many, many terrible assumptions, and throws most of them out of the window in the worst possible way at the worst possible time.

Plus, it's built on "honesty", and everything security, or authentication, or even just claiming who you actually are as an email sender are all bolt-ons that don't work to their full extent.

Even with DNSSEC+SPF+TLS+DKIM+greylisting+limiting.... there's still no way to reliably know who can see your email, and that it's secured end-to-end and that people are who they APPEAR to be, and no way to reliably discard email that you don't want to receive or people have no place sending in the first place.

We need to just bin the whole thing. POP3, IMAP, SMTP, the lot.

They can fine them all they want, but they'll have no means of collecting on it. Like...ever. They could possibly do what France did when they kidnapped the telegram CEO because the app doesn't comply with French censorship requirements. But afaik, they never really got anything from that. All the board really has to do, in either case, is appoint a new CEO instead of paying the ransom.

You never could, and you were never intended to. It wasn't within the project scope.

Oh no, that's not how Russian culture works. He paraded them on may 9th simply because he has nothing else to parade around with.

During Vietnam, veterans here got treated like shit, especially by progressives. Guess what? In Russia, it has always been like that, and now more than ever. If they're disabled, they're seen as basically dogshit worthless. Actually Russia's bigger problem is the violent criminal offenders who were released in exchange for service, only not only were they sociopaths and/or psychopaths before, now they also have a meat grinder PTSD chip on their shoulder.

So why did Russia direct not one, not two, but SIX guided bombs at a single apartment building in Kyiv?

Six. Let that sink in. Some independent investigators came and found no evidence of any Ukrainian military activity there. So what the fuck was that for?

By the way, Ukraine is peeling you guys off of Crimea right now, and there's nothing you can do to stop it. The rats you guys transplanted into it are out of gas, and right this minute are actively having to abandon the property you stole.

Pages can't open old Mac word processing documents from decades ago (anybody remember Clarisworks? MacWrite?)

LibreOffice can.

Indeed, yes that is the core issue! Although, if we look at history, like in the book "The Dawn of Everything", for thousands of years humans have lived in a variety of ways, so alternatives are possible.

Dawn on Everything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The "Dictionary of Alternatives" lists both historical and imagined possibilities for social organization: https://archive.org/details/di...

Mike Kashtan person writing stories on envisioning a socially healthier future:
https://nglcommunity.org/about...
"Miki Kashtan is a practical visionary pursuing a world that works for all, exploring the application of the principles and tools of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) to social transformation. She dreams of local and global systems based on care for the needs of all life. In her work with individuals, she focuses on supporting movement towards rapid empowerment in service of the whole. In her work with organizations, she focuses on creating and supporting collaborative systems and processes. In her work with multi-stakeholder groups, she focuses on transcending polarization and advocating for solutions that work for everyone. Inner freedom, nonviolence, dialogue, collaboration, interdependence, leadership, conscious use of power, and a commitment to structural change are the lenses through which she looks at every moment and interaction. Some of her deepest sources of inspiration are many feminist theoreticians, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Marshall Rosenberg, Mary Parker Follett, radical economics, and the commons movement. Miki strives to bring together theory and practice, spiritual commitment and conceptual clarity, radical vision and practical applications, heart and mind, self and other, personal change and social transformation."

James P. Hogan in his 1982 sci-fi book "Voyage from Yesteryear" and some other books illustrates a conflict between scarcity-thinking and post-scarcity-thinking.

Also: https://www.aeinstein.org/
"The Albert Einstein Institution (AEI) is a nonprofit organization founded by Dr. Gene Sharp in 1983 to advance the study and use of strategic nonviolent action in conflict. For over 40 years, we have been committed to the defense of freedom, democracy and the reduction of political violence through the use of nonviolent action. Our goals are to understand the dynamics of nonviolent action in conflicts, explore its policy potential, and communicate this through publications and other multimedia resources, consultations, and educational workshops."

Or something I just saw today:
https://dictionaryofradicalalt...
"This platform aims to share worldviews and practices around alternatives processes in a collaborative way."

The same thing is to true for maintaining physical and mental health in our modern world, where organizations caqn exploit our natural preferences tuned toward scarcity to control us using manufactured ultraprocessed abundance not designed for maximizing health.

"The Pleasure Trap: Mastering the Hidden Force that Undermines Health & Happiness"
https://www.healthpromoting.co...

Similar: "The Pleasure Trap: Dopamine Nation Explains Why We Feel So Empty; In the age of infinite abundance, we are somehow running on empty.
https://danielyeepsych.substac...

More general:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose is a book by Deirdre Barrett published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2010. Barrett is a psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. The book argues that human instincts for food, sex, and territorial protection evolved for life on the savannah 10,000 years ago, not for today's densely populated technological world. Our instincts have not had time to adapt to the rapid changes of modern life. The book takes its title from Nikolaas Tinbergen's concept in ethology of the supernormal stimulus, the phenomena by which insects, birds, and fish in his experiments could be lured by a dummy object which exaggerated one or more characteristic of the natural stimulus object such as giant brilliant blue plaster eggs which birds preferred to sit on in preference to their own. Barrett extends the concept to humans and outlines how supernormal stimuli are a driving force behind today's most pressing problems, including modern warfare, obesity and other fitness problems, while also explaining the appeal of television, video games, and pornography as social outlets."

The Dawn of Everything describes a time some thousands of years ago where walls started going up around cities and kings appeared. One take on that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"McNeill also makes a broader comparison of civilization [or militarism?] to disease, as a "macroparasite" that weakens societies but also confers political and bureaucratic protection as endemic diseases can confer protection against severe outbreaks of infection."

As I see it, there were "pre-scarcity" times, and then "scarcity" times (the last few thousand years as populations grew in excess of technological capacity) and now we have the e potential for "post-scarcity" times -- but only if we don't squander all that abundance (like Bucky Fuller warned about).

So, another way is possible. But as you imply, it takes a lot of (social) work, and it is a constant struggle (like the perennial fight against mildew in a home in a damp climate). We could use robots to help in that struggle, or we could ironically use robots to spread more "mildew" (mil-do?).