I know of no one who uttered the word that "capitalism is the root of all problems"

However, is that an actual point making the many posts speaking of end stage capitalism, or is from OP "With capitalism we are rushing off the side of a cliff."

not If you demand specific wording, no - I saw no such exact wording. But unless you are new here, there is a lot of hate heaped on "capitalism" Especially towards one particular country where there is a narrative that said country is run by capitalism. It isn't

Well, let's look at the country in question. Here in the USA we are not living under capitalism. We have a combination of corporatism, with a lot of socialism effects tossed in.

There are many benefits for people of low economic means. Free phones, free laptops, Heating oil assistance, low cost internet, section 8 housing (if you are not an American, Section 8 is a program where a low income person pays a small amount, perhaps a couple hundred dollars a month for their apartment and the Government picks up the rest) WIC- Women, Infants, & Children program giving free food. Medicaid for children and many adults. Medicare, Social Security disabled benefits for adults, and children, even Social Security benefits for children of older parents. We have food Stamp programs, we have free transportation for poor and retired people, including personal pickup and delivery for people living in areas not served by regular public transportation.

This does not sound to me like Capitalism in any shape or form.

These are things that don't get mentioned much. At one point in the past, I provided cites and links to all of this. It varies by state, but even deep red states have these programs.

You tell me. Should there be a maximum allowable salary? How do we make a completely level playing field? Force the driven not to work?

I have to note, I was born in poverty, and worked myself up to around top 10 percent. Zero help. Put myself through college, built a salable skillset. Doing 6 figures in retirement. So I'm probably in the group who need penalized for success.

So how do we deal with the driven vs the non-driven? How do we deal with those who build something? I built my money through frugal living and saving while young and then at around 50, really hit my stride. Waited until interest rates were down, then bought a house that's below what I was approved for, and paid it off in less than 15 years. Kept saving and investing. Don't want to turn this into Ol's financial classes though.

And I'm astute enough to know that not everyone is going to do that. But in the modern parlance, I am the bad person, and they must have the same economic resources as I do. So yes, I've been told I was part of the problem.

Now I might not be the brightest person in the room, but my experience has been that while some are whining about how bad it is that only some people have money, that the proper gestalt is a level playing field, I would propose that it really isn't possible to make that level playing field. Mainly because of different abilities and individual drives.

What do we do with the "obscene" rich, and the poor that are not driven or mentally capable on the other end. I've personally shown that with drive, a very poor person can work their way up that ladder. Takes hard work and financial smarts. No, not everyone has that combo. And here in the land people love to hate we have a way to help the people that might be stuck on the lower end of the economic scale, and don't really care about rising any further. I support such a system.

Now your solution for a level playing field?

If you ask Gemini why Google's search results have gotten so bad, it will give you an honest answer and suggest you use DuckDuckGo instead. Not exactly sure how you monetize "our service is telling our customers to go to our competitors instead" unless you're Macy's and you're in a Christmas movie.

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Yes but people do and companies selling agentic AI are encouraging that they do.

But I'm not a customer of Bank of America or any American bank so I don't quite understand the description that goes with this story. I thought every bank uses MFA - pin readers, authenticators, biometrics, email / SMS verification etc. in addition to username / password. I assume Bank of America does too, in which case even stupid customers should be protected. But maybe it doesn't.

Perhaps banks should also figure a way to allow customers to use AI if they want, e.g. issuing some kind of limited purpose token that an agent can use according to some max spend / txn limits, that the bank might even randomly challenge and seek authorisation for.

If you haven't read the interview, in it she relates a story where her young daughter's teacher asked her to write three things that made her child special. Apparently she is such an awful mother that she couldn't do that, and turned to AI for assistance. The AI shat out some generic Hallmark style platitudes, and she was delighted.

People like her want to dehumanize all of us to that level.

I used it (Gnu Emacs) 30+ years ago when the alternative was vi and there weren't really IDEs to speak of. But these days 95% of the stuff I edit is in an IDE or graphical text editor. If I need to edit something quickly I'll just use nano or vi because they're easier to get in and out of.

Even back when I did use emacs, I preferred microemacs because it had most of the normal commands but loaded faster. Emacs was s..l...o..w. It was also infamously bad for accepting patches, practically moribund in fact. Forks like xemacs demonstrated it was capable of being a lot more, e.g. offering proper GUI support when running in X11, but emacs never bothered with that. Even when I open emacs today it feels arcane, like it just gave up. It does have some GUI support but it's a joke. Frankly it's no wonder most users gave up on it too.

Well, to clarify, since we're. worried about communism versus capitalism, the US is in no way shape or form capitalism. It is a mixture of corporatism and (cover the kid's ears folks!!) socialism. Don't believe it? Tax dollars, quite a few of them in fact, go to things like free laptops and smartphones for the low income, subsidized fuel oil, medicare, medicaid, free food for Women, Infants and Children as well as Food stamps, Section 8 housing, where low income people pay a very small amount per month, while the Government pays the rest. When you are in a 2000 dollar apartment and paying 200 dollars a month, government is picking up the tab. Free or very reduced internet. Free buses for the poor and retired people. If you live in an area without bus service, you can call and get a free ride and return. May older and poor use this service to get back and forth to doctors and other appointments. This even in some very red states.

Doesn't sound much like capitalism to me. I am not opposed to such things. I am not claiming that there are not some economic issues we have. But it creates cognitive dissonance in people that get their facts from our adversaries.

But yeah - there is a middle ground. Collective ownership can work as long as people understand there has a be a group of business savvy people running the business. That said, what I have seen in life is that many to most people don't actually have that savvy.

Social democracy is the way to deal with it. If everyone has a stake, but nobody has overall or excessive power, and the government truly works for the people, the outcomes tend to be decent.

It probably does cost Google something. They scan apps and devices for malware, and anything that increases the number of apps and ways to distribute them will increase the cost. They also have to certify these app stores, they aren't just going to let anyone set one up and start distributing malware or pirate streaming apps.

It feels calibrated to deter unserious applicants, but not cause further legal woes.

The real issue is F-Droid and similar open source app stores. It remains to be seen exactly how it is going to pan out.

Well, how bow the communist revolution? Howbow Chairman Mao, Uncle Joe Stalin, Pol Pot. The revolution of the proletariat. Ha's that workin out for ya Comrade? The were some of teh best humanitarians amirite?

That's interesting. Ours hasn't quite caught up yet, and will do things like limit the size of the inverter you can install because they don't trust the export limiter.

Yeah, that was the target. Doesn't men that 1750 was the sweet spot, the correct amount of CO2.

I understand that a target is needed, but that target was seriously unrealistic, requiring zero emissions from humans, and a concentrated effort of re-sequestering every bit of Carbon release of over 200 years of release. Even when the concept of radiative forcing was known, we were never going to return to 1750 levels

That is correct. All we can do is wait it out as the methane degrades to CO2, and the CO2 cycle does its work We're on a roller coaster ride at this point.

No, it isn't. It is a human aided change. There have been times in the past when there was much more CO2 in the air. Carbon was sequestered in various times like the Carboniferous, and where the final age, the Pennsylvanian, enough Carbon had been sequestered that the average temperatures on earth cooled enough to stop the large scale forest growth. Humans ended up de-sequestering much of the stored carbon, and that's why we are returning to something like earlier times.

There is a lot of proper concern over the rate of de-sequstering, and we face serious issues. And unless we do something stupid, humanity isn't likely in danger of extinction. But the planet isn't going to fail.

Very good point. One of the issues with changing lifestyles is that a "better" lifestyle is a natural goal for humans. We're hardwired for comfort. How that can be circumvented is a real issue.

As well, here we are, around 80 years into nuc plant power, and I question if we are any closer to getting it right. The Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Generating Station scandal, AKA NukeGate, shows that there is a certain contempt about nuc power advocates, with unqualified people making critical infrastructure without engineers signing off on them, parts not fitting, coupled with the Baseload Review Act, a law passed that made customers responsible for every cent of the construction. The people of South Carolina are still paying for the billions of dollars lost, without getting a single milliwatt of energy.

So in the modern age, a nuc power plant was being constructed with dangerous controls, and never generated power, although all of the sunk cost is being extracted from the customers.

Another thing not often mentioned is scalability. On any centralized power plant, nuc, gas, or coal, you have to design the plant to some maximum capacity. You go over that, and you need a new plant, or at least the equivalent of one with massive re-fitting.

With solar or wind, you can add more as you need more. Here in PA, we have a lot of places mapped out, and if we need more wind turbines in teh future, we know where to place them.

Side notes, solar installs turn out to be a haven for animals, especially birds.

We've tried making the many the boss. Turns out it doesn't work so well. Just enables the not-so-good guys rise to the top more easily.

Welcome to the human condition. People can go reeee about the governments they hate, and lay all the problems at "capitalism" a dog whistle for the USA, but that shows you are more worried about governance than the actual problem. Especially when the big four are China, US, India, and Russia. Laying this at the feet of the USA is pointless and simply wrong. We are part of the problem, not the actual problem.

And the problem is that we have a pretty big problem. We are in a bit of a positive feedback loop now, de-sequestering methane. The time to speak of tipping points is long gone. IMR&IO, the actual tipping point was some time in the mid 1980's.

So what should we do? We should understand that we have a rough ride ahead of us. We should shift to renewables, we should consider the environmental impact of the "data centers" we should stop de-sequestering greenhouse gases. We should not try quick-fixes like aerosol injection, which will simply create as many problems as CO2 and Methane, and likely be worse. A thousand years of acid rain is not good for living beings or infrastructure.

We should work to preserve as many species as possible What will we do? Probably not much of anything. People will bring their favorite axes to grind, just like we see here. The US will get blamed, and the other polluting countries will pat themselves on the back.

What will happen? Despite the political rhetoric, we are all in this mess together, and we'll be pointing fingers at each other as we have hundreds of years (at the very least) of adaptation.

But hey - maybe the archenemy of Capitalism, which is Communism, can take over and lead us to a glorious future, just like it always has. It has a perfect track record so far. And I put that sentence together to show just how silly the political axe grinding is.