Yepp, as I said: The system is built first and foremost to defend itself.

Personally, I don't think that police should have any right whatsoever to enter your digital devices. Yes, including for terrorism and kiddie porn. And I am 100% for us nerds developing defenses against this overreach. This case is a lesson that teaches us distress PINs are a good thing, but we need to improve on them, make it less obvious they were used, etc.

It's not a question of "Germany for the Germans". It's a matter of allowing people who are openly opposed to your culture to become a sizeable minority, while at the same time putting pressure on society in every way in order to extract wealth for the "elites", while at the same time replacing everyone among the "elites" who is actually capable of something with incompetent, corrupt egomaniacs.

If one of these factors were absent, we might yet manage. Competent leaders might be able to keep things together. Not maximizing profit for the few while returning the populations' lives back to peasantry would give ordinary people breathing space to cope with everything and solve issues at the base. Not importing culture war would keep society more cohesive and able to fight back against the exploitation.

I love the idea of Facebook money being used to teach kids how to block advertisements. $25B should be enough to teach every single kid in New Mexico how to do it, going forward forever, as a permanent addition to public school curriculum.

I was going to suggest that maybe we could even use a tiny portion of the money to establish a state DNS server that blackholes the adservers the way pi-hole does. Then kids stuck running proprietary "apps," instead of accessing things through their Manifest-V2-compatible web browser, wouldn't have to install their own DNS server.

But then I realized the aforementioned ad-blocking curriculum ought to have resulted in every kid building their own pi-hole at school anyway, so a state pi-hole is unnecessary.

As a (small) shareholder of both companies, I'm against this move. Not that my opinion counts for much, but these are two companies that are strong each for their own reasons and a merger would muddle that. But maybe that's the point.

We thought the Megacorporations would emerge as vertically integrated all-consumer-products giants. Turns out that a tech bubble beats that.

Only if you upgrade to goldtooth.

That does not follow. Germany especially is an export-oriented economy that relies on cheap energy to be profitable. It competes directly with asian countries that have far lower costs. You might not grasp the magnitude: Gas was 2.5 cents per kWh a decade ago. It jumped to 30 and more after Ukraine, USA or a combination of both blew up North Stream 2. Granted, it came down again, but it's still over 6 cents today. (exact numbers depend on your market, location, yada yada )

Russia is suffering a slow-burning blow to its compound growth. I honestly don't think that the damage to Russia is worse than the damage to Europe.

Russia's army also took a beating AND would be needed to keep control of Ukraine, half of which (the western parts) are intensely anti-russian. Controlling an occupied territory can be as demanding if not more than conquering it.

It's not just you.

I've lived most of my life in Germany and definitely got its best years. It's been going downhill for the past 20 years or so. And a lot of the why are very similar to the ones you list, and while I saw them early and left the country for that, it's only been coming to a head in the past decade.

True, but there's a saying that capitalism won the competition because communism failed first. Meaning capitalism will fail 2nd and we might be seing that.

Yes, but by what measurement? Being able to destroy the competition might mean you are better, or it might mean you aren't playing fair. Microsoft dominates the OS market, but not by offering the best OS.

And your example of Kuwait is more spot on than you think. The USA also was handed a cheat code - it was the big winner of WW2, with no damage to its infrastructure while Europe was in ruin, Russia had lost 10% of its population and insane amounts of infrastructure, etc. - and while everyone else involved was busy rebuilding basics for a few year, the US could pivot its wartime industry to productive industry and jump ahead.

Worse than that, it's an entire circle-jerk. Many of these people were at consulting companies, then were placed into their positions, while still being loyal to their consulting company. The biggest one whose entire modus operandi is placing their people into positions where they can give the company future business is McKinsey. This isn't even news.

Yeah, but that's not how that works.

The CEO these days is one of the bad apples, and his real-world experience consists of a cozy upper-class childhood, a business school that exchanges money for degrees, a few years at McKinsey or such and a placement as CEO somewhere. He has barely even MET a working class man in his life. His primary concern are quarterly numbers and getting his bonus. The fact that quarters are very short periods in the business world alone doesn't allow him to focus on anything else, unless he wants to explain to the wife why they can't buy that nice mountain chalet she wanted this year.

Buffet is exceptional in many ways, he's not a good example here.

He didn't, though. He gave an officer a couple numbers. This action did not destroy any data. The phone could still sit in an evidence locker, all data intact, even after this action.

The officer entering that number into the phone is what destroyed the data. You could argue that he aided in the destruction of evidence. But in that case you need to put the officer on trial as well for destruction of evidence.

Now the officer will claim "I didn't know". In which case you'd ask "then what the fuck were you doing there, not knowing? Does procedure not require you to handle evidence with care? If you didn't know what you were doing, how does that constitute care?"

But, of course, this isn't what's happening. Considering the actual facts, I mean. What's happening is that the government wants the right to spy on you and this dude defended his privacy. And we can't have that, can we? So my money is on the court siding with the police, because they're all part of the same system whose primary purpose is to keep itself intact.

And you aren't. There's the problem. This is why they pretend that it's a friendly interaction when actually it's a hostile one.

We need a right to not just remain silent, but to lie just as much as the cops do. This would also get rid of the whole "anything you say can and will be used against you" bullshit, you'd just say "I lied" when they bring it up.

I understand that a society needs police. I don't think we need THIS police, the amount of fails it has is dramatic.

It's not like you can't use another model to validate the results you got with one model. That's a step you should be taking anyway. It's actually built into the system for test/dev of the agent and inference model itself. Active supervision, sandboxing and all that.

We live in a capitalistic society that builds wealth.

Historically, hand-loom weavers complained when automatic looms were first introduced in the late 1700's, and ultimately they all lost their jobs.

...but at the same time, the cost of clothing and cloth in general came way down, making high quality clothing affordable to many, many more people. And the relative low cost of cloth gave rise to new uses, such as tarps and tents.

That's what building wealth is about: putting something in place that can reduce the cost and/or effort for future generations.

The fact that some people were put out of a job isn't a flaw, it's a feature. Making things more affordable and available raises the standard of living for everyone.

If you want to help the poor, if you want to solve some of society's problems, then that's a fine conversation to have. And I'm on board with it, I'll happily support your efforts... so long as your proposed solution doesn't involve changing capitalism.

If you want to help society, it has to come from a different place. UBI might work, government assistance is well intentioned but inefficient, communism is a complete disaster. An indexed wealth fund of $2 million would give out a dividend of $50,000 each year in perpetuity by gaining more value than inflation plus the disbursements, so maybe we should start setting up individual wealth funds for selected people, single mothers and doctorate students, perhaps. Start small and start taking people out of the workforce, and salaries should rise.

Other ideas are also welcome.

The idea that "workers and communities become afterthoughts" was well explored and described by Karl Marx himself in the middle of the 1800s, we don't need a Harvard Professor to remind us. Marx's mistake was to blame capitalism for the problem, we know that doesn't work.

We need new ideas and new institutions, but don't change capitalism.

Capitalism didn't cause any of it.