There are a bunch of billionaires, going on trillionaires, working to that goal. If we get to that point money doesn't matter anymore any more than money mattered to the kings.

Basically we are looking at the end of capitalism without socialism replacing it. Instead you will have a hereditary class of kings and queens, and they will have a handful of engineers to keep everything running and a handful of violent thugs to keep the engineers in line and to occasionally exterminate the masses of they become a problem.

I'm aware of that wholesale pricing fucks small businesses, I'm assuming that your business is so much better that you are able to compete without the bulk wholesale advantage.

Whenever I bring up the fundamental problems of capitalism people tell me that it's okay because capitalism is self-correcting. If a business does bad things people will stop patronizing that business because there will be a competitor that does a better job with a better product.

You're actually just kind of proving my point. You are pointing out that it is even harder to compete with large businesses.

So what I'm saying is it's already hard to compete with a large business and now that large business is going to Target you as a potential competitor and get away with it because we don't enforce antitrust law.

If you go tits up because you can't buy them bulk enough to compete that just means you didn't get to the point where they noticed you and crushed you. That doesn't mean they aren't crushing people who get to that point.

First yeah we're all going to chime in and say this will backfire.

It doesn't matter if it does. It's a blows up and costs a business some money odds are very good that the savings from wages will more than cover that.

What's worse is because we don't enforce antitrust law if a company goes down to tubes because it relied too heavily on AI it can just buy out any potential competitors and jack up prices on products you need to live and make back all the money.

Second there's basically two possibilities here, either the AI works and they got the fire a bunch of people or the AI doesn't work but they fired them anyway and the survivors have to work harder to keep their jobs.

Remember no antitrust law enforcement so if you get shit canned and try to start a business then you will be targeted and best case scenario you might get a buyout if you are under the radar long enough but more likely they just run you out of business.

Companies don't need good products anymore because they don't have to compete. So there is no floor and they can make things as shitty as they want and if you have a problem with it tough shit.

You could of course just stop consuming all together but at the very least you need food and shelter and medicine and some minimal financial services and transportation. So good luck stopping all consumption.

The point I'm getting at is that fundamental underpinnings of a functional economy have broken down and we refuse to acknowledge that fact.

AI training data was going to be the major problem and sticking point. Previously they could just soak it up for free from the internet but now that the internet is 70% AI slop that's not really going to work.

It does still raise the question of how the name of hell are we going to train AI to do programming tasks when we've replaced most of the programmers. But I guess we will cross that bridge when we come to it. I suspect that over time programming languages will be built AI first and programmer second.

One thing is for sure everything is going to keep getting worse and worse and worse. And we are going to keep blaming the wrong people because that's what we've always done.

There is way too much danger of collusion and antitrust violations with surveillance pricing. It's been a common workaround for companies looking to collude. Instead of getting in a smoky room and agreeing on price fixing you put all your data on a shared platform and use that to do your pricing decisions. The end result is the equivalent to the aforementioned smokey room but on an app so it's passed off as legal.

Apartment owners did this and it caused rents to shoot up an extra 20 or 30% over what they would have been without it. Several attorney generals pushed back against it but the damage is already done. Also the courts are packed with pro corporate judges so long term it's probably going to die and we're going to go back to having these policies in most places.

Kids in particular like multiplayer games. You kinda do need a connection for those as local co-op long since went the way of the dodo.

That's not really enough. Don't get me wrong it's the best hundred billion we ever spent. We basically kneecapped Russia and took something that could have been a competitor nation and turned them into a laughing stock. If we hadn't put a pedophile lunatic in charge of our country after that it would have been pretty good for us.

But what we needed to do was give them more weapons and give them faster so that they could push Russia back harder. We also needed to give them long-ranged missile systems that could hit Moscow. Not a lot of them but enough to be a threat. Basically we needed to call pooty poot's bluff on the nuclear weapons. In the meantime though we needed to give them a shitload more defensive options and weapons to push Russia back so that Ukraine would be less likely to actually hit Moscow since that wouldn't actually be good for Ukraine but desperate times can make people do foolish things, like vote for an orange pedophile in the hopes that egg prices will go down...

Nonetheless $100 billion to take out a potential competitor Nation by drawing them into a quagmire War was one of the cheapest and most effective things we ever did on the world stage. It's also disgustingly probably why we didn't give Ukraine the weapons they needed to win. We gave them just enough weaponry to bog Russia down because we were trying to take Russia down to third world status and keep them there instead of trying to help a democracy remain a democracy.

That's pretty par for the course for US foreign policy but it doesn't mean I like it.

It's genuinely hilarious that the bot somebody wrote to reply to all of my comments in order to soak up mod points is constantly talking about how Trump fucks kids.

I was wondering if the bot was so simplistic that just repeating Trump fucks kids a few times would make that happen and sure enough it is.

A long time ago we had sophisticated actors manipulating opinion on this website because it was a pretty big part of the internet believe it or not but these days this is the best we get. Meanwhile Trump still fucks kids and he's still president and he still has a 40% approval rating despite Trump fucks kids.

The same people pushing age verification also fight relentlessly against free breakfast and lunch at schools for kids.

They don't care about children. They have never cared about children and they never will.

I think that ship sailed in November 2024...

That's why when Israel bombs an apartment building, everyone in it is automatically enrolled in Hamas/Hezbollah first.

So the problem we have with schools is they are underfunded so classes are crowded and teachers don't have enough time to spend on lesson plans let alone individual students and we also put too many laptops in the schools when it turns out if you want to learn pen and paper is pretty much how you do it.

Also there is some indication that infinite scrolling and social media algorithms fuck with kids brains and weird ways but we can't talk about that because that would involve regulating companies owned by billionaires and that is morally reprehensible.

We're all sitting around basically saying the kids are distracted by their phones without asking why they are distracted so much. Because actually fixing the problem at the source in a way that was materially effective would be too much like communism. We would have to regulate large corporations, tell billionaires no, and worst of all properly fund to schools meaning we'd have to take some money away from billionaires.

These are all things we have been taught are morally wrong on an absolute fundamental level. So they're right out the door.

Taking kids phones away is the equivalent of banning plastic straws while letting corporations pour tons of plastics into the ocean. A pointless gesture that makes people feel better.

There is some work being done in Europe to ban social media for kids but I suspect that's really just a muscle out the American social media companies because Europe is trying to cut ties with America because we've shown ourselves to be batshit insane.

Avanti trust law enforcement you might have a point there.

The problem isn't subsidies becoming a lot of a corporations revenue the problem is that corporations lack any meaningful competition and meaningful competition is literally the only thing that puts downward pressure on prices. I mean besides a mass murder. Kill off 20 or 30% of your population and I guess that'll probably reduce demand enough to show up in the numbers. At least a little bit.

You are still trying to solve a government problem with market solutions and it doesn't work.

So instead of acknowledging that capitalism needs a referee you are desperately trying to argue that if we just cut subsidies a little more the magic of the free market will make it all work. Even though you have literally 200 years of History proving that wrong

The problem isn't corporations are a psychotic it's that their psychotic and we're letting them do literally anything they want because we are either distracted by whatever nonsense is being put on our plate at the moment, currently trans girls in sports, or because we have blind Faith in imaginary free markets

It's because Russia invaded Ukraine and the Republican party wouldn't allow Biden to properly arm Ukraine in order to defend themselves even though it was very very much in US national interest to do so.

The Republican party is basically a franchise of the Russian government at this point. Some of it is because of direct bribes and some of it is because Trump actively protects Russian interests and some of it is because the Republicans know they get a shitload of indirect help through propaganda on social media from the Russian government.

It doesn't matter the specific reason why a specific Republican politician defends the interests of Russia over the interests of the United States.

The question you need to be asking yourself is do my interests align with Russia's so much that I'm willing to vote Republican when they are actively doing the bidding of the Russian government.

And I think if you answer that question honestly you're going to come up with a no.

With very few exceptions every single person who votes Republican knows they should have stopped years ago but they keep doing it. I think we called that the definition of insanity.

And Ubi is worthless by itself. If all you do is do Ubi then monopolies coordinate and jack up all their prices and suck out all the money that you're getting from the Ubi system.

I've actually seen this in the real world. Companies will give out stipends for the company cafeteria that you use through an app. When they do this they also typically outsource the running of the cafeteria. The company that has the contract for the cafeteria then Jack's up prices until the stipend no longer even covers your lunch.

Typically the way this gets solved is somebody eventually complains that the prices in the cafeteria are ridiculous and the company yells at the vendor running the cafeteria and they cut their prices a bit.

In this analogy the company is functioning as the government and it's regulating the market, in this case the market is basically the vendor running the cafeteria who's afraid of losing a contract.

My point being we have seen Ubi fail in the real world. Unless the government basically steps in and regulates markets then Ubi is basically worthless, but the problem with that is Ubi is only ever put forward by tech bro libertarian types that want to use it as an excuse to eliminate all government regulation and put in dog eat dog techno feudalism that they pretend it's capitalism...