i2p and TahoeLAFS mean that anyone with five old ThinkCentres can have censorship-resistant hosting and their own experience curation. The internet never had to be beholden to payment processors, which are the parties responsible for the vast majority of the problems on it. But touching computers is boring and icky, and the people who do it refuse to front-end shit like that, so here we are.

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?

Right. We understand that it's the opposite way where you live, in Russia, but we do, on occasion, try to make it this way in the US.

Should I offer that he's "virtue signalling"?

And AI is *worse*?

Ten or so years ago, I was looking for
      men's boots -women
And on the return, there was a sponsored ad on the right side for "woMENs boots" (the men, that I've capitalized, was rather bolded).

Give me a *Nix text editor with Bief emulation mode.

EMACS - as my buddy, Don Richey, the senior systems and networking admin I was working with the end of the nineties put it, "EMACS, the windowing operating system masquerading as a text editor".

I do, eventually, manage to remember how to get *out* of emacs when I foolishly invoke it.

Yep. Using more tokens (I will *not* use *xxxing") as a yardstick? There is *zero* difference between what - who was it, forty year ago, who wrote that lines of code does *not* equal productivity.

Of planning a theme to your kid's birthday party? You mean, other than cake and cookies with lots of sugar, so that they leave footprints on the ceiling?

"Mental work"? Really? Maybe she should have a job as a telephone cleaner, per Doug Adams.

So what you're saying is there is a chain of accountability that leads directly to people via those elected by people? Glad we agree. Hint: Chain of accountability means there are links in the chain. You at one end of the chain have no direct connection to anyone on the other end of the chain (I'm really glad you used the word chain here because it so helps drive my point perfectly).

The chain of accountability is a perfect analogy. You the people, should elect the policy makers, and their information should be public. That's the end of it. Precisely no other people report to you, precisely no other people are accountable to you.

I'm a shareholder of a company, that doesn't mean I'm privy to their janitor's phone number, or that I am entitled to know the name of the engineering assistant.

No one knows you other than your reports. Just because you were working under a policy stupid enough to publish your name and direct information publicly doesn't mean your comment makes any sense. The "people" presumably the public have zero clue what work you directly produced. They see a road was built. They elected an official who ran on a policy of building roads. No one cares if "Arrogant-Bastard" (LOL, thanks, I don't often get a chuckle when looking up who I'm talking to, though you don't come across as one :-) ), did the soil load calculation of the road.

The chain is in place. Your responsibility and accountability stops where someone else takes over, and you are not in any way serving the public (that's just a corporate mission statement), you're serving the whims of your accountable manager.

What kind of a stupid idea is that. Maybe you should design and build your own road. Design and build your own gas system. You don't need experts right? Hell maybe Trump can build the plumbing to your home, better hope he knows the difference between drinking water and sewer pipes.

Civil servants are not the government. Civil servants work for a government. Politicians create policy direction to serve the people, that doesn't mean everyone underneath them you is at your beck and call. Quite the opposite. Civil servants are not elected bureaucrats for a reason, and that is they are hired for their expertise, not simply to serve you, And you by design should have no influence on them beyond electing the leaders who create the policy they enact.

Political appointees should be public, they are accountable. The rest of civil servants are no different to you doing your job at your place of employment.

No, only those who report directly to politicians are political. The rest is just a bunch of people working under a policy, in every way identical to what your employer tells you to do. Who is your employer, what's your position and phone number?

It's easy to be a keyboard warrior, harder to actually stand by your conviction. Common out yourself.

Yes hydrogen really is rubbish quality helium ;-)

The problem has nothing to do with the process and everything to do with the cost of energy. Energy is ludicrously cheap in China which is why so many companies move process production over there. I worked at a plant in China where our steam boilers were coal fired. COAL FIRED. The cost of steam generation was insanely cheap and not something that could ever be replicated in the west. Suddenly running a compressor from a turbine to run your Joule-Thomson cooling process needed in the purification step becomes a lot more viable.

The Chinese don't have some magical new process to purify helium, they just have different market economics.

Lifetime emissions aren't relevant. The point is time. All emissions are in the construction phase which means if you want to build a nuclear power plant right now, today, for the next 25 years you are INCREASING CO2 emissions, significantly. After 70 years you get the numbers you have.

Hint: If you are standing on a train track watching a train come towards you wondering what you are going to do about it, the answer is not "tell the train to drive faster", the answer is not "stand still for 20 years hoping that some project will divert the train around you before you get hit". The answer is to look at alternative meaningful solutions to your problem, relevant to your timescale.

I'm not lying, at best I'm not not explaining things in terms simple enough for you to understand. I hope the train analogy helped. Don't get hit.