What is this unhealthy fixation on what someone is "worth"? It is not a billion tons of gold, it is not a quintillion tons of grains. It is a fiction, a fleeting number on paper that signifies current valuation of a business. Musk does not have a trillion dollars under his mattress. Not even 2 billion.

I think Musk is a con artist, but why is it difficult to wrap your head around a person benefiting less from his billions than the society? Society gets to use these billions in many ways more than the person himself. Society gets the products made by the businesses that are valued at billions, society gets the jobs and paychecks from all of this money. What does the person get except for a headache of dealing with the norms and rules and taxes imposed by the society upon his business? He really doesn't eat much more than the next guy, though his meals will be more expensive because they are cooked by some private chefs. But the cost of the food, chefs, housing, airplanes, whatever is negligible compared to the value of the company that society gets to enjoy. Even just the trading of the stock market allows people to have something to invest into, there are jobs, there are products, then there are various contracts required to maintain this business, so there are other side businesses that rely on the gigantic companies owned by the billionaire.

Again, a billionaire personally can use maybe a few hundred million dollars, maybe even a couple of billion (if he buys a couple of yachts and a few mansions). The gain to the guy is completely negligible compared to the gain to the society. It is like infrastructure in itself, that's what these huge businesses are. To say that this is 'Libertarian-Randian gobbledygook' is simply to use a personal attack in place of an argument.

But again, I am fully convinced Musk is a gigantic fraud, running his empire almost exclusively on vaporware.

Women do not want children in more numbers than ever because they are not marrying, because they follow each other on instagram and other mass hysteria sites where they promote hedonistic living to each other and yes, much of it requires resources and time that otherwise would be allocated to rearing children. Unmarried women rely on the government systems that women (and womenized men) have promoted and voted for over decades. This promoted disconnect between generations, grandparents and other family members are not involved in helping with the kids as previously. Two income household means women are working (because of inflation caused by the women as a voting block people are forced to pay insane percentage of earnings as taxes). Taxes used to subsidise classes of people, especially single women require so much more money that women im families have no choice but to work. Their husbands' earnings are more than halfed by the taxes, so need 2 people to work where previously 1 would have sufficed.

So women as a voting block created the environment of high taxation and subsidization, this in turn requires that more women entered the workforce than ever before. None of this is child friendly, women as a block are truly pushing towards childless society. This is self defeating, the people with more children will inherit the world, which will roll back most of these anti child policies. This will require a demographic collapse first, which is coming within a few decades. Within just 2-3 decades most of the world that has anti child policies will be very old of-course. The age of single childless people will cause an age of single old people. Their policies will die off with them giving apace and rise of various fundamentalist cultures, for example Islam. The only hope is that Israel also keeps their births up and somewhat balances out the Islamists. If not, then the few remaining non muslims will feel very lonely on this planet indeed.

I have no idea what your point is at all. Seriously, are you OK? Just to make it clear - I am against governments, I am against governments using any technology to make it easier for government to oppress people and this is one instrument of oppression.

So how can this be allowed if there is so much graft around this technology that is flowing through thousands of hands in the government offices?

Here is an example: https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/news...

This here: https://simpler.grants.gov/opp...

Funding Opportunity Number: FM-MHP-26-002
Assistance Listing: 20.245
Funding Details: $52.7 million expected total amount to award

Executive Summary:
The objective of the HP-ITD program is to advance the
technological capability and promote the deployment of
intelligent transportation system applications for CMV
operations, including CMV, commercial driver, and carrier-
specific information systems and networks, and to
support/maintain CMV information systems and networks to
(i) link Federal motor carrier safety information systems with
State CMV systems; (ii) improve safety and productivity of
CMVs and commercial drivers; (iii) and reduce costs
associated with CMV operations and regulatory
requirements.

Eligible Applicants
1.1 General
The HP-ITD awards are available to States, the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto
Rico, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin
Islands. FMCSA may award HP-ITD funds to eligible applicants that have an approved program plan as
outlined in the Fixing Americaâ(TM)s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act. Individuals and businesses are
not eligible to apply for HP-ITD funding.

This entire thing is premised on the idea that there will be *more* information available to the federal government to work with, not less. They are fully committed to using these ALPR cameras that are everywhere now to track everything all the time and to put every truck driver out of service for any inconsistency in their visual data and thus hand out more fines, more court time, more oppression.

This is just one single program, one example, there are so much more, there is so much money at stake, never mind the actual flock graft itself.

"Cocaine back in coke." - why was it removed in the first place?

I can print to my Bambu printer locally by using LAN only or an SD card, not sure why you think I need their cloud to print at all.

Also https://orca-slicer.com/ is not offline, some kind of a fork of it is offline.

Completely disagree. 100% disagree. If I need something that my printer from Bambu cannot do I will get another printer. For what I need it though it is great and keeps me from *wasting* time. My time is what is important to me more than money.

I like their products. I just want printing without fuss and without having to learn every detail about leveling, etc. Their product works for me and I do not care about its openness, it is about as important for what I need it as my headphones being open sourced (not at all). So this product is for my use case, not for people who want to control every aspect of their printer and every software feature.

IF they decide to make it prohibitively expensive to operate their hardware, then I will go back to a less capable hardware kit.

I got an Idea. How about locating and deleting data centers that host these things? Deleting them from existance.

So looks like AI is taking over everything, every platform, every product, every service, every job, it's a plague, a virus, a disease of some sort and apparently there is no cure, someone is always pushing it. Is it AI that is pushing AI?

40% Informative
    20% Troll
    20% Overrated /. has long become a voting system for political opinions that the moderators agree or disagree with, 'Troll' or 'Overrated' means that they disagree with the opinion, yet the opinion is a fact in this case. It is a fact that taxes are introduced by majority voting to take something away from a minority. It is a fact that income taxes were introduced only to tax the top earners and it was 1% for incomes of 3000USD and over, 6% for incomes of half a million and over, it is a fact that can be independently confirmed.

The opinion in this case is that such behavior is confiscation and that it is not a sound foundation for the economy and that eventually these taxes expand to the rest of the population because this is how taxes work.

So I wonder is it the fact or is it the opinion that the /. moderates here? Neither facts, nor opinions are a way to troll anyone, if we mark everything that we disagree with as 'troll' then there is no discourse at all.

So are you saying that a large number of people ganging together to take possession of property that is already owned by a small number of people is a fair way to run society, fair way to tax people, just invent new "taxes" on the fly on property that has been taxed already or that hasn't been sold yet, so there is no transaction, no money exchanging hands? Is THAT how "happy places" operate? Is that a sustainable path towards happiness?

This is just property confiscation, I understand that poorer people do not care about wealthier people paying anything, that's how taxes and subsidies are pushed through in the first place. However call it what it is - it is confiscation of private property. As a side note, the so called 'income tax' also started as a wealthy people's tax. It was 1% and it was only applicable to a small fraction of the population who were earning over 3000 dollars a year or so and 6% of additional tax on incomes above 500,000USD, which was a tiny number of a small fraction of people.

You can go ahead and figure out what happened to that idea of only taxing 1% of a tiny number of people over the last 113 years without my help.

So the current production version of Mark Zuckerberg is building a newer version with a more intuitive human interface, I get it.