That would be corporate America working hard to bring us the worst downsides of Soviet Communism, but none of the (granted, limited) upside.

But they didn't do that. The devices had offline functionality. Then the raging asshole manufacturer sent an update that chained them to the mothership.

In a sane world, that update would be a criminal act and swiftly punished along with a court order to back out the change and never do it again.

I'll grant that public school isn't doing great in the U.S., but private school has it's own share of problems in the U.S.

I would argue that healthcare would be a good candidate for a public option. Many factors confound market economics in health care.

But in addition, we really need to bring worker's rights into the 21st century.

I was responding to a post claiming it can't work because of behavior. It makes sense to address the argument given rather than something else.

Or, it means that well rested and happier workers are able to be more productive in 4 days than workers who are drag-ass tired and grumpy can be in 5 days.

Firing some workers will just make the rest of the drag-ass workers slower and grumpier.

And yet we TRY to stop murder with laws. Anger is a fundamental human emotion, and it naturally leads to violence and then murder. Yet for some reason we feel we should have laws against it...

If you were to advocate that we remove laws against murder, battery, etc I would at least grant you that your position is consistent, but I would not join you in advocacy.

It could be argued that our attempts to ban murder have failed, since murder still happens. It could also be argued that we can sure cut down on murder with laws even if we can't fully abolish it.

Perhaps we should now work on economic exploitation. Or we can lynch the bosses and landlords. Personally, I'll advocate for the first option.

Side note, I do not believe a purist version of Communism is likely to work, mostly because we as a people just aren't that good at organizing and planning. But I do believe we can move closer to it in some form for the benefit of everyone.

Smoking had a masking effect. In the past, if a person diagnosed with lung cancer ever so much as looked at a cigarette, that was the go-to for blame.

Now that fewer people have ever smoked, they still get the lung cancer, only now there's nothing to blame it on.

That's not to say that smoking doesn't increase the risk, just that that increase was never as great as it was made out to be.

As another example, sometimes a genetically-influenced mental trait can be good in one environment and problematical in another. For example:
https://www.psychologytoday.co...
        "One source of such variation in adaptive stability is surely genetic difference among infants, but genes alone do not make a child an orchid or a dandelion. As work by other researchers has shown, the genetic characteristics of children create their predispositions, but do not necessarily determine their outcomes. For example, a consortium studying Romanian children raised in horribly negligent, sometimes cruel orphanages under the dictatorship of Nicolae CeauÅYescu, before his fall in 1989, discovered that a shorter version of a gene related to the neurotransmitter serotonin produced orchid-like outcomes. Children with this shorter allele (an alternative form of a gene) who remained in the orphanages developed intellectual impairments and extreme maladjustment, while those with the same allele who were adopted into foster families recovered remarkably, in terms of both development and mental health.
        Similarly, a team of Dutch researchers studying experimental patterns of children's financial donations--in response to an emotionally evocative UNICEF video--found that participants with an orchid-like dopamine neurotransmitter gene gave either the most charitable contributions or the least, depending upon whether they were rated securely or insecurely attached to their parents--that is, depending on factors that were not genetic."

So, potentially parents can select, say, for children who may be less likely to get depressed or miserly in bad circumstances, but you will also select out children who might excellent or generous in good circumstances.

More examples: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=the+...

Other ideas include "tulip" children:
https://nurtureandthriveblog.c...

Is it ironic or intentional that the company has "orchid" in the name?

https://newpublic.org/
"Reimagine social media: We are researchers, engineers, designers, and community leaders working together to explore creating digital public spaces where people can thrive and connect."

Their Digital Spaces Directory listing hundreds of alternative platforms (including Slashdot):
https://newpublic.org/study/33...
"As the social media landscape changes and a new wave of digital spaces emerges, this Directory is meant to be a resource for our field -- a jumping-off-point for further exploration and research for anyone who's interested in studying, building, stewarding, or simply using digital social platforms. We hope this will inspire creative exploration, spark new collaborations, and highlight important progress."

Ultimately though, standards (open protocols, of which there are many good examples better than Bitcoin, like, say, email RFC 5322) are probably more important that implementations for distributed social media. I gave a five minute lightning talk about that for LibrePlanet 2022:
"Free/Libre Standards for Social Media and other Communications"
https://pdfernhout.net/media/l...

The text of the talk in IBIS outline format is available here:
https://pdfernhout.net/librepl...

From there:

What are key insights for moving forward?

        * Standards unify; incompatible services fragment
        * The power of plain text
        * Simple Made Easy ( Rich Hickey https://www.infoq.com/presenta... )
        * A democratic government is a special case of a free/libre software community

What are current free alternatives?

        * Matrix.org
        * GNU social
        * Mastodon
        * Mattermost (can import from Slack)
        * Wordpress + plugins
        * Drupal + plugins
        * Nextcloud
        * Email with better clients and servers including using JMAP, Nylas, mailpile etc
        * IRC with better clients
        * Smallest Federated Wiki (Ward Cunningham)
        * Citadel
        * Kolab
        * Diaspora
        * A plain website of text files using Git
        * Twirlip (my own experiments, very rough)
        * Many others

What are problems with free alternatives?

        * Usually more about implementations than standards
        * Hard to start using
        * Fragmentation of user bases with walled gardens
        * Often not federated
        * May not scale (like to trillions of messages)
        * Design missing the big messaging picture (e.g. whether email can be used to edit wikis)

What is my guess at what the future holds for innovation in messaging?
        * Free/Libre standards that unify messaging, with free implementations (a social semantic desktop?)
        * Obligatory XKCD on "How Standards Proliferate": https://xkcd.com/927/
        * It is the social consensus issues that are hard at this point, not the technical ones
        * We need less, not more: less standards, less code, less features, less division & stupidity
        * We need better: better standards, better code, better features, better peacemaking & sensemaking

Well, I'll grant that the marketing for that will certainly have something to do with a cat box...

Given the rate of "progress" with QC doing prime factorization of arbitrary compound numbers, not only will I be dead by then, everyone who will have known me in my life will be dead. And if you add the criterion that QC must be cheap enough to make it worthwhile to crack my secret messages, there's a fair chance that everyone who would have known anyone who knew me in life in life will also be dead by then.

And no, I do not believe in doomsday prophesies.

Meanwiile, without any form of cheating, a 6th grader will be a lot faster than a quantum computer, and they'll do it for rewards that cost way less than the operating cost of the QC.

Practical quantum prime factorization is all the way up to (some) 2 digit numbers and it only took 20 years. Lately, scaling of quantum computers seems to have hit a wall. MS's meetoo quantum chip turned out to be a mock-up, Google's imminant announcement of the largest QC yet is now a year overdue and silence from the hype machine is ominous.

So I guess this is Aptiv trying to cash in (or perhaps cash out) before the bust.

What about LONG term income and price changes?

Wages haven't kept up with inflation for decades. Various social norms pressuring people to have kids have been eroding the whole time due to the simple impracticality of it.

OK, open the hanger, here comes the airplaaaaaane!>/p>

His name is Paul Yura. I'm pretty sure Nick Bannon is not rsilvergun IRL.

Now finish those nummy strained peas.