You got an economic system in your back pocket that doesn’t allow money to funnel upwards? Bring it out! It’s not capitalism you’re complaining about, it’s plutocracy we’re living under.

Adam Smith would be horrified at our monopolies. 1980s conservatives would be horrified! Yeah, the economy has always served the wealthy, but it wasn’t anything like today.

I have a dozen hobbies, but don’t know a way to make a living except IT. Haven’t had a good job in nearly two years, don’t give a fuck about tech any longer, so lost.

How did AI help linux noobs? Sounds interesting.

He can’t. The strict command and control structure between POTUS and launch keys will break down, just as it did with 3 or 4 events during the Cold War.

Nah, SCOTUS pushed back on Trump, first time around and this time as well. The administration had a solid run of Supreme Court wins for several months because they only brought cases they thought were slam dunks. Now that we’re getting into meaty subjects like birthright citizenship, the justices look to stand firm. Too little, too late, I know.

Among other reasons you’ve been given:

• The figured MN folks would be peaceable and lay down.
• No open carry of weapons.
• Didn’t think they’d show out in deep winter. (HAH!)

Could not have written my exact take as closely as yours.

Only thing I’d add is using it to screw around with personal photos. ChatGPT is cleaning up some 80s pics of my wife that were atrocious. I have rudimentary PhotoShop skills, but we’d never have these clean pics without AI. OTOH, I’d gladly drop that ability to reclaim all the negatives.

Very few laymen have noticed or give a shit about RAM prices. My young friend across the street and I are likely the only people on the block who know what RAM does, let alone are able to build a PC.

Business purchasing is where we might see some backlash soon. I’ve bought all the IT goods, hardware and software, for my last two companies, and I’d be screaming.

Boss: What the hell? Weren’t we getting these laptops for $1,200 last year?!

Skill in Excel is wholly different than skills in other Office products. But if Excel is on your resume, your better expand and show what real use you’ve made of it. Otherwise it comes off just as you said.

I do. Got a free license from my last job and Excel blows the doors off Calc, or anything else. For business, Excel is moat of the reason they’re so tied into Office.

That’s rather my point! What are we to replace a free market with? Everyone screams SOCIALISM, but no one seems to agree on what that actually means.

Shall we do the literal, textbook definition? State ownership of the means of production? That’s been a complete failure.

What we need is a capitalist economic system, reigned in by:

• Unions, to protect the workers
• Breaking and disallowing monopolies, so they never get so large as to control the government
• Democratic governments who protect us, voted in by an educated electorate

But I repeat myself. I guess the Nordic countries, and most of Europe, who act exactly as I outlined, are failures.

Spell it out then. I am willing to listen, willing to be wrong.

For all the bitching about capitalism, which basically every country on Earth uses for an economic system, we’re missing 3 key things.

• We can have unions under capitalism.
• We can break, or prevent, monopolies under capitalism.
• Our governments can protect us under capitalism.

Everything works fucking great with those 3 ingredients. Imagine that.

Now THAT’S a shower thought. I can’t think of a single athlete that’s crossed over so many decades.

And of course lemmy is spitting, hissing mad.

I was a teen in the 80s, a young adult in the 90s, and overall, America was pretty fucking nice, especially the Clinton years. With the benefit of hindsight you can say we should have fought for X, Y and Z, but we weren’t at war, starving or overrun by fascists. Was a 20-something young man to have foreseen today’s disastrous climate? I was partying and getting laid.

And I have never once in this heard of this, “working in the shadows” bullshit. None of us talk that way, never have, we embraced being disconnected slackers.

Only 3 Kennedys had real power with the new RFK being a weird outlier, and one without much real juice. They’re just a rich family with name recognition at this point.

How about the Bush family? I’d rank them above the Kennedys.

Americans substitute wealthy people for the royalty we’ve never had.

If ICE comes, I have no plans to escape alive. Take that as you will.

In America, in most cases, they can’t cross the door frame and can’t touch you unless you cross outside. ’

And if masked men kick the door down? I got that covered best I know how.

Not sure what you mean. We talking about the two slightly different creation myths?

Pretty hilarious reading along and the book just starts repeating as if the first couple of chapters didn’t happen. 😁