“I want to speak to you now, somebody who is not incredibly rich, but has a bit of money, and is opposed to wealth taxation of the very rich. And I want to explain to you what is going to happen from here. Okay, we have increasingly, in this country, in America, in the world, an untaxed super-rich class. These people have enormous amounts of passive income. The poorest billionaire in the world with a wealth of just one billion dollars will generate more than a million dollars a week in passive income, and that is currently almost untaxed. These people have no choice but to buy up all of the assets very quickly, and that is squeezing asset ownership out of every other group in society. As that continues to happen, more and more people in our societies will own no assets and will be in debt. This will mean we will have no strong consumer, and we will have a weak economy. That will lead to an increasingly angry public that push their governments into taking action to support the growing poverty. Governments will be politically forced to step in to try to deal with the growing poverty. But because they do not have the capacity to tax the richest people in society, they are going to tax you.”
First, our understanding of political risk has to change. We are no longer dealing with actors who are constrained by norms, expectations, or even basic human decency.
Second, the institutional safeguards that we assumed would provide protection look increasingly fragile. If those in power are willing to ignore them, their effectiveness is limited. They have, quite literally, thrown the international rules-based order aside. So far, there is nothing to replace it.
Third, the psychological impact is real. Living with the possibility of extreme events, including those we once thought impossible, alters how people think, act, and relate to one another.
And fourth, inequality and exploitation are likely to deepen. When crises are used as opportunities for enrichment, the costs are borne by the many, while the gains accrue to the few.”
Relieved that genocide had not happened in Iran, @richardjmurphy@mas.to regards opposition to the promotion of fear and hate as the only means by which we can hold on to our sanity and prevent political failure.
“Here’s me in the UK, which is probably the least prepared country in the world for an energy price crisis, right? Massively dependent on imported energy, hasn’t built up its own energy storage, doesn’t have an enormous amount of reserves of energy like other countries like Japan or Korea have, which it probably should have done, and yet when there is an energy price crisis, what happens to me? I make hundreds of thousands of pounds because I own the energy. If you are watching from America and you are paying more for energy, despite the fact that there is a fuck-ton of oil in your country, that’s because you don’t own your oil, I do. And the point I’m trying to make here is when I come out here every fucking week and tell you guys ‘You need to care about wealth distribution’, it’s not because I am some fucking communist tree-hugging hippie. It is because if you do not own your resources, then when the price of the resources go up, you are fucked.”
“But when you frame it that way, you understand that social media isn’t the problem: the extractive profit motive is the problem. And then, banning under-16s is like putting a plaster on a bullet wound. Sure, maybe it helps a bit, but you’re still bleeding out. The real question is, how do you stop the bullets?”
“Treating people as things can begin in many ways, but I think one of them is the idea that things can be people. The motivated muddling of categories so prevalent in writing and thinking about AI, beginning with the very name ‘artificial intelligence’, is intentional and serves the narrative that this software can and will take over for human workers, doing their jobs cheaper, faster, better and without requiring rest or dignity. The AI industry is selling a dream of digital slavery—infinite human labor with no actual human involved.”
“Replace ‘:poke’ with ‘Pokémon,’ or save some time by replacing ‘:greeting’ with a stock email template. That’s the basic idea, but Espanso goes much further. It’s one of the most powerful utilities I’ve used, and if you’re willing to do a bit of legwork to set it up properly, it can be one of the most powerful tools on your PC, too”, writes Jacob Roach.
If you have previously installed from apt.syncthing.net and are currently running Syncthing 1.x, upgrading to the stable-v2 channel is straightforward.
“A society cannot meaningfully debate policy, science or justice if information is locked away behind paywalls or controlled by proprietary algorithms. If we allow AI companies to profit from mass appropriation while claiming immunity, we are choosing a future in which access to knowledge is governed by corporate power rather than democratic values.” Bruce Schneier warns of a future in which access to knowledge is subordinate to corporate interests.
