The issue is that they are run as for-profit businesses but the product that they provide is a public good. They make money by providing as little product as possible. This type of structure is fine if your company makes luxury goods, but in the case of health insurance it results in unnecessary pain and death.

How do I jam a set of folding over-ear headphones into the top pocket of a backpack without tangling the cord with all the other crap I have in there?

Chomsky’s stroke came at a really critical time and we could use a successor to point out how idiotic the whole movement is.

The idea that LLMs are anywhere close to having the general intelligence needed to comprehend this kind of statement is ludicrous.

I’m in. How do I get started? Please and thank you 😁

Oh god. You can buy one on Temu for $10. I’m guessing they overheat and explode.

Right, but the issue is that if they don’t know what they are doing then the gear is irrelevant. I’ll give an example. If I’m skiing and I see someone hiking up to the off-piste bowl run in brand new topline gear, and they are visibly struggling to do the hike, I can ssume they are inexperienced and might really hurt themselves or crash into someone else.

If it’s a dangerous hobby then this becomes a safety concern.

I haven’t been over there in a while but I noticed the AIs are starting to show up here. How was it over there? Rough percentage of how many?

And Aaron Swartz is dead.

It’s called digital enclosure. Enclosure was a movement that began in Britain in the 1700s (but really it’s always been going on…) to close off the commons that pastoralists had been using to publicly graze their sheep. It happens to all new media because it’s the only way capitalists can imagine their operations.

Abu Ghraib comes to mind. War does horrific things to people’s minds.

Sure, no arguments there. I guess it’s the “green” label I take issue with. Carbon-free capitalism is definitely possible as long as there are enough critical elements to produce all of the necessary solar panels and wind turbines (and I guess fusion reactors if we’re really ambitious about printing money 🤑). I do wonder about rent collection long-term though, especially with such decentralized energy sources. Overproduction will also come sooner than everyone thinks. But I guess these are much better problems to have than imminent eco-catastrophe.

Yeah that’s my point. The average democrat would consider him to be a dangerous radical leftist.

I was considerably happier before I knew this. Hopefully coal prices will continue to increase, and they won’t end up burning more coal even though their capacity has increased. From what I’ve read, it’s mainly provincial governments trying to boost their economic statistics that are responsible for this building spree.

This is exactly what they would all be doing if we just made the goddamn digital carbon currency!

Capitalism can’t do green. If you were to make an accounting of all of the environmental damage that capitalist industry has done to the ecosystem, the cost to clean it all up would dwarf the revenue. Capitalist economists are incapable of calculating such “negative externalities” because they don’t understand basic thermodynamics. I used to work in environmental remediation and am happy to talk more about this if there is interest.

The best way to counter this is to point out the laziness at the top. Corporate welfare is way more damaging to society than the few million lazy people at the bottom. It would cost a lot less to write them off than to pay CEOs 2000 times as much as the average worker.

And, since we’ve shifted so far to the right, the “Marxist” texts can be written by John Maynard Keynes.

“Massive coal” was twenty years ago. India is “massive coal” now.

They have an electric car that costs $10,000.

They are quickly switching from Li batteries to Na, which will not require Ni or Co either.

They have a mixture of capitalism and central planning, so it’s not entirely fair to call them “non-capitalist”.