6 years of age would put me in 1978.
There is a lot I could do from that point onward, that would make $10M look like spare change. Like investing in Apple, or working with Tim Berners-Lee to more effectively launch an Internet that could better resist corporatization and enshittification.
Flat earther-ism used to be satire, too.
Now we have people killing themselves in attempts to “prove” that the Earth is flat.
Never doubt the ability of satire to fly over people’s heads at 10,000ft, and for those people to swallow that satire uncritically; hook, line, and sinker.
Libertarianism requires its members to engage in due diligence in order to execute their libertarian ideals properly and make the choices that are correct for them.
This, unfortunately, excludes the lower-60% of all Americans, who are so ground down, economically terrorized, and mentally overwhelmed with their daily struggles to survive that they have little to no opportunity to approach any major choice with anything even vaguely in the realm of due diligence. They just don’t have the headspace to do so, and are forced to spend all their available mental efforts on just putting one financial foot in front of the other.
This is why having social support frameworks enforced/provided/funded by the government is so important for so many working-class people - it allows them to put those issues on autopilot, significantly reducing their own cognitive load and allowing them to better process the most important issues in their lives.
Ergo, libertarianism is a wealthy person’s toy. It is something that they can champion, because only they have the economic options and financial freedom to fully and properly engage with it.
Until everyone has vanishingly few catastrophic-level issues on the horizon (like one missed paycheque leading to homelessness, or a sudden illness leading to medical bankruptcy), any attempt to implement libertarianism will only bring mass amounts of misery and destroyed lives to anyone beneath the Parasite Class.
And when you have those kinds of widespread government-provided supports that lift all boats - and not just the megayachts - why bother with libertarianism? We should continue to use what got everyone into that safe state in the first place – socialism.
Remember, the Parasite Class already uses socialism for themselves. It’s called grants and bailouts and subsidies, and allows the Parasite Class to privatize the profits and socialize the losses.
It’s just at a scale that makes it impossible for working-class people to leverage.
LOUDER, for the parasite-class business owners and their bootlickers in the back.
someone without insurance rear-ended my vehicle but I chose not to pursue it because then my own insurance rates would’ve gone up.
Somehow, this sounds deeply wrong. Your insurance should cover you regardless of what happens. If it’s an act of god, the insurance company should just swallow those costs. If it’s caused by a third party who is not their customer, they should go after the company that insured the other party, or the other party directly if uninsured.
No matter what the circumstances, if you are not at fault you should never see an increase in your rates, no matter how catastrophic the damage or the costs to make it right.
Passing cables through existing walls nearly always involves taking part of the drywall off to gain access to the core of the wall. If you need to feed a wire across an entire wall, you typically have to cut an entire strip of drywall off along the entire length of the wall.
If you have access to the beams beneath the floor or in the ceiling, you may want to do most of the run there, then drill into the desired wall through the sill or header plate. That allows you to get the cable into a specific stud gap to limit the amount of drywall affected.
But unless your house was built with cable pipes/runs built into it (and I can’t imagine this being done outside of commercial buildings), you have lots of futzing around to do, and no small amount of drywall work.
Sure sounds like labour to me.
And there is no requirement for labour to generate income immediately. A majority of labour is front-loaded, with income being back-loaded.
Server maintenance and updating code to work with current releases is still “labour”. Because sure as shit you’ve been doing these things… no hosting provider is going to let you go 10 years with zero updates or patches to the website or the underlying framework that allows the website to run. Because failing to do that is how entire hosting platforms get rooted and infected with malware.