Missing the fourth panel, where Moneybags shoves one of the workers over the line and announces “They hate you for your success!”, while the rest of the crowd stabs the outsider with pitchforks.
It’s such a laughably weak veil the rich pull over people’s eyes I’m surprised more folks don’t figure this out.
Its a layered veil. I’ve seen plenty of people take some mushy centrist “Yes, the system is broken but did you see what’s happening outside of the line?! Its much worse!!!” position.
Also, lots of “I just want people to Obey The Line” rhetoric that precludes any kind of conversation about where Mr. Moneybags got the stick that draws the line from.
And of course, if you question the line or challenge the guy with all the money, you’re shoved to the other side and accused of being a foreign agent.
Popular Fascism isn’t called Fascism. Its called Patriotism, typically with a sneer towards the Fifth Columnists and Country Haters who would dare question the innate reasonableness and fairness of the domestic system.
Fascism is what happens in foreign countries. It Can’t Happen Here.
wars become more likely as parity decreases between adversaries
The pre-Columbian civilizations endured endless cycles of petty violence, as near-peers feuded over territory, romance, and scarce resources. However, the Colonial Era brought a new age of peace and prosperity, ending the millennia of fractious tribal conflicts with a single continent-sweeping genocide and subsequent chattel slavery system.
Finally, one man in a big house with a loaded gun could impose peace upon an entire field of imported slave-hands, and the cycle of violence emblematic of First Nations rule could come to an end for ever and ever and ever (or at least from around 1789 to 1864).
That was truer 60 years ago, when enlistment promised WW2-era benefits and minimal wealth disparity meant your dollar stretched significantly farther. Today, over 1.2M veterans are on some form of food assistance. Military health benefits have been privatized to the point of comic relief. The old GI Bill and housing benefits have been whittled down to a small recruitment bonus and some tax exemptions. The pay for your first five years of service is well below what you could earn in the private sector and there’s virtually no path to advancement outside of the officer’s corps.
But what military recruiters lack in financial incentives, the make up for with bald face lying. You get sold a pack of lies about “job experience” in technology fields, when most of the actual work is menial labor (professional jobs are heavily outsourced to private military contractors). You get promised a package of benefits that are nearly impossible to claim, even assuming you make it all the way through your term of service with an honorable discharge. You’re subject to physical, emotional, and sexual abuse for which you have no recourse. And also there’s the question of your proximity to a combat zone, which cares a litany of additional perils.
The military is not a cheap option, it is a high stakes gamble. Its possible to come out the other side better off than a peer who worked a trade job or took debt to get through community college. But the tail risks are enormous, and the benefits are increasingly illusionary.
Let’s carry on that anti-military sentiment.
Its a shit job for suckers. Even assuming you’re a rah-rah keyboard commando, you’ve got no interest in actually taking these jobs. That’s the whole reason why poor people are targeted. They’re not being offered a sweat heart deal. They’re simply the most misinformed and desperate group of people and therefore most likely to fall for the bait.
No. They come from two very distinct brands of communist ideological thought and are sharply divided on a host of issues particular to 20th century communist organizing. In fact, its something of a sticking point between the two countries. In the fine leftist tradition of purist infighting, NK leadership and Chinese leadership insist the other side did it wrong.
I wish Putin and his oligarchs will be sent to Hauge sooner.
I’m sure they’ll arrive shortly before Netanyahu and some time slightly after Maduro, Assad, and Abdourahamane Tchiani.
they were quickly flooded by the hordes of “they have to make money somehow”-drones.
On the one hand, fuck the comment drones.
On the other hand, that’s the freelance/gig economy for you. Everyone’s out there hustling until they can reach their passive income workless lifestyle dreams.
Less about enforcement than ease of transfer. If I’ve got a Steam account and you’ve got a Steam account and I die, Steam won’t let you transfer the licenses from my account to yours. You just have to maintain two independent accounts now - accounts with 2-factor authentication that you also have to maintain (so second cell numbers and emails, etc).
Steam will simply let the administrative burden of juggling extra accounts take these licenses out of the pool.
At some point, Gabe is going to sell the company and/or die. The company will be transferred to a hedge fund. And then you’ll see a bunch of evil IT bros come up with increasingly sadistic means of cannibalizing the user base for profit.
Drink the Mountain Dew Verification Can to continue, etc, etc.
Some of this is a bit soft. Like, the 50% / 0% employment split says something about business’s ability to command labor. If we had an amazing economy with 50% unemployment, this would imply a large population that businesses either didn’t want or couldn’t access. And the former says something very different than the latter.
In that same vein, the ability to grow the economy is heavily predicated on how individual workers within the economy operate. A bunch of precarious workers with tentative access to capital, poor education, and dismal living conditions don’t generate the kind of surplus value found in countries with ready access to new capital, high end education, and comfortable low-stress environments.
From a raw numbers perspective, you can try and transition your economy to an entirely financialized scorecard. But then you just end up with two engineers optimizing the rate at which a dollar can be traded back and forth.
Although, this might already technically describe the London economy.
Either way, you’re divorcing the means by which we measure new value in the economy from the actual measures of economic utility through layer after layer of abstraction. Yes, this can fool people while economic utility is increasing (or even while its increasing for a subset of the right kind of people). But eventually - at the 50% unemployment and large migrant caravans of jobless vagrants trawling across the country - you run into some very basic domestic policy problems that outshine the focus on GDP Go Up.
You know how Google’s new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won’t slide off (pssst…please don’t do this.)...
But this is not misinformation, it is uncontrolled nonsense.
The strategy is to get you to keep feeding Google new prompts in order to feed you more adds.
The AI response is just a gimmick. It gives Google something to tell their investors, when they get asked “What are you doing with AI right now? We hear that’s big.”
But the real money is getting unique user interactions for the purpose of serving up more ad content. In that model, bad answers are actually better than no answers, because they force the end use to keep refining the query and searching through the site backlog.
The value of Google is they provide accurate search results.
They offer the most accurate results of search engines you’re familiar with. But in a shrinking field with degrading quality, that’s a low bar and sinking quick.
I want google to use actual AI to filter out all the nonsense sites
So did the last head of Google search, until the new CEO fired him.
A beginner's guide to nationalism (lemmy.world)
Listen to a genius, kids. (lemmy.world)
Picture by Rob Hoeijmakers
Direct link to the pic: files.catbox.moe/o0x30l.jpeg...
YouTube videos are skipping to the end for users with adblockers (9to5google.com)
Valve confirms your Steam account cannot be transferred to anyone after you die | Your Steam games will go to the grave with you (www.techspot.com)
The Internet Archive is under a DDoS attack (bsky.app)
Brought to you by the Department of Erasing History.
Every time I hear news from the tech industry lately (lemmy.world)
CEO of Google Says It Has No Solution for Its AI Providing Wildly Incorrect Information (futurism.com)
You know how Google’s new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won’t slide off (pssst…please don’t do this.)...
Kyle Rittenhouse Tells Native Americans They Can ‘Leave’ If They Hate America (newsone.com)