That’s how meritocracies actually work.
Being responsive and responsible is the merit accumulation stage.
Once you accumulate enough merit, you enter the reward stage.
And what’s the reward?
The reward is that you no longer need to be responsive or responsible.
Lots of companies feel the need to serve their users on their way up.
Once they feel they got much or most of the market on lock, they no longer need to justify themselves to their users, and a cycle of pure valueless exploitation begins, aka enshittification.
You didn’t read my message.
That’s just a longer way to say, yes, the shareholders asked for it.
Just because they didn’t ask it in letter form or explicitely that doesn’t mean much.
Look, if M$ does this ‘agentic’ move and its shares drop 20% overnight, then, and only THEN, you’d be right to say the shareholders did not ask for it.
Are shareholders punishing or rewarding these moves?
Billionaires, looking for more mass control.
It is not for our benefit.
Owners win.
If I have a plot of land with some cherry trees on it, I can get a landless person to pick most of them for free.
I make an offer “for every 100 pounds/kilos of cherries you pick for me, I’ll let you keep 1”. If the person who receives such an offer has no land of their own, they have to agree to avoid starvation.
That’s why our system needs a huge class of the landless, resourceless, and assetless people. Then for the priveledge of touching a privatized resource you have accept the privateer’s conditions.
Fencing off resources and protecting the fence by the threat of death is how this scam works.
And it is impossible to fix this societal problem by simply trading more and better as an individual. The ruleset of the game is tuned for mass free energy extraction from the assetless class at the macro level.
At most only for those that are willing to call him “god emperor”.
Only until he gets bored of it. Once he gets bored of the boot lickers he’ll make soap from them.
There needs to be a hard cap on wealth at around 100 mil, but defined relative some multiple of a median yearly salary.
If the salaries grow, the total wealth cap can grow too. And vice versa.
Large wealth should be about luxury and having lots of toys, and not about being a law-making aristocrat who is themselves outside the reach of the law like now.
People who hit wealth cap should have no privacy, and be banned from any interactions with the government. There should be some trade-offs to huge wealth. A mega wealthy person should lose something for the priviledge of having so much wealth. Also mandatory psychiatric tests, to make sure they are human and not a lizard in a human suit. OK, I am joking about the last part.
If I were assuming I would not need to converse first.
In a democracy there will be persusion in the form of arguments.
But in a democracy the demos is not actively or low-key campaigning to give away their power, to put the interests of economic royalists ahead of their own.
In other words, the quality of energy is not defensive when someone tells you to be more proactive, faster, more zealous in defending your own interests.
The first functioning democratic governance was practiced by the pirates. Why? Each pirate could kill half the crew at night. And they all knew this fact about each other. So they did the rational thing: nobody’s voice can be ignored, or there are dire consequences.
The only way democracy works is if most people will want to govern, make policy, make and change the rules of the game, own the game, and are not content merely passively playing the ruleset they inherited from their ancestors.
Once you encounter someone who lacks that hunger to be an administrator, and not merely a passive and reactionary player, more arguments is the wrong way to go. These passive people cooperatively bind to economic royalists and their entire view of life is not 1, 5, or 10000 arguments away. The enablers together with the economic royalists are an obstacle, not some harmless loyal opposition, but basically a team (mutually supportive and cooperative group) of rapists and their enablers. The passives/reactionaries and the economic royalists are one indivisible team.
To successfully adapt to a position of servitude is not trivial. It’s 1000’s of adaptations all woking as a unit. You won’t argue such people off the ledge.
Get the getables. Leave the rest behind.
That’s fair. Then to me you are neutral at best, assuming you are largely apolitical.
Your thinking sucks.
I want a comrade who will help me govern my world.
I don’t want a dead weight that requires a lot of persuation before they can even let out a fart.
I am thinking ahead. I can persuade you now, and tomorrow I will have to persuade you again. Anytime I want cooperation I will need to persuade you. And you are just one person. I am going nowhere fast with that approach. The default for you becomes one of passivity. And then I have to start persuading you after things have gotten already very bad. That’s late action.
That will not do.
No. We need to start thinking and talking like me first. There must be anger and a demanding atmosphere.
Courts are not the only way.
Other ways: legislation, direct action, economics.
We have to impose our will. Don’t act lke a warmed over fish.
The trick is to stop thinking like a rabbit. Rabbits expect to be attacked and think defensively. Rabbit acts late, which is why they are dinner. Even rabbits dig some escape tunnels in advance of dangerous encounters, so they are not totally late. But compared to predators they are late.
Predators don’t focus most of their energy on “how will I get attacked, and how will I avoid it?” They think, “who will I eat today? How will I attack?” Even predators can get attacked. Even lions get attacked. But they don’t put more than 30% of their mental energy into defence. Rabbits put 100% of their energy into defence. Even eating for a rabbit is defence.
Do you watch boxing? Can a boxer win on just defence? And only by reacting after the fact, without their own offensive plan?
I am tired of everyone playing helpless. Helplessness starts with victim or prey mentality. Try putting yourself in a role of a predator for 5 minutes a day.
Humans are apex predators. We aren’t helpless, just waiting to accept the crumbs that the corporations and the aristocrat-wannabes give us. That is not what we are.
Because he or she works for Google’s image and status management interests.
Does not matter consiously or unconsciously. Does not matter paid or free. Dependent or independent. Good faith or bad. Bot or human. None of it matters.
What matters is the result of their action/speech, and the priorities. And it is loud and clear what those are.
“Google must be trusted and given all the information first. Then, if you can find mismanagement, try to prosecute your grievance AFTER an injury has occured and was proven.”
^^^ We need to flip the script here.
Protect your iterests first. Google’s interests mean nothing to you.
If Google can serve my interests they get paid. They don’t get freebies or deference or first dibs or ownership of the phone, or part ownership, or benefit of doubt, fucking NOTHING. They get just what they need to render a service. That’s it.
If Google does not like that they are to serve, and instead Google’s managers have aristocratic ambitions, we need to talk.
I disagree that we need to find mismanagement first.
Never mind that Google is 100% opaque from outside and is not subject to inspections by its users.
Even if Google had an open door policy inviting and empowering any and all citizen auditors, I would still disagree that Google gets the benefit of doubt by default, and only after something blows up can we begin asserting our interests.
I think we can assert our interests any time, for any reason, and for no reason at all, with arbitrary aggressiveness, limited only by our own practical considerations.
Instead of waiting for things to go wrong, we can protect our interests before there is even a chance of things going wrong.
Can.
Will we? Each person has to consider their situation pragmatically, but if they considered everything and decided to assert themselves, we would be idiots to insist Google gets the first dibs, they have the initiative, and so how dare we want to limit Google in any way without first PROVING harm. Horse. Shit.
I take the same view toward any monopolies in general. We should not bother proving harm. We should break all monopolies as a matter of principle, even if they are “harmless.”
And Google shound be given as close to zero information as possible. As a matter of principle.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Then you want real and enforced competition.
Right? More like lawlessnessmakers.
These folks dog walked us straight to fascism, but now that it starts to smell like gasoline they got cold feet these “lawmakers.”
I get it that if the feds ignore the courts, then the court opinion is just a fart in the wind. But the courts can fight back by deputizing an arbitrary size armed militia.
In other words, our courts are not toothless. As far as I know with my so-so knowledge of hitory the courts never had to test their teeth in practice. But they I believe do have a legal framework for in fact enforcing their opinions assuming the will of the people is on their side and assuming they don’t mind for things to get hairy. And yea, it means an armed conflict, if not an all out civil war.
For me it will depend on what that foriegn country is, how it is governed, its cultural norms, things like that.
I don’t have more trust in Chinese government than I do American.
How about some real privacy rights instead of making me choose my surveillers.
We’ll just wait to be picked up.
Or not.
Because job difficulty and job pay aren’t correlated under capitalism.
The easiest job is to own assets. Not manage assets. Own them. Which is to say get your name on a title of a sufficiently large asset, and the money just rolls in while you sleep in bed. You sleep, your asset works. For a large enough asset this also provides the largest pay.
Owners need lieutenants to look after their assets. That’s what a CEO is.
So why are CEOs so highly paid? Because if you do not, they will embezzle (steal) money from your asset since they control every aspect of your asset’s daily functioning! So you need to cut the CEO in on the grift of being a big asset owner.