Libertarians are in favor of maximum freedom for the maximally wealthy first and foremost. It’s an ideology promoted by the late Koch brothers.
It doesn’t take a genius to realize how this type of “freedom” shakes out for the less wealthy, and then further down, for the have-nots.
Basically libertarians are just undercover fascists.
Some notes.
Unionizing is great when you must work in a business with highly concentrated ownership. Unions, when they are democratic, counterbalance the concentrated ownership of your workplace.
An undemocratic union can be a tool for worker management as opposed to worker empowerment.
However, workers should aspire to own their workplaces. That’s what worker coops are for.
In a worker coop workers are the owners and the boss of themselves. That goes far beyond what even the best union can achieve for worker empowerment.
Also workers competing for scraps has been a thing forever now. AI simply pours gasoline on that fire. It’s bad, really bad, but not new.
The main problem is landlessness or assetlessness. When you own nothing, you will accept any conditions to survive. Owning nothing sets your leverage to 0. Even if you have skills, if you can’t say ‘no’ you cannot negotiate. To be able to say ‘no’ reliably and reasonably you need either personal assets, or incredibly useful and resourseful commons, which are assets in which you have an unshakeable share.
We should do away with the landless/assetless condition as a matter of principle. That means wealth accumulations must have a ceiling.
“Run the government like a business.”
🤡
I’ve moved plenty and you don’t see me ever casually suggesting it to a stranger on the internet. Not once.
There is no one, no one ALIVE, who doesn’t know about moving. Likely the person you suggested it to moved 5 times already and knows more about it than you. It’s very possible.
Eat shit with your shit advice.
The person was asking about dating and you told them to move without knowing a damn thing about their life or preferences. It’s really dumb.
That’s advice on the level of “Just take a small 10 million dollar loan from your father.”
Laughably unserious.
You need to meet the people where they are at.
I moved recently, and nearly died as a result. It was hell. And I got lucky too. I’ve moved 10 times. Each move was hell. I never benefitted from moving. I just treaded water. I often moved because I had to, not because it was good, and by often I mean each time. Often one aspect would improve while another would go into the toilet. Not a single move was a pure win or a solution to anything. Fuck every trashcan out there that casually, completely mindlessly, suggests moving like moving is so easy, like it has no downsides, like moving is a solution, like moving is affordable to anyone any time, etc. Fuck that kind of “advice.” Fuck every trashcan out there with this kind of “just take a small 10 million dollar loan from of father” style of advice. Or like “just learn how to code.” Another trash advice. In fact 99% of all life advice is trash.
I see a bunch of people in this thread picking bones with Yanis’ word usage.
I upvoted the best of those that are simple, straightforward, and focus on what they want instead of what they don’t.
The legit way to go negative is to demonstrate real tangible harm, and not just tell me you don’t like it. You don’t like the word? Well boo fucking hoo your little boo boo. Everyone likes or dislikes all sorts of things. Why should I care about this particular dislike of yours? Why is it important? Convince me.
I see Yanis Varoufakis as an ally. He’s making great points. Are the points new? Who gives a shit? I don’t. Is he convincing new people every day? Yes, he is. Is he opening and helping align new minds every day? No shit. Yes. Absolutely. Is he eloquent, clear, and persuasive? Yes, yes, yes. And that’s what matters.
I will upvote Yanis as long as he keeps being the Yanis that I know and like. I know what he is going to say. And that’s fine. It’s like if Ricardo Semler were giving a new talk I could guess the content. If Richard Wolff says something new, I can guess the general gist of what it is. That doesn’t make it wrong or bad. There are still folks out there who need to hear it. New people are born every day. Every day is someone’s first time.
The bigger reason Yanis is popular is because he served in an important government post in Greece. And he is right. That helps too. No need to produce useless unproductive friction toward Yanis. (“Oh, but his taxonomy is not to my liking!” holy batman what a low value comment)
I myself use all these words: neofeudalism, economic royalists, oligarchs, fascists, cappies, wealth consolidationists, private property fetishists, free market fundamentalists, libertarians, etc. There is not just one legit way to describe that evil. The point is to oppose the wealth and economic decision consolidation and to oppose the erosion of the commons. That’s it.
- Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.
Billionaires owe a moral debt to the broader society and to the commons, that made their wealth, influence and giant egos bossible.
- We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible.
We must rebel against the tyranny of the oligarchs.
- Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public.
Billionaires have their asset portfolios in the game, but not their skin.
The 99% have their skin in the game, because skin is all they got.
Relative the economic royalists the 99% got no assets to speak of.
Our interests are those of cattle and the ranchers. Our interests clash. The ranchers systematically limit and drain the life energy of the cattle to boost their own freedom and energy. That is not a society.
- The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.
This is the lesson the 99% are waiting to learn.
The billionaires already know about every kind of power, soft and hard, and aren’t ashamed to show their ass in public to use power to get their objectives met.
It’s the 99% who are politely queueing up in line and are waiting their turn, which never comes. And the longer the 99% continue surrendering their power and their initiative, the furtheir the objectives of the 99% are from them.
The billoinaires don’t ask for permission. They just take. They 99% ask for permission first, and are denied permission.
- The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.
The question is not whether AI will be bult, but who will own the AI. AI will serve the owners at the expence of all the non-owners.
The real divide is not USA vs China, but the legal owners of the AI machine vs the rest.
- National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.
Sky high top marginal rate wealth taxes should be a universal duty.
Wealthy people must be forced to live as a poor person would, and among the poor, for 5 years straight, from age 20 to 25, so they stop talking out of their ass and get a fucking clue. I don’t wanna hear about the 10 dollar bananas, Michael.
Every wealth accumulation above 500 million (indexed to median wealth) is a policy failure.
- If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm’s way.
No. The society should not serve the U.S. Marines and the billionaires, how absurd. Of course the billionaires want to throw some crumbs to the folks with guns that are backstopping their power. That’s how the billionaires’ thugocracy works.
- Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.
“Run the government like a business” claptrap.
- We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.
The public doesn’t want billionaires’ grace, for fucks sake.
The public, the 99%, wants, and should want, POWER, precisely to avoid depending on grace.
- The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed.
Talk about using extreme wealth accumulations to nourish their soul and sense of self. Who does that?
- Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.
If what I said under the point 6 were the norm, my eyes would not now be assaulted by such ignorant claptrap.
- The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.
The owners of the AI machines will use their private ownership of the AI to deter all the non-owners. Got it.
- No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet.
Take that, Finland and Iceland.
- American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war.
Doing 5 regime changes a year is peace. America is trying to put the billionaires’ handpicked dictator to run every country around the world. That’s what they call “peace”.
Again, point 6.
- The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
- We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn.
So close, and yet so far.
- Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives.
Combat the extreme levels of wealth inequality. Play a role in that! Then watch what happens to violent crime once everyone has significant assets in the game and not just their naked and cold skin.
- The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.
Then why is the executive branch of government in the USA filled with more billionaires than ever?
Looks like the problem is not talent, but the objective of said talent.
Economic royalists are savant talented in the area of wealth accumulation and power consolidation. No surprise this kind of talent does’t help them serve the 99%.
- The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all.
Broken clock.
- The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.
If we all take the Bible a bit more seriously, the Israel/USA vs Iran war will get hotter (God gave all that land to the Jewish faithful, you know), and the winners of that war will be the pedo billionaires building out their private rivieras on top of the bodies of the 99%.
Religion has gone too far already. Separation of Church and State NOW.
- Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.
This is saying “White people > brown people” in dog whistle.
Name the cultures! What specifically is better? Talk straight and plain. No more dog whistles for the nat c’s.
I think they are hoping it will go unnoticed.
It can also be a result of deal-making like “I will vote for the budget if I can include this other provision, otherwise I am sabotaging the budget.”
Why are they getting away with it? Simple: no negative consequences.
It’s a tool in their toolbox which they have never gotten punised or penalized for using, so why wouldn’t they use it?
I hate to say it, but our lawmakers don’t take us, the voters, seriously enough. Sure, if there is a ferocious backlash, they will listen for a minute. Otherwise they just do what their billionaire donors want. In case of a backlash they can just wait for it to die down, the outrage fades, and they can try to serve the billionaire interests again.
In this case the billionaires fear the peasants 3D printing untraceable guns. Imagine if full auto or selective fire firerams can be 3D printed? In other words, gun regulations cannot work when every citizen is a gun factory.
If our government worked in our interests, none of this would matter because nobody would be angry enough to want to resort to political violence, even if they were armed.
On the other hand if there were say 50 million (out of 340 total) enraged have-nothings with nothing to lose in life, then if only 1% of those 50 actually take action, boy, our government and the billionaires will have their hands full. Bodyguards might start charging 50 million a year to guard the billionaires, and just try to stiff your bodyguards and see what happens then.
Even an idiot understands that it’s not smart to create a society with a whole bunch of desperate people with nothing to lose. But our system is run by people worse than idiots, which is why they will try to regulate and surveil the peasants first, punching down first, before being forced to finally do what they should have always been doing: serve the goddam people, serve the 99%!
Have the comments here read the article? It’s arguing that the CEOs themselves have spread the doomer narrative and are now being molotov’d as a result.
The CEOs were talking to investors. They didn’t used to care if the proles overheard all that radical signaling intended for investors. I guess now they have a reason to care.
The difference is likely size and expense.
Now you don’t need a 100 million dollar Boeing 737 sized drone to loiter for 3 hours.
Previously small and cheap drones could loiter for 40 mins on an internal battery. Now they can stay up for 3 hours. That can be useful.
Of course these mobile wireless recharging stations will become military targets for the opposition. So the overall combat math isn’t obvious to me, but it’s not a tech I see as obviously useless.
This could be much more straightforwardly a win for civilian applications.
It doesn’t use any AI. Not sure the VCs will be interested.
That bill had just been introduced. It is a loooooong way from passing. No need to panic. This is not our doom yet.
Now is the time to give those representatives a call, mention the bill number, and tell them in a few logical and polite sentenses why this bill is a terrible idea.
Fuck this bill. And it’s not going to be too late to use the less polite methods later. We lose nothing by trying to be polite first.
I am a different person from the one you were bantering with. This is the best quote I’ve found:
By the fall of 2024, Lane found the source of his next fix: Credentials stolen from a PowerSchool contractor were available online.
And he’s 20 now, mentioned right at the beginning of the article. So roughly 1.5 years ago? So if my math is right, he could have been 18? We have to count a few months more than just one year back (apr 2025 would have been exactly one year ago).
Anyway I upvoted the both of you for the conversation. No hard feelings at all. It’s just not so obvious to me he was 19 at the comission of the crime.
They were approving evety health claim for a fucking while back then.
It’s not 100% safe for the patient either, but if surviving the treatment is more likely than surviving the disease, it’s a go? Assuming the pain is bearable, and the post-treatment quality of life is worth a damn too. Mere survival is not good enough.
Micro$oft isn’t America.
Micro$oft is a special interest inside America, maybe, at best, American-government-aligned, assuming the government is heavily influenced or captured by Micro$oft.
If Ameirca is first and foremost its people, the megacorp and the oligarchical interests (economic royalists) inside America are at odds with most of the American population. The megacorps and the oligarchs can be considered anti-American.
Anyway, what’s bad for Micro$oft is not always bad for America. What’s good for America is not always good for Micro$oft. These interests are not all on the same page, to put it politely.
(this is just me agreeing with you in a longer form)
The problem lies in direction and methods.
Direction: toward greater wealth consolidation.
Methods: fear, lies, fostering ignorance, fostering political disinterest, truth embargo, surveillance, overclassification, embezzlement and other white collar crimes unpunished, eliminating the commons, paywalling all things, etc.
Both of those are huge problems that create unlivable societies.
The only proper direction is toward a legally mandated wealth ceiling plus a wealth floor plus enforced and publicly measured and publicly tested market competition to regulate maximum allowed wealth consolidation.
And of course truth has to be the informational currency. And rights. And privacy for the small players, with heavy oversight for the large players because large is dangerous.
We can’t lose the big picture here. Of course the governments must govern, but toward what ends and with what methods matters hugely.
Hopping from one proprietary platform to the next is like shopping arround for a kinder slaver who doesn’t beat you as much. We can do so much better.
Promote the platforms that respect your rights and freedoms.
Apple and Google are financially wired to squueze you for all you’re worth. You are the product. You are the sheep that needs fleeced.
We need tech platforms and solutions that respect us and that are not incentivized to squueze max profit. We all know where the road to maxxing profits leads.
I’ve been windows-free for more than 5 years, and as soon as I can get a reasonable Motorola Graphene phone, I am out.
I have been deGoogled as much as I reasonably can, and if possible I want to stop rewarding scum companies altogether. I am ever looking for better options.
The real target here is population control.
The lawmakers, which take billionaire money by the ton, who HAVE NEVER given a shit, suddenly, NOW, they want to protect the vulnerable. Abso fucking lutely laughable on its face.
It’s easier to search online for WLBR than for Imp. It might occasionally force people to search for the full name “GNU Imp”, which might be a plus.
Other than that, I love your proposal.