Absolutely. We don’t need kings making decisions like this. The downside is the difficulty in forcing government and the anti-help-anyone segment of our society to spend such taxation correctly to actually help people.

I disagree. It’s not “one leads to the other,” it’s that people change. Far too often people start out, not just in tech, bucking the system in some way. Anti-authority, pro-privacy, anti-centralized control, etc.

But when the server costs start mounting for a service that gets popular and money needs to come in, people change. Now you need to monetize via ads or whatever, now you get attacked, you circle the wagons, get investors, and it’s all downhill from there.

Digg and Reddit are big examples, Google could arguably be a similar case, it happens in music too where a band “sells out”, like Metallica for example. An originally anti-authority metal band starts lawsuits and banning fans to protect profits.

Sure there are plenty of situations where services remain open and free (for now), like wikipedia, linux distros, etc. but we aren’t always that lucky.

*can’t

But have a strong, brutal, militarized police force and an easily manipulated ( by those with money) legal system.

The only places I’ve found that take USD are really poor places that really want USD, and maybe Mexico. Even some of those places will really take advantage of the exchange and you get way less than what the USD is worth if you just pay with USD.

I travel all the time and tourist locations, barring the ones I mentioned, don’t want anything to do with handling USD when tapping a card or phone to pay is vastly preferred.

Yeah. He was clapping back at trump and the republicans a lot which helped boost him to run. Pretty popular. Then he got elected and suddenly started aligning with the republicans on some issues. The consensus since then (at least on Lemmy) is that brain damage causes conservatism.

…the government doesn’t have any right to tell me that I have to feed my kids

Would work better.

SpaceX and all of Musk’s companies have received many tens of billions in government contracts, subsidies, and incentives and more are on the way.

The meme is right, but it’s WAY short of the amount of money SpaceX is getting.

AI bots.

Not the rest of them.

$5k when having a kid costs $3k in insurance copays with a normal birth and average insurance. So you’re down to $2k before even leaving the hospital. This dude has all the intellectual depth and forethought of a mushroom.

Wooden is a good way to describe her.

The old people liked the predictability of the system, the comfort in the known. Even if it sucked, and the version they have in their heads doesn’t really remember the hardships. That’s true today for a lot of the people that miss the “good old days”; they forget everyone that died of polio, the institutionalization or beating of non-normative people with autism or adhd, the racism, homophobia, all the people that never came home from wars or did so broken…

Yeah. People are really strange like that.

We got lulled into thinking everything was going to be fine. Then we got whacked with all the tech outsourcing, dot-bomb, 9/11…etc. but at least we had cheaper college first and that gave us a foot in the door without as much of the crushing college debt that millennials got.

communist authoritarian dictatorships

Nobody has done real communism on a national scale. One of the damndest things done by the cold war was allowing the US to convince anyone who would listen that the USSR was actually communism and socialism. It was authoritarian, kleptocratic, tyrannical, dictatorial…anything but actually letting the people have actual control and benefits from their labor in any form other than on paper. I’m not arguing for communism in any way, nor do I want to split hairs over differing methods of applying communism, but to call any version of countries claiming to be communist as actually communist is crazy. They’re all authoritarian dictatorships.

There’s renovation in keeping with the intent and history of the building, and then there’s trump’s ostentatious and tacky design preferences.

60 Minutes finally found their spine? They’ve been barely tolerable for a while now with poor reporting. Looks like getting attacked personally was what it took to hit back with actual accuracy.

Funny that they equate “businessman” to “liar, cheat, thief”, yet continue to idolize businessmen like Musk.

They do.

However the flyovers and other military displays during sporting events were originally done as a recruitment tool.

An advertisement for the military.

It has nothing to do with deliberately planning flight hours for pilots, the hours are a secondary benefit.

AFV edited the shit of its show. People didn’t get hurt, there were no politics, it was silliness and “family” entertainment.

Jackass was all about stupid humans hurting each other or themselves. But they didn’t imply or tell you to engage in the stupidity.

The social media tools today are actively and willfully destructive. Doesn’t matter if it’s telling outright lies about politics or the sciences, or “challenging” people to do risky or damaging things.

Yeah, stupid humans have done stupid things since forever, but now they’re paid to do it and encourage others to do so as well.

Some garish, tasteless, gold shit everywhere.

I post this to mock the premise of the whole thing, especially the part where he’ll “pay for it himself.” The only thing he pays for is sex, lawyers, and bribes.