Oh I see so youre a based supporter of the People’s Republic of China, the model for strong government control over capitalism.

There is such a thing as class. There are ruling classes and servile classes, and have been for thousands of years. We live in a class society, capitalism is the system that creates class antagonisms, government is a way to manage them. But as long as there are capitalists, and they own everything, then the government will belong to them. I would rather the government belongs to us.

No governor can save us. The amount of organization and political will that it would take to turn a psycho oppressive society like ours into a rational social democracy with nice capitalist rulers (like the Europeans have with DAVOS, lol) would be enough to run society for our selves, and get rid of the profit motive. Capitalism, as class society, can not be rational, because it is not rational for some people to rule others.

Your proposed ideal governance is just Karen-ism, like the best we can hope for is being able to speak to a manager to solve our problems. If they won’t do anything, then we just need better managers.

No. We dont need managers, the managers are a sign of the actual problem: bosses whose incentives are completely different than the rest of us. We need to take power rather than give it away. A better world is possible, not by giving away power but by seizing it and organizing for the benefit of all, rather than a special few.

need ai integration to code

Nah that dude is on the left, and he makes 250k per year

Good one!

Here’s a list of the 10 richest people in 2019: Jeff Bezos ($131B), Bill Gates ($96.5B), Warren Buffett ($82.5B), Bernard Arnault ($76B), Carlos Slim Helú ($64B), Amancio Ortega ($62.7B), Larry Ellison ($62.5B), Mark Zuckerberg ($62.3B), Michael Bloomberg ($55.5B), Larry Page ($50.8B)

Here’s a list of the 10 richest people today: Elon Musk ($480B), Larry Page ($270B), Jeff Bezos ($255B), Sergey Brin ($250B), Larry Ellison ($245B), Mark Zuckerberg ($230B), Bernard Arnault ($190B), Jensen Huang ($120B), Warren Buffett ($115B), Steve Ballmer ($110B)

So, during covid the rich made so much fuckin money, and they made it so fast that they can’t go back. Line must go up, and at a greater rate of profit than before. Yet after covid, the fed raised interest rates to suppress wages. They said the cause was inflation, they always say that increased wages increase demand, which lowers supply, which causes prices to increase. But even in the midst of the war in Ukraine, which was used to explain away inflation, independent economists confirmed that at the time, around to 50% of price increases were arbitrary and not connected to higher costs. https://www.epi.org/blog/profits-and-price-inflation-are-indeed-linked/

So if the government and the banks can then decide to raise interest rates in order to suppress our wages, as they did after covid, while the richest people have multiplied their own wealth astronomically, all during a period where the working class is under attack in order to increase the unemployed reserve surplus population, thereby suppressing wages, then how exactly, in your opinion or analysis is capitalism something other than a system that takes your wages and gives them to the wealthiest people on the planet?

Recall a guy named Jeffrey Epstein who was close personal friends with the people above, and what they got up to. That is who you are defending, pedophiles, rapists, and psychopaths. Do you think it will help you quadruple your income in the next 5 years? If so, I would love to talk to you about some beachfront property I think you’ll be interested in.

I’m not calling you a pedo defender, just making a point that capitalism is a system that fucks us and rewards them for fucking us. So which side are you on?

The difference is that capitalism is more than just an economic system, it is a form of class domination. Its a whole set of social relations that reinforce dominance. Voting with your dollars is not a viable strategy for opposing capitalism, there is no individual consumer decision that can make a dent.

A good example is Boycott/Divest/Sanction. That’s like voting with your dollars right? And it is objectively an effective tactic against apartheid regimes, themselves driven by capitalist incentives, the same way that slavery was in the US. But BDS isnt an action taken by an individual, or rather, it isnt only that. It is a movement of people organizing with each other to take collective action to resist injustice. Capitalists and their political proxies fucking love Israel, who cares who is exploited or murdered in the name of economic development? Same in South Africa. And these campaigns infuriate the capitalist and political classes, they literally imprison people for showing support for Palestine. If it was one guy, or a few people scattered who decided they just weren’t gonna buy goods from Israeli companies, nobody would care. But they’re organized against the capitalists as a class, they educate people, convince them, and are effective.

Capitalism organizes people too, it organizes us to sell our labor to someone who uses it to make themselves rich. When we organize on the basis of our own enrichment or self defense, against the interests of the wealthy, that’s where the cops show up and the president starts calling the most harmless and caring people “domestic terrorists.”

When capitalism seems like just some economic system, then it doesn’t feel as repressive. We can go whole days without spending money. But capitalism is more than markets. Its practically impossible to avoid enriching capitalism as an individual. But spending a little money to organize and help people is resistance to the system as a social system rather than an economic one.

Mutual aid can draw criticism on this basis too, like there are plenty of left criticisms of mutual aid. But by my reckoning, wherever people are helping each other rather than competing for a slightly higher wage, there is a pocket of anti capitalism. The capitalists have total control over the all production and markets. In order to free ourselves from it on a mass scale, we have to be principled and practical, and we have to do what it takes to get enough people to unite and take action. If that means giving someone money or doing mutual aid as a tactic, then that can be part of an anticapitalist strategy.

My favorite bit is everyone running around like “vulcans are so logical and intelligent” and vulcans saying “we are so logical and intelligent” and then they’re just sort of weird racists

I may not agree with how you make your profits, but I’ll kill everyone defending your right to make them

Yes but that is never going to happen without putting restraints on the auto industry, which puts big money into preventing public transit from being built, and if its already exists, to destroy it.

Car culture is killing us. I get you’re trying to be pragmatic but more is necessary.

Gotta push through it. Most people only retain like 80% of what they read anyway, sometimes it takes my eyes a little while to wake up to what im making them do. Sometimes it takes a page but its better to find your groove after struggling, rather than getting stressed out because you can’t process every word right away.

Reading is a skill that takes practice.

Everyone’s struggles are different though, but that’s my experience

ASICs are used to mine crypto, but the ledger itself is on a regular server, more or less. It’s also true that LLMs are trained on High throughput ASICs. I don’t know what that volume looks like rn wrt AI, but I imagine its still in high demand.

The number of actual active coins has barely changed since the peak. Its a little higher, and there are more coins now, but they are significantly less active. Active trading on exchanges during the peak was about 25T, now its around 18T, a decrease of over 1/4. Are you arguing that 7 trillion dollars in annual exchange volume is inconsequential? At the peak there were about 400 exchanges, now there’s a little more than 200 active exchanges. Do exchanges not use any computing power? Are people trading bitcoin by hand somewhere? I’d love to see that.

There’s still a good amount of marketing and advertising but it has cooled a great deal. Lots of that business has consolidated and sees significantly less traffic = less computing power.

Added to the post covid lockdown decline in demand for computing services, which affected all of the same subjects of concern, there was a fuckload of unused computing power, just sitting around. This computing power represents a ton of investment in infrastructure, and long term plans that could not be stopped. AI is the justification to buy up a bunch of cheap server space available at the time, and continue growth of data centers and chip manufacturing plants (now stalled for 5 years or more). Why are all these companies who are heavily invested in vast server farms and chip manufacturing going so hard for a service that barely works?

The answer isn’t technical, its economic and political. I have no doubt you know more about chips and computing than I do, but if you want to understand what is happening, you have to look at economics and politics. The technical world of these tiny little areas of concerns and continuously manicured definitions is not how you tell what is going on in the world of chips and computing.

Trump is buying 10% stake in Intel, whose stalled manufacturing plant in Ohio was once visited by Biden and heralded at his state of the union. And the justification for it is National Security concerns. The great tech giants all sat right behind Trump at his inauguration. Did you not get the message? Chips and servers are a national security issue, it is incredibly political and as such greatly influences, and is greatly influenced by, the economics of an economic system that has to constantly grow greater returns of profit.

Anyway coin maintenance, ancillary services and subsequent economic activity surrounding crypto uses the same kind of computing power as AI. Its not like once a chip is mined with a ASIC GPU it stops using computing power, quite the opposite, but it does stop using ASIC computing power.

The bubble isn’t just the thing itself, its all the services and infrastructure that built up around it. Crypto doesn’t have to be awful, its just a tool, a ledger. But it exists in its current form because of what it creates, what kind of economic activity it stimulates. My point is that all the grifty ass economic hype activity around crypto just moved to AI

But I do appreciate the clarification, it gives me a chance to refine my perspective

The crypto bubble is the ai bubble. AI was the answer to “what are we going to do with all these chips and servers now that crypto crashed?”

Its gotta be Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. Evelyn clearly struggles with it.

Yeah right, the gloves fit about as well as cohesive plot points in a JFrakes episode of Disco

Its so crazy, fuck me for having opinions!

I haven’t seen TNG or First Contact since it was on the air. I remember FC being good, and the Frakes episodes of ds9 are good. We were watching Disco, and in that case, his episodes are just bizarre.

His episodes make no sense at all in Disco, which is saying something for a show that makes no sense at all, but his ds9 EPs are pretty good.

I just watched this series in the last year and I remember scoffing when I heard that, lol I had no idea what was coming.

Also being kinda new to Star Trek, is there a joke about Frakes? My wife and I always joke that when an episode makes no fucking sense, it was directed by JFrakes, and I wonder if its something like a joke among trek fans

Haven’t watched yet but its funny to me the idea that the Federation with their lofty principles still has a secret police – but its actually a make work program for all the incurable psychopaths in the galaxy that resembles a black ops wetworks deep cover operations in every way, except you give them “very important and secret missions” just chasing each other around the edges of the galaxy to keep them away from the rest of the federation