Absolutely. And I've done it to quite a few places.
Like it's no secret it's expensive as shit to live lately. If you're just giving away your software/knowledge/ideas, and I feel I gain value from them, I'll happily throw some cash in your hat.
Gawker outing people against their wishes, the person they outed being one of the larger avatars of the crypto-fascist right, who worked with one of the biggest co-conspirators of Vince McMahon's brutal anti-union activities to destroy them for strictly personal reasons.
All of these people really deserve each other.
Edit: also for bonus points, him getting outed in such a dangerous place is ironic as all hell, given that he didn't need to be there apart from wanting money out of the Saudi royal family.
Like I wouldn't want to be outed while there either, but my answer is I wouldn't fucking go to Saudi Arabia with a gun to my head, and I certainly wouldn't be sucking up to the crown prince for m(b?)illions of dollars for my disinformation machine. But I guess principles are for the poors.
> On the topic of HN users, is it our collective first day on earth?
The disease of financialization at work. Money is all that matters to people, everything is converted into money. It's only value is what you could get from selling it, and/or what you spent to acquire it.
Like those weird fuckers who buy $200k supercars so they can sit in a damn garage. (She said, having put 30k miles on a Corvette inside of 3 years)
> 10k mi/yr is a nice round "lease" number of miles. Are you sure you don't value the resale value of your car more than the joy value?
I mean it's helped by the fact that I can only realistically drive it like 7-8 months out of each year, and it's my fun car, not a commuter. As much as I'd love to drive for fun every day that's just not feasible, lol. That said it's resale value has never once entered my mind. I'm waiting until the loan is paid off at which point I'm planning several modifications to get more power out of it, and probably a lambo-door-hinge kit.
> For whatever reason, there’s a strong motivation for people to dismiss the gigantic global effort to transition the energy system away from fossil fuels, and claim that all that effort isn’t really doing anything.
Because renewable energy is Communism, or something.
But seriously: $$$$. The Fossil Fuel industry, before it finally dies, will make big Tobacco look downright merciful. The owners of these companies and their media co-conspirators should be tried in the Hague for what they have done to our planet just to keep making fucking money.
> The Fossil Fuel industry, before it finally dies, will make big Tobacco look downright merciful.
This should not be surprising when one realizes that this industry is the biggest industry that humanity ever created (in terms of monetary value). Nothing ever is or was bigger than energy from fossil fuels. Predictably, those who profit from this, behave like selfish [...] and fight tooth and nail to keep their profits.
I would disagree, I think that plentiful affordable energy has been a huge benefit to the human race. Transportation, refrigeration, manufacturing, simply having electricity in the home, most everything we take for granted in terms of our current standard of living traces back to abundant and cheap energy.
But there is no reason to hang on to the old, dirty technology if there are now better alternatives. And if the economics work, the market will follow, as it seems to be doing. You can't fake lower costs.
Nuclear should have replaced coal decades ago but the economics didn't actually work, even though the environmental benefit would have been real.
Oh for fucking sure. I consider humans as much a part of the planet as anything else, but also very valid to call it out specifically.
Mass death of species too numerous to name, the biosphere itself, property damage from rising ocean levels, the soon to fail air currents, all the damage and death from extreme weather events, all of it. All of it could've been fucking prevented and it wasn't, because profits.
Perhaps not yet, but we have at minimum 2 and a half years of the Trump Family Circus to contend with, and they've gotten a lot destroyed in what time they've had so far.
And, Trump isn't the real problem. Anti-intellectualism here has hit it's zenith. Fully a third of our country is so propagandized and media-illiterate that they can't really be said to share a reality with the rest of us anymore.
I don't know how we can fix this. Talk radio, Fox News, and social media may well have damaged our civil life beyond repair. And they're still doing it.
And largely owned by the same fucking people, to boot. Hey maybe letting like 30 people have as much money as some sovereign nations was a bad idea guys...
One can take some hope that Germany recovered from its descent into fascism. But that was in a time where there was no social media and other brainwashing technologies embedded into the population.
They also had 45 years of being split in half with one side being under a totalitarian government, and the other being partially administrated by three other countries with troops stationed there and the threat of thermonuclear war should ever the two sides get in a disagreement.
Also, many of the same ills that caused fascism the first time are starting to re-emerge. You can see this in the rise of AfD.
I have heard very little about AT&T's actual telecom services, but my god have I heard about their billing department. I daresay the only departments in more of a shambles than their billing one is... well. A lot of Microsoft lately.
Telecom billing is seemingly designed to stochastically fail in favor of the telecom. This is not a shambles, but excellent system performance, from their perspective.
Every time you hear about some corpo or another getting to "play a role in the development of $nation" it's pretty much always going to be some kind of bullshit that will employ a lot of locals for shit wages to provide a product or service to residents of the Global North.
There are exceptions of course but the vast, vast, vast majority are tourist trapping and wealth extraction.
The post-information age has never felt so well-named as it does lately. Investors dumping billions into completely unproven and, largely, undesired tech. Why? Because the Valley doesn't have anything else to sell, seemingly.
Either way, as always, we'll do it the American Way: Privatize the profits, socialize the losses.
>The post-information age has never felt so well-named as it does lately. Investors dumping billions into completely unproven and, largely, undesired tech. Why?
Eh. There's too much money. Covid response involved printing a lot of money and it all ended up somewhere. The chaos of the current administration has made everything considerably harder to price and the coincidental rise of the LLM has put us in strange situation that is legitimately difficult to price things correctly.
Our society was designed from the foundations to benefit the owning class, and this is a prime, easily observed example of that. You're completely correct and it doesn't matter, because the point of IP law is to allow people who know nothing to sit on assets they own and make money for doing no work.
If someone wants to argue this position, I would challenge them to explain why anything around IP law exists as it does now if that was not the explicit goal.
The good faith interpretation is that innovation is spurred by having some guarantees that your innovation isn't immediately ripped off. It allows for investing more into R&D.
I'm not saying the current system achieves that, but it is part of the justification.
A good faith interpretation at this point is voluntarily sticking your head in the sand to feign centrism. The purpose of a system is what it does, and ours, too predictably to be mere coincidence, permits capital to endlessly extract value from those actually creating it, to the detriment of those value creators, the people they create value for, and even if they're too dead inside to perceive it, the capital holders themselves.
Initially, copyright and patents were a counter-response to the European guild system.
Early on, you also had to prove your patrnt with a physical thing. Couldnt write the patent to deceive. And for making plain language, you got protection for 17 years.
Now, theres shit like 'business process patents', genetic patents, and other horrible. And patents are now writtten to confuse and hide, unlike plain language.
Copyrights were basically bought by Disney. Theyve been grossly perverted due to money interests.
Im mostly OK with trademarks. It comes from Heraldry and family coat of arms. Trademarked colors are quite bullshit however.
I think it's parody? That said all products made with heavy AI use are so inherently bad, and the buffoons so credulous behind their prompts, that it's difficult to suss out genuine efforts by unqualified people vs. people who know it's bad and are doing it to be funny/make that point.
It's kinda like trying to identify actual crypto projects headed by people who have no idea how anything outside cryptographic programming works, versus ones headed by people who know exactly how stupid it is and are just looking to cash a check.
Also the people who hype AI and the ones who backed crypto are basically the same exact circle of bag holders. They'll be out of AI as soon as the bubble pops. I think robotics is gonna be the next one.
Like it's no secret it's expensive as shit to live lately. If you're just giving away your software/knowledge/ideas, and I feel I gain value from them, I'll happily throw some cash in your hat.
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