Uriel238 [all pronouns]

The ultra-wealthy are not only not geniuses, but they might be downright incompetent.

The most recent episode of How Money Works (here on YouTube) demonstrates this during the recent bonanza of tech layoffs (these include the AI layoffs, attributed falsely to replacement by AI automation).

The story it tells starts with the COVID-19 epidemic and lockdown, which lead to mass telecommuting and then the great replacement. The working class got a modicum of class consciousness since it was clear that their jobs were necessary and involved skills that would be difficult to replace.

The tech industry had developed its own culture from this and had gotten used to being able to openly negotiate their salaries, and the C-suite didn’t like that. In fact, the billionaire class openly resents the workforce on which it depends.

And thus, they laid off a ton of people. Too many, it turns out. It started with the RTO mandates, some of which were intended to incentivize workers to voluntarily quit. And some of them did. Specifically, the best and brightest talent were the ones most confident they could get work elsewhere at better pay that still allowed telecommuting.

So the billionaire class, via the great layoff, facilitated their own brain drain.

And now those same tech companies have found they’ve gotten rid of too many people, including essential talent that actually knew how to run the businesses (and the technology). So they’re now hiring them back. The greybeards are negotiating at an advantage, and are asking for higher salaries. And the ones that are no longer available are being replaced with rookies fresh out of college.

So yeah, the tech industry billionaires, out of pure vindictiveness, collectively fucked themselves.

I hypothesize our billionaire class got rich in their early careers through a combination of fortuitous opportunity, family connections, infusions of generational wealth and ruthless willingness to sabotage their peers. Then they were subject to years of sycophancy and cronyism where they were shielded from any criticism. They gladly assumed they earned their lot, and got there because they are brilliant. At that point, having immense wealth, it’s difficult to not fail upwards, and so they don’t actually see the difference between skillful decision-making and incompetence.

Sadly, incompetence with extreme amounts of money is very dangerous, and so we have the high lords playing their games of thrones and wrecking the world for the rest of us.

Vaccine denialism was a problem during the Spanish Flu epidemic in 1918.

In the eighties, I remember that Christian Scientists would refuse medical treatment for their dying children, choosing to pray instead. The kids usually died.

There was always a subset of the population who refused to acknowledge science or expertise.

These days, we’ve gotten rid of the government departments of experts that are supposed to advise our legislators regarding the consequences of the bills they want to pass. Instead they just listen to the lobbyists of the corporations who finance their campaigns.

Or in the case of Trump, his own imagination, since he hallucinates more than Google Gemini. A recent example is his belief that the CHIPS act requires the hiring of trans folk to run microchip-making factories. (It doesn’t. Also the rumor that he confused transgender with transistor is probably false.)

For most Americans, it would take a lawyer present just to know what is safe to do while under arrest.

The problem is, SCOTUS has already ruled on this in 1985, via the good faith exception. If a police officer mistakenly violates your fourth-amendment rights, but did so in good faith, then evidence of any crime found is inadmissible. It’s very difficult to prove bad faith, and officers have learned to lie to cover up, say, that they knew they were crossing a line, or were motivated by corruption, bigotry or ideology to fish for evidence beyond the scope of a reasonable search.

Besides which, I wouldn’t trust an officer to turn off data before combing though my phone, and the difference between what is on the phone and what is cloud data is transparent. They would absolutely have access to my entire email history of decades, and law enforcement has intrinsic personal cause to fish for criminal activity.

For one thing, collars is how police officers get accolades and promotions. And for another, there’s the matter of asset forfeiture. Police routinely will declare any open cash or valuable property as criminal in order to confiscate it. And it’s very difficult to get it back. In the 2010s some precincts already had the capability to empty pre-loaded credit cards, so it wouldn’t surprise me if they could do something similar with mobile payment services.

In the US since the aughts, law enforcement departments have regarded the public as enemy, and this shows up countless times in uncovered intra-department memorandums. It also shows up in precinct suspicious activity guidelines that are contradictory and include all possible forms of behavior (including inaction). It also shows up in police tools like poorly-trained detection dogs who signal at a 90%+ false positive rate, or the two-dollar roadside drug test that false positives on dozens of inert chemicals, such as donut sugar glaze.

In the twentieth century, I would hypothesize over 50% of our incarcerated are innocent, or are serving a sentence disproportionate to the alleged crime they committed. Of course we’re now in the era of random abductions and detention centers run by private prison companies.

Curiously, it’s often not even okay for het women to admit to liking dick in the current climate.

Around the end of the COVID-19 epidemic (when we finally had vaccines and stuff), I remember a refreshing article in a women’s magazine that was a post-hoc discussion of an online confessional for women who dangerously liked dick: women who risked infection by consensually having sex with strangers during the lockdown.

Anyway, Overton window be damned, it’s totally valid to like dick (or not).

I’m AMAB (presently enby) but since my forties have gotten along swimmingly in lesbian communities. And yes, at one point I wondered if boobs provide an endorphin high to wlw the way they do to het men (or at least to me.)

It turns out in r/actuallesbians, I didn’t have to wait long to learn my answer. Hornyposting about boobs was a regular thing when I was there.

Yeah, we need to take Trump and the ultra-wealthy seriously as a global existential threat, so I don’t joke about them.

And when someone spends their entire live in the pursuit of power, then to die, such as Charlie Kirk or Lindsey Graham, it just means another person got away without accountability. It’s been that way at least since Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson.

Sadly, as a neurodivergent on a fixed income who has no local friends, c̾o͎͕͐m̝̮̳͚͊͌̽m̽u͇̰̗̳̙͒ͪ͂̃ͧn͉̟̿̔í͔̬̠̩͕̿t͙͖̞̝ͩy̜̜̣͎̠̔̑̋ ͔͔̾͌͒͛ͨb̳̾u̥̮̾͗̒̄̏ͅĩ͔͉̺̙̖l̔̇ͥ͂̇dͣî̝͔̎̓ͩͣn͙̈́g͚̠̮̼̫ is entirely alien to me.

Seriously, I’ve tried to get into the local resistance / activism community and found they want me to start my own group and bring my alleged friends. Also I ended up on the email lists of dozens of orgs begging for cash and demanding I write to my officials, to the point I’m overwhelmed and have to unsubscribe from them piecemeal.

Online influencers who talk about community building have no empathy for spectrum folk who are isolated. Sometimes someone asks them and they don’t respond positively.

So whenever I hear organizing or community building it sounds like a tautological fictional action that no-one really knows how to express into plain words. It’s a circle that cannot be squared.

Obama was around for a second term, long enough for the recovery to be felt.

I think the primary thing that happened was due to the backlash of Obama being *1) black and 2) highly competent. Without Trump, the establishment Republicans were as boring as ever, so Clinton might have had a chance.

But then Trump came in and made racism great again, id est started saying the quiet parts out loud, which gave the voters permission to express their hatred openly.

And establishment Democrat corporatism was at its height. Obama was responsible for the disposition matrix (massive drone strikes burning villages), the FISC and the massive surveillance state. And we expected Clinton to be even worse: The Republicans may have been dastards. Trump may have been pure evil, but the Democrats sure were not friends to the US public.

And so Trump won with a minority, but by the Electoral College. And we underestimated how bad he was going to be, much the way we did with George W. Bush.

What’s crazy is the US elected Trump again knowing in advance exactly the kind of monster he is. I don’t buy the Trump regrets: Either the US constituency is very manipulable and they got played with the culture war, or it is very ignorant, and doesn’t take seriously the civic duty of voting in its own interest.

In 1980, Reagan won by a landslide, largely supported by the Religious Right, who didn’t care about any policy except eliminating abortion access. From then on, anti-abortion = Jesus, and (possibly coincidentally) Christian church membership has been suffering ever since.

But that might be an indicator that human beings are just very susceptible to certain kinds of messaging. It’s why nations restrict gambling, false advertising, confidence ploys, and so on. It’s why phishing and social engineering are matters taken seriously by cybercrime divisions.

Human beings are, in fact, that gullible.

And until we figure out how to counter it or effectively regulate it, then the ultra-wealthy who can buy massive marketing campaigns will have a technological advantage.

Possibly not the best example, then.

It’s fun to stay at the Y.M.C.A.
It’s fun to stay at the Y.M.C.A.
You can get yourself clean
You can have a good meal
You can do whatever you feel!

Meanwhile, if they seized his phone and tried to unlock it without a warrant signed by a judge, that is a violation of his rights as per the fourth amendment of the Constitution of the United States. However, in the US presently, such violations are routine by law enforcement.

Some agencies insist suspects do not have access to those rights if certain conditions apply, such as being within one hundred miles of a US border (such as a coast), or being on a terror watchlist.

…Federal authorities had put him on a terrorism watchlist because of his alleged association with the movement against Cop City.

Terrorism watch lists, no fly lists and government lists of cults and sects should not be legal in the US, as they violate the right to due process. Often there’s no reasonable way to challenge having your name on a list. It’s put there arbitrarily by a law enforcement officer without any oversight or process, meaning your name can be added again without restriction. And being on those lists often affects the civil rights to which you have access.

But then, the new regime is trying to strip ordinary citizens of their rights until we are all bonded serfs again.

The starving (and recent gutting) of the public domain demonstrates the institution of intellectual property persists in bad faith. Therefore media piracy is a legitimate means to acquire and consume media.

As the C-suite and its political and paramilitary minions have shown us crime is not about behavior and consequences, but who you are and to whom you bend the knee.

FOX News is possibly the most honed outlet of the massive oligarch-owned far-right propaganda machine that dominates social media and television viewership.

It offers a diet of fear, rage and bigotry, and then seasons it with red-pill conspiracy theories, implying that everyone else is lying to you, but FOX knows better. It encourages its viewers to reject all other sources, so that you’re watching news in a silo. Just FOX and you.

And this is the carrier by which it feeds you culture war and a narrow, extremist ideology.

And we know it works. Presidents, US Senators and Supreme Court Justices will regurgitate FOX talking points verbatim, using the very same words in the same order, when expressing opinions and passing policy.

We’ve known for a long time human beings are fallible. Fox Mulder tells Robert Modell his shoes are untied and he looks. Societies regulate gambling, outlaw false advertising, investigate confidence ploys, because we know humans can be tricked. Cybercrime divisions take phishing seriously because we know that the weakest link in the security chain is between chair and keyboard.

So it’s interesting that Ronald Reagan, as part of deregulation, had his FCC end fairness doctrine regarding news media, opening the gateway for conservative radio like Rush Limbaugh and eventually Murdock’s new project to change minds, the FOX News channel. We’ve known that humans can be sown into panic since Orson Welles’ radio drama of War of the Worlds.

So yeah, we’re being subjected to what is literal mind control, and our government isn’t doing a thing to stop it. But at the same time we’re in the age of prediction markets and online sports betting, and our respective protection bureaus have stood down, so it’s not exactly like our state is watching to make sure we’re not being defrauded.

To be fair, when I took Economics 101: Macroeconomics in 1985, there was a big point about how important it was to maintain a fairly even wealth distribution, with a discussion of how it is a very bad thing™ for all the wealth to consolidate at the top. (In the meantime, Reagan was gutting all the policies that were used to keep wealth distributed and preserve a strong middle class.) So this is something that anyone who took a basic college course should know.

In time, I got confused that presidents and legislators kept pushing supply side (trickle-down) economics and kept passing laws that allowed the upper class to keep more of their money, while leaving the lower and middle classes to languish, when I was certain these officials were educated (or had experts who were) and should know better. Then I worked out that they are just captured and corrupt AF.

Seriously, we have multiple economists saying the only way out of this fine mess (and to save the world) is to massively redistribute the wealth at the top to the rest of the population.

This is not a solution it’s a workaround. Sleeping in cars is typically hard sleeping, which is still the problem.