WillowWithAWand

In a vacuum I absolutely agree with you. In fact my PoliSci 101 prof defined politics as “who has power and how they use it” but in a system like ours where money also is a form of power (or at least a force multiplier of power) unto itself, money helps concentrate political power into fewer hands and magnify the ways they can use it.

It certainly would be naive to think that simply “getting money out of politics” would “fix” things but it is still a desirable goal for anyone who, themselves, does not currently have extremely large quantities of money.

ngl I don't think a quote from 250 years ago is all that relevant in discussing capitalism as it exists today. Adam Smith wouldn't recognize the world we live in. Nor was my point "pRoFiT bAd" but rather growth for the sake of growth is not the way to actually improve lives. Infinite growth is impossible (something I'm sure even Adam Smith would agree with me on) and yet our system is currently designed around the idea that it is not only possible, but good and necessary.

I don't have to answer a bad faith question that was and still is irrelevant to the point I made.

If you have your own actual point, feel free to make it.

[Actual Citations That Support YOUR Assertions Still Needed]

(You've sufficiently established your personal opinion that capitalism > communism but that's kind of irrelevant to the actual claims you were making)

[Citation Needed]

Ah yes. The two genders: capitalism or divine right

If you notice, I said capitalism creates increasing levels of inequality. I did not however, make a claim as to what level that inequality is at, objectively or in relation to any other system. So your "Compared to what?" response is inane and irrelevant.

Nobody here is saying we should dispose of capitalism in favor of feudalism. Well as long as Musk or Altman isn't in the thread...

Which is exactly why the rich lobby so hard to pay as little in taxes as possible

All of this is missing the ultimate underlying truth that capitalism (at least as it is implemented here and now) is the problem here. Capitalism creates increasing levels of inequality over time while nominally providing "equal opportunity" to all.

So it may be more accurate to say that "a capitalist system that creates an increasing gap of wealth inequality and defines money as speech is a system that inherently tends toward corruption" but that's a bit wordy for a headline

One would hope. But it just reminds me of all the times a news story will run with a line from the abstract of a scientific study and convince a bunch of people a breakthrough that didn't happen happened

I really wish headlines would stop using words like "discover" and "found" when they really should use words like "says" and "reported" because an LLM was involved. IMHO anything produced by an LLM should be treated like something said by a cable news host.

[Insert HbomberguyShoutingAtBenShapiro.gif here]

Now I see why ATC is such a stressful job!

Just from playing a bit in skirmish, this game seems really tryhard and that's not really what I want from my RTS games

The thing is that AI is not some inevitable force of nature that must just be contended with and weathered. It is an active choice by our society to develop it and it is a choice by our society how we should use it, if at all.

We would all do well to remember that and remember that each and every advancement and use case regarding AI is the result of choices by people (or the groups of people we call corporations) and are oftentimes motivated by the profit motive, not the best interest of humanity.

We could make different choices up to and including our own Butlerian Jihad where we ban all forms of AI but we could also do everything we can to prevent the worst fallout short of that.

There are only two types of problems in the universe: 1) those posed by the laws of physics 2) those posed by human choices

The problem of AI is one of the latter.

The frustrating thing for me, having worked as an avionics technician, is that the F-35 is actually a waste of all that money

Yeah when I did the math on that I was like "oh so you're basically a child!"

>people are terrified of trans people

For no reason. Trans people aren't doing anything but trying to live their lives but the concept of being trans disrupts their view of the world. People fear what they don't understand and because they don't understand the real reasons for their struggles, everything they don't understand can be conflated by a confident liar saying they are related.

Possibly the most succinct summary has been sitting in pop culture for a quarter century but how it could apply to real life never clicked with most people: "Fear is the path to the dark side"

Also, that link stops with Obama and that leaves out two whole administrations that would be pretty pertinent data in this discussion. Nearly a decade of data. It looks like Trump's first term had 220 and Biden had 162. It would be interesting to see the data classified the way you described and then broken down by party over time. The actual policymaking via EO by each party over the last 50 years would be more elucidating than the straight numbers for sure.

I also wouldn't label cancel culture as "far-left" because just as it isn't in any way "liberal", it isn't limited to those on the proverbial left of the spectrum. The mainstream language used to discuss politics simply lacks the ability to reflect the nuance needed in the 21st century. And that's not even getting into the discussion on what we call "cancel culture" because there is a big gulf between "that person said a thing that was a bit off" and "that person is a literal criminal/fascist" in my opinion.