I read a book about startup stuff at the request of the CEO of my old company. Some of it was at least superficially interesting, but one part stood out as haunting. It casually mentioned how a “founder” at Zoom was trying to get money, and the investors thought it was a stupid idea. It was a “solved problem” that already had big players in the space. But they were personally friends with the guy, so they gave him a few hundred million dollars.

That’s not something to be proud of. Nepotism and bro-driven-investment isn’t the ideal.

But these rich assholes pretend they’re such visionaries. Gatekeepers of the future. Fuck them. Fuck them all. The climate is a disaster and they’re pouring billions into “Cats in the metaverse”? Crimes against humanity.

Not much information about the driver. It’s likely they could’ve been taking the subway instead, and avoided this tragedy.

Most messages are so short I don’t see why you’d need a summary. Are people that poor at reading that like 10 sentences is a struggle? If so, education seems like what we should spend millions of dollars on.

People often say like “You can’t just shoot trump, you’ll make him a martyr and hyper energize his base!” I don’t know if that’s true. I like to think that if Zohran was assassinated, people would push harder for his vision and legacy. But a lot of people are also kind of just… not all the way here.

Ok, I understand what you meant better. Thanks for explaining further.

But capitalism sucks in a more tolerable way to me than communism.

Ok, this I understand. That’s a position reasonable people can agree or disagree on. (Though from earlier posts, I’m not certain we have the same working definitions of capitalism and communism. That’s a problem for later)

Personally, I find the model of “I work all day and create $100 of stuff. The boss keeps $90 and I get $10” kind of bad. But that’s a whole complex topic with more solutions than just “laissez-faire capitalism” and “communism as attempted by the soviet union”.

I would further assume that the original meme was meant to take a shot at how ceaseless profit motive by the ownership class (ie: capitalism) has given us a bad outcome. Isolated, samey, homes with heavy car dependency. Pollution, inefficient, dehumanizing travel. Bland consumerism. Old people left to rot in for-profit homes.

Now, you can rightly say “other systems can lead to the same outcome!”. That’s true. But, we know that capitalism as implemented in most of the world got us here. Maybe the solution is some other system or combination of systems. I don’t know. But the original poster didn’t say anything about communism. To reuse a metaphor I made earlier, that’s a bit like someone saying “These wolves circling the camp suck” and someone responding “Yeah but bears are worse.” Okay. But we’re not talking about bears. When someone says “We should bring in bears to deal with the wolves,” then sure, bring up bears. But, from what you’re saying, I guess you feel like you’ve seen this song and dance before, and are confident that bears were in the subtext, or were about to be brought up. Fine. I get that can make sense to you, but it can be jarring to anyone who isn’t sharing that mental context.

Name a country that doesn’t possess any of those problems?

I don’t know if there’s anywhere on earth that doesn’t have some capitalism. I feel confident that unchecked capitalism (which the US favors) leads to worse outcomes than what most of Europe does. Our health care system is pretty bad, in large part because it’s run as a capitalist (ie: not owned by the workers) system.

I had more thoughts but someone started texting me, and my train of thought derailed.

Ok, but that seems like a non sequitur. I don’t understand how your metaphor is supposed to help translate “[capitalism] beats communism any day of the week” into “communism isn’t automatically good because capitalism isn’t”. Those are two completely different statements.

I think it would help me if you connected the dots more when you write things.

My original point is: Communism isn’t automatically good just because capitalism isn’t.

I absolutely did not get that meaning from your comment at the top of this thread, which was:

No, but It beats communism any day of the week.

But you’re the one who brought up communism. That’s like someone saying “Poison ivy sucks” and you’re like “Yeah, well, getting bit by bugs sucks”. Like, ok, maybe, but we weren’t talking about bugs. And now you won’t even tell us what bugs you’re talking about.

I feel like you think you’re being very clever, and maybe communicating your ideas, but it’s not coming across. I’ve gathered you have an idea of what communism means, and you don’t like it, but I’m not getting any specifics. If you’re trying to convey what you believe and maybe change people’s mind, your current approach isn’t working. If you’re not, then what are you trying to do?

But that doesn’t make any sense. Words mean things. When people say “communism”, they usually mean something more concrete than whatever you said. Usually it has to do with who owns the means of production.

This is a terrible definition that could be applied to any form of government the speaker dislikes.

You didn’t even come close to answering the question. You didn’t say anything about who owns and benefits from production.

I think the recommendation is 30% of income goes into shelter? Not sure if that’s gross or net. You’d want to be making $80k i think, if it’s gross.

Anyway, this is all hair splitting. Basic costs are too high, yes.

I live in New York, I’ve had friends run into Zohran, and I’m only a couple steps removed from him socially. I’m told, admittedly not first hand, that Zohran basically stood up against a creeper in his friend group, and told the guy he wasn’t welcome anymore with that sort of behavior. Sort of the opposite of the more common “missing stair” pattern

I’m not good at math, but looking at the chart I think the average is dragged up but the huge spike of $5k+/mo units. You can find places for ~$2k/mo that don’t look terrible, assuming the listings on zillow are real. That’s still too expensive, but better than the $3700 average on that chart.

“It could be worse!” is extremely small comfort, though.

I kind of assumed you were making a joke, not asking the question in good faith. Perhaps others made the same assumption.

Isn’t that most of history? Liberals, “centrists”, et al would rather side with fascists than give an inch to labor.

I don’t think it saves time on net if you have to read it and then go verify it anyway. Might as well go directly to the more trustworthy source in the first place! And if you don’t care if your answer is correct, why even search? Just make something up.

Well, yes, Google has been becoming shittier for years as they prioritize ads and fail to deal with SEO slop. You have to know what’s a good source, but that was true even when we were doing research in libraries.

The AI summary is making the problem worse. The information it provides is not trustworthy. It also deprives site owners from traffic. It’s really bad on like every metric.

Almost all of my friends are big zohran fans. Even the one that’s to the right of me on some issues is cautiously optimistic.

But to hear my friends’ parents talk about it? Doom. Dooooom.